Lots of discussion at that link, but what's the bottom line? Can you register without a phone number yet?
By the end of the year (tm)
Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
131–140 of 201 posts
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenAI is 501c3, should they also be required to release everything?
OpenAI is a 501c4 not a 501c3. Also the structure is much more complicated for OpenAI. Nevertheless the point stands - I don’t see what relationship company organizational mission has with their technical responsibilities. Indeed, if the open sourced everything, standing up a clone would be easier which creates funding risk due to a race to the bottom of people who didn’t invest into the R&D investing very little add…
> OpenAI is a 501c4 not a 501c3
> Also the structure is much more complicated for OpenAI.
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ugh wtf so I need a Google account on Android? That's not going to happen. For an org that pretends to care about privacy you'd imagine there'd be a way to avoid, you know, the biggest privacy invader on the planet. Just allow monero payments or something. Alongside Google play for the sheep that want to use that.
Are you being hyperbolic, or do you really consider Google the worst with regards to privacy.
Google is objectively the worst
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Signal is there for power and control, not for its users, otherwise they would welcome the usage of third party clients, and generally, encourage decentralisation measures like self hosting, federation and account portability. Yep, they have nice engineering blog posts, they are also US-incorporated, extensively centralised in AWS and subject to the cloud act, which together negates, or largely diminishes claims abou…
Does the perfect messaging tool exist (100% e2ee encrypted and decentralized and open)?
Is there a messenger that allows anonymous group chats, i.e. for union organizing in a company?
As far as I can see, you can invote people to a group chat using QR flyers, but your Signal profile is visible to everyone in a chat, so everyone knows what Tina in marketing thinks about it.
Because nobody is going to have a burner phone with a data plan for a separate Signal identitiy.
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps it shouldn't necessitate it, but I can't think of a good reason why not. If it were expensive to release it, that would be a reason. But it costs roughly zero dollars to create a public repo on GitHub and a cron job to push to it once a day. Making the system public potentially increases the likelihood of a hack, which would be bad for Signal users. But relying on this argument to keep the source secret is, I…
How about they: 1. Don’t want hack competitors launching products using their code 2. Don’t want the resulting fracture in the community If I were Signal I wouldn’t want either of those.
1. A for-profit company rationally doesn't want competitors launching products using their code. Why would a non-profit care at all?
2. An app like Signal depends completely on network effects, so there's even less motivation for a community-fragmenting fork than in most OSS cases, where you'll notice that forks are already rare. There would have to be something very weird or contentious happening with the original codebase for people to want to fork it -- otherwise it's in no one's interests.
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#136Especially with AI agents being more common this would be very useful. I'd prefer to use Signal over telegram but haven't gotten around to getting another number.
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#137Signal needs to release all the infra automation code behind their backend. How they setup and manage it all should not be secret. It also makes it easy to rebuild if for some reason they are compromised. They've ghosted multiple people about this question. There's no reason a 501(c)(3) shouldn't release it.
Why would the CIA bother?
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#138any link to presentations/papers on this? I'm interested on learning ZKPs -- they seem so much like "fairy-tale come true" because I don't know much
It's standard cryptography, not some new-fangled tech! Wikipedia even has some easy examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof Main caveat is that ZKPs are probabilistic. The protocol (number of rounds etc) determines how sure, e.g. 99.9%. But never 100%. Second caveat: tech- and crypto-bros play fast and loose with the term "ZKP", either because they don't know any better (marketing) or they straig…
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#139Unrelated.
But if you have a spare phone with your account on, e.g. kids or whatever
You can install Authenticator and get codes, even if the other phones need biometrics.
Re: Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
#140Signal needs to release all the infra automation code behind their backend. How they setup and manage it all should not be secret. It also makes it easy to rebuild if for some reason they are compromised. They've ghosted multiple people about this question. There's no reason a 501(c)(3) shouldn't release it.
Why would the CIA bother?
Context?