Worried About the Privacy of Your Messages? Download Signal

* Websites do weird things with textareas. If it's a plain-ol HTML form, it's pretty easy to intercept and do what you want. It seems most websites intercept button clicks then pass your text around to twenty different JS functions and libraries before doing something useful with it. You wind up writing code to handle edge-cases more than anything else.

* To address your final comment, embedding the pubkey inside the text would defeat the entire purpose. A malicious actor (see recent Reddit controversy) can just create their own pubkey, sign the modified comment with it, and noone would be the wiser.

Some things I discovered, and found worked well:

* Keybase has a fantastic library for generating PGP keypairs in-browser. It really added that extra bit of "magic" to the extension.

* Chrome extensions can get CORS exemptions on a per-website basis, and uploading to a standard SKS keyserver is just a POST request that can be done by Javascript.

* Expanding on the last bullet point, verifying other user's comments was tricky. During development, I just downloaded all keys on the keyserver that were uploaded by my extension on a scheduled interval and stored them in localstorage. Unfortunately, I don't think this would scale.

If anyone is interested in picking up where I left off, I could upload the source to Github.

Actually, Jabber with OTR is pretty solid. If need be, you can use throwaway addresses too.

> I can understand the reasons for not supporting federation, but I disagree.

I disagree and can't understand the reasons, which however I suspect to be rather shortsighted. Just imagine if email had not been what came to be called a federated system.

The downside of becoming known to the NSA is that you can get caught up as an "associate" in someone's drug, criminal or terrorism investigation, and you had no idea that the person was doing anything like that. You might even have no idea that the person exists, since the NSA is "allowed" to go out some number of degrees of freedom from the supposed suspect.

The downside of becoming known to criminals is that you can fall victim to criminal schemes. You don't even have to be known by name or association, your device just has to be discovered; owning it is the all too easy next step. You can be known by installing malware (see the articles on phone downloaded apps), or by criminals seeing your communication on the open internet and becoming aware of you.

That's what I'd tell my friends, if any of them were still listening.

The fact that the guy behind it is hyping it via the New York Times, a generalist publication, instead of validating the thing through professional cryptographers (which he isn't) and recognised privacy champions such as the EFF is very telling.

The thing has not been properly validated or verified (for a start, because there is no design document to validate against, and no published goals to verify against), it uses an ad-hoc encryption scheme from a non-cryptographer, it is not open source (see F-Droid discussion why it's not there), it uses hardwired servers controlled by a party or parties which are not known to be trustworthy, and apparently it requires Google Play services, which nobody who is truly concerned about their privacy is going to use in the first place (and definitely one should not).

From the way this is going, it is becoming clearer by the day that this is just another start-up, their target market are unsophisticated but paranoid users and hipsters with no real need for privacy but who think they should make some kind of statement. Their plan is to hype it up (e.g., via the NYT), get enough users, then get bought by one of the so-called "social media" players. It is more attractive to them than Telegram because the latter is run by a Russian, which to the American public sounds sinister (Mr Brin and countless other great scientists and innovators notwithstanding), and their servers are probably based in Germany, which is a bit more of a problem since there are (still) some proper privacy laws over there, and which would cause some headaches to the acquiring party. Besides which, there is a good chance that their current investors come from those "social media", or are the usual Silicon Valley VC crowd, so things stay between friends, as it were.

So, in brief:

* If you want a new Skype, go for it.

* If you care about the privacy of your communications, you should avoid it.

* If you need to keep your comms private, you must avoid it.

Anyone disagrees? Feel free to reply and tell me why!

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/769