Signal Desktop • Hacker News Board

Re: Signal Desktop

#271

Post by akshatpradhan » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 1:09 PM UTC

moxie wrote: post #84

darklajid wrote: post #59

I'm feeling dirty, because I don't like to be that negative, especially if we're talking open-source software. And I feel that I kinda hold this project to higher standards: If I compare this to WhatsApp/Telegram/Threema/Whatever, I inheritently, somewhat subconciously expect more from Signal. And I'm disappointed. I tend to repeat the 'central server' and 'a phone number is not an address and not public information,…

If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order: 1) Make mass surveillance impossible. 2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds. It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions. If you don't want to use your phone number, don't use it. You can register with any GV, Twilio, Voicepulse, or other throwaway VoIP number. If you don't wan…

Moxie, you really think crypto nerds are being attacked? They're not the ones with Keys to the Castle. Sysadmins have the keys! In fact, the NSA has been targeting sysadmins for a while. Sysadmins make great targets. Forget about their inability to implement a real security program, a sysadmin can barely get a security compliance regimen off the ground. Here's an article from Glen Greenwald's TheIntercept that details why Sysadmins are sitting ducks against both the NSA and Nation States: https://theintercept.com/2014/03/20/inside-nsa-secret-effort...

It's Sysadmins who make for a delicious muskrat lunch, not the crypto nerds.

Re: Signal Desktop

#272

Post by throwaway7767 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

akshatpradhan wrote: post #271

moxie wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order: 1) Make mass surveillance impossible. 2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds. It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions. If you don't want to use your phone number, don't use it. You can register with any GV, Twilio, Voicepulse, or other throwaway VoIP number. If you don't wan…

Moxie, you really think crypto nerds are being attacked? They're not the ones with Keys to the Castle. Sysadmins have the keys! In fact, the NSA has been targeting sysadmins for a while. Sysadmins make great targets. Forget about their inability to implement a real security program, a sysadmin can barely get a security compliance regimen off the ground. Here's an article from Glen Greenwald's TheIntercept that detail…

There is a bunch of overlap between those groups (though too many sysadmins indeed don't grasp the threats that face them, or don't take them seriously).

I'm saying this as a sysadmin and crypto nerd who really wishes we had a secure messaging system that achieved both of Moxie's stated goals. Unfortunately, I don't want to use it in its current state for largely the same reasons as laid out by 'darklajid.

Both goals are important and feed into each other. If we don't have #2, it's easy for NSA and friends to backdoor the software or services for #1, for example like they did with their trusting-trust trojaned XCode.

Does anyone really believe these agencies will not react as we deploy "mass-surveillance-proof" software? What will be their next move to collect the data that they want? All of these attacks that people now write off as "crypto-nerd paranoia" will just become the new normal.

Re: Signal Desktop

#273

Post by nextos » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 1:41 PM UTC

slasaus wrote: post #264

nextos wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the fact that Signal makes good cryptography available to the masses. But I also share the OP concern about Chromium (and about a central server, but this is technically much harder to fix). Perhaps it would be possible to have a simple CLI app that is free from these dependencies (which should also be quite simple to develop).

some signal cli clients were discussed on the mailing list yesterday: https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/whispersystems/2015-12/msg0...

Sounds very interesting, thanks.

Re: Signal Desktop

#274

Post by OvermindDL1 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 2:22 PM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #59

I'm feeling dirty, because I don't like to be that negative, especially if we're talking open-source software. And I feel that I kinda hold this project to higher standards: If I compare this to WhatsApp/Telegram/Threema/Whatever, I inheritently, somewhat subconciously expect more from Signal. And I'm disappointed. I tend to repeat the 'central server' and 'a phone number is not an address and not public information,…

Sounds like Tox might be for you then.

Re: Signal Desktop

#275

Post by ge0rg » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 3:30 PM UTC

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #221

Why should I use this instead of Jabber/XMPP over TLS? Can someone sell me on this that knows how both work? Thanks!

The differences are:

* XMPP is using addresses with the same format as e-mail addresses (Jabber ID/JID), Signal accounts are bound to your phone number

* Signal has strong end-to-end encryption built-in, for XMPP you need OTR or the recent OMEMO port of Signal's end-to-end crypto magic

* XMPP is federated, where you talk to your server, and it talks to your buddies servers; with Signal everybody talks to WhisperSystems' servers

* XMPP has no decent iOS app, but pretty good multi-device support otherwise

Re: Signal Desktop

#276

Post by newscracker » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:19 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #61

darklajid wrote: post #59

I'm feeling dirty, because I don't like to be that negative, especially if we're talking open-source software. And I feel that I kinda hold this project to higher standards: If I compare this to WhatsApp/Telegram/Threema/Whatever, I inheritently, somewhat subconciously expect more from Signal. And I'm disappointed. I tend to repeat the 'central server' and 'a phone number is not an address and not public information,…

The central server in Signal does not have the same role as the Telegram's. If you care first and foremost about UX, use Telegram. If you care first and foremost about the security of your communications, use Signal; go out of your way to use Signal.

