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You can change your number

signal.org

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Re: You can change your number

#371

Post by frankfury »

godelski wrote: post #160
Vinnl wrote: post #2

> We built Change Number using the foundation of more exciting features to come. Surely this is referring to the ability to use a non-phone number ID, which they've hinted at before [1]. Looking forward to that, only because I know many others are! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/comment/...

I think the real question is what "usernames" will look like. There were hints dropped that this could be stronger than a typical username (like what HN has). I took a poll on reddit[0][1] to see what people wanted. I was rather surprised at how many wanted strong anonymity. I expected that the top choice would be the weak anonymity, where people just have an alternative to phone numbers. But I think if that's what S…

I'm really curious about how will the usernames pan out in the end

Re: You can change your number

#372

Post by quesera »

grishka wrote: post #369
scotty79 wrote: post #67

Why would supposedly secure communicator use actual phone number as identifier is beyond me. And everybody does that, either phone number or email. The only software I could find for anonymous communication was old Polish communicator http://gg.pl which uses arbitrary numbers as identifiers I understand that startups are scared that they won't be able to build up userbase from scratch but come on! Discord and Slack d…

Email is okay to me because you can actually own one. Phone numbers though are terrible because they're tied to countries, their security depends only on your carrier, you can't run your own carrier to take it into your own hands, and sending SMS costs money. Also the underlying interconnection networks like SS7 aren't secure at all and rely on trust.

Unfortunately, you do not own your email address either.

TLDs are managed by governments or government-adjacent organizations. Domains are managed by the TLD manager. Email addresses are managed by the domain manager.

I've never had a phone number or a domain name taken from me, but I've heard of more cases of the latter than of the former.

Re: You can change your number

#373

Post by WallowingInShit »

guerrilla wrote: post #279
mlissner wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can just say the message wasn't received. They don't have to say it was uninstalled. Just loudly tell me things aren't working like I expected. That's all this takes.

You could just check for yourself if it's important. I do.

This is bad design. Why excuse bad design? When I send a text message and it doesn't arrive, my messaging app lets me know. With Signal, this is a step backward.

Re: You can change your number

#374

Post by grishka »

quesera wrote: post #372
grishka wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Email is okay to me because you can actually own one. Phone numbers though are terrible because they're tied to countries, their security depends only on your carrier, you can't run your own carrier to take it into your own hands, and sending SMS costs money. Also the underlying interconnection networks like SS7 aren't secure at all and rely on trust.

Unfortunately, you do not own your email address either. TLDs are managed by governments or government-adjacent organizations. Domains are managed by the TLD manager. Email addresses are managed by the domain manager. I've never had a phone number or a domain name taken from me, but I've heard of more cases of the latter than of the former.

There are now those custom TLDs that are not managed by a government-related organization. Your domain is managed by whoever you registered it at. You can transfer your domain between registrars too. Your email address is managed by you because you control the domain. You can use someone else's email service with your domain, or you can host your own. You can switch between one and the other without anyone noticing.

I've heard stories of how a US carrier issued a replacement sim card to a fraudster. I've also heard stories of how a Russian carrier intercepted someone's SMS messages to break into their Telegram account.

Re: You can change your number

#375

Post by quesera »

grishka wrote: post #374
quesera wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, you do not own your email address either. TLDs are managed by governments or government-adjacent organizations. Domains are managed by the TLD manager. Email addresses are managed by the domain manager. I've never had a phone number or a domain name taken from me, but I've heard of more cases of the latter than of the former.

There are now those custom TLDs that are not managed by a government-related organization. Your domain is managed by whoever you registered it at. You can transfer your domain between registrars too. Your email address is managed by you because you control the domain. You can use someone else's email service with your domain, or you can host your own. You can switch between one and the other without anyone noticing.…

But unless you operate the TLD, you do not "own" your email address. Donuts can choose to cancel your domain registration, or to hand it to someone with a more compelling trademark claim, etc. Legal niceties vary by jurisdiction, but at the end of the day you "own" nothing but a contract where you are the subordinate party.

SIM swapping is a big problem, but that is more equivalent to DNS hijacking of your domain than to the concept of legal/contractual "ownership" or rights to operation.

But semantics aside, the important question is how easy would it be for a malfeasant to interfere with your quiet enjoyment of your public identifier (phone number or email address). SIM swapping is way too easy. Domain hijacking isn't hard either, and sometimes one attack can leverage the other.

Re: You can change your number

#376

Post by vel0city »

doc_gunthrop wrote: post #68
caslon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord keeps your friend information on their servers. This is, like tptacek said, exactly what Signal is trying to prevent. If servers get seized by the Feds, they don't want to needlessly reveal who's contacting who for everyone. It's about storing as little personal information as they can.

Not only do they keep your friend information on their servers, they maintain a copy of every single message you've ever sent via Discord. Their service is the antithesis of private communications.

Also, every thing you've ever attached in a message (even 1 on 1 messages) have publicly accessible URLs.

There is no such thing as privacy on Discord.

Re: You can change your number

#377

Post by colordrops »

sa1 wrote: post #336
colordrops wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With usernames, the contact graph has to be stored on their servers. Are you suggesting that there isn't a contact graph on their servers? How exactly do they route from one user to another? It's certainly not P2P. If you are suggesting that we should trust them just because it could work without them storing who I've contacted, you are mistaken. The whole point of private messaging is to obviate the need for trust…

They only started sending your contact graph after adopting SGX. Before that the matching used to happen client side through a bloom filter. They can theoretically rebuild a contact graph by finding everyone you’re talking to, but that’s a small subset of the contact graph created by contact matching. The code is open source and SGX literally means that the client attests that the code on the server matches what it’s…

I trust bloom filters more than SGX. I assume they stopped using bloom filters because of performance or reliability reasons?

Also, aren't most mobile processors not Intel? How would SGX be used?

Re: You can change your number

#378

Post by vel0city »

charcircuit wrote: post #140
stjohnswarts wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you request deletion of these? I've never really thought about that before (I don't use discord that much anyway other than hoping on some channels occasionally to help beginners to rust and c++. I guess I'm not giving away too much there :)

Yes, you can.

  Update Discord.messages 
    Set Deleted=True
  Where messageID='71d01110-e3d8-4673-9ba0-7bc676c5b6e6'
Deleted!

Re: You can change your number

#379

Post by vel0city »

WallowingInShit wrote: post #373
guerrilla wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just check for yourself if it's important. I do.

This is bad design. Why excuse bad design? When I send a text message and it doesn't arrive, my messaging app lets me know. With Signal, this is a step backward.

> When I send a text message and it doesn't arrive, my messaging app lets me know

Signal does let you know, it never gets the delivered mark.

Re: You can change your number

#380

Post by vel0city »

sneak wrote: post #330
snowgrove wrote: post #282

I stopped using Signal, along with my adult tech-oriented friends, when we all had bad experiences migrating our accounts to new phones. That plus the phone number requirement, intrusive contacts integration, and the weird crypto side projects killed my interest in Signal entirely. My friends and I use Discord now.

Discord is not end to end encrypted, and Discord, along with whoever buys them, will receive the complete plaintext message history of all of your conversations with those friends.

Not only that, all attachments are publicly accessible.
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