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Standalone Signal Desktop

signal.org

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Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#151

Post by flukus »

halayli wrote: post #124
jsnar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not as simple as you thought. Consider a bug in the image decoding library Chromium used that can be exploited by simply sending a crafted image in the chat.

same logic can be applied to a native app that is using libpng and an attacker exploits the lib in one way or another.

That's likely to get fixed quickly and I can just apt-get upgrade. With electron we have to wait for google to fix it in chrome, wait for electron to update the chrome version or backport the patch, wait for the app developer to update their version of electron and then update it on your machine.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#152

Post by fattire »

openfuture wrote: post #2

I want to say "finally!" but they're deprecating the chrome extension so now my chromebook won't be connected anymore but at least I'll be able to get rid of chromium on my desktop. Guess you can never please everyone. But in all seriousness thank you for the great work, this is excellent news!

That you won't be able to run it on a chromebook any more is a big deal actually... will you be able to sync the android version on chromebook w/o a phone #? I haven't tried that but I don't think you can "slave" the android version to an existing account the way you do the standalone app.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#153

Post by ec109685 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #147
dbrgn wrote: post #82

Does it still store all data unencrypted on the disk? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/1017

Wow, reading that thread basically made me decide against using Signal. For an app that is supposed to be the pinnacle of secure messaging, leaving anything unencrypted on the local device is just breathtakingly negligent. The way moxie ushers people to take the discussion elsewhere doesn't help either. It just reinforces the perception that he doesn't care.

Shouldn’t you instead just encrypt your disk entirely?

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#154

Post by smcleod »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #149
smcleod wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're looking at all the processes: A fresh launch without logging in or having it run for any period of time immediately uses 211.2MB: 1. Signal: 58.3MB 2. Signal Helper: 128.6MB 3. Signal Helper: 24.3MB After logging in and starting a few conversations I quickly see the total rise to over 350MB.

Memory usage isn't well understood. If you are using Activity Monitor on OSX the memory tab doesn't tell you much. Double click the process and look at the "Real memory size". That's a much more accurate picture of the physical ram being used by the process. It is typically much less than what you see on the memory tab overview.

It is by me, that is the real memory usage, pretty shocking.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#155

Post by pritambaral »

MarkSweep wrote: post #143
ktta wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it 4MB is a bit ludicrous. On first run (on linux) it downloads half a GB worth (508 MB to be exact) of 'browser content'. On first run. So this isn't light or native. It uses the same Chromium codebase, but atleast twice the size of Electron apps. https://hardbin.com/ipfs/QmNttGPf65DZ3eeuNCCWemrxyNzaHxLhpAZ... If the rest of you are wondering where the bulk of it came from, check libcef.so (466 MB)- which is…

For what it's worth, it only uses that when adding an account initially to display the login webpage. The CEF is not used in normal operation of the app. It appears the app's GUI is created using OpenGL. That said, I could not get the app to work with Google Hangouts or Facebook Messenger after 5 minutes of fiddling, so I gave up.

It still downloads half a GB.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#156

Post by darklajid »

smcleod wrote: post #121

Other than the memory usage - these are problems I've encountered thus far: - It said it was 'Importing contacts and messages' when I signed in without first prompting me if that was OK. - Importing contacts and messages failed. - Manually importing contacts fails. - Conversations show up, but each message just shows as an error. - Deleting a conversation doesn't delete it, it just makes it as read. - Messages marked…

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but .. did you report those on GitHub / to the Signal developers?

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#158

Post by darklajid »

enraged_camel wrote: post #147
dbrgn wrote: post #82

Does it still store all data unencrypted on the disk? https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop/issues/1017

Wow, reading that thread basically made me decide against using Signal. For an app that is supposed to be the pinnacle of secure messaging, leaving anything unencrypted on the local device is just breathtakingly negligent. The way moxie ushers people to take the discussion elsewhere doesn't help either. It just reinforces the perception that he doesn't care.

As someone that doesn't care at all about Signal (I'm in the "no federation & mobile number as ID is unappealing and I can just as well use WhatsApp" camp) I came away with the opposite opinion:

The people in the report (not necessary the original submitter, the "Now I'll go and tell everyone to uninstall Signal! There you have it!" crowd) seemed to be demanding/whining and spammed a bug tracker with random anecdotes and their personal agendas in a rather rude way.

Whereas moxie - again, in my opinion - replied in a very friendly, objective and calm manner and invited these people to discuss the issue further. In the _right place_ for an open debate about design decisions.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#159

Post by petre »

Still requires pairing with my phone, thus not standalone.

Thank you but I'll just keep using Wire on the desktop and Signal + Wire on mobile. Too bad, because the mobile version is really good.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#160

Post by vxNsr »

amedvednikov wrote: post #53
tmikaeld wrote: post #5

Another 205MB Electron App to the collection, at least it's 50MB smaller than Wire.

eul is a light (4 MB) native desktop client for all popular messengers: https://eul.im Signal support is coming later this year. Right now it supports Slack, Skype, Facebook, and Gmail.

I need something like this for my phone. I never used it but I heard about blackberry's messenger app that brought all the messaging services of its day together, why doesn't this exist on every platform today!?!?! (rhetorical, I know why)
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