Lots of ranting here. Signal is a WhatsApp alternative. That's it. No money to Meta which is at the end of the day just an arm of American imperialism.
If you want privacy you shouldn't use the internet at all.
Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
21–30 of 47 posts
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#22> The ability to register for Signal without a phone number is a frequently requested feature. I wonder if Signal missed the forest for the trees with a paid registration. I imagine privacy is the primary reason for registering without phone number and yet they ask one to register by giving them money which 99% of the case involves means of payment tied even tighter to one's identity than a phone number.
Signal is private with a phone number for the purpose it serves. Its does not aim to be an anonymous chat service. For 99% of people Signal is ideal for private communication and we should not spread FUD about it not being private because you need a phone number.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#23> The ability to register for Signal without a phone number is a frequently requested feature. I wonder if Signal missed the forest for the trees with a paid registration. I imagine privacy is the primary reason for registering without phone number and yet they ask one to register by giving them money which 99% of the case involves means of payment tied even tighter to one's identity than a phone number.
Signal is private with a phone number for the purpose it serves. Its does not aim to be an anonymous chat service. For 99% of people Signal is ideal for private communication and we should not spread FUD about it not being private because you need a phone number.
If it’s not anonymous then it’s only a matter of time until it’ll lose its privacy …
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why as a security engineer and researcher even I do not have a Signal account. My conversation with Moxie about Signal convinced me that Signal cannot be trusted as they are obsessed with centralized control and user tracking, via app store stats. Privacy assurances come from enclaves internet randos can freely manipulate as they chose not to implement full source bootstrapped remote attestation. Also relying…
Is there an alternative out there that you do trust that is "noob friendly"?
My daily driver for family, friends, and coworkers is Element/Matrix.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can sideload (for now) but that forces you to enable "unknown sources" and increase the attack surface on your device, forcing you to reproduce every new release from source by hand to verify it was not compromised... or blindly sideload binaries and just hope your IP address was not served an extra special one. Moxie -knew- this was a path almost no one has time to use safely and liked it that way. He actively b…
Reproducible builds are nice, and I would love to have them for Signal. But I think I disagree with most of what you've written. Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device less secure. The setting is also disingenuously named: It is in fact "known sources" I am installing (not "sideloading") software from. It is just not a source Google wants to know of. I also do not need to reproduce every new release from…
> Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device less secure. The setting is also disingenuously named: It is in fact "known sources" I am installing (not "sideloading") software from. It is just not a source Google wants to know of.
By disabling signature verification you open yourself up to man-in-the-middle attacks and supply chain attacks. How do you know the signal CDN account was not compromised to serve certain IP addresses different signal binaries with backdoors? Independent reproducible build signatures, like f-droid supports, are the only way out of this, which f-droid offered to do and was refused. Accountability was refused.
> If the antagonists in my threat model are so capable they could serve a tailored, signed APK from signal.org for the IP I'm using, I should absolutely not use a messenger whose identifier is my phone number, aka my real world identity AND permanent location marker. That feels absurd. A threat actor that capable could just locate me, pick me up and shake me until I unlock the device.
Do you think the Signal team signs all their Android binaries in a full source bootstrapped secure enclave that requires a quorum of signal team members to sign each release following their own deterministic builds and code review to ensure only a -single- variant of every version of Signal exists with multi-party verified code with multi-party verified signatures?
It would be weird to keep it secret if they did all this work for public safety. I do this sort of thing for most projects and am pretty loud about it so people understand they do not need to trust me.
Instead, it is likely how everyone else does it. A release engineer builds and signs it with a key they fully control, that could be coerced or bribed or given a secret court order.
That is a massive massive single point of failure for a messenger whose goal is supposedly privacy without having to trust the Signal foundation.
Their negligence in supply chain security gives them, Google, and Apple an incredible amount of power to covertly backdoor any conversation at any time, for seemingly no reason.
> You are saying Molly exists and works fine, so I'm not really sure the whole problematization of Signal holds up. Does the existence of Molly not disprove your criticism that you have to use the mainline Signal app?
Molly only helps if both sides of the conversation are using it. At that point the network effects of Signal, and the privacy loss of being forced to identify yourself, no longer makes sense. Both parties could use an open network alternative instead.
Also I personally do not use Android or iOS so I am not welcome on the Signal network at all afaict.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Signal is private with a phone number for the purpose it serves. Its does not aim to be an anonymous chat service. For 99% of people Signal is ideal for private communication and we should not spread FUD about it not being private because you need a phone number.
If it’s not anonymous then it’s only a matter of time until it’ll lose its privacy …
They have sealed sender which improves contact privacy.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#27Lots of ranting here. Signal is a WhatsApp alternative. That's it. No money to Meta which is at the end of the day just an arm of American imperialism. If you want privacy you shouldn't use the internet at all.
