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Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

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21–30 of 247 posts

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#21
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, they still expect me to trust the signed binary they send through the App store right? How is that anyway non-proprietary just because there is a Git repo somewhere that may or may not be the same code running on your phone? Can I run a client from the Git repo and still use all of their infrastructure? Until I'm able to do that, it is still their "pinky promise".

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

And so? You're still trusting them and the various libs they're using to protect you... Did you read the code? Did you understand it?

Me neither. How can a bit of software like this obtain any kind of reputation whereas we barely trust openssl anymore is fucking beyond my understanding.........

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#22
post #6

Why isn't anyone talking about Wire? https://wire.com/ The little I've used it, I found it pleasant and effective. But it almost seems like there is a campaign to ignore Wire; nearly every article written about Signal and alternatives fails to even mention Wire.

Wire has a really great user interface and it works quite well! My wife and I communicate almost exclusively using it.

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, they still expect me to trust the signed binary they send through the App store right? How is that anyway non-proprietary just because there is a Git repo somewhere that may or may not be the same code running on your phone? Can I run a client from the Git repo and still use all of their infrastructure? Until I'm able to do that, it is still their "pinky promise".

Survey says: NOPE. Realistically, the code in that repo probably isn't even everything that would run on your device even provided you built it yourself. Bets on some 'fetch js from somewhere' code in there which could completely unfuck the whole thing which acts as a help screen or something that would be very hard to find... There is literally no way this sort of thing can ever be trusted. Christ, we barely trust P…

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#24
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

And so? You're still trusting them and the various libs they're using to protect you... Did you read the code? Did you understand it? Me neither. How can a bit of software like this obtain any kind of reputation whereas we barely trust openssl anymore is fucking beyond my understanding.........

This criticism applies equally to every piece of software you haven't written yourself. You have to trust someone at some point. OWS has demonstrated that they are more trustworthy than their competitors.

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know how Wire makes money to sustain what they are doing? Don't want to invest my time into something that will eventually sell out and do that opposite of what they stand for today.

Last time i checked they have no revenue possibility. So I decided to skip, I am curious on this too

There's quite an interesting discussion here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacytoolsIO/comments/57n8ee/inst...

As I see it, there's some sort of trade off for all solutions for private instant messaging right now. Wire comes close to a good solution. The biggest problem for me is that the official Android client is quite buggy, UI wise...

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#26
post #19

I found a weird issue on a friends phone when I suggested they download it for iOS. It says "This item is no longer available". They were able to download other apps from the store. When emailing Signal support they said nothing was wrong on their end. Still havent figured out why my friend cant download Signal from Apple App Store.

Maybe device management or policy?

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so? You're still trusting them and the various libs they're using to protect you... Did you read the code? Did you understand it? Me neither. How can a bit of software like this obtain any kind of reputation whereas we barely trust openssl anymore is fucking beyond my understanding.........

This criticism applies equally to every piece of software you haven't written yourself. You have to trust someone at some point. OWS has demonstrated that they are more trustworthy than their competitors.

Sure, but the ease of someone abusing this is far greater than what we've been using before.

Can you honestly say that you trust signal over locally or even airgapped pgp'd text?

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#28
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survey says: NOPE. Realistically, the code in that repo probably isn't even everything that would run on your device even provided you built it yourself. Bets on some 'fetch js from somewhere' code in there which could completely unfuck the whole thing which acts as a help screen or something that would be very hard to find... There is literally no way this sort of thing can ever be trusted. Christ, we barely trust P…

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

All well and good for us, but we're probably not the target here anyway.

And be honest, did you really bother to do all that?

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, they still expect me to trust the signed binary they send through the App store right? How is that anyway non-proprietary just because there is a Git repo somewhere that may or may not be the same code running on your phone? Can I run a client from the Git repo and still use all of their infrastructure? Until I'm able to do that, it is still their "pinky promise".

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/wiki/Reprod...

Thanks for that link. I'll go through the build process and play with the apk.

But even if I wanted to build my own apk, and run it on my custom Android build, it would'nt work right? Because of the need for Google Play store?

Verifiable builds are atleast a step in the right direction.

Re: Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

#30
post #14

All the privacy solutions on the market are varying degrees of bad (from a privacy/security/freedom perspective), by which I mean they're all flawed in their own ways. Signal requires Google Play Services on Android. That means it's put simply not a privacy messenger. Yes there's crypto, but it's also tied into Whisper Systems' infrastructure, there's no federation. I use Signal reluctantly, and only on IOS. Threema,…

I just tried out Signal earlier this week with my wife and a friend.

The friend had a crash shortly after opening it on iOS, but it went OK after that.

You can't paste or drag in images directly on any client, as far as I can tell.

The "desktop app" is a Chrome app (not even Electron). Not loving that.

There were some hiccups with contact syncing.

It decided it should be responsible for alerting me to receiving ordinary phone calls (!?) on my iPhone, for some reason, which was annoying.

We abandoned the experiment pretty quickly :-(

[EDIT] it also lacked nice-to-haves one might be used to from other messengers, like auto-emojification.

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