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Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

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Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#81

Post by williamscales »

YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #14

Aside from the typical encryption worries here are some features I would love to see being offered on a alternative messenger app -ability to give out your alias or username to people to reach you on whatsapp instead of a phone number, something you can change later after banning the contact. -transcribe voice messages to enable search among them. -ability to hide the fact that i have listened to their voice message.…

> -save my chat history in the cloud so that i dont lose everything when i move from iOS to Android or vise versa.

Is there something in the existing WhatsApp cloud backup feature that prevents you from bringing those backups between iPhone and Android?

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#82

Post by mfkp »

jayalpha wrote: post #39

Besides signal, there is also 1. Threema. Swiss based but not Open Source AFAI 2. Frozen Chat. Android client based on Jabber XMMP/OTR

Frozen Chat seems to be removed from the Play Store, and I can't find many references to it online. Never heard of it before.

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#83

Post by orbifold »

neonhat wrote: post #12
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried signal, much more inferior to WhatsApp in terms of functionality and usability

How is Signal inferior to WhatsApp "in terms of functionality and usability"?

It feels much worse to use than both Telegram or WhatsApp, both on Android and on OSX. I had installed it on iOS and Android and uninstalled within 10 minutes of trying to use it. That is how bad my user experience was.

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#84

Post by jolmg »

YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #14

Aside from the typical encryption worries here are some features I would love to see being offered on a alternative messenger app -ability to give out your alias or username to people to reach you on whatsapp instead of a phone number, something you can change later after banning the contact. -transcribe voice messages to enable search among them. -ability to hide the fact that i have listened to their voice message.…

- user accessible backups. WhatsApp backs up to your Google Drive account but you can't access it directly. Only WhatsApp may do that (f_ck you Google for contributing to WhatsApp's lock-in). Local backups are encrypted so you can't read them. Exports are incomplete (for example, on one chat it would give me the last month or so when I could scroll back more than a year). WhatsApp discards old messages at its discretion without letting you configure otherwise. I lost a ton of very important texts from the last months of my now-deceased mother. I f_cking had to scrape what was left from WhatsApp Web.

- open protocol and open source clients and servers, with network working independent of any particular provider to be able to ditch any misbehaving one.

- no expiration on software versions. Why are we being forced to update versions to view old messages?

Damn is software becoming user hostile.

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#85

Post by YeahSureWhyNot »

williamscales wrote: post #81
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #14

Aside from the typical encryption worries here are some features I would love to see being offered on a alternative messenger app -ability to give out your alias or username to people to reach you on whatsapp instead of a phone number, something you can change later after banning the contact. -transcribe voice messages to enable search among them. -ability to hide the fact that i have listened to their voice message.…

> -save my chat history in the cloud so that i dont lose everything when i move from iOS to Android or vise versa. Is there something in the existing WhatsApp cloud backup feature that prevents you from bringing those backups between iPhone and Android?

I did a lot of research and apparently its impossible because if different database formats the messages are saved on two platforms. At least that's what I understood on some random forum.

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#86

Post by torben-friis »

YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #85
williamscales wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -save my chat history in the cloud so that i dont lose everything when i move from iOS to Android or vise versa. Is there something in the existing WhatsApp cloud backup feature that prevents you from bringing those backups between iPhone and Android?

I did a lot of research and apparently its impossible because if different database formats the messages are saved on two platforms. At least that's what I understood on some random forum.

It is possible to do so, using third party applications. I've done it with the help of a friend, although it required using paid Windows apps that looked like there was no way they could possibly be legitimate and not a scam - they worked like a charm. the process involved an application downgrade, forcing the iPhone to make local backup instead of backing up to the cloud and a handful other things, all of which where automated.

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#87

Post by staticvar »

> Exist completely within a network

I bet this requirements implies working seemlessly between online and offline networks. In which case this project is not just building another XMPP/WhatApps/Signal/etc. They are building another Cabal (https://cabal-club.github.io/) :-)

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#88

Post by jolmg »

tehlike wrote: post #69
nsuser3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -full desktop support for video and voice calls Any desktop support would be nice. WhatsApp web is not a real solution.

It kind of is, at least it is 80% there. What is your problem eith it? Having to handshake almost everytime?

For me, the problem is that it requires internet access. When I found that WhatsApp was deleting important messages and that the backups and exports that I was counting on were useless, as I mentioned in another comment[1], I found that the easiest way to save those messages was to scrape them from the web client. However, connecting the phone to the internet meant that it would receive more messages and hence delete more messages. I took screenshots manually of several days of the oldest available messages to avoid losing them, but it wouldn't have been necessary if the desktop client didn't require internet access.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19669740

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#89

Post by YeahSureWhyNot »

torben-friis wrote: post #86
YeahSureWhyNot wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a lot of research and apparently its impossible because if different database formats the messages are saved on two platforms. At least that's what I understood on some random forum.

It is possible to do so, using third party applications. I've done it with the help of a friend, although it required using paid Windows apps that looked like there was no way they could possibly be legitimate and not a scam - they worked like a charm. the process involved an application downgrade, forcing the iPhone to make local backup instead of backing up to the cloud and a handful other things, all of which wher…

yeah I saw those and to your point I thought there is no way these are legit and I thought it's definitely a scam

Re: Darpa wants to make a better, more secure, version of WhatsApp

#90

Post by wfn »

dominotw wrote: post #67
nothrabannosir wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use signal on the reg, and the short comings are both superficial and unrelated to the security. In my opinion. What are your specific concerns? I could list things like: lack of bold and italic , poor voice message UI, lack of video conferencing , lack of group names, ... Note that WhatsApp was wildly popular for over half a decade before it got most of those features. In other words: I don’t get the point of talk…

they are not just cosmetic.. * no search (big one for me) * no web client ( another big one) * app gets stuck in "retrieving message..." if there is a poor signal like travelling under a tunnel and there are many cosmetic ones like the ones you pointed out.

Text search across full message history has been part of stable production releases (on Android at least) for a decent long while, just fyi. (Desktop client has also gotten better (but is obviously far from perfect); those messages end up retrieved later on, fwiw).
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