>If you want privacy you shouldn't use the internet at all.
Signal messaging between two iPhone users is more or similarly private and secure communication compared to what governments use.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#28> Signal Login, one-time payment, price unknown Of course price is unknown, because it doesn’t matter, what matters is linking your real identity to signal. As I mentioned before, many times, that the main purpose of the phone requirement isn’t to fight “spam”, is to fight privacy and always have the option to expose the real person behind that account whenever needed. Most countries around the world require an ID to…
> is to fight privacy and always have the option to expose the real person behind that account whenever needed
This post is FUD. Signal is about privacy. Nowhere do they mention anonymity as a goal of their messenger. They don't sacrifice contact privacy by using sealed sender (trustless) and by not keeping metadata (trust required that the server isn't malicious but proven in legal documents).
It barely would help an investigation to know the identity of a Signal account. All they disclose is the account creation time [1] when handed a court order.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why as a security engineer and researcher even I do not have a Signal account. My conversation with Moxie about Signal convinced me that Signal cannot be trusted as they are obsessed with centralized control and user tracking, via app store stats. Privacy assurances come from enclaves internet randos can freely manipulate as they chose not to implement full source bootstrapped remote attestation. Also relying…
Is there an alternative out there that you do trust that is "noob friendly"?
You don't need an alternative. Signal is the best private messenger in terms of privacy and usability.
SimpleX has more privacy and anonymity but has worse usability.
Matrix has terrible metadata privacy and terrible usability.
Re: Signal is working on a paid option to create an account without a phone number
#30> Signal Login, one-time payment, price unknown Of course price is unknown, because it doesn’t matter, what matters is linking your real identity to signal. As I mentioned before, many times, that the main purpose of the phone requirement isn’t to fight “spam”, is to fight privacy and always have the option to expose the real person behind that account whenever needed. Most countries around the world require an ID to…
This is why as a security engineer and researcher even I do not have a Signal account. My conversation with Moxie about Signal convinced me that Signal cannot be trusted as they are obsessed with centralized control and user tracking, via app store stats. Privacy assurances come from enclaves internet randos can freely manipulate as they chose not to implement full source bootstrapped remote attestation. Also relying…
> I do not understand the true goals of Signal, but their actions are inconsistent with their stated ones.
I've been annoyed and suspicious since they stopped being TextSecure and dropped support for SMS messages, and still don't buy the reasons given.
It started as offering opportunistic end-to-end encryption on "direct" (SMS) communications to help privacy. It didn't even need a data connection. People bought into it and as an Android user it was good [1]. Data then got added. First boiling frogs to the side, and then SMS support was removed completely, for what I still think are disingenuous reasons (see [1]), and the summary of it's technically impossible and not worth it. Trust us.
So what did we get? Well instead of leaking metadata to my phone provider, I'm now sending even more metadata to signal. They've put themselves in the path of every kex, every message, every group chat, every call, every read-recipt. Moxie Marlinspike is my new Santa; he knows when I'm sleeping and he knows when I'm awake.
And for something sold as privacy, what the heck is with their Linkedin-be-proud dark pattern of convincing people to upload their contacts (it's safe - honest!), or announcing proudly that "contact I haven't spoken to in 15 years and for good reason" has joined signal! Would I like to connect with the person I was really hoping had forgot I existed and was only saving the number so I could make sure I never answered it? Yes please - and I hope you told them that as well - FML... I'm also suspicious about the encrypted cloud backups, but that might just be me.
They also spent years making it difficult for people on de-googled phones, or to use it on desktop, or to run their own servers, or to run custom clients which seemed at odds with encrypt-all-the-things.
I should be happy about the mass adoption of the encryption protocol. I should see WhatsApp adopting it just before they got bought out by Facebook as a win for privacy for the common folk. I should trust it more now that there's so many eyes on it. I should be in no way suspicious of the lack serious objection the lack of LA provision by the authorities, or the fact Spy-on-You INC would continue buying the messaging platform they can no longer look at.
Things have felt off for a while and I wouldn't be shocked to see it on a future list alongside EncroChat, or Sky ECC, or Exclu or maybe even ANOM - a honeypot from the start. I can't prove anything, and don't know anything, but it sets _all_ of my "there's something wrong and I don't know what it is" senses tingling. But also I'm pretty bad at feelings. Maybe I just need to wee, or drink more water. My gut feel still insists there's a pattern to my RSA dongle's one time codes, so really you shouldn't believe a single word I've said.
[1] There were issues. iirc it didn't work on Apple devices, sms is bad for images and group chats, it broke in a messy but easily bypassed (& fixable) way and it would never work for calls. It also still leaked metadata to the phone network. And SMS is just fundamentally dead and costly - but it absolutely served a purpose.