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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#141

Post by kgraves »

vintermann wrote: post #79
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 you're tempted to switch back to WhatsApp because of Signal reliability issues, consider the possibility that you may be the target of a downgrade attack.

my parents don't care about hypothetical downgrade attacks.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#142

Post by XorNot »

circularfoyers wrote: post #67
XorNot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amongst other things they could take some action to develop an income stream that isn't whatever is going with their cryptocurrency endeavor. Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email dom…

Is it possible that Signal don't want to go down this path as it potentially puts them at the whim of the demands or requirements of paying businesses? Which demands/requirements may not be aligned with the degree of privacy which set them apart from other messenging apps. If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to co…

I don't really see how the demands of the core product - E2EE messaging to customers - can be compromised by accepting payment for one of the core problems of E2EE when legal entities are involved: establishing trust.

Signal aren't allowing accounts not tied to phone numbers because it currently serves a very useful spam mitigation problem for them. There's no real alternative there that's going to solve it without more work on the business side. Technically the phone number requirement right now means they do charge for "named" accounts, they just don't get paid for them - the phone providers do, since in many countries even prepaid phones require proof of identity to activate.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#143

Post by the_other »

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…

Invading your privacy is literally Zuck’s business model. The entire company operates based on selling an analysis of you and your friends to the highest bidder. Whether they planned that from the start or not, that is the basis of their funding, their IPO and their current valuation. All their products synergise to better invade your life. Duroc may not be squeaky clean, but he has a much better public record on standing up for ethical causes than Zuck. WA’s E2EE is entirely managed by WA - the user has no control over the keys and everything goes via their servers, so can it really be trusted?

I still think the WA privacy story is more suspect than Telegram’s at this point.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#144

Post by lnl »

hulitu wrote: post #82
gnicholas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't had reliability problems, but I do find it annoying that if I don't update my app frequently enough, they just cut communications entirely. That is, I don't get notifications that I've received new messages anymore. I usually find out about this when someone emails me to say they've sent me a message on Signal, but I've not responded. Instead of silently failing, I wish they would pop up a notification that…

Whatsapp forces you to update to be able to use it further. Not a nice thing.

Sometimes it's necessary, when the protocol itself is updated, e.g. the multi-device beta page currently says "Messaging or calling someone who is using a very old version of WhatsApp on their phone won't work from your linked device."[1] for this reason. If they don't force those users to upgrade at some point, it would lead to an undesirable situation where you are not guaranteed to be able to message someone from desktop. My experience with my grandmother's phone confirms gnicholas's account that they do this very rarely.

But, more importantly for gnicholas's point, Whatsapp gives you a warning days/weeks ahead about the need to update the app. My grandmother is almost never connected to a Wi-Fi network, so her apps don't usually update, and she hardly uses any app other than Whatsapp anyway. She got the warning one time and gave me a call immediately, so I walked her through about what to do (i.e. yes grandma, click the update button). If it silently fails, like gnicholas says, and if this happens often, then I can't imagine using Signal with her.

[1]: https://faq.whatsapp.com/general/download-and-installation/a...

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#145

Post by maqp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #139
maqp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Oh please. You're complaining about technical person evaluating technical product on technical level, on a technical forum.

E2EE is the bare minimum for security these days, as so carefully explained by the message you're replying to.

"If someone were to come to me and offer me E2EE by default without those features I would say no thank you."

This is such a loaded and unthoughtful comment. It assumes you have to make a choice. You don't, at least per technical reasoning. The only situation where you can't have E2EE is massive groups, and it's obvious those have no expectation of privacy. Anything else, I can explain to you on a technical level why it can be done in a privacy preserving way, and the only reason its not, is because Telegram's team lacks the know-how. Signal has already shown they can pull off pretty much any feature in a privacy preserving way.

So the question is not "what features do I need", but "should all my features be actual features". A feature that doesn't protect your privacy by definition can be used to spy on you, and I'm sure we both agree that is not a feature.

So ask yourself

Group chat with end-to-end encryption (Signal) or Group chat without end-to-end encryption (Telegram).

Which one do you choose? The answer is obvious.

>What I don't want is a corporation behind my chat app

Also, you should know Telegram is not a non-profit like Signal. Telegram is a limited liability _company_. It's a for-profit entity, and the LLC only means, the owners are "legally responsible for its debts only to the extent of the amount of capital they invested".

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#146

Post by busymom0 »

ninchuka wrote: post #140
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

Did he give a reason for why he's against decentralization?

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#147

Post by Jazww »

ninchuka wrote: post #140
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

Decentralization is not some great magic. Its a gigantic pain in the ass to fix even a single simple issue across all those servers.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#148

Post by mstngl »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #126
maqp wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Basically I can understand this yearning for a messaging service with the ease of SMS in the good old day - no need for an app and everybody was able to recieve as this is just an infrastructure protocol. Indeed, RCS looks promising to let this principle live further.

RCS has a long lasting history but is driven forward mainly by google during the last years. [1] One mayor flaw is that it comes basically without end-to-end encryption which - again - google announced to add an roll-out slowly. [2] Furthermore its unclear in how far Apple will implement RCS [3]. And last-but-not-least there is lack of some feature we are used to by messenger apps, like avatar picture, status message, live location etc.

With 473 M users worldwide [4] it seems to be everywhere an nowhere. I'm checking from time to time with my contacts, but I've not seen the lock symbol in the Android Messages App on by up-to-date Pixel phone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services#Hi... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/19/21574451/android-rcs-enc... [3] https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/07/20/apple-holds-out-i... [4] https://www.gsma.com/futurenetworks/rcs/

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#149

Post by maqp »

the_other wrote: post #143
maqp wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Invading your privacy is literally Zuck’s business model. The entire company operates based on selling an analysis of you and your friends to the highest bidder. Whether they planned that from the start or not, that is the basis of their funding, their IPO and their current valuation. All their products synergise to better invade your life. Duroc may not be squeaky clean, but he has a much better public record on sta…

>but he has a much better public record on standing up for ethical causes than Zuck.

Paying lip service is not the same as practicing what you preach. I'm not saying Mark Zuckerberg is on your side. I'm saying WA team managed to implement Signal Protocol before Zuckerberg et. al. realized what was happening wrt. WA's data aggregation capabilities. Also, Durov isn't called the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia for nothing. Also, it's not like VKontakte users Durov made his fortune with, had too much privacy. Why is Telegram suddenly a magical fountain of privacy when on tech level it's worse than WhatsApp?

"the user has no control over the keys"

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

"everything goes via their servers"

Kind of the central point of centralized messengers?

Also, with Telegram there is a guarantee 100% of group chats, and 100% of Win/Linux desktop chats go through the server in the form that allows the server to spy on the content. All Telegram clients also leaks the metadata that you specifically enabled E2EE with some person, i.e. you disclose your desire to hide data from all third parties. That type of metadata is extremely valuable, and something WA -- due to ubiquitous E2EE -- is unable to collect.

"I still think the WA privacy story is more suspect than Telegram’s at this point."

Your opinion doesn't override that of Matthew Green, or Bruce Schneier who have explicitly advised to NOT use Telegram. I have never seen a security expert recommend Telegram, and don't expect you to provide evidence on the contrary, either.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#150

Post by Multicomp »

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.

DeltaChat. Chat over email,no separate service to go down. Even has group chats and Android & IOS apps and a desktop app.
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