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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#101

Post by deepsun »

bmarquez wrote: post #32
deepsun wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram is not even in "secure" category, according to Bruce Schneier and other security researchers. They also meddled with Russian elections this year, blocking opposition bots, but allowing govt bots.

"Meddling" with Russian elections is a pretty strong statement, they just followed what Apple and Google did, and there was lots of discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655937 Telegram is not E2E encrypted by default, so the other comment makes sense.

Good question btw: Do Signal owners have capability to selectively block chats/groups?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#102

Post by INTPenis »

LordAtlas wrote: post #4

It's really annoying that they didn't even acknowledge the problem officially. Till about 15 minutes ago, their status page said everything was fine. Their Twitter account still doesn't mention any technical problems. But the service has been having issues for at least 3 hours. [1] Most people I know that started using Signal a few months ago are now back to using Whatsapp. Privacy is a nice feature to advertise, but…

If people are going back to Whatsapp after that, then let them. Signal has been working really well for me for years now. I don't like it from a privacy standpoint, I'd much rather see wide adoption of Briar or Matrix. But to say Signal isn't working well for a free app is crazy.

Who's paying for all their infrastructure anyways? What's the plan Moxie?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#103

Post by MrDresden »

donkeyd wrote: post #97
MrDresden wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations." Completely agree with this point. Unless you are paying for the service (by being the product or via donations) you have no particular right to get upset with the creators of said service. > "What do you expect?" Professionalism and an understanding of the impact this will have on Signal's users. Some will be cut off from necessary communicati…

> others might literally have their life depended on the service working If your life literally depends on a service, make sure to pay for that service. Also, make sure to have a backup.

While you are correct, I just want to clarify that by that I was talking about people living as subjects of totalitarian regimes or in places where their lives may truly be on the line if what they say in private would ever get out.

These individuals may not have the means or the option of paying for the service (either due to being blocked or by potentially exposing them selves to said regime if they would).

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#104

Post by BiteCode_dev »

unclekev wrote: post #10

It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unpro…

I a world were public service outages can take days to get an official announcement, I think 3 hours for a free non essential service is damn fast.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#105

Post by m1keil »

unclekev wrote: post #10

It frustrates me to no end that it took them 3 hours to officially acknowledge this outage at all. A single tweet 3 hours AFTER the outage has started is just not acceptable [1] [1] https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1442354759009247232 Edit: Yes I know signal is free and funded by donations. I've donated multiple times. I still don't think 'free' is a a valid reason for not informing people sooner. It's just unpro…

Why are you so frustrated? It clearly had issues, how would faster acknowledgment would make your day better? With limited resources I rather engineers to just fix the problem instead of spending time trying to give timely status updates.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#106

Post by growse »

zaik wrote: post #99
harry8 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol. This is just false. You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case but he has been very clear on the reasons why he hasn't gone that way and the success of his project among non-technical users where so many others have failed suggests he's doing something right. I will applaud and cheer if you show his concerns on federation aren't re…

Here is the opinion of someone who actually made such an app: https://gultsch.de/objection.html

It's a thoughtful rebuttal, but I'm not sure it hits the point. As usual, there's nuance here.

The top selling points of Signal are security and privacy. If you want these things, then there's a lot of things that maintaining complete control of the protocol gives you. From the original "Ecosystem is moving" essay: "By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update". That's the point of centralisation. Control means agility in the face of adversary, which when you're trying to optimize for security and privacy is pretty useful.

The comparison to HTML is therefore wide of the mark, because the whole point of HTML is to be interoperable. A better comparison would be with something like TLS/SSL, and then you can judge how effective the combination of slow-moving protocol evolution and a security focus has worked over the last few decades.

There is no bad choice. There are just compromises that you have to make depending on what you choose, and some of those compromises are more suited to some objectives than others.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#107

Post by cranekam »

ranguna wrote: post #63
cranekam wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook Messenger, Hangouts, Google Chat, and above all SMS / iMessage. Whatsapp by all accounts is the most popular (as much as I personally detest it). Given you’re calling out WhatsApp specifically as a service you detest I’m going to assume you rank it last of all these options. Why is this? WhatsApp is E2EE, has a simple UI (at least IMO) and doesn’t store messages centrally. If I claimed to be a privacy nut…

Because past experience matters and Facebook has failed quite a few times on the privacy spectrum

Right. I’m just surprised that WhatsApp was just called out as worse than Facebook messenger. Both are owned by the same company but one of them is technically much more secure. (Yes, FB has the keys to the kingdom and can technically do whatever they want, but it’s much easier to snoop on messenger than WA.)

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#108

Post by blitzar »

a-dub wrote: post #73
AYkALxknJh wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. lol. Its funny, take a step back and you'll see this thread is everyone complaining that a messaging app that's free had an outage and the company acknowledged there was an issue and they are working on it, but took 2 hours to do it. A free app that as you pointed out is run on donations. And the same people would also complain about alternative apps finding ways to monetize while still offerin…

it's quite funny when you think about how many commercial internet services that were originally offered to the public for free, usually to cross-promote or grow some other business (advertising, mostly, it seems), that now, as the internet has subsumed more basic functions in society, are basically as vital as a telephone was 30+ years ago. like, imagine if gmail announced they were shutting down...

> imagine if gmail announced they were shutting down...

but its free so you cant complain /s

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#109

Post by fsflover »

hirako2000 wrote: post #76
everfree wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any good paid alternatives to Signal? Looking for: Good UI, E2E, shared source native phone and desktop apps, group support, reliable push, easy setup. It seems to me that all the alternatives are either free and suffer from some of the same issues Signal does, or don't have all these features.

Element on the Matrix protocol. Not perfect UX but keeps improving. Free but it has a solid business model servicing business cases with the open source set stack that suits corporate needs.

And you can host it yourself.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#110

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