Signal, the secure encrypted messenger app, doesn’t offer an app for Chromebooks. The Android version won’t run on Chromebooks, either—but, by using the Chrome OS Linux subsystem, you can easily install and use Signal.
Signal is a free, open-source application published by the Signal Foundation and Signal Messenger LLC. The design started with the need for privacy and security as its first and most important principle. The Signal Messenging Protocol (SMP) was developed to provide that security.
The source code of the protocol has been reviewed by an independent team from the German CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the Swiss ETH Zurich University, Cisco, and the Canadian University of Waterloo. They all declared the encryption to be world-class and the code to be free from backdoors and other weaknesses. The security of the protocol provides one type of privacy. No one can intercept a Signal message and read it. Signal holds virtually no information on you. It stores the smartphone number that you registered with, the date that you registered, and the date that you last used the service, and that’s all: a phone number and two timestamps.
They retain nothing about message contents, your contacts, your location, or anything else. And what little they do know they don’t share with anyone else unless a court demands it. And if that happened, the few bits of information that Signal would be forced to divulge wouldn’t reveal anything about your use of the system, apart from when you first started using it and when you used it last.
There’s been a huge migration from WhatsApp to Signal. WhatsApp changed its privacy policy in 2021 and has started sharing information about its users with Facebook. There was a backlash to this. When Elon Musk tweeted “Use Signal” in early 2021, the rush of people registering with Signal overtook the platform’s ability to spin up new servers to meet the demand.
Everything was running smoothly again within a few days, but it does demonstrate the tremendous growth that Signal has undergone.
Signal is primarily a smartphone app, but there are Signal desktop clients available for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers. Everyone seems to be using Signal—apart from Chromebook owners. Signal doesn’t provide a native Chromebook app and, although Chromebooks will run Android apps, the Signal Android declares itself to be incompatible with your device if you try to install it on your Chromebook.
Modern Chromebooks have a Linux subsystem that adds even more power and flexibility to your Chromebook. You can run Chrome apps, Google Docs, online services, Android apps, and Linux apps. We can use the Linux subsystem to install the Signal Linux client and use that on your Chromebook.
Note that you’ll need a Signal account in order to activate your desktop. There’s only one way to sign up for Signal, and that’s through your smartphone. So, if you don’t already use Signal, download the Signal app on your smartphone and register an account.
[mai mult...]It can be tough to organize a lengthy spreadsheet to make your data easier to read. Microsoft Excel offers a useful grouping feature to summarize data using an automatic outline. Here’s how it’s done.
In Microsoft Excel, you can create an outline of rows, columns, or both. To explain the basics of this topic, we’ll create an outline of rows. You can apply the same principles if you want an outline for columns.
For the feature to serve its purpose, there are a few things that you’ll need your data to include:
It’s easiest to have your summary rows located below the data that they summarize. However, there is a way to accommodate this if your summary rows are currently positioned above instead. We’ll describe how to do this first.
[mai mult...]Captions are an important part of making sure videos are accessible to everyone, but they can be a pain to add on your own. Instagram has a nifty tool that can automatically add them to Stories. Let’s try it out.
The automatic captions feature is available when you record a video for your Instagram Story. The captions are actually one of the many “stickers” you can add to a Story. Instagram automatically transcribes what you say, but it can be edited as well.
[mai mult...]Throwback alert! Microsoft’s vintage File Manager program, which originally shipped with Windows 3.0 in 1990, has been ported to Windows 10, and it’s available for free from Microsoft.
[mai mult...]Google TV devices, like the Chromecast with Google TV, are great at surfacing content to watch, but not all of that content is family-friendly. Thankfully, you can set up a specific profile for your kids, complete with parental controls.
You can have multiple profiles for everyone in your home on Google TV devices. The Kids profiles have a bunch of extra controls, including bedtimes, viewing limits, app monitoring, and more. Creating a Kids profile will add them as a member to your Google Family. It’s not the same as creating a Kids profile from scratch, as you won’t be assigning them a Gmail address.
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