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Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

element.io

301–310 of 422 posts

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#301
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t run my own service for the same reason I don’t build my own car or I don’t do accounting for my company, I don’t have the time to learn how to do it nor doing it.

No, this is not the same. You want the utmost privacy, yet you still decide to trust someone over it.

I also want utmost security for my money, which is why I put it in a bank rather than holding the cash myself.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#302
post #13

The fact that content sent to signal and Whatsapp resides unencrypted at the matrix homeserver makes this product completely useless to me. I don't think I want to sacrifice the security for having all my chats in one place. If they can fix that I might reconsider. They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client? I don't really follow why they move the bridge…

> They already reverse engineered the Whatsapp protocol. I see little reason why it can't live in the client ? Because Whatsapp crushes any client other than their official client. Everyone else is confined to scraping Whatsapp Web.

At least it's better than getting zero-clicked.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#303
So this service consists basically in paying to compromise E2EE, adding an attack vector, storing my otherwise encrypted conversations on centralised servers, using an arguably worse client with less features just for the convenience of not having to open 3 separate apps? Who is this for?

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#304

So this service consists basically in paying to compromise E2EE, adding an attack vector, storing my otherwise encrypted conversations on centralised servers, using an arguably worse client with less features just for the convenience of not having to open 3 separate apps? Who is this for?

It's for all of us! Created by those nice folks over at the NSA! I make joke!

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#305
post #80

Matrix and a Element are great in theory, too bad the available clients still suck.

Element for Android is far from bad. Lacks threads, though. But same for Telegram and Whatsapp.

Both the Android and web clients are promising, it's clear there's been a lot of work put into it, but they're also way too buggy and unpolished to recommend. As such, I'm really not eager to use this feature.

I would pay/donate just for them to improve the clients, regardless of this "Element One" service. It's an extremely important project.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#306

Back in the day before the rise of Facebook, there was an open source service that combined all the popular messaging protocols - MSN, AoL, IRC, etc. It was called Pidgin[0], and it never got particularly big. I see the same thing here. While it's interesting, I'm failing to see what the use case is. What's the niche that needs this solved in a big way? [0] https://www.pidgin.im/

I think Trillian was even older, and I think there were some KDE apps that did it even before that...

Kopete

https://apps.kde.org/kopete/

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#307
post #80

Matrix and a Element are great in theory, too bad the available clients still suck.

Element for Android is far from bad. Lacks threads, though. But same for Telegram and Whatsapp.

Threads are currently under active development :)

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#308
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't know that when you message someone on Signal it's for their eyes only. What you know is that unless their device is compromised, it is up to them to decide who can read the messages that you send to them. Thus the situation with the bridge is not in reality different from the situation now.

No - the bridge could be compromised without your conversation partner’s involvement. I.e. the bridge is a vulnerability that enables man in the middle attacks.

Your conversation partner's device could also be compromised remotely.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#309
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no way for me, a hypothetical person who wants to keep my Signal messages 100% encrypted in the Signal ecosystem, to opt out of my contacts using an Element bridge. This sounds like a made-up concern. How do you stop me from screenshotting your convo and posting on twitter, or just copying and pasting from one app to the next?

Those are distinct from my concern. In your scenarios, I have trusted you to keep the conversation secret, and you betrayed that trust. My concern is about giving messages in an automatic fashion to a third party, which I'm completely unaware of and have no way of making an informed decision about. The third party could be breached (they run an online service, which is much, much easier to attack than some dude's iPh…

How much do you know about your conversation partner's cyber hygiene? They might leave their phone unlocked at the library or even unknowingly install malware.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#310
post #110
post #97

> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…

> I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal.

As someone who used trillian, you should recognize that you're likely to need to follow someone to a new trendy messaging service within a few years, regardless of an aggregator taking off.

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