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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#131

Post by einpoklum »

INTPenis wrote: post #102
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?

> then let them.

That means that _you_ are going back to WhatsApp, then, since when you want to talk to them - that's what you'll use too.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#132

Post by Kelteseth »

pmlnr wrote: post #40
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.

SMS. It's on every phone. Beyond that, there are free XMPP servers, and you can even run you own. Clients like Conversations, blabber.im are all wonderful. I've been using it with friends and my wife for years without issues, albeit I have my own server.

SMS is awful for everything more than just plain text, and costs money. Have you ever tried to send an image or a short video via SMS?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#133

Post by Aachen »

m1keil wrote: post #105
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.

Apps often don't work for me. Spotify often needs restarting before it realizes it does have Internet, Antennapod keeps asking if I want to make an exception and use mobile data for a download (I'm on WiFi), etc.

An outage confirmation is nice to have before I debug things on my end or ask other people to check things, so I can understand the frustration to an extent (even if it seems overblown).

But it doesn't need to be a tweet for me. These people need sleep and/or could be spending their time on fixing the problem like you say, so just get a status page right? Everybody happy. (Just not one of those political ones like Amazon and co have, showing greens until someone hits the outage button manually.)

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#134

Post by maqp »

the_other wrote: post #81
novok wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram, because every chat is a 'secret chat' by default. If your using signal, a priority for you is private chat with something the normies in your life can use, otherwise you'd just use whatever is the most popular where you live.

> WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram No it doesn’t. It’s owned by the 2nd largest surveillance capitalist; it shares a back-end with Facebook (so at a whim they can use the metadata around your chats to update their advertising models of you and your contacts); IIRC it leaks your engagement to FB (via web link previews).

Let's do an apples to apples comparison

-End-to-end encrypted by default (WA yes, Telegram No)

-End-to-end encrypted group chats (WA yes, Telegram No)

-End-to-end encrypted group video calls (WA yes, Telegram No)

-End-to-end encrypted desktop chats (WA yes, Telegram No)

-Client-side encrypted cloud backups (WA yes, Telegram No)

-Cross-platform end-to-end encrypted chats (WA yes, Telegram No)

It's a bit hard to make a case for Telegram's good intentions when they lack the ability to actually deploy usable, ubiquitous end-to-end encryption. They could even pay people like Moxie to implement it for them, which begs the question, why haven't they. Durov absolutely has the money.

Yes WA and FB has access to your communications metadata, but so does Telegram. And every entity that hacks Telegram.

Pavel Durov isn't a magical entity of good will and intentions, he's a Russian guy with sure, decent eye towards good user experience, but the cost for that is too great, considering he's never hired a competent cryptographer to even see if the features the app provides could be implemented in a privacy preserving way. I'd love to be able to defend Telegram's design choices, but the more they spend their time adding "sleek animations" and other bs features, the clearer it becomes it's just another social media platform with same privacy features as Facebook Messenger:

-Not end-to-end encrypted by default (Telegram Yes, FBM yes)

-No end-to-end encrypted group chats (Telegram Yes, FBM yes)

-Opt-in 1:1 end-to-end encrypted chats on mobile (Telegram Yes, FBM yes)

In that comparison, WA comes at the top. But then again, it's a false dichotomy as Signal puts incremental privacy features with no real down-sides.

-Open source clients (Signal yes, WA no)

-Reproducible builds (Signal yes, WA no)

-User-managed groups (Signal yes, WA no)

(And no, Telegram being open source with reproducible builds isn't really worth anything until the verification confirms that it's really using proper E2EE. Currently Telegram's source only confirms that it's not E2EE by default etc.)

As for the surveillance capitalistic aspect, Telegram is only as good as their word. FB wasn't surveillance capitalistic when it started back in 2005. Telegram isn't slaughtering the piglet before it's time to cash in, but they can get hacked at any point, and the hundreds of billions of messages that sit on their server, effectively unencrypted (storing the database key in server's memory is the same as "not encrypted"), Telegram isn't private even if Durov never wanted to use that data. The fact is experts agree such data is a liability, a toxic asset, that nobody can protect forever. Durov isn't as security researcher patching zero-days faster than NSA, GCHQ, Fancy Bear, Unit8200, CCA et. al. find them. Most probably Durov wouldn't even realize a rootkit has been sneaking data out of his server for the past 8 years.

