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Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

signal.org

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Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#101

Post by simias »

harry8 wrote: post #100
simias wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The desktop app is very useful but it's mainly because there's no alternative. It's bloated, slow, under-featured. Telegram also has an electron desktop app but at least it lets me do ultra-advanced things like changing the spellchecker's language on the fly. As somebody who's used to 100KB snappy and fully featured IRC clients I'm always baffled when I use these modern clients that use 3 orders of magnitude more res…

I'll take your word for the telegram app. I prefer signal to telegram. Any benefit of the telegram desktop app seems like a marginal one when the signal one works and signal do encryption well, properly and honestly. (Maybe telegram are catching up to this now, not sure, Moxie has always been solid and has forced the entire feature set of messaging to end-to-end encryption for which he's going straight to heaven). My…

Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering calls not long ago. It also had at least one significant vulnerability (some code injection IIRC) so I don't know if I'd say that it does "encryption well". Having applications with such a needlessly huge attack surface is not good crypto in my book.

I do like Signal, otherwise I wouldn't put up with that software. But you can both enjoy the protocol and Android client and think that the desktop app is a pile a donkey dung.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#102

Post by godelski »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #25
godelski wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that they were working on this. https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-introducing-usern...

you seem to be the only one actually replying to my comment. any idea what is the trigger word resulting in the downvotes?

I'm not sure. Doesn't look like you're negative now (except this one). I guess because you're complaining about something that is in the works? But I'm not sure how you'd be expected to know what is going on. We're not all experts in the same things here and in the same areas. Whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This comment is downvoted because you asked about down votes.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#103

Post by godelski »

drummer wrote: post #94
pthatcherg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at Signal on group calls. We're being careful with rollout. The limit will hopefully be increased soon.

Hi do you know when legacy groups will be converted? Would love to use the new features but I have legacy groups with lots of history I want to keep.

I think they got updated in the latest update. At least for me they did. So if yours haven't, then soon? You need everyone in the group to update.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#104

Post by harry8 »

simias wrote: post #101
harry8 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take your word for the telegram app. I prefer signal to telegram. Any benefit of the telegram desktop app seems like a marginal one when the signal one works and signal do encryption well, properly and honestly. (Maybe telegram are catching up to this now, not sure, Moxie has always been solid and has forced the entire feature set of messaging to end-to-end encryption for which he's going straight to heaven). My…

Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering calls not long ago. It also had at least one significant vulnerability (some code injection IIRC) so I don't know if I'd say that it does "encryption well". Having applications with such a needlessly huge attack surface is not good crypto in my book. I do like Signal, otherwise I wouldn't put up with that software. But you can both enjoy the protocol and Androi…

>desktop app is a pile a donkey dung.

And you can put the stated criticisms of it in proper context. Then assess the costs and risks to yourself. Compare its use along with the rest of signal to the alternatives. And examine the response of Moxies team to issues.

At least that's what I did and came up with a "Hard Disagree" on that statement. Signal desktop is pretty good. (And no I don't like electron apps as a rule - it's the only one I use).

Deviation from perfection is not donkey dung.

>Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering [voice] calls...

vs

Messaging on phone and internet everywhere was missing end to end encryption before Signal. (Yes I used OTR with like 3 people, now I encryption with almost everyone, thanks signal).

Advantage signal. By a huge margin, for mine. Picked the essential feature. Got it right. Expanded from there. I find it pretty hard to fault what they're doing. People who want to do it differently because they think it's "better" (eg federation), don't seem to actually get much done in comparison to signal's massive win they chalked up for all of us.

I find it kinda odd that here, where people understand tech, there is more sticking up for facebrick, goo, appletax etc when they screw their users yet again than there is for Signal doing the opposite. The contrast between how they view people who use their stuff is very, very stark. Signal are pretty great. We need more love for anyone who can achieve at a similar level to make computing better for us. To push competition toward being better at privacy, security and so on and away from the direction of turnkey totalitarianism surveillance that the Stasi could only have wet dreams about. Alarmist right? Could bad things really happen here? Are the interests of Cook, Zuck, Seregey, Larry, Jeff et al not precisely yours or a wider population's? They all do seem really quite friendly to despotic regimes. But I guess those reigimes are foreign?

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#105

Post by godelski »

yuvadam wrote: post #11
axegon_ wrote: post #3

While Signal is pretty awful on desktop(not to mention this[1] thing), it is my goto messenger on my phone. Brilliant security and props for being one of the very few to extensively use Rust in production. I was really sad to see they hire in the US only. [1] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1630

I find it odd that packaging for a specific distro is an upstream effort. I never understood why upstream source should include Debian/Fedora-specific files. The way that Arch Linux approaches packaging makes much more sense to me - a single bash-like PKGBUILD file that describes how the upstream source should be transformed into a package that the distro knows how to deal with.

