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Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

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Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#161

Post by maqp »

snovv_crash wrote: post #38
botto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, no. Although Telegrams has encryption it's by default Client-Server, you have to explicitly start a secret chat with individual people. Additionally group chats are not encrypted except between client and server. I'm not sure of a good alternative as simple as Signal

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.

"By default it's not e2ee"

And Win/Linux desktop chats are groups are not E2EE even if you want, so it's not just about it not being default, it's about the complete lack of E2EE for those.

"but this makes the distributed app model sooo much more user friendly."

It does not. It forces you to either drop E2EE, or whip out your phone hundreds of times a day.

"All your history is instantly available on the web client for example."

Which is a privacy nightmare, web-based crypto is never safe, not even when it supports E2EE. https://tonyarcieri.com/whats-wrong-with-webcrypto

"Try that with Signal."

You obviously can't because a) it's a security risk as per above and b) you don't need to as you can have native Signal client on your phone and your laptop and your desktop. Try having just one E2EE chat with Telegram across all three devices. You can't, even if you want to.

"The web client works if your phone is out of battery. Try that with WhatsApp."

Yeah, WA's system is shit, but at least they're working on a native desktop client (that also works on tablets), and that too, will feature E2EE for everything. Can't say that for Telegram.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#162

Post by maqp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #135
input_sh wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

The problem isn't the message log itself, it's the fact you pay for the privilege of having the cloud backup of conversation history, by giving that history to Telegram as a company.

It doesn't have to be this way, as WA's planned feature of client-side encrypted cloud backups[1] shows, disproving Durov's implied claim that Telegram must have access to messages to provide such feature.

[1] https://engineering.fb.com/2021/09/10/security/whatsapp-e2ee...

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#163

Post by pmlnr »

Kelteseth wrote: post #132
pmlnr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why would I? The question was: for casual messaging.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#164

Post by pmlnr »

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

> user-hosted instances of the Signal

Those are called XMPP or Matrix ;)

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#165

Post by emptysongglass »

maqp wrote: post #145
emptysongglass wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is such a loaded and unthoughtful comment. It assumes you have to make a choice. You don't, at least per technical reasoning.

When Signal provides these features, please feel free to ping me back here but until then, the proof is in the pudding and the Signal pudding doesn't taste like the Telegram pudding.

As Signal's client is open source and its server is whenever they feel like it, I'm sure they'd also value your contribution to prove out your point.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#166

Post by maqp »

emptysongglass wrote: post #165
maqp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is such a loaded and unthoughtful comment. It assumes you have to make a choice. You don't, at least per technical reasoning. When Signal provides these features, please feel free to ping me back here but until then, the proof is in the pudding and the Signal pudding doesn't taste like the Telegram pudding. As Signal's client is open source and its server is whenever they feel like it, I'm sure they'd also val…

So to return to your original post:

>"Actual multi-session clients across devices."

Not available with E2EE

>"No Electron."

Sure, because you need all 32GB of RAM but not your human right to privacy. Also, this is an argument against Signal's client, not excuse why you can't have E2EE on non-electron native client.

>"Truck loads of features and thoughtful touches everywhere."

So, eye candy. Not very strong argument.

>"Searching through your messages"

Only exact messages. Gets incredibly slow once you go past few weeks. Client-side searchers are as fast as your phone, i.e., fast.

>"video chats"

Not E2EE for groups

>"best stickers"

1:1 match between my Signal and Telegram sticker packs (50+ packs)

>"even though there are technical trade-offs to an E2EE-everywhere model"

The problem with this BS claim, is you can't point to a single trade-off. Everything you mentioned can be done with E2EE.

>"but do wish it was an option in group chats."

So the question is, why aren't you demanding it?

>"When Signal provides these features, please feel free to ping me back here but until then"

Again, which features? Please provide an actual, exact list so we know when to ping you.

>"the proof is in the pudding and the Signal pudding doesn't taste like the Telegram pudding."

The problem when you add a ton of sugar into a pot of porridge made from shit, is now you have a ton of sugar with an even coating of shit in it. No matter how much eye candy you glue on top of insecure design and spaghetti code that is Telegram, the fundamental truth is, it was never empowering you, only its owners who are collecting as much data about you as FB does, if not more.

EDIT: Fixed lack of E2EE on video calls to mean group video calls. Apologies if this looks like moving the goal post, not my intention.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#167

Post by krater23 »

bigiain wrote: post #88
krater23 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you have a relatively new smartphone and never used Whatsapp.

That does describe me nicely (Well, sort of, my daily driver phone is an iPhone XR - so only _sort of_ new?). But. I also run Signal on a ~6 year old iPad, and I've not noticed it run badly there. I haven't tried Signal on a budget grade Android phone though. I have a few Galaxy S4s I use for various odd projects, but most "modern" apps run fairly badly on those. I'm also "looking forward" to a weekend or two's worth…

My last test of Signal was some years ago on a Galaxy S3 mini. Whatsapp wasv running without big problems, Signal had sometimes hangs of two or three seconds. I now use a Galaxy S4 mini, didn't suppose that Signal is performing better now.

And all that with most features of Whatsapp missing(on my last test). Currently I don't see a reason to go from Whatsapp to Signal. Encryption is the same and Moxie see's the Signal-Network as his own where no other client has to connect. So the trust in him is better than in Facebook, but not as good as it could be.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#168

Post by krater23 »

gnicholas wrote: post #39
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…

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…

On my Signal client a message like this happened relatively often and gave me only some days to update.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#169

Post by krater23 »

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.

Yes, they do, but Signal does this too. But on Whatsapp they give you a month, on Signal some days.

BTW, I got messages from both that I have to update. No silent failing at all.

Re: Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

#170

Post by ninchuka »

upofadown wrote: post #157
busymom0 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ... is the article in question. Basically the argument is that federation slows down the possible rate of change. If you have but the one server in a system you can change things whenever you want and then push out any client changes. The root concept here is that constant protocol and feature change is the most desirable state. Not all of us accept that.

I get quicker and more reliable notifications from a self hosted matrix instance then signal and even if I went on the signal app and looked at the chat I couldn't see the message until I got a notification a bit later from them could I see it
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