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Signal Foundation

signal.org

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Re: Signal Foundation

#121

Post by jkarneges »

e12e wrote: post #109
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users don’t want federation. See also: Adoption failure of Google Talk XMPP, massive adoption of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, and AIM before it. I wish it were different, too.

Xmpp was pretty popular. Fb messenger and Google talk never allowed federation, but they did for a while allow access by xmpp clients. Apparently WhatsApp still use xmpp, but afaik also never supported federation. Aim didn't allow federation. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say? You could claim the rotting corpse of duckduckgo's xmpp service is evidence that users don't want federation - but I thinks more just…

Google Talk absolutely federated: http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html

Unfortunately they were the only major service provider to do so, and the capability was later discontinued.

Re: Signal Foundation

#122

Post by mashedvikings »

darkstar999 wrote: post #37
gburt wrote: post #36

So, where did the $50 million come from? That is a significant amount of money for what has been a handful of people, not taking venture capital, now operating as a nonprofit to "secure communications."

The article isn't directly explicit, but > Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp Brian Action funded it himself.

Makes sense only if he didn't spend the $19,000,000,000 on one go when FB bought WhatsApp.

Re: Signal Foundation

#123

Post by jakebasile »

mapgrep wrote: post #71

This is very very good news. As a heavy Signal user, from where I sit I personally see the following clear needs: -Better group support. Right now, to do a group in Signal you have to name the group, which makes it kind of a pain to create ad hoc quick groups. I'm forever naming them "John Sue Bill" or "Jane Roger Amanda". iMessage, by contrast, just automatically makes a group without a name. You get a thread for th…

I'd love to use Signal, but in order for me to do so there's a lot that has to be added.

- Real multi device support. I want my messages on all my devices, without having to have my phone on.

- An iPad app.

- A desktop app. I'd pay for a native one, without Electron.

These things are basically table stakes for competing with Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and iMessage. If Signal's goal is to bring encryption to the masses they have to solve things like this, since regular people care less about security and more about convenience.

Re: Signal Foundation

#124

Post by tomcatfish »

acct1771 wrote: post #112
Asdfbla wrote: post #65

Pretty amazing and absolutely deserved. After the failures of systems like PGP, which aren't really suitable for the masses, the Signal protocol did a great job at spreading end-to-end encryption. I'm happy to hear that they got some philanthropic funding, even though I don't doubt that Moxie and the others did the work out of principle anyway and might have continued to do so even without the money.

IMO, saying PGP has failed is like saying cryptocurrencies have failed.

There is no public interest in PGP from non-technicals

Re: Signal Foundation

#126

Post by Ao7bei3s »

leshow wrote: post #82
JoshTriplett wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an argument for reproducible builds; building the same source should give the same checksum.

Theoretically, but when you throw in things like build systems often not being deterministic, minor versions of dependencies changing, different OS or slightly different OS version with different libraries; there's a multitude of places to throw the final binary off by a few bytes or more and end up with a different checksum. Signal wants to distribute a binary with a checksum. Once the checksum is different all bets…

As if reproducible builds hadn't been done before. If Debian can get to building 80% of their packages reproducibly[1], the communities around Android can get there too. Luckily, it's being worked on.[2]

Now the question is: (when) will this be supported by F-Droid?

[1] Scroll down for a big graph https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

[2] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/wiki/Reproducibl...

Re: Signal Foundation

#127

Post by mashedvikings »

Arathorn wrote: post #118
mashedvikings wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, Matrix does not pose arbitrary limitations to clients that want to use end-to-end encryption. Clients that do not yet feature it by default, and that give huge warnings when you try to enable it. Clients that have problems with complex navigation when trying to verify fingerprints. Matrix is not the future, because at some point you're going to need to defeat metadata, and decentralized platforms can't do t…

To be fair; Matrix's crypto is fairly solid. The key management however is a mess, and we have run late on fixing it - but we're working on it currently. The metadata concern is bogus however: we designed Matrix to evolve into a hybrid p2p/decentralised architecture in future without changing a line of clientside code, so folks who want to store their metadata on their client rather than their server can do so - http…

What are the benefits of decentralized servers over p2p?

"Metadata concern is bogus" yet the linked documentation explicitly says bridges expose metadata, and that home servers expose metadata.

One advantage of Pond-hybrid is "Supports any and all Matrix clients via the existing standard client-server API". This means the issue is desire to remain compatible with insecure clients. This is lack of agility is not needed.

I hope you fix things before it's too late and focus on Pond or other Tor hidden service based communication.

Re: Signal Foundation

#128

Post by mtmail »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #125
spullara wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19B they only had a little over 50 people.

is it known how many of those 50 were devs?

"When WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for $19 billion, the popular messaging app had about 35 engineers and 450 million users." http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-f8-whatsapp-engineer...

Re: Signal Foundation

#129

Post by mattl »

mattl wrote: post #32
y03a wrote: post #27

Any reason Signal isn't available through F-Droid? It may be unjustified but I'm not a big fan of installing privacy conscious apps through Play. Edit: Wait, haven't installed anything yet, but I read the getting started guide. I have to sign up using a phone number? That throws all expectation of anonymity and thus privacy out the window.

F-Droid wants to compile their own binaries, and Signal/OWS/Moxie want to provide checksums and the like for Signal binaries.

Some more detail: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/282
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