People already have, it’s called wickr
We can do better than Signal
271–280 of 290 posts
Re: We can do better than Signal
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Maybe I can help: I feel Signal is doing a lot right and if I need to send a message right now and be 99.999% sure nobody except the recipient can read it, Signal is my choice. My criticism is mainly directed not at Signal, but at the people trying to promote Signal by trying to trash every other messaging technology. The reason is tha…
I want none of this stuff in a messaging app, it's not a social media platform.
Agreed. If all you need is glorified SMS replacement, Signal is the way to go.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#273I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Is it perfect? No. But come on now; I see other threads on HN where people are debating/bashing their use of Intel SGX, really? Assuming you trust the client builds (or use a verified build) and verify the public key, all of these arguments go out the window with the exception of exposing your phone number. This situation seems like a pr…
> I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Maybe I can help: I feel Signal is doing a lot right and if I need to send a message right now and be 99.999% sure nobody except the recipient can read it, Signal is my choice. My criticism is mainly directed not at Signal, but at the people trying to promote Signal by trying to trash every other messaging technology. The reason is tha…
Agreed. In fact, as I also said here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802021) I consider the lack of backups to be a huge security flaw that is conveniently left out in such promotions.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
The benefit of running Signal on F-Droid is its secure update mechanism. Do you really think a homebrewed self-update mechanism is superior to the battle tested F-Droid? Moxie has a complete stranglehold on the Signal system. You are completely at his mercy for all decisions affecting the platform See: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco... The solution is federation, like email has always be…
> Do you really think a homebrewed self-update mechanism is superior to the battle tested F-Droid? I don't think it makes a practical difference. > both users have to be online at the same time for their messages to be delivered to each other Not only online but one has to be directly reachable, e.g. ping $IP works. With mobile connections it's rarely the case. > on my own hardware where I am in control of the logs T…
A federated system design can be made to tolerate temporarily unreachable nodes. See email.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want none of this stuff in a messaging app, it's not a social media platform.
Agreed. If all you need is glorified SMS replacement, Signal is the way to go.
Indeed, and Signal has been marketed from day one as a drop in SMS replacement. Initially it even used SMS as the transport for encrypted messages. it was literally called "TextSecure". This is why I have always found the attacks on it using phone numbers to be amusing.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great example of what I'm talking about. Are you also commenting how you can't see the source of your phone's baseband, Google's services, your ISP's router firmware, WhatsApp's servers, Facebook's service's, etc? Because Signal's client is open source it's considered a unique-to-Signal downside that we don't have access to the server's source. I feel like some people would bring up the server source issue…
Well Signal has put itself as a high privacy option, we are open, check out our code. Well we can check the client code but we dont know what you are running on the server. FB, Google etc never claimed to be open source with their infrastructure. So if WhatsApp cant be trusted as to what happens on the server, right now neither can Signal. Can Signal show that what they are running on the server is the same as whats…
You don't need to trust the server with E2E encryption. If you can review and trust the client, the server only has access to the information that the client sends.
Even if they release up-to-date server code, we have no way to confirm that's the code that's running on their servers. People would then complain that they don't have shell access to the servers to ensure the code is what is expected.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#277I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Is it perfect? No. But come on now; I see other threads on HN where people are debating/bashing their use of Intel SGX, really? Assuming you trust the client builds (or use a verified build) and verify the public key, all of these arguments go out the window with the exception of exposing your phone number. This situation seems like a pr…
> I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Maybe I can help: I feel Signal is doing a lot right and if I need to send a message right now and be 99.999% sure nobody except the recipient can read it, Signal is my choice. My criticism is mainly directed not at Signal, but at the people trying to promote Signal by trying to trash every other messaging technology. The reason is tha…
I should have stated in my original post that there are a lot of features that Signal could add/improve on; my post was meant to be commentary about the implementation critiques levied against Signal.
Your only point I disagree with is backups: there is simply no way for a non-for-profit company that doesn't monetize user data to afford providing cloud backups.
P.S. "New" groups in Signal support up to 1,000 users, did you need something bigger?
Re: We can do better than Signal
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Maybe I can help: I feel Signal is doing a lot right and if I need to send a message right now and be 99.999% sure nobody except the recipient can read it, Signal is my choice. My criticism is mainly directed not at Signal, but at the people trying to promote Signal by trying to trash every other messaging technology. The reason is tha…
I should have stated in my original post that there are a lot of features that Signal could add/improve on; my post was meant to be commentary about the implementation critiques levied against Signal. Your only point I disagree with is backups: there is simply no way for a non-for-profit company that doesn't monetize user data to afford providing cloud backups. P.S. "New" groups in Signal support up to 1,000 users, d…
> Your only point I disagree with is backups: there is simply no way for a non-for-profit company that doesn't monetize user data to afford providing cloud backups.
I would actually prefer local backups. I can always upload them to the cloud myself, and then I pay :-)
> P.S. "New" groups in Signal support up to 1,000 users, did you need something bigger?
OK, this might come off as moving the goal posts, so let me say why it is not intended to[1]: Signal is very usable for what it is intended for. 1000 is enough for my family in law and even my family.
I'm fairly certain I read at least one other messenger has a limit of 200 000 members in one group, moderation tools, channels with channel publishers, subscribers and comments.
And my point is not that it is better than Signal but that they are different!
If I need to send pass codes or something I can use Signal. If I need to receive broadcasts from one of the channels I follow I can use Telegram etc.
I have 32GB (or even 64GB?) of storage on my phone so I never had to choose :-)
[1]: That is, it is not moving my goal posts. My hope was never that Signal should replace everything else.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Maybe I can help: I feel Signal is doing a lot right and if I need to send a message right now and be 99.999% sure nobody except the recipient can read it, Signal is my choice. My criticism is mainly directed not at Signal, but at the people trying to promote Signal by trying to trash every other messaging technology. The reason is tha…
I want none of this stuff in a messaging app, it's not a social media platform.
Fine, then you can go on using Signal.
I am happy with that.
My point wasn't about that but about those people who won't let the rest of us use one or more other messengers.
Re: We can do better than Signal
#280I feel like Signal is held to a ridiculously high bar when it comes to anything. Is it perfect? No. But come on now; I see other threads on HN where people are debating/bashing their use of Intel SGX, really? Assuming you trust the client builds (or use a verified build) and verify the public key, all of these arguments go out the window with the exception of exposing your phone number. This situation seems like a pr…
If the goal is to protect yourself from the NSA, switching from WhatsApp to signal is not going to change things.
Signal could well be a honey pot software designed to attract people who don't want to be listened to by the NSA.
I agree that signal is secure and oriented towards privacy, two different things.