Compared to these risks, WA has been ahead of Telegram ever since they implemented Signal protocol in 2016.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#135

Post by emptysongglass »

input_sh wrote: post #80
snovv_crash wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By default it's not e2ee, but this makes the distributed app model sooo much more user friendly. All your history is instantly available on the web client for example. Try that with Signal. The web client works if your phone is out of battery. Try that with WhatsApp.

But I don't want my entire history to be available on a website? Who would even want that, what's the use case? Who looks at their months or years old messages? If my message is over two weeks old, I'd prefer it not to be on anyone's server. I can keep a local backup if I wish to do so.

Then you're not a person who values their message history. That's OK, you do you but there's many users out there, myself included who deeply value a searchable index of their chats from all time. I use it as a Memex or outboard brain I can tag and search. It's been in invaluable to digging up old quotes, pics, links, ebooks, etc. I wanted to re-surface either to share to someone else than the original recipient or for my own reference. Because you can search by broad types, it's doubly easy to find that archived data.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#136

Post by maqp »

fsflover wrote: post #112
novok wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram, because every chat is a 'secret chat' by default. If your using signal, a priority for you is private chat with something the normies in your life can use, otherwise you'd just use whatever is the most popular where you live.

> WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25685446

The backdoor only applies to WhatsApp for Business, where companies want a fail-safe to open employee messages e.g. after they've left the company. The fact they're transparent about it should be enough. Do not use WA for Business, for personal private communication. They are not the same product, and the business version isn't truly E2EE.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#137

Post by maqp »

colordrops wrote: post #21
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…

Not sure I'd say that their reliability "sucks". I've been using it for years and this is only the second major outage I can recall, the other being when an Elon tweet dogpiled millions of users onto the service.

Tens of millions, 50 million to be more precise. <:

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#138

Post by maqp »

elpy1 wrote: post #113
INTPenis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Time for people to look into Session ( https://getsession.org ). You get automatic native onion routing via decentralised infrastructure - currently 1800~ community-run servers (service nodes).

Still fraction of the size of the Tor network. Let's take another look in 5..10 years.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#139

Post by emptysongglass »

maqp wrote: post #134
the_other wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WhatsApp has a better privacy story than Telegram No it doesn’t. It’s owned by the 2nd largest surveillance capitalist; it shares a back-end with Facebook (so at a whim they can use the metadata around your chats to update their advertising models of you and your contacts); IIRC it leaks your engagement to FB (via web link previews).

Let's do an apples to apples comparison -End-to-end encrypted by default (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted group video calls (WA yes, Telegram No) -End-to-end encrypted desktop chats (WA yes, Telegram No) -Client-side encrypted cloud backups (WA yes, Telegram No) -Cross-platform end-to-end encrypted chats (WA yes, Telegram No) It's a bit hard to make a…

You're evaluating Telegram with many paragraphs given to your metric, which is E2EE. That's fair enough but it's not representative for what many users outside of the HN bubble are evaluating by. For me I value all of the features I wrote in my original comment in this thread more than I value E2EE by default. If someone were to come to me and offer me E2EE by default without those features I would say no thank you.

What I don't want is a corporation behind my chat app whose business is in monetizing my data. If Durov can keep Telegram out of that business I will be pleased.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#140

Post by ninchuka »

avnigo wrote: post #92

Down due to a hosting outage, but back up currently. This is why I would wanna see user-hosted instances of the Signal server [0] plugging in to the network and supporting traffic. I think a zero-config server app install of Signal server would work great for decentralizing the messaging platform too, but unfortunately it's not set up to handle that yet. [0]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

moxie the creator of it is so against decentralizing signal its insane so thats never going to happen sadly, it really would fix the problem just have a few thousand server people start running and it connects to the network and gets sent messages to send to its destination
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