171–180 of 262 posts
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I always thought they did distribute among AWS, Azure, Cloudflare and GCP as the output from running their domains on runson.cloud seems to suggest. But after this outage, clearly not.
Perhaps someone out there with skills could make a cloud of clouds to make implementing such a thing easier.
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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>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…
Sorry, I was not aware that you were not permitted to criticize anyone unless you invested tens of thousands of hours into building a competing product to demonstrate your point. Something to remember for next time.
I never made you aware of any such limitation, quite the contrary, in fact.
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…
https://getsession.org/ I doesn’t need phone numbers
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> "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.
Session. https://getsession.org/ I doesn’t need phone numbers
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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.
draft-moriarty-tls-oldversions-diediedie (now RFC 8996) only exists because of this. Moxie doesn't need to worry about security problems with a protocol he shipped last century but for TLS we had to actually document that people should stop using that - because of course they are anyway.
In the Web PKI we have in practice even more centralization, in principle it would be possible to operate a public CA that simply isn't trusted by Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google, but in practice you need all of them to have a viable service. The de facto situation is that you need logging with Google (and any other service, but Google is mandatory) and you need a sign-off from Mozilla, or you are dead in the water.
Now, I think the Web PKI is arguably the only global PKI with something approaching public oversight and it's a huge success. But it's not decentralized in the way you mean, not at all.
The real question here isn't about which system is technologically superior (though HN gravitates to that question), it's which one is technologically superior taking into account network effects. Briar and Session may be great, and I wish everyone used them, but at present at least where I live it'd be very tough going. Getting people to use Signal isn't all that hard, the network is pretty robust in my communities (university city).
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It's a free service with no actual income stream, driven by donations. What do you expect? I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.
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.