On Privacy versus Freedom • Hacker News Board

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#101

Post by 3xblah » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #95

3xblah wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk at CCC, he had many presumptuous and dubious "arguments" but one regarding privacy of phone numbers was that a user's APN would be used to determine their phone number, so there was no point in trying to keep phone numbers private. This fails to account for the possibility of not using the cellular network. With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear a…

That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with. I might not agree with the phone number thing, but I recognize the tradeoff being made and am willing to begrudgingly accept that for right now, Signal/Moxie are probably making the right call. It's not like they're not moving to fix it anyway. Also, unless I misunderst…

"You realistically can't use Signal without an Apple ID, as you couldn't get it from the store otherwise."

Isn't this the issue people are complaining about. They want to install this program without going through an "app store" to get it.

Is it possible to avoid using APNS. Probably it is enabled by default even the user does nothing with her phone and installs no third party apps. What if the user blocks the DNS requests to Apple.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#102

Post by Marsymars » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:02 AM UTC

ksbakan wrote: post #8

I won't touch signal because I care about user freedom more than privacy. (Both are important) No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.

> mobile only

It requires a phone number, but it has iPad, Windows, macOS and Linux apps that function dependently of the mobile device once set up.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#103

Post by upofadown » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #92

alerighi wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking about privacy of a system that requires you to sign up with a phone number, that in my country (and in most other European countries as far as I know, and without talking about non democratic regimes) is required to be associated with your ID (it's illegal to buy a SIM without registration) is nonsense. And you know another thing? Email works great to me, and it's decentralized. I have my email server, with m…

> I can even send encrypted emails with GnuPG without any problem, and it's as secure as Signal, if not better. Alas this requires a fairly contorted definition of "secure" to be true. The cryptography in GnuPG has plenty of problems even if you insist on manually doing everything from your own CLI tools which maybe don't suffer the problems from EFail. Mostly it's just kinda old, AEAD hadn't been conceived when Phil…

>...if you insist on manually doing everything from your own CLI tools which maybe don't suffer the problems from EFail.

The only surprising thing that EFail revealed is that there are email clients out there that will silently allow html emails to communicate with the outside world. Encryption isn't the only thing that leaks from such clients.

>...PGP had to kind of fudge a separate MAC into the design and hope that's good enough.

Well isn't it? What attack is possible here? What attack was ever possible?

>When you send your GnuPG encrypted mail, how do you decide which cryptographic primitives to use?

You use the best ones supported by the receiver as listed in their public key. No one actually has to decide this and no guessing is required. This is something that the OpenPGP standard gets right for a crypto standard. Such things by necessity have to evolve over time. Sure this was hard to figure out, but it's done now. This particular wheel does not have to be reinvented or avoided.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#104

Post by samth » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:06 AM UTC

dublinben wrote: post #58

samth wrote: post #31

One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS, carrier, or messaging app, Signal as designed wouldn't work. People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to app…

>People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it. That's great and all, but because Signal takes advantage of that existing network of identifiers, it is able to deliver usable private messaging to many users today. Replacing phone numbers as identifiers is a much harder problem than what Signal has done so far. We shouldn't wait to solve this at…

The position you're taking, roughly that with limited resources you have to aim for achievable goals and while distributed federated networks are the underlying reason Signal works, it can't try to replace them right now, is totally reasonable, although not everyone will agree. However, that isn't at all what Moxie said. Instead he made no acknowledgement of the distributed nature of the phone system, he suggested that everyone who disagreed lived in the imaginary past, and suggested that his approach was the only sensible one. So I'm not inclined to read it as charitably as I read your comment.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#105

Post by Klonoar » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:24 AM UTC

3xblah wrote: post #101

Klonoar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with. I might not agree with the phone number thing, but I recognize the tradeoff being made and am willing to begrudgingly accept that for right now, Signal/Moxie are probably making the right call. It's not like they're not moving to fix it anyway. Also, unless I misunderst…

"You realistically can't use Signal without an Apple ID, as you couldn't get it from the store otherwise." Isn't this the issue people are complaining about. They want to install this program without going through an "app store" to get it. Is it possible to avoid using APNS. Probably it is enabled by default even the user does nothing with her phone and installs no third party apps. What if the user blocks the DNS re…

If you don't accept push notifications, sure, you wouldn't technically be using APNS - the tokens change every time you give access for notifications. Last I checked, there's a connection to APNS running on every device or something... so blocking it would be interesting.

You'll be SOL on iOS anyway, ultimately - you're def not building it yourself with Xcode without an Apple account. Jailbreaking may be a fit here, but in defense of Signal, jailbreaking was kinda dead for a few years and only recently became usable again. Altstore[1] is... interesting, but I don't have enough experience with it to comment further.

I get what you're after, but Signal's not about to ignore the massive iOS userbase, and these are defining parts of the iOS ecosystem currently. You either play by those rules or you probably don't grow.

[1] https://altstore.io

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#106

Post by jeltz » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #99

tialaramex wrote: post #2

I think the timing makes Moxie's point very well without him saying a thing. All these years later Matrix only has... The ambition to some day try to offer the core privacy features Signal already delivered back then. Some of the most basic stuff is, you believe, almost kinda sorta done. This is, to be clear, much better than just sitting back insisting you were right but not lifting a finger. But for an actual user…

It seems like they are both right based on their values? Signal put privacy and security first, and Matrix put federation first. They are both idealistic in their own way.

