I guess it's worth mentioning that people are currently working on removing the Google services dependency in Signal: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/pull/5962

That is good to know, thank you for sharing that! I'll be following this and try Signal again when it should finally work on my phone :)

Looks like they are waiting for the calling portion of the app to become open source. Any ETA on that?

Also worth reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wash_symbols

The external link list gives nice examples for symbols in different countries.

A Song of Ice and Fire

Anyone else noticed that the article was written next week?

When the New Yorker publishes an article it always uses the date for the print magazine.

Ah, thanks.

Your example describes a preimage attack on SHA-1, not a collision attack. Even with a working collision attack you are probably still far away from taking "some.other.input" and creating a sha1("some.other.input") = sha1("johndoe:creditcard").

For instance MD5 collisions are really easy to create but for preimage attacks on MD5 there is still no better approach than just doing brute force.

For webmail I can recommend roundcube + dovecot, for calendaring/contacts davical has all I need.

Yep, roundcube, integrated into ownCloud for CalDAV/CardDAV