11–20 of 68 posts
Has ring improved much? I remember a few months back it used 28gb of background data over LTE (which was fine since I'm uncapped) on my phone, and was less stable than sflphone, which would randomly stop registering occasionally. I can recommend pjsip though, very reliable so long as you read its docs before writing a script to leverage it.
There seems to be no browseable source code around, what are the implementation language(s)? I want to know whether the protocol implementations are written in a memory-safe language.
P.S. I couldn't find any browseable source either, so I cloned their repo.
What stops attackers from poisoning the DHT? Could one publish false name IP address associations?
The DHT system for identities is cool, but the thing that gets me is that they don't have support for SRTP with ZRTP, only SRTP with SDES. There's no perfect forward secrecy, and a bunch of other features that ZRTP has. https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/technolo...
A more comparable thing to Signal is Matrix [1] and it's client Riot [2]. Theoretically, it has perfect forward secrecy. It's not as distributed as Ring is, but there is no centralized server as in Signal either.
Riot is also in F-Droid. So while not a GNU member, I find it sufficiently open and free.
A totally distributed approach with forward secrecy is Tox [3]. It needs a good code audit, though. And as in Ring, P2P causes data consumption issues in mobile.
[2] https://riot.im/
What's the advantage of being a GNU project these days? It seems like it ties you very strongly to the FSF's political opinions and in particular Richard Stallman's political opinions (e.g., eugenics) and restricts your technical decision-making options (e.g., limited plugin architecture, limited support for non-free OSes, mandatory support for things like GNUTLS), while not giving you very much in return - with the…
Some are happy to be associated with the opinion that all software should be free.
>in particular Richard Stallman's political opinions (e.g., eugenics)
Richard Stallman's opinions, outside of the realm of free software, are irrelevant in the context of the GNU project. Throwing out eugenics like that feels manipulative to me.
>restricts your technical decision-making options
The next few paragraphs will explain why what you see as restrictions aren't seen the same way from the perspective of GNU developers.
>limited plugin architecture
You are of course referring to exposing the AST of GCC to other (possibly proprietary) programs, which was a GCC-specific issue. It doesn't broadly apply to everything. I help maintain GNU Guix, a project designed from the ground up to be as extensible as possible, and there has been no such issue. Nor does GNU Emacs have an issue with extensibility.
>limited support for non-free OSes
I think this is distorting the truth a bit. The point is that the focus of the GNU project is to develop a fully free operating system, and maintainers should focus their efforts accordingly. That doesn't mean that GNU software shouldn't work well on other, proprietary operating systems, and maintainers shouldn't reject patches from contributors that add or improve such support unless it adds a significant burden. Bottom line is: GNU software should work the best on the GNU system, which seems sensible to me. The GNU maintainer guidelines go into more detail about this topic.
>mandatory support for things like GNUTLS
Software in the GNU project should work well with or use other software in the GNU system. Again, those that participate in the GNU project think this is positive, because GNU should form a cohesive whole, just like MacOS or Windows should.
>while not giving you very much in return
GNU and the FSF give Guix a place to host many Git repos, space for a website, several mailing lists, a bug tracker, they colocate our hardware in their datacenter, give us virtual machines on their own servers, handle donations, and promote our releases. I think it's a pretty great deal given the project is philosophically aligned with the free software movement.
>With the existence of GitHub and a wide variety of competitors
I wouldn't call GitHub a competitor. GitHub is just a code hosting site, GNU is a unified project with a political mission.
>What am I missing?
Hopefully I've helped answer this question.
What's the advantage of being a GNU project these days? It seems like it ties you very strongly to the FSF's political opinions and in particular Richard Stallman's political opinions (e.g., eugenics) and restricts your technical decision-making options (e.g., limited plugin architecture, limited support for non-free OSes, mandatory support for things like GNUTLS), while not giving you very much in return - with the…
Some believe that's not necessary a bad thing.
The DHT system for identities is cool, but the thing that gets me is that they don't have support for SRTP with ZRTP, only SRTP with SDES. There's no perfect forward secrecy, and a bunch of other features that ZRTP has. https://www.silentcircle.com/products-and-solutions/technolo...
Yes, that's true. A more comparable thing to Signal is Matrix [1] and it's client Riot [2]. Theoretically, it has perfect forward secrecy. It's not as distributed as Ring is, but there is no centralized server as in Signal either. Riot is also in F-Droid. So while not a GNU member, I find it sufficiently open and free. A totally distributed approach with forward secrecy is Tox [3]. It needs a good code audit, though.…