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Signal Introduces Stories

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Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#451

Post by eurasiantiger »

unhammer wrote: post #403
iudqnolq wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About once a week I accidentally send a sticker in Signal. It feels like it should be impossible, but somehow my subconscious muscle memory uses those positions for something. But I've never met anyone else with this problem and still haven't figured out how or why I'm doing it, so I can't blame them.

my older relatives do this with swipe-to-reply, every other message is a reply to some random previous message ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This just underlines how unintuitive swipe gestures are. There is no way to tell the feature exists or what swiping might do, and having horizontal finger drag do interactions when vertical drag just browses is simply inaccessible to many people.

I still do not understand why everyone and their cat copied that from Tinder.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#452

Post by thesz »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #234
kibwen wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still of the opinion that encrypted private group chats are an impossible UX problem (1:1 chat is fine). But if I were to trust anyone to find a way to do it properly, it would be Signal.

What makes it impossible? Naively I would think that if you have a secure 1:1 communication protocol, then you can send N*(1:1) secure messages to a group of N people. To solve the "fake group message" problem where an adversarial member of the group sends different messages to different members of the group, or delays the message to some members, the protocol could simply allow for a 2nd level "vouch" message to be…

What you described is a tendermint-consensus-protocol-like round. It requires a direct connection (or some emulation of such channel) between participants.

Consensus protocols are tricky, BTW.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#454

Post by falcolas »

batiudrami wrote: post #284
falcolas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My curmudgeonly self would prefer if the stories were off by default. It's not a feature I'm even remotely interested in, and feature creep really isn't a positive thing. I've tried snapchat and Instagram stories, and I hate that the messages disappear with time. It seems counter-intuitive for an asynchronous communication method, and that doesn't even count how it always feels like another FOMO marketing gag to keep…

I think you don’t quite have the right mindset for the purpose of stories. The point is “this is not important enough to interrupt my friends; but here’s what I’m up to if you’re interested”. It doesn’t matter that it expires, because it’s only relevant to what is happening now. Of course it still has all the usual social media failings where it is used to make the senders life seem more exciting and fun than it real…

> it’s only relevant to what is happening now

See - that's the part I don't get. Photos, to me, are not ephemeral. They are valuable, even if you don't think they are at the time. I've lost too many photos because I considered them to be ephemeral, and I regret that loss because I now only have vague memories of the events they captured. My only remaining memories of some of my oldest friends who are no longer with me are captured in those "irrelevant" photos.

Future you will thank you for keeping photos of your friends.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#455

Post by uoaei »

hadlock wrote: post #236
uoaei wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand the qualms with SMS support. SMS was never secure, and it certainly doesn't become more secure when you push it through a pass-through on one app or another. There is nothing you can do to SMS to make it more secure except to send encrypted strings: but then you have the same problem of sharing secrets, etc. that requires a separate app to manage anyway.

Because I already have an encrypted messaging app. It's called Whatsapp. This bumps up to E2E encrypted if both people using "SMS" have signal installed. Now this is just an alternative to WhatsApp. I will just keep using WhatsApp.

WhatsApp and Signal do not provide the same level of security, despite what Meta might try to tell you.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#456

Post by aeturnum »

m000 wrote: post #439
dontparticipate wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging. This will make all my conversations less private rather than more. It was a really dumb decision. I was able to convince a lot of people to switch because "it's just text and voice messaging except if we both have the app then it's more secure." I will basically be alone in my usage of Signal after the change g…

> My family members will basically all stop using Signal now because they didn't want two apps for messaging. Schedule time in your calendar for helping family with their "lost" SMS. At least at the moment, Signal seems to keep SMS separately from other apps. Uninstalling Signal will probably make any archived messages dissapear, at least temporarily.

If you uninstall signal w/o exporting your SMS and MMS I believe they will be gone forever.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#457

Post by ikawe »

srcreigh wrote: post #397
Vinnl wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kinda were forced to by Android limiting what they can do: https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-blog-removing-sms...

There is (sometimes?) a way for Signal users to deregister from RCS which should presumably cause other devices to send messages via SMS instead of RCS. People's Android devices can be opt in to receive messages via RCS based on phone number with either Google or their carrier. If the number is registered via Google, the number can be deregistered using a form. [1] For Verizon, it seems you can call Customer Support…

Disabling RCS, which apparently is encrypted with the Signal protocol for G messaging, so that people can continue to comfortably use unencrypted comms (sms) in Signal messenger itself would be a really wild course of action.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/verizon-google-messaging-...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/google-enables-end-t...

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#458

Post by aeturnum »

Daniel_sk wrote: post #94
yamtaddle wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My SMS use: 1) Spam (~40%) 2) Transactional messages (~40%) 3) Conversations with old (45+) relatives (~15%) 4) Conversations with people I barely know (parents of kids' friends, people responding to a web market listing, that kind of thing) (~5%)

Yeah, but why do you need Signal to handle those messages?

You don't! But that's exactly the problem - you don't need signal at all. All the important messages that you get are gonna come through another platform (SMS, whatsapp, weechat, etc [depending on where you are]). So, now that SMS support is gone, all signal installs are in addition to the apps that you actually need.

Most people will use the messaging platforms that they need to have installed to get through their days. It's nice, ofc, to have friends who are privacy enthusiasts - but Signal main goal has always been to go beyond that group.

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#459

Post by OkayPhysicist »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #285
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it impossible? Naively I would think that if you have a secure 1:1 communication protocol, then you can send N*(1:1) secure messages to a group of N people. To solve the "fake group message" problem where an adversarial member of the group sends different messages to different members of the group, or delays the message to some members, the protocol could simply allow for a 2nd level "vouch" message to be…

Ah, but what if I send different vouch messages to different users? There is actually a way to do it, if you assume PKI (which signal provides) and that all messages will be delivered in some bounded time. It’s called the dolev-strong protocol and it guarantees that all honest members of the group will agree with each other. Unfortunately, it requires one round per group member and delivering all messages within a bo…

Since you'd be receiving vouches from all group members, you'd get some data about who trusts who's message. To the user, you'd probably highlight the message with the "something's fucky" notifier (red background? a caution symbol?) and then have the further "of X vouches you've recieved, these Y disputed the message's (content/existence)" type deal.

Which lets you know that Alice and Bob are in contention, which is probably good enough for most situations. "One of these three (or more if you have multiple groups of bad faith actors) sets of users are operating in bad faith" should be plenty of information for a user to make an informed decision. Even if that decision is "wow, how did I end up in a group containing multiple groups of bad actors, I should be elsewhere".

Re: Signal Introduces Stories

#460

Post by e12e »

sasattack wrote: post #276
e12e wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otoh, maybe a small company like signal is easier to completely subvert by Cia, nsa, Mossad than meta is?

Both tor and signal are funded By one or another branch of the American intelligence community. If you want more info i recommend googling "signal radio free Asia" It's original function was to allow CIA agents posing as reporters for the CIA mouthpiece called Radio Free Asia to be able to report their discoveries. I use the app but in many ways we are actually providing cover for the military and state intelligence…

Oh, indeed. But funded by and subverted by isn't the same thing.
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