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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#121

Post by ho_schi »

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…

The UX and reliability sucks? I doubt that. Using Signal for years on a old iPhone SE (1st Gen) and a new Pixel 4a. Signal works perfectly and for many other people. It is just funny when the local radio reports that WhatsApp has another outage. While Signal had only serious problems when WhatsApp changed it terms last time - too many new users. Sounds like "I had once a bug with it therefore it is bad and I know how to doge the bugs in the other crapy software...so the crapy software is better".

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#122

Post by maqp »

deepsun wrote: post #101
bmarquez wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Nope. WA uses server-side group management, with Signal its purely on user-side. The message is revealed to be a group message on client-side. In theory, since the group messages are a burst of packets of the same size, the server can distinguish between messages to groups,and drop them if it wants to, but that would be interference of communication which, IIUC, is a felony.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#123

Post by maqp »

crakenzak wrote: post #18
toastercat wrote: post #5

What's a good alternative to Signal on Android for casual messaging? I don't think Element is a good fit since it's not easy to ask a friend or family member to sign up for Element whereas it's simple to install Signal.

Telegram is great!

-Not end-to-end encrypted by default (on any platform)

-No end-to-end encryption for groups (on any platform)

-No end-to-end encrypted desktop chats (Win/Linux)

-No cross-platform end-to-end encrypted chats (iOS)

-No end-to-end encrypted group (video) calls

Great, for Durov if he wants your data, and all entities hacking their server for your data. Not that great for you.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#124

Post by maqp »

YeBanKo wrote: post #16
na85 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS, WhatsApp, if you don't care about security and/or privacy. Perhaps Telegram but I recall reading some commentary on their crypto that made me hesitant. Conversations is a good XMPP messenger, and it supports crypto extensions, OMEMO, etc.

Telegram supports E2EE only of you specifically switch to secret chats and I believe it is only supported in pm, not in groups.

It's also not supported for majority of desktop clients, so if you want to continue the "secret chat" you had on mobile on laptop when you get to work/school/whatnot, guess what, you're shit out of luck and need to whip out your phone every time you want to reply. It's so bad you'll just give up and use non-E2EE 1:1 chats because at least they're cross-platform. So one could argue Telegram has no _functional_ E2EE at all.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#125

Post by Otek »

I ditched Signal about a month ago. Transferred my last group chat to iMessage.

Most of my friends don't care about privacy, I tried to love Signal for 2 year, I recommended it to friends, only to give up and make a fool of myself. But after so long, the fact that I regularly don't get notifications of new messages is inexcusable.

So in my inner cirle, Signal has damaged people's willingness to improve privacy. Thanks.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#126

Post by tannhaeuser »

maqp wrote: post #117
tannhaeuser wrote: post #51

Anyone using Threema? The app costs 3 bucks but then is free and e2e-encrypted.

Bought Threema in Jan 2017. Still 0 contacts so I guess the answer is no. Even Matrix has three contacts. Closer to 100 contacts on Signal though.

The more I think about it and getting pushed to use messaging, the more I can't wait for RCS/5G to come. After all, what sucks most (for me) is that we've created all those communication standards such as http, html/sgml, XMPP, and GPS/SMS/MMS only for lusers to flock to proprietary systems at the very first occasion. I mean I can do without all the vulgar dating precaria but then what to do if you're horny and your lover only does What's App LOL?

Or is there anything wrong with RCS I should know, like rampant data collection or sth?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#127

Post by maqp »

annadane wrote: post #44
donkeyd wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> security and/or privacy WhatsApp is arguably more secure than many of the alternatives. Just look at the repo for Signal. For privacy it probably isn't, when you're in the US, that is.

Whatsapp is owned by Facebook. That automatically disqualifies it.

Metadata-wise, yes. For protecting content, it's still pretty good. Also, WA seems to add features pretty close to Signal, which could indicate WA supports Signal in testing some of the features Signal provides consultation wrt secure implementation. WA probably doesn't want to fully take the wheel and fuck around with the Signal protocol. They've of course made some changes such as the group management system, and the levels of safety number warnings (no-warnings/non-blocking warnings as opposed to Signal's non-blocking/blocking warnings).

But WA has been working on interesting proof of concepts for wider deployment such as the client-side encrypted backups. Those are actually fantastic when properly implemented. There's of course shitty aspects with WA about those like the 64-bit passwords, but, if that's a feature Signal thanks to possible collaboration can properly deploy later, I'm all for it.

There's a difference between Signal being categorically better for pretty much everything when compared to WA, but, WA isn't the worst option, even when considering its owned by FB.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#128

Post by ddevault »

growse wrote: post #106
zaik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 singl…

TLS/SSL is a better comparison, and it's a protocol which has enjoyed widespread and unprecedented success in securing the privacy of users worldwide, despite being decentralized.

The tradeoffs Moxie was thinking of when rejecting federation had more to do with centralizing his power over Signal rather than any kind of technical limitations.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#129

Post by einpoklum »

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.

Many services your life depends on can't be paid for, or rather - you can't decide whether and how much you pay for them, and thus cannot increase their reliability through payment.

One set of examples is online services and apps like Facebook, GMail, WhatsApp and such (although you could argue whether your life actually depends on any of these).

Another set of examples are things like transportation infrastructure, fire-fighting services, etc.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#130

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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