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Standalone Signal Desktop

signal.org

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Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#181

Post by Vinnl »

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!

Unfortunately that was going to happen anyway, as Google's planned to deprecate Chrome apps. Note sure if in general, or if they'd still be supported in Chromebooks, but it's quite a lot of work to support it just for Chromebooks.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#182

Post by lorenzhs »

kuschku wrote: post #52
noja wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a different user base. Give us a github repo and we can build it ourself. Let me see if I can find one. Edit: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop

Moxie strictly disagrees with that, and has previously tried to shut down every third-party build of Signal, even in repos for distros or F-Droid. He only wants users to get Signal builds from himself, and no one else.

Oh come on kuschku, stop it with the deliberate misinformation about Signal! You bring nonsense like this up in just about every thread on Signal and it's becoming harder and harder to assume that you operate in good faith.

Moxie is most decidedly not against building the code yourself. He doesn't want anyone distributing forks or other clients using the official servers because a) that creates a giant hassle when updating the server and suddenly someone's fork doesn't work anymore and people will blame Signal, and b) if the client doesn't do what they want it to, people will blame Signal even though it's a third-party bug because it's got Signal in the name.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#183

Post by unhammer »

j7ake wrote: post #3

Does signal do search for text as well as a way to view all images exchanged within a chat ? The only way I found was to scroll up while keeping my eyes focused on certain key words or images. Not a pleasant experience.

work in progress, non-trivial on phone at least: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/1232...

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#184

Post by kakarot »

bilkow wrote: post #146
nvr219 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: "One major problem Telegram has is that it doesn’t encrypt chats by default, something the FBI has advocated for. “There are many Telegram users who think they are communicating in an encrypted way, when they’re not because they don’t realize that they have to turn on an additional setting,” Christopher Soghoian, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told…

That's not entirely true. While Telegram's "cloud chats" are not end-to-end encrypted by default, they're encrypted at rest. They claim that "all data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other DCs in different jurisdictions."[0] It's not even close to perfect, but it's also not everything that the government wants. For me, the problem with Signal is based mainly moxi…

I think it's fair to not want a project whose quality you cannot control use your servers and your name to compete for users in a market whose focus should he keeping those users safe.

The issue with not encrypting in transit by default is that it makes profiling encrypted communications MUCH easier and can potentially defeat the purpose via the Streisand Effect.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#185

Post by laresistance »

darklajid wrote: post #158
enraged_camel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then again, you can't expect Signal's target users (normal tech un-savvy people) to have FDE. But that's not necessarily bad in my book. IIRC Signal's security model wasn't aiming for maximizing security but instead making mass-surveillance harder to execute while offering an acceptable UX.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#186

Post by xgbi »

darklajid wrote: post #158
enraged_camel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Also, encrypting files on disk is not actually protecting anything. The Signal app still has to decrypt is somehow, and has to store the private key somewhere, usually on disk, unencrypted..

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#187

Post by digi_owl »

Nition wrote: post #126
ezekg wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with doing that though is that most Electron apps don’t use the same version of Electron. I have apps I’ve built that are still running pre-v1 because updating has been too much of a headache.

Like DLL Hell all over again.

I can't help shake that DLL and similar is a symptom of a culture of lax backwards compatibility upstream.

Re: Standalone Signal Desktop

#190

Post by kethinov »

Another Electron app, another thread full of people complaining about Electron.

The solution is to build a common Electron runtime that all Electron apps can use. But it seems nobody is working on it despite all the complaints.[1]

I really don't understand why there isn't anybody working it. If that got implemented, it would put a swift end to the biggest complaints about Electron.

[1] https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/673

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