Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wire open-sourced

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 140 posts

Re: Wire open-sourced

#91

Post by moxie »

drdaeman wrote: post #38
mintplant wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, in your opinion, is the gold standard?

For now, isn't is still plain old boring OTR? No less secure (and because of its mature age, it had received more auditors attention), far more ubiquitous, and while not perfect, still doesn't seem to have too severe limitations that make its use too hard or impossible.

OTR doesn't work in asynchronous environments, which makes it infeasible to deploy on mobile devices. I think that's a pretty severe limitation in today's world.

In terms of ubiquity, Signal Protocol is running on over two billion monthly active devices. I would be surprised if OTR's active install base exceeds a hundred thousand.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#92

Post by mtgx »

deltaprotocol wrote: post #27

I must say that my first impression is beyond positive. One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption? I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and…

Not sure about the Switzerland thing. My firewall sees connections from U.S. servers when installing and using it.

They may not have the HQ in the U.S., but if they still have servers in the U.S., we've seen with Megaupload, and now KAT, that the U.S. thinks its entitled to jurisdiction over the company.

So at the very least, the company should have its lawyers already work on a strong jurisdiction defense, if they want to be prepared and maintain their credibility once the U.S. gov comes after them.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#93

Post by walterbell »

mtgx wrote: post #88

I've been asking for three things from Signal for the past almost two years: 1) desktop app 2) video call support 3) self-deleting messages Signal finally (sort of) delivered a desktop app, but it still doesn't have the other two. Wire has the first two, but it's still lacking the last one. I hope one of them will have all three of these features soon.

This HN comment (22 days ago) says Wire has a prototype of ephemeral messages, but insufficient demand, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12014056

This Twitter comment (5 days ago) says Wire is looking into self-destructing messages, https://twitter.com/wire/status/755078974728970240

Re: Wire open-sourced

#94

Post by newscracker »

deltaprotocol wrote: post #27

I must say that my first impression is beyond positive. One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption? I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and…

I discovered Wire several weeks ago and started using it (more as a replacement for Signal, while my go-to app is still Telegram). I was pretty impressed that the feature set was quite rich (compared to say, Signal, which is also end-to-end encryption by default), with multi-device sync, multi-OS support, photos, videos, sketches, voice messages, video calls, etc.

Wire is still behind Telegram in a few aspects, and I hope it'll become better soon. The main issues I see with Wire currently are:

1. No message delivered and message read indication. This is a big shortcoming for a chat application. Without an indication, it's almost like sending SMS and not knowing if the message reached.

2. The time taken for message delivery seems a lot longer than Telegram's. This in turn affects conversation speed negatively.

3. Finding other users, even those in one's address book (uploaded to Wire), needs a lot of improvement, and is currently buggy. Since Wire also allows signup using email address, it's important to allow users to be associated with multiple email addresses and using any of them for discovery and addition.

Additionally, it'd be nice for Wire to add the following:

1. Groups, super groups and channels for different use cases (all these terms are taken from Telegram).

2. Usernames to add people without exchanging phone numbers or email addresses. Along with this, @mentions to draw attention would be great.

3. If message editing is available, that'd be super cool, although I don't know about the complexity and limitations of such a feature in an E2E encrypted chat application. Telegram now allows editing messages for a limited time, and I no longer have to feel bad about typos, autocorrect, etc., and add more (annoying) messages in the conversation with corrections.

4. Easily mute conversations, for a short duration or permanently, from conversations or notifications.

5. Ephemeral (self-destructing) messages. I use this in Telegram's secret chats to exchange sensitive information that I don't want lingering around anywhere (of course, I trust the other party I'm talking to; so screenshots and related concerns don't arise).

I can't wait to move completely from Telegram to an E2E encrypted chat/call platform that's rich in features and works well. Wire is the only one I know of that fits the bill at this point in time, though it needs improvement. Having the code open source and independently audited by security experts would really help boost the confidence of users who value privacy.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#96

Post by laksjd »

moxie wrote: post #90
laksjd wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other signal/axolotl protocol based systems currently don't support true multi device solutions. It's not a limitation of the protocol, after all Wire is based on it, too, just that Signal/WhatsApp decided not to implement it. Wire has true multi device support (basically multiple keys per identity)

Not sure what you're definition of "true multi device" is, but Signal Desktop does not do phone routing and functions whether your mobile device has connectivity or not: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-desktop-public/

Thanks, I thought it did phone routing, mostly because the Signal FAQ lists some odd restrictions on multi device usage (e.g. desktop can't be linked to the iOS app, cannot have iPad and iOS at the same time [1]

[1]: http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21324092...

Re: Wire open-sourced

#97

Post by Siimteller »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #79
deltaprotocol wrote: post #27

I must say that my first impression is beyond positive. One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption? I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and…

It does look good. I wonder how good its group video chat is. I've been looking for something a little better than GoToMeeting (which is nice but clunky), which we migrated to from Google Hangouts (which generally terrible and also clunky). My hope was that Slack would launch this quickly, since they acquired Screenhero, but nothing has happened. For organizational purposes, group chat does need smooth screen sharing…

Wire doesn't have group video or screen sharing yet (although 1:1 screen sharing is not far off).

Re: Wire open-sourced

#98

Post by Siimteller »

mtgx wrote: post #92
deltaprotocol wrote: post #27

I must say that my first impression is beyond positive. One to one and group chats, group video and audio calls, GIF search built-in, doodles, the best implementation of photos in the message stream that I've seen, poking and playable Spotify and Soundcloud music by just sharing links? All with end-to-end encryption? I have that "too good to be true" feeling but, still impressed. Just waiting for possible audits and…

Not sure about the Switzerland thing. My firewall sees connections from U.S. servers when installing and using it. They may not have the HQ in the U.S., but if they still have servers in the U.S., we've seen with Megaupload, and now KAT, that the U.S. thinks its entitled to jurisdiction over the company. So at the very least, the company should have its lawyers already work on a strong jurisdiction defense, if they w…

All servers in the EU, the US connections you see are to proxies we use for better performance. Nothing stored there and chat contents E2EE, of course.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#99

Post by Siimteller »

walterbell wrote: post #87
redthrow wrote: post #85

Why does this Android app require a phone number to sign up? At least Hangouts lets me use the app without a phone number.

You can register with just an email, using a desktop web browser at http://app.wire.com , then use that account to login on mobile. Unclear why it's not possible to register a new email-only account from the mobile app.

We had this, was confusing UX. Considering bringing it back.

Re: Wire open-sourced

#100

Post by lobster_johnson »

Siimteller wrote: post #97
lobster_johnson wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does look good. I wonder how good its group video chat is. I've been looking for something a little better than GoToMeeting (which is nice but clunky), which we migrated to from Google Hangouts (which generally terrible and also clunky). My hope was that Slack would launch this quickly, since they acquired Screenhero, but nothing has happened. For organizational purposes, group chat does need smooth screen sharing…

Wire doesn't have group video or screen sharing yet (although 1:1 screen sharing is not far off).

Ah, oops. Front page says "group and video chat", so I interpreted that to mean group video chat.
Post reply on HN