Moxie Marlinspike has a plan to reclaim our privacy

Post by spurgu » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 12:55 AM UTC

thristian wrote: post #81

spurgu wrote: post #76

Weird typos(?) in the article: coördinate, coöperate. Seemingly other sloppy typos like "Signal could only proffer the relevant". No critique against the substance of the article though, seems great so far, love Moxie. Edit: And the date in the URL is October 26.

The New Yorker's house style is to use a dieresis to indicate when adjacent vowels do not form a diphthong. There's a syllable-break in between the Os of "coöperate", as opposed to between the Os of "chicken coop", so it gets a special marker. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28diacritic%29#Engl... "proffer" is also a perfectly legitimate word: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proffer

Post by petertodd » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 1:00 AM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #72

upofadown wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Like the key agility that makes the Axolotl Ratchet so superior to GPG, I am not sure how you can usefully compare a thing originally intended to secure email to a thing intended to secure IM. The ratchet only provides forward secrecy anyway. My take on that is that it is a pointless thing for something like email and pointless in practice for most IM applications. Most IM users keep their old messages and practical…

It provides forward secrecy and deniability. Your chat database doesn't prove that I said what your database says I said.

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #64

novok wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal is OSS and you can start your own fork & network if you want to. App publishing platforms not having a good binary signature verification system is the orthogonal issue that you're bringing up, that would in many ways apply to matrix for most users too. Most will never bother to sideload it.

Signal disallows federation from forks (it has been attempted). "Using signal" requires using the official build, and that requires closed-source libraries and services (e.g. Google Play Services).

Post by lozaning » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 1:42 AM UTC

nickff wrote: post #12

cwyers wrote: post #9

Why is it, whenever Signal is brought up on Hacker News, we get inundated with the people who object to the core decisions of the Signal Project? Would Signal really be better if, instead of having a secure messenger available to the masses, it spent massive amounts of time implementing the things these people want? No. I would be comfortable recommending Signal (or WhatsApp) to a nontechnical friend and communicatin…

A great deal of human communication is dedicated to signalling high rank/superiority, or demonstrating familiarity/intimacy.[1] In the case of HN, very few people know much about Moxie, so the only useful signal they can convey is expertise. Many people come here because of their technical or product development background/interests, and the way they show expertise is by second-guessing technical, user interface, and…

Post by sdenton4 » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

dexterdog wrote: post #77

askvictor wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're really paranoid, you'd convince your contacts to use your fork.

I can't even convince my contacts to use signal.