This reply is mainly intended for Moxie and the team developing Signal as feedback (which they probably have received from others). I'm not going to focus on security, because Signal is likely the best on that front from whatever I have read.

I really want Signal to be my only app for chats and I do try Signal once in a while, but I always go back to Telegram for a few reasons. Telegram is very fast in delivering messages, just like it claims. Signal, on the other hand, has been and continues to be slow. Messages could sometimes take anywhere from 10 seconds to even a minute or several minutes to get delivered. That's not really a good UX for chats when you can't say whether your message would get delivered or not. If I wanted to send a slightly urgent message (urgent enough to be a message but not urgent enough to be a call), I wouldn't rely on the current implementation of Signal. Back and forth communication also becomes very odd and frustrating if the messages don't get delivered within a few seconds. Even SMS seems better when compared to Signal's speed of message delivery.

Next is the multi-device availability and syncing of conversations in Telegram. Once you get used to having Telegram on the desktop/laptop and phone (and perhaps a tablet), it fits in so well with the physical location someone is in, what the person is doing and which device the person feels comfortable with. There are many people who have deep and heavy conversations on these chat apps, and doing that on a small screen's touch keyboard is a big hindrance. Being able to do that with a laptop or a desktop makes it so superior an experience that it's difficult to give that up.

People that I chat with either don't know much about encryption and privacy or don't care much about those. Getting some of them to use Telegram instead of WhatsApp was difficult, but they're now big fans of Telegram because of how it works and what it provides. But getting them to move to Signal? I can't imagine doing that with the current state of affairs with Signal.

While Signal may be a very secure chat app, not focusing on the things that help increase UX (and in turn, market share) will not help in the long run.

My hope and wish is that Signal development would accelerate faster and provide quicker releases that solve what I see as fundamental issues. This would benefit everyone and make our world a much better place.

Re: Signal Desktop

#277

Post by newscracker » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 5:29 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #182

Zash wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you care about control over the system and not being tied to a single vendor?

Then you definitely don't want to be using Telegram.

I'm curious about this response. Could you please explain or point to something that explains, for a common person who doesn't code or cannot build code or cannot maintain servers, how Signal would provide more control and avoid being locked to a single vendor when compared to Telegram?

Re: Signal Desktop

#278

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 6:52 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #108

frayesto wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're using Google groups to manage the beta testing program. Make sense since that's how you sign into the Chrome app store to download the app.

"Make sense since that's how you sign into the Chrome app store to download the app." I don't think it makes any sense at all. Even if you do use gmail/google in some places (I don't) it's not a given that you want to tie that identity to this app or these activities. A throwaway google account is getting very difficult since google automatically flags an account with no mobile phone number attached to it as a "suspi…

Really, they do that now!? No way am I giving Google my phone number, goddamn. I have gradually drifted away from using any Google services - I guess I won't be creating any new Google accounts in the future, then.

Re: Signal Desktop

#279

Post by lewisl9029 » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 8:07 PM UTC

qrmn wrote: post #131

lewisl9029 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two features I mentioned, automatic contact discovery and robust offline messaging, are examples of features that I have concluded to be impossible to build without some degree of centralization (there are probably more, but those two were the only ones I could recall off the top of my head). Though it is certainly possible that I simply haven't put enough thought into it. Toc's original goal was to be a decentra…

Automatic contact discovery is tricky, but the beginnings of one potential solution is I think explored in agl's Pond, using pairings on BN curves?: https://pond.imperialviolet.org/ To a point, so is offline messaging. Distributed datastores in general do that kind of thing - there are old implementations over Freenet in particular, and GNUnet as well and other things I think. The robust part is harder: if the client…

Yes those are definitely not the hardest problems in this space. I was only referring to UX-related features in my original post (i.e. rather than the much more tricky privacy and security related ones), ones that I couldn't figure out how to actually implement in the context of a client-side web app. Impossible was probably too strong of a word to express that.

Thank you for all the interesting ideas and resources though! They'll definitely come in handy when I eventually revisit this space when I have more time later on.

Re: Signal Desktop

#280

Post by codethief » Thu, Dec 03, 2015, 8:18 PM UTC

Tiksi wrote: post #241

codethief wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need a central server for that. Just set up a p2p network and have all peers broadcast their messages (¶) to everyone they're connected to. Those peers in turn forward everything they receive to everyone they are connected to and so on. (And, of course, they try to decrypt everything in the meantime to see if any message is meant for them.) (¶) I think you could do without sending random data unless ne…

>broadcast their messages (¶) to everyone they're connected to. Those peers in turn forward everything they receive to everyone they are connected to and so on. That sounds like a great way to DDoS everyone using it and every network in between.

Well, there're obviously a lot of things you could improve to lower the chances of a DDoS. (E.g. introducing a TTL / maximum number of hops for a message or forwarding some messages only to some peers, thereby influencing the exact way messages are routed through the network.) But I agree it doesn't look like the most viable idea for a medium for mass communication, not even if it's just for high-latency messages. Yet, people are working on it.