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Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

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Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#171

Post by Jkvngt »

Dumbdo wrote: post #106
Jkvngt wrote: post #74

Signal needs your phone number and is run by a "former" Twitter person. It just smells funny.

On the other hand Signal is encouraged by people like Edward Snowden (who I assume is paranoid enough about American big corps). The clients are open source and feature a strong E2EE, which is called the Signal protocol and is used by many other clients nowadays because it has such a good reputation. There are lot of efforts to reduce metadata further. Just dismissing it as "smells funny" is not a valid criticism.

Rosenfeld’s admitted that they don’t NEED need your phone number, so why does he still need it? I didn’t give Zucc my phone number, I didn’t give it to Suzy, Jeff, Larry, or Sergei. So why’s Rosenfeld need it? He doesn’t, but he does. It’s “easier” this way.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#172

Post by infogulch »

zrm wrote: post #2

Most of these criticisms are solvable problems. If you make a direct connection to other users, they see your IP address. So use Tor or a VPN. Many P2P lookup systems assign identifiers for routing etc. So assign ephemeral ones for anything that doesn't need a persistent one, and make sure persistent ones aren't suitable for correlation, either by not using the same identifier for multiple services by the same person…

What about Matrix over I2P? Seems like an ideal pairing, especially since Matrix' robust history syncing may combine nicely with i2p delayed forwarding and other advanced traffic mixing strategies.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#173

Post by zepto »

billyjobob wrote: post #156
zepto wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason this comment has been downvoted? I know this is usually not a good question to ask, but since this comment looks reasonable to me in context, I am wondering if there is something about safenetwork.tech that makes it a bad example or even a scam?

Last time it was featured on HN the top comment accused it of being another crypto currency scam. Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any consensus one way or the other on the technical merit, but clearly some people are not fond of it.

Thanks - this is helpful!

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#174

Post by myself248 »

Macha wrote: post #161
growse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what would happen if Signal would ever stop being benevolent? You fork it.

The harder part is you need to fork the network by convincing all your friends to move to a new "good-Signal" network.

And that's worked so well with the good-Google.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#175

Post by codemac »

catmanjan wrote: post #34
codemac wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but what about in 1992? How much did you need to understand about TCP/IP when you got AOL? Very little. And what happened when you got online? You could communicate online, suddenly reaching millions and then billions of humans. So learning just a little bit about IP (let's be real, you didn't need to know shit about TCP) Compare that to a VPN or Tor. What do you need to understand to use it, and what is the pa…

Yep all it took was some usability products and it was easier... See what I'm saying...

In this case centralization is the usability, just like AOL centralized internet access options for users? Maybe you're unfamiliar with AOL in the beginning but it was largely a walled garden that happened to have a web browser.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#176

Post by southerntofu »

growse wrote: post #25
Thorentis wrote: post #19

I think a half-way point is needed for something to be truely durable. I agree with the criticisms of P2P in that you need to make some privacy tradeoffs. But durability is another concern (as we've seen recently with the takedown of Element from the Play Store). Is it possible for somebody else to spin-up a new centralised Signal server? Why isn't the server code-base open source? Signal would grow immensely in my e…

> Signal would grow immensely in my eyes if they made the server code open source [SEE EDIT], and allowed an easy way to set the centralised server address in the Signal app. The current server would be the default, and perhaps changing the server would be hidden in Advanced Options for now. I feel like this misses the point of what Signal is. It's not just software, it is the network as well . The client is a client…

> People seem to have an expectation that Signal server API is public, and that it should allow any compatible client to connect

That's because people have a reasonable assumption that a single actor (however good it is) should not have power over all of our communications. That's why we had federated networks in the first place (HTTP, SMTP, XMPP, DNS). Avoiding vendor lock-in is an important feature for most people.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#177

Post by southerntofu »

stereolambda wrote: post #80

I'm annoyed that the comments here pile on the "ease of use" part, while largely ignoring what is more original here. (I don't know what I expected.) The critiques of p2p identity leaking and big hungry servers are valid and I'm glad they are raised. As a Matrix user, I could respond to the first point that yes, it's a tradeoff depending on your threat model. I think that having a tractable identity is less bad than…

> you could use an unfederated server of Matrix if you want something like Signal for sensitive connections

In the Jabber federation, we've had servers federating over tor onion services for about 8 years now, if that can be of interest to you (see prosody's mod_onions).

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#178

Post by southerntofu »

sweden wrote: post #58
gorgonzolachz wrote: post #9

Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that…

I have been running my own Matrix instance with federation on my 20 dollar/month Linode VPS for 5 years already. I use between some friends and family and I'm also connected to massive channels like the official "Element Android" and "Element Web/Desktop". And it runs... just fine. The server can be a bit performance hungry but I also host plenty of other services on my VPS (email, HTTP server, Seafile, VPN, etc) and…

I would be interested in average resource usage per user and/or per channel: CPU/RAM/disk, if you can provide the details.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#179

Post by natchy »

kitkat_new wrote: post #67
natchy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastodon is great as a decentralized Twitter Federated, not decentralized. Decentralized is peer2peer like torrents. Federated is like email where there are little fiefdoms like Gmail, yahoo, or self-hosted.

that definition seems like a bit of a stretch: decentralized does not mean anything more than not being centralized. Federation implies decentralization.

> Federation implies decentralization.

No it doesn’t. Gmail is a centralized instance of a federated network.

You can have a federated node that becomes so popular that it’s basically centralized.

This federated/decentralized distinction is pretty common.

You’re dwelling on literal definitions but there are more semantic differences those words have picked up in the communities involved.

Re: Drawbacks of P2P and a defense of Signal

#180

Post by southerntofu »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #9

Can anyone chime in on their experiences hosting a synapse server? I have close to a dozen people on mine (although we don't federate much with the network as a whole, I set it up initially for a couple of groupchats/DMs with friends) and I'm not even close to hitting the limits of the $5/mo Digitalocean server I put it on. Does federating with the greater Matrix ecosystem cost that much extra processing power, that…

I didn't try personally, but i heard from some hosting cooperatives they dropped synapse (and matrix entirely) because it was too resource hungry. for example disroot https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure
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