Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signal Is Back

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 158 posts

Re: Signal Is Back

#91

Post by arianvanp »

curiousmindz wrote: post #7

We rarely get to see an app have to grow suddenly like that. And with Signal being open source, it must be very educational to follow. Has anyone found a publication around what they had to do on the technical side (code)? Edit: Their server's repo hasn't been updated since April 2020. Why? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

I more and more get a feeling that the server is a reference implementation but not the thing they run in production.

OTOH due to end to end encryption all the fancy features are implemented client-side so the server is very simple in scope. So maybe it's really feature-complete.

Re: Signal Is Back

#92

Post by yorwba »

xster wrote: post #68
decrypt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are powered by donations [1] Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, who left Facebook post WhatsApp acquisition, infused 50M USD too. [2] I hear he lent another 50M with 0% interest, repayable by 2068. [3] [1] https://signal.org/donate [2] https://www.wired.com/story/signal-foundation-whatsapp-brian... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_Foundation

Take this with a grain of salt since it's not too clear how much money they got exactly from OTF, but they seem to have been partially seeded initially with the CIA spin-off Radio Free Asia money ( https://pando.com/2015/03/01/internet-privacy-funded-by-spoo... ). Since the OTF's own spin-off from RFA, it seems to have continued being non-trivially involved in regime change while funding communication initiatives lik…

Good. Let them put their "regime change" money into generally useful infrastructure like Signal instead of propaganda for their favorite rebel group or some other narrow political goal.

Re: Signal Is Back

#93

Post by emn13 »

adamddev1 wrote: post #88

I would say one of the most important things they need to compete with WhatsApp is a better desktop client. WhatsApp's client is great because it works in the browser and is a joy to use. It would be nice if people didn't have to be burdened with downloading a big Electron app and then sit through the slow process where it syncs contacts etc. (kind of makes the user feel like it's broken)

What? Whatsapp's client is terrible - it not only requires a phone during signup, it requires an active connection to your phone, so if your battery is every running low - good luck with that. Additionally, it allows just 1 desktop client to be active at a time, which is just a hassle. Finally, in practice the connection to a well-charged phone is still subject to the vagaries of a phone app - it's very common for the desktop client to lose its connection temporarily, and require the user to "nudge" the phone app to wake it up.

Much as electron is ridiculously heavy, I'd pick that every single day over the joke that is the whatsapp web UI. I guess our experiences differ!

Re: Signal Is Back

#94

Post by juniperplant »

adamddev1 wrote: post #88

I would say one of the most important things they need to compete with WhatsApp is a better desktop client. WhatsApp's client is great because it works in the browser and is a joy to use. It would be nice if people didn't have to be burdened with downloading a big Electron app and then sit through the slow process where it syncs contacts etc. (kind of makes the user feel like it's broken)

> I would say one of the most important things they need to compete with WhatsApp is a better desktop client.

Anecdotally, most people I know didn't even know that WhatsApp Web was a thing until I set it up in their computers.

Maybe most users are fine with just their smartphones, so this makes me wonder if it's really that important to compete.

That said, as a power user I agree with your points.

Re: Signal Is Back

#95

Post by ghgr »

An important point that I didn't see mentioned: Signal implements the "Sealed Sender" feature in order to encrypt metadata (as much as possible).

https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/signal-secure-messaging-me...

That's in my opinion the USP against other (actually or allegedly) E2E platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram.

Re: Signal Is Back

#96

Post by ghgr »

adamddev1 wrote: post #88

I would say one of the most important things they need to compete with WhatsApp is a better desktop client. WhatsApp's client is great because it works in the browser and is a joy to use. It would be nice if people didn't have to be burdened with downloading a big Electron app and then sit through the slow process where it syncs contacts etc. (kind of makes the user feel like it's broken)

Agreed. And not only that, in my case at least the Signal desktop app is randomly missing messages (and 100% of the images). I tried reinstalling it multiple times to no avail (Ubuntu). I'd really love to see more 3rd party alternatives.

Re: Signal Is Back

#97

Post by usr1106 »

KitDuncan wrote: post #52
usr1106 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is not ready for the general public. I am a user who can (mostly) deal with the horrible user experience of pgp. With matrix I immediately run into trouble that some of my chats could not decrypted the second day any more. The documentation is confusing, the spec has been changed less than a year ago IIRC and different clients a at different stages of implementation. Nothing that a random user could handle.

Not sure when you had your experience, but they improved on e2ee a lot and as long as you backup your recovery key you should never see "unable to decrypt message" warnings.

> Not sure when you had your experience, but they improved on e2ee a lot

As I said last fall, so maybe October 2020.

I got the impression that the big improvement happened early 2020 and maybe the Web client I used first did not support it.

But if they say that the system has been running since 2014 and the improvement that makes it usable came in 2020 I would not yet call it a mature and proven system.

> you should never see "unable to decrypt message" warnings

Warning is an understatement here :) I could not at all decrypt the new messages other people were sending me and I had to communicate with them by an independent channel. One of them was an experienced Matrix evangelist running his own servers and he could not solve the problem and not tell what I might have done wrong.

Re: Signal Is Back

#98

Post by [deleted] »

rglullis wrote: post #84
strken wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're getting downvoted because your comment doesn't add anything to the conversation. To claim something isn't free to the user just because it has externalities is a cheap rhetorical trick that doesn't give any new information or perspective.

Of course it does. OP asked "how do they manage to have a business". "Depend on donations" is not viable for a large-scale operation that has costs that grows with the customer base.

[deleted]

Re: Signal Is Back

#99

Post by [deleted] »

jsilence wrote: post #76
Arathorn wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of development-in-the-open on Signal-Server is a little concerning, in terms of not giving visibility on what's at least theoretically running serverside. If you compare it with Matrix, the last commits to Synapse were ~32 hours ago, Dendrite was ~31 hours ago, and Conduit was 3 hours ago - so you can keep up with where development is at, and of course see what is meant to be running in production (and run i…

A couple of days ago an old long forgotten friend popped up apparently using Telegram now. Looking at the profile picture it became very clear that friend must have abandoned this phone number a while ago. Not really a privacy issue for the new user, since this is his public avatar, but a nice reminder for this issue that phone number are ill suited as identifiers

[deleted]

Re: Signal Is Back

#100

Post by juliand »

emn13 wrote: post #93
adamddev1 wrote: post #88

I would say one of the most important things they need to compete with WhatsApp is a better desktop client. WhatsApp's client is great because it works in the browser and is a joy to use. It would be nice if people didn't have to be burdened with downloading a big Electron app and then sit through the slow process where it syncs contacts etc. (kind of makes the user feel like it's broken)

What? Whatsapp's client is terrible - it not only requires a phone during signup, it requires an active connection to your phone, so if your battery is every running low - good luck with that. Additionally, it allows just 1 desktop client to be active at a time, which is just a hassle. Finally, in practice the connection to a well-charged phone is still subject to the vagaries of a phone app - it's very common for th…

As a power user I find what you said to be strong points of WhatsApp Web. For instance, I want it to alert me as soon as there's a web connection and that's only possible with the current connection model and for security measures I think it's safer to have only one instance at a time.

The connection reliability is a hassle but usually when you're in the desktop you also have a good wifi connection and even though the web client loses connectivity temporarily it keeps working as good as it can.

On the other hand it's easy to forget that you have an active session in other apps such as Telegram unless you keep track of it in your app. Someone you share your laptop with can just open the Telegram app and they'll be able to see my chat conversations be default.

I know some of these things might be something you'd prefer but I choose the hassle instead.

Post reply on HN