Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

motherboard.vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 29 posts

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#11

Post by rarrrrrr »

dchest wrote: post #5
CiPHPerCoder wrote: post #2

I'm starting to look through the code right now. A scroll through their open source page indicates they're using libsodium, which is a good sign that they avoided most of the foot-cannons alluded to on this page: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad

I wonder why they don't use golang.org/x/crypto/nacl instead of bindings to C library (libsodium-go). All primitives in it are implemented in assembly (for amd64 arch), so speed shouldn't be a concern.

Great question!

We really wanted to use the pure go implementation, but it doesn't cover as much functionality. Detached signatures for example.

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#13

Post by rarrrrrr »

newscracker wrote: post #7

SpiderOak describes this as "Collaboration and messaging for teams." It seems like it's for (for-profit) business teams and not for personal "teams" or groups or non-profits/social groups. I guess the pricing model mentioned in the article is to get businesses that use Slack or Hipchat or other system. I don't like SpiderOak's pricing models in general because of how it seems to oversell and upsell services. For pers…

Thanks for taking a look and for your feedback! Do you have any recommendations for us for alternative pricing?

One of the things we tried to accommodate is that teams can be paid for by the individual members instead of one entity having to foot the whole bill. This was one of the common complaints we saw about Slack, where large communities enjoy using it but had no way to pay for better service.

You can use Semaphor for free just like Slack, with limited historical content retention.

Also, for what it's worth, I use Signal daily for personal messaging, and my own experience with it has been great. We think of Semaphor and the team/business context as as having pretty different requirements (and therefore somewhat different underlying crypto structures) than individual messaging. The biggest differences are about message retention and what happens when you want to invite a new member to an established conversation.

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#14

Post by rarrrrrr »

fizzbatter wrote: post #12
implicit_none wrote: post #3

Downloadable here: https://spideroak.com/opendownload

Bummer, they say Android, but the download isn't available.

Sorry! Ironically (since we're using Google's Golang) Android has been the hardest platform for us to finish. We've got Mac, iOS, Linux, and Windows now, and are running Android internally but it's not release ready yet. Should have it within a few weeks. It is likely to require a newish Android version though. Thanks for taking a look!

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#15

Post by walterbell »

fizzbatter wrote: post #9
walterbell wrote: post #6

Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com ) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server. Article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/go-ahead-make-some-f... Security: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2756350-Wire…

How's the UX of wire? I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things: 1. Secure. A few of them exist 2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1 3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of…

> How's the UX of wire?

No UX complaints here. I don't think it has ephemeral messages, but you can delete per-contact history of end-to-end encrypted msgs. There's a neat doodle/whiteboard feature. The surprising killer feature of Wire has been the quality of audio, which may be due to their hiring of former Skype engineers, http://www.wired.com/2015/08/wire-declares-war-on-terrible-c...:

"You know that vague hissing noise that’s omnipresent during your phone calls? It’s called “comfort noise,” and it’s totally artificial. It’s placed there so that when you hear those brief moments of silence between each speaker’s vocalizations, you don’t think the call has disconnected. In Wire, there’s none of that; it’s actually a little jarring, not hearing anything at all when no one’s speaking ... a Wire group call is also set up in a sort of virtual space. Sound comes through the app in stereo—you really need a headset to experience it—and the app’s post-processing is able to delay it by a few milliseconds in one ear or the other. The effect is that even though you’re all on a call, it will always sound like Mary’s sitting on your left, Mike is right in front of you, and Stephanie is a few seats over to the right. Your brain doesn’t have to re-identify a voice every time it starts speaking."

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#16

Post by dchest »

rarrrrrr wrote: post #11
dchest wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they don't use golang.org/x/crypto/nacl instead of bindings to C library (libsodium-go). All primitives in it are implemented in assembly (for amd64 arch), so speed shouldn't be a concern.

Great question! We really wanted to use the pure go implementation, but it doesn't cover as much functionality. Detached signatures for example.

Ah, yes, there are no signatures in x/crypto/nacl. There's https://github.com/agl/ed25519, however it will be slower, as there's no assembly.

Edit: oops, looks like signatures were added 2 months ago (https://github.com/golang/crypto/blob/master/ed25519/). (I guess it's the same agl's code). There is a detached version (Sign/Verify).

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#17

Post by rarrrrrr »

fizzbatter wrote: post #9
walterbell wrote: post #6

Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com ) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server. Article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/go-ahead-make-some-f... Security: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2756350-Wire…

How's the UX of wire? I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things: 1. Secure. A few of them exist 2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1 3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of…

Your "temporary" criteria is not yet available in the 1.0.x version of Semaphor, but the very near term roadmap includes retention policy per channel/conversation, with settings like "N days" and/or "N messages". Then Semaphor uses ephemeral key rotation to match the retention policy (i.e. both the messages and ephemeral keys are destroyed as the retention expires.)

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#19

Post by joeblow9999 »

fizzbatter wrote: post #9
walterbell wrote: post #6

Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com ) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server. Article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/go-ahead-make-some-f... Security: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2756350-Wire…

How's the UX of wire? I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things: 1. Secure. A few of them exist 2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1 3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of…

Just a friendly reminder: Snapchat is not actually ephemeral. They save everything they just stop showing it to users.

Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

#20

Post by DKnoll3 »

curiousgal wrote: post #18

I always cringe when I come across this type of Snowden branding. Can't put my finger on the reason.

Perhaps it's because it reeks of limited hangout (trusted insider reveals a bunch of info, and then everyone uses his brief software mentions to convince everyone what tools to use), even if he isn't actually one?

Vice has me very cautious these days in general, as well: https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/disney-fox-hearst-time-warner-tied-...

Post reply on HN