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Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

element.io

161–170 of 422 posts

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#161
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications. All Matrix homeservers and bridges are open source. I self host some of them myself. Have been doing that long before Element One was a thing.

How can I verify you're running unmodified, unhooked source in your server if I'm a user?

How can anyone verify that?

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#162
post #84
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications.

Why would I want a man in the middle of my communications?

The real answer is because you want all your conversations to happen in the same app/protocol. You never have to download a shiny new messenger again

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#164

I fully understand that for many, this is not an acceptable security risk. It may have technical compromises. For me, Whatsapp is used by my non-technical in-laws for the simple reason of "because everybody uses it". I find whatsapp extremely impractical (I communicate better via large ergonomic keyboard on my computer, vs via 1.5"-wide screen; to each their own), so anything that makes Whatsapp and other proliferati…

There is desktop and web clients for WhatsApp by now tho

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#165
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications. All Matrix homeservers and bridges are open source. I self host some of them myself. Have been doing that long before Element One was a thing.

How can I verify you're running unmodified, unhooked source in your server if I'm a user?

You don't, you self-host your own server.

My problem with the self-hosted model is that I don't trust myself to get it right and/or keep it updated. My problem with the 3rd-party model is that I don't trust them, either. So, lacking trust in either myself or the third-party, I'm just one of those people you can get only via secure e-mail, clear-text SMS, or whatever well-supported encrypted service happens to be the one with a plurality of users in my friend/family group. Clear-text sucks, but it can be used to negotiate a secure channel.

Unfortunately, the levels of spam in my traditional telephony services have dramatically increased in recent years, and as a tradeoff, I've just gotten harder and harder to get in touch with directly as I increasingly default to ignoring more and more methods of communication. I don't even think I'm someone with anything to hide or anything to fear my communications being in the public, there's just too much information to manage.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#166
post #110
post #97

> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…

I wrote a bridge between signald and prosody (without spectrum) so I can use xmpp clients with signal. Async python, only non-standard library dependency is slixmpp. It's working well.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#167
post #110
post #97

> It’s also worth noting that end-to-end encryption is necessarily broken as messages to (and from) WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram pass across the bridge(s). The bridge(s) operates in Element’s trusted EMS environment, with no content scanning or datamining, but currently bridged conversations are not stored end-to-end encrypted in Matrix (they will be in the future). As a Signal user, I kind of don't want this to tak…

I want this to take off. I'm tired of having to follow trends because people suddenly think there's a new shinyshinytrendy thing around: IRC to ICQ to MSN to Skype to Google Talk to Facebook Messenger to Whatsapp to Signal. Pidgin is good (I also miss the ancient Trillian, even though it was closed source), but limited to a local device. There are XMPP Transports as well for these (see https://git.eta.st/eta/whatsxmp…

I dont have a PhD in crypography and am not sure I will do a good enough job in covering even potential mid-level vulnerabilities. I still care about privacy and so use Signal.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably because they don't want to lose users. If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile? The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.

Exactly! Providing a walled garden just for the sake of keeping users should not be legal, just like abusing any other market position wouldn't be legal. I get that they want their "network effect" and keep it to themselves, but this is no good for users and the industry doesn't "regulate itself" as we've heard so many times, so time for law makers to step up finally.

My point is that the walled garden is the competitive advantage.

A law like this could regulate businesses out of existence.

Which websites fall under it? Only social? What about forums, etc. What if the companies just rebase to non-US jurisdictions? Even if you make this law, it's unlikely it would actually compel anyone to comply.

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#169
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).

And FB will probably not like running WA in an emulator, and will kill that option as soon as it reaches ~100k users.

how can they kill it?

Re: Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place

#170
post #119

I just have a really hard time understanding who this is targeting. If you're on average more willing to sacrifice privacy over ease of use, you're very likely not using Signal or Matrix anyway. So if you're not, but you're using both WhatsApp and Telegram, how is using two apps a big enough problem to set up a third one? Even if we disregard that, I can honestly say that I don't think using four separate apps is a p…

why would privacy enthusiasts not use Matrix, considering it's fairly easy to self-host?

That’s not what I wrote.
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