For those kinda newish to linux, one thing I learned when I didn't have a deb/rpm file is to go look at the arch aur pkgbuild as a guideline of how to build the packages from source. Arch has surprisingly been a good guide for general linux questions.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#106

Post by simias »

harry8 wrote: post #104
simias wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal desktop was missing basic features like answering calls not long ago. It also had at least one significant vulnerability (some code injection IIRC) so I don't know if I'd say that it does "encryption well". Having applications with such a needlessly huge attack surface is not good crypto in my book. I do like Signal, otherwise I wouldn't put up with that software. But you can both enjoy the protocol and Androi…

>desktop app is a pile a donkey dung. And you can put the stated criticisms of it in proper context. Then assess the costs and risks to yourself. Compare its use along with the rest of signal to the alternatives. And examine the response of Moxies team to issues. At least that's what I did and came up with a "Hard Disagree" on that statement. Signal desktop is pretty good. (And no I don't like electron apps as a rule…

The Signal devs have always been extremely hostile to anybody making third party clients, because they say they know better than everybody else. Instead of making a library or daemon that could interoperate with third party software and decently built messengers, they preferred to create their own Moxie Approved(tm) bloated elecron crap.

So be it. But then when their software is crap I won't just accept the "well at least it's not Facebook" defense.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#107

Post by harry8 »

simias wrote: post #106
harry8 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>desktop app is a pile a donkey dung. And you can put the stated criticisms of it in proper context. Then assess the costs and risks to yourself. Compare its use along with the rest of signal to the alternatives. And examine the response of Moxies team to issues. At least that's what I did and came up with a "Hard Disagree" on that statement. Signal desktop is pretty good. (And no I don't like electron apps as a rule…

The Signal devs have always been extremely hostile to anybody making third party clients, because they say they know better than everybody else. Instead of making a library or daemon that could interoperate with third party software and decently built messengers, they preferred to create their own Moxie Approved(tm) bloated elecron crap. So be it. But then when their software is crap I won't just accept the "well at…

They've given their reasons for why they have the policies they do. If they were bad reasons somebody else would have made something that makes signal redundant.

Somebody will make signal redundant one day. When I look at it I see that day has not come. When it does the world is a better place for the advances made by signal.

The decisions they've made are /why/ signal is the leader of the pack by a margin. But please do make better ones. Please do give us something better than signal. Their libraries are all capital F Free. Go for it.

Crapping on them from the sideline, sure, go ahead but acknowledge they've done rather better than /anyone/ else in this space. It's not even close. So maybe their decisions are worth considering as having some merit? Disagree sure, but really. They've done it. Well. I haven't. Nobody else has.

I don't like electron. The desktop client works well for me on linux and for non-techy family members on mainstream consumer machines. There's some merit there you're completely discounting which doesn't seem quite fair.

And it's not "At least it's not facebook"

It is: "Whatsapp now is end to end encrypted thanks to signal" and "new players have to match signal's encryption"

That's crap loads more than "at least it's not facebook" that's actually good as opposed less evil. Straight to heaven for achieving that, for mine.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#108

Post by orestarod »

zorbash wrote: post #68
blub wrote: post #56

Calls are unusable in Signal: they drain a fully charged battery in about half an hour.

Second that. I hear back my own voice, it drains the battery and the connection is almost always choppy. I wanted to be able to use Signal to replace whatsapp, telegram and FB messenger. I've convinced some of my friends to install it, but none of them are happy with it. On both mobile and desktop sometimes messages take hours to appear and on mobile it reserves ~2GB of storage for no apparent reason. I trust that pe…

In case the storage is due to numerous messages and media, you have the option to limit the number of messages saved for each conversation, default is no limit I think.

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#109

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

godelski wrote: post #102
2Gkashmiri wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you seem to be the only one actually replying to my comment. any idea what is the trigger word resulting in the downvotes?

I'm not sure. Doesn't look like you're negative now (except this one). I guess because you're complaining about something that is in the works? But I'm not sure how you'd be expected to know what is going on. We're not all experts in the same things here and in the same areas. Whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This comment is downvoted because you asked about down votes.

Ah. Dont talk about fight club. Eh?. 'Anyways, I was not complaining. I was arguing why was phone used in the first place when there are real world security issues with it. Only because everyone is doing it. Then using a flawed tech with "security". I am hoping for signal to have usernames because until then I am not going to link

Re: Adding Encrypted Group Calls to Signal

#110

Post by johnchristopher »

harry8 wrote: post #107
simias wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Signal devs have always been extremely hostile to anybody making third party clients, because they say they know better than everybody else. Instead of making a library or daemon that could interoperate with third party software and decently built messengers, they preferred to create their own Moxie Approved(tm) bloated elecron crap. So be it. But then when their software is crap I won't just accept the "well at…

They've given their reasons for why they have the policies they do. If they were bad reasons somebody else would have made something that makes signal redundant. Somebody will make signal redundant one day. When I look at it I see that day has not come. When it does the world is a better place for the advances made by signal. The decisions they've made are /why/ signal is the leader of the pack by a margin. But pleas…

What are your thoughts on session which uses blockchain tech to remove the need for a phone number ?

I don't care about the blockchain tech in session but would session be a good candidate to a signal replacement ?

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