The bigger news here is that China is rapidly winding down its holdings of US debt. This is very bad for America. We'll see American standards of living decline without the Chinese financing American extravagance.
Japan holds more US debt than China. The UK has also surpassed China.
China had $776.5B a year ago and has $730.7B now, a roughly 5% drop. They don't seem to "rapidly winding down", unless there's some additional data I'm missing.
Look at the other holders. Belgium and Luxembourg combined have more US debt than China.
If the goal was to crash the US economy by selling their small amount of debt (which likely isn't possible for them to do, despite the rhetoric, they have less than 2% of the total debt), they would also significantly impact of all the countries listed here, which would make them very unpopular indeed:
Stablecoins offer a relentless price insensitive buyer of US debt. This is good for America, good for democracy, and good for property rights globally.
However, stablecoins WILL cause unrest in Nigeria, Venezuela, Lebanon, and Turkey as their corrupt local currency completely erodes and the ruling class can no longer extract from their citizens.
Confidence in crypto will go poof when there's a big enough run that the measly 7 transactions per second can't keep up with demand. We just haven't seen a crypto bank run yet. The $100 / transaction is nothing compared to what it could be. When that happens "stable" coins will lose their stability and the smoke and mirrors behind audit-free coins will collapse. You couldn't pay me to hold crypto.
In my experience, the only Windows games that don't run on Linux are those with malware-esque anti-cheat that explicitly block Linux. Almost all games I tried worked out of the box.
Telegram was not disrupted during the AWS crash, so they probably were not using it (or had a decent fail-over mechanism to a backup system). Telegram's user-base is two orders of magnitude larger than Signal, so 'we use AWS because we have to' argument clearly is bogus and nonsense.
That flag is tiny compared to the one telegram has been sailing with for years.
Despite there founder crying on twitter[1] how horrible and distopian chat control client side scanning to bypass E2EE would be, telegram is still only offering hidden and limited opt-in E2EE instead of making it global default like signal.
E2EE is nice to have, but not the magic cure Signal advertises it is. The #1 most authoritarian governments access chats is by forcing people to unlock their phone. At which point Signal's obsession with phone numbers becomes a huge liability. You can't claim security while tying a phone number to each and every account.
>The #1 most authoritarian governments access chats is by forcing people to unlock their phone
How would you know this? If they access the data from the platforms server you would never know unlike with obvious forceful physical seazure. The point of E2EE is that the weakest link, the server, is removed. It increases the required threat model from simple dragnet surveillance to high effort targeted attacks. If the client is insecure nothing can protect your data and signal has said that many times.
I don't see how the debate about requiring a phone number is relevant to this discussion since telegram does too.
That makes no sense. If you don't trust your government anything but E2EE is compromised from the get go. "But they could seize your device" is not an argument against but for mandatory E2EE because it moves the responsibility from the server you have no control over to your device that you do.
>There is no security without anonymity.
You don't understand what these words mean. You can be surveilled 100% by bodyguards and cameras to be secure but have 0% anonymity (or privacy).
Telegram vs Signal is really a moot comparison in the technical sense.
It is more of a question, who would you rather read your messages ? USA or Russia ?
Because even if there is E2E encryption and an open source client, unless you review it and compile it yourself, there is nothing to say that your messages are relayed to some agency's datacenter after decryption. The USA has all the legal framework necessary to achieve that with the tremendous power of the "intelligence" agencies, and Russia.. well.. doesn't even need that.
Telegram's founders are in exile from Russia after the Russian government took over their previous venture (Vkontakte). It is misinformation to associate Telegram with the Russian government.
Nikolai Durov lives in Saint Petersburg and works for the Russian Academy of Sciences. Pavel Durov had visited Russia multiple time since his "exile".
The public-facing story around Telegram is performative PR, which could be explained by the exact reasons listed in the parent comments: association with the Russian state had hindered VK growth besides the CIS region.
A more generous explanation is that it might be both — vendor lock-in also happens to be a security measure.
Having important info on your device and having that device accessible to the wild, wild, internet is a very real problem. If the "walled garden" is a flawed solution we should work on a better one.
Anyone who thinks that vendor lock-in is a security feature didn't learn a thing from the Crowdstrike incident last year. The biggest security incident in the history of the entire internet was caused by a cybersecurity ''vendor''.
Let me try to strawman a little: I personally accept this on my phone because I honestly don't consider my phone to be a computer, and I don't really care about "computing" on it. My phone is not really that important to me. It is a toy/appliance that I goof around with. What it's running and how "free" and "open" it is, is about as important to me as how free the firmware in my car is, or the software on my gaming console.
I care about the free-ness and open-ness of my computer, because that's where I do all my work, my E-mail, my finances, and all my "serious computing." I feel that a different standard applies on a Real Computer because they are totally different devices, used for totally different purposes. So what I accept on phones, cars, and gaming consoles, I don't accept on my computer.
While this is fine for you, I worry about a sociocultural divide.
I believe the likelihood of a smartphone being the only form of computing (and access to the internet in particular) grows with diminishing income / cultural means.
This is based on anecdotal observation, does anybody here know of relevant survey data?
Based on a cursory look, keywords can include "smartphone-only internet users" and "large-screen computer ownership".
The American Community Survey asks questions related to that (income, computing devices). Comparing states, the poorer the residents of a state, the smaller the percent of households with regular computers ("large-screen computer ownership"), per "Computer Ownership and the Digital Divide" (Mihaylova and Whitacre, 2025) [0, 1, 2].
Also, Pew runs surveys on income and device usage ("smartphone-only"). Again, the lower the income, the higher the proportion that is smartphone-only [3, 4].
I suppose the reason for this is that this is how it has always been with mobile computing. People don't even bother to think about their smartphone as a computer anymore.
reply