71–80 of 750 posts
I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?).
Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :)
Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
But it’s par for the course for newly popular services. Some don’t survive the popularity and some thrive in spite of the degraded service. Signal will figure it out. All the best to the engineering team at Signal right now!
I too wish Signal engineers good luck!
(Even if I personally mostly use Telegram and hope for Matrix to "win", Signal is a fantastic piece of software as far as I can see, both as an extremely secure (I think) messaging client in its own right and also as an inspiration for other messaging platforms.)
Nice workaround for Android users: tap and hold the send button to switch to SMS (insecure but still) https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca... You'll keep all your message history in Signal that way. Good to know when your contact don't have an Internet connection, too.
What a workaround. SMS are not encrypted, cost money, have a length limit, don’t support images or groups...
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
This is not good. I've moved so many people over in the last week. For purposes of getting them invested, this is a truly inopportune moment for an extended outage.
I haven't moved any friends in the last week, but I've gotten lots of notifications in Signal of many friends joining this week. Hopefully it just requires some simple modifications of some parts of their infra that they didn't realize were scaling bottlenecks. Based on my friends, mostly foreigners and English-speaking locals here in Hong Kong, Signal has grown about 20% in the past week.
I will continue to use iMessages for my iOS contacts. For SMS people I will gently nudge (hey, have you tried Signal? and then let the convo go where it does) and then use Signal as the primary for those people.
After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
I know in their own terms they basically say “we can delete your account, but we won’t”. I chuckled and never bothered.
The centralized-infrastructure-Tower-of-Babel is about to collapse. As much as I love Signal, we've got to move to things that are decentralized. I setup a prosody[1] server a while back, but have nobody to talk with. If anyone wants to try their system out, I'm bjt@2n3904.net on XMPP. 1 - https://prosody.im/
I thought signal was highly decentralized? What traffic does the server handle once two clients have "found" each other? Which I believe uses hashes of phone numbers.
Maybe that's a good reason to open for federation and now I wonder if it would be possible to have an user migration between servers without cooperation from the origin server. This would allow users to move to a new one without losing track of existing conversations.
Seems crazy, but the reason we can't do this with email is the lack of a generally agreed identity for an user account that does not depend on the server itself. Signal accounts have a "master" key that can provide this and it's only stored in the device and backups (it's the most trusted of all keys, after all).
A sketch:
- User creates an initial account on server X (account: user@serverX.org), the procedure includes signing a message saying "I use server X since $TIMESTAMP and this is the 1st server that I use";
- Everything works as now.
- User wants to change server, so they signs a new message "I use server Y since $TIMESTAMP and this is the 2nd server that I use" (account: user@serverY.org); this message is sent to all chats/groups/contacts and to the old server (as an information only, it may be already down or be non-cooperative). Contacts update the server part of the account and start sending messages through the new one. Maybe the user can still try to contact the old server for a while, for the event it delivers a message from a account that didn't get the first, but at some moment all users will get the new address.
Notice: I have no idea of how this can work with sealed senders of other metadata-prevention measures that Signal uses and we all love.
Bonus: no more dependency on phone numbers.
Or if it goes to an more email-like architecture were users only speaks with their servers, it can adopt concepts from djb's Internet Mail 2000 [https://cr.yp.to/im2000.html]. This will *not* work for current email due to the need of keeping compatibility with the enormous existing user base, but this problem does not exist for a new protocol.
After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.