https://snee.la/posts/the-workings-of-whatsapps-end-to-end-encrypted-backups/

This is my analysis of WhatsApp’s backup mechanisms. The best possible thing you can do from a privacy PoV is to enable end-to-end-encrypted backups, which is disabled by default.

As far as I know, WhatsApp’s backups don’t go to meta’s servers, but instead google cloud / icloud. If your wife logged into her google account before, had backups enabled (frequency is weekly afaik), and signed into the google account again on the new phone - WhatsApp will restore the backups from the cloud.

If you enable E2EE backups, then you’ll be asked to enter your password, which only you can have. If you fail to supply that, your backups are lost forever. The implantation is a bit scuffed IMO, but still better than nothing. Things may have changed since I analyzed it in 2022.

My website’s the one linked in this post: https://snee.la/

My email is at the contact page: https://snee.la/contact/

sneela [at] tugraz [dot] at

I’ll be sure to reach out if I find myself being unable to replicate it.

No worries, and good luck! My email can be found on my website if you want it :D

I wasn’t even talking about tikzplotlib. It’s just that pgf backend is now supported by matplotlib and you can produce pgf files with.

Ah… I’ve think I’ve heard of it, but I never really registered that. Thanks for the info :D

I could give you the tikz source of Fig 2 if you’d like. The patterns and colors of the plots took me almost a day to choose. I wanted to go for a color-blind friendly pallette and keep it looking still snazzy. (https://github.com/simon-pfahler/colorblind)

I’m familiar with matplotlib -> PGFplots (using the Python tikzplotlib library). Unfortunately, I’ve decided against using it for the paper as it produces quite unmanageable outputs. Especially if I rerun experiments + with new data, and later want to change patterns, colors… It was always more of a hassle. I used it for my Master’s thesis.

Instead, Python program -> show plot -> if okay, generate CSV.

In LaTeX, have PGFplot code which reads CSV file and generates the data that way. Much, much easier to maintain.

Thanks for your words!

Yes! We use TikZ for the diagrams, which can be a nightmare sometimes… but it gets better the more I use it.

Regarding the plots, we use PGFplots. I often use matplotlib for quick plots while running experiments, but the paper itself uses PGFplots with the data in a CSV for that sweet, sweet scaling when you zoom in.