Security: sure, but privacy: no. An application focused on privacy should never require a phone number. In many countries phone numbers can easily be tied to individuals.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#107

Post by the_pwner224 » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 2:53 AM UTC

est31 wrote: post #9

ksbakan wrote: post #8

I won't touch signal because I care about user freedom more than privacy. (Both are important) No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.

> mandatory google play services Note that since a while there is also the possibility of using web sockets. But they are an extreme battery drain, and thus google services are quasi-mandatory. Telegram solves this without being a battery drain, possibly at the cost of delivering messages with a delay, but why isn't that my choice.

I use Signal without gapps and do not have extreme battery drain. I always get real-time notifications too - no late or missing deliveries. This is both on a galaxy s9 which went from stock ROM to deleted Gapps with no battery impact, and s 1+ 7 Pro with no Gapps from the very beginning (I get the expected excellent battery life).

I suspected that Signal basically took Over Gapps's role since it's the only app I use with notifications. Google keeps open a single optimized connection and apps go through it instead of having 10 open connections. After deleting Gapps, Signal is the only app keeping open a connection so it basically has the same impact.

But then I installed WhatsApp and Signal+WA both work perfectly without Gapps and with no gigantic battery drain. So I have no idea what black magic is making this work.

I just looked up my battery stats; since the last full charge 32 hours ago Signal has used 1% of the power. I got a few notifications and used the app for a few minutes in this time. WhatsApp's power usage is too low to show up in the stats.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#108

Post by samdixon » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 3:15 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #32

rumanator wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I don't recall the last time I've received spam in my email inbox among the tens of emails I've receive daily, and newsletters/invoices are messages that users intend to subscribe. You might argue that instant messaging scratches an itch that email doesn't, but that's a bit shortsighted and doesn't mak…

Newsletters and other BS notifications are the new spam. Sure, you can technically opt-out and keep your inbox clean by spending 5 minutes opting out of the garbage every time you sign up to a new service, but that’s irrelevant considering nobody does this and most of my friends’ mailboxes are pretty much unusable because this kind of spam arrives every minute and they have tens of thousands of unread emails in their…

Most sites will allow you to opt out from account creation and also will allow you to unsubscribe without even having to login to your account. If your mailbox has 10k+ spam messages it is IMO a personal problem of either not opting out, or signing up for total garbage sites in the first place.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#109

Post by shmerl » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 3:21 AM UTC

Klonoar wrote: post #95

3xblah wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk at CCC, he had many presumptuous and dubious "arguments" but one regarding privacy of phone numbers was that a user's APN would be used to determine their phone number, so there was no point in trying to keep phone numbers private. This fails to account for the possibility of not using the cellular network. With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear a…

That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with. I might not agree with the phone number thing, but I recognize the tradeoff being made and am willing to begrudgingly accept that for right now, Signal/Moxie are probably making the right call. It's not like they're not moving to fix it anyway. Also, unless I misunderst…

> That's not the representative experience for most consumers/users. Most people do have a phone number, though, so it's easy enough to bootstrap with.

It's a trap most don't realize they are falling in. It's easy to set up things without one time registration step (instead of making a user id and password, just download some client and boom - you are set). But think about it. One time(!) convenience is paid with constant(!) reduction of privacy.

Compare it to one time inconvenience of registration step, that gives you constantly better privacy. I'd say the second is the obvious choice.

And it's easy to sell this "convenience" for the clueless, but it's also evil to do so, because most don't realize what they are paying with. So I blame developers who are proliferating this approach. Unlike many of their users, they know very well what they are doing, and they exploit people's cluelessness and natural preference for convenience.

Re: On Privacy versus Freedom

#110

Post by blindgeek » Fri, Jan 03, 2020, 3:41 AM UTC

My biggest problem with messaging applications as a whole is that I need so many of them. I have a few contacts who are reachable with Signal, a few more who are reachable on Hangouts or whatever Google is calling its latest thing, and a few more who are reachable with Skype. That's three programs, to communicate with three different subsets of people. I'm sure if I used Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, I'd have two more subsets of people who are only reachable through those.

XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early 2000s. But then all the big tech companies who build "ecosystems" decided to push their own applications, all incompatible with one another. So here we are again with this proliferation of programs that really only do one thing: communication. It's like the 90s / early 2000s with the proliferation of instant messengers: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and on and on and on. The players are different, but the game is still the same. I suspect that twenty years from now, when the players have all changed yet again, there will still be one reliable method of reaching me: IRC.

If the Googles and Whatsapps and Facebooks of the world had been around in the early 90s, you'd have one email client from Facebook for mailing Joe and Fred, an email client from Google for mailing Mary and Jane, and an email client from Whatsapp for mailing Alice and Bob. Thankfully, email became entrenched before that could happen.

I want messaging to be like email, where I use one and exactly one program to communicate with all of my contacts, regardless of what server they use. People say that federation is more complicated than centralization. I'm sure that's true for developers, but in fact, federation can be vastly simplifying for an end user. I'm a fundamentally lazy person. Having to learn all these different messaging tools is frankly a waste of my time. All I want is a federated protocol and an open system, be it Matrix, XMPP, or something else.

As a final aside, you know what else that bugs me? The word "ecosystem". I worked for a big tech company for a while, and the only people I ever heard use that word were people out to build a walled garden.