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You can change your number

signal.org

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Re: You can change your number

#241

Post by psanford »

wolverine876 wrote: post #152
tptacek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord works by keeping a serverside database of which people are talking to which people, which is, to a serious adversary, the most valuable single piece of information the service can cough up. Discord is much, much more convenient than Signal, and that's good. The services have different goals.

How is Discord more convenient? I don't mean the question critically, but I wonder what a sophisticated user sees in Discord when Signal seems, to me, as convenient as texting and calling.

Discord has your full chat history in a conveniently searchable server side database. When new people join a channel in your discord server, they call see the full chat history so they can get fully caught up.

You can use discord on multiple devices at the same time without the devices needing to directly sync with each other (because the state is stored on the server).

Re: You can change your number

#243

Post by wolverine876 »

alfiedotwtf wrote: post #149

It would be nice if it didn't require a phone number. My daughter doesn't have a phone, but I would still like to use Signal with her when she's on a wifi-connected iPad.

Regarding your specific issue: You could get your daughter a VOIP number, which can run as an app on the iPad. VOIP numbers can process text messages too, which should enable Signal's confirmation message.

Re: You can change your number

#244

Post by pomian »

scotty79 wrote: post #186
pomian wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That looks like a great app. Thanks. Can you send SMS to a regular number with this?

I'm not sure if it's great. It just lets you communicate without endangering valuable resource that your phone number is. > Can you send SMS to a regular number with this? Why would it do that? Every phone has perfectly good sms app. What would that even mean? Using sms as a transport layer? Or making messages passed through internet look like pseudo sms messages to someones phone number?

First, it would be great to be able to send SMS messages without using the cell network, just through internet. Then you could use computers, tablets, etc. As far as I know only textplus/nextplus allows that, but it had become very buggy, and definitely not secure. Also you don't need a cell number to communicate with people through the cell network.

Re: You can change your number

#245

Post by austhrow743 »

scotty79 wrote: post #176
bt1a wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure - that's why Signal is for secure communication between individuals who have some level of trust. There's nothing stopping your interlocutor from leaking all of the messages you send to them, what's the big issue with them having your number?

> Sure - that's why Signal is for secure communication between individuals who have some level of trust. If I have this level of trust with someone they are about at level of adding them as a friend on Facebook. Who knows, I even might invite them on Facebook sooner than I decide to give them my phone number. > what's the big issue with them having your number? Seriously? With my number you can harass me endlessly wi…

>If I have this level of trust with someone they are about at level of adding them as a friend on Facebook.

Yes that's exactly what Signal is for. Talking to people you would otherwise talk to on facebook messenger but you rather not have facebook engineers be able to read your personal conversations.

Re: You can change your number

#246

Post by pomian »

mburns wrote: post #202
scotty79 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if it's great. It just lets you communicate without endangering valuable resource that your phone number is. > Can you send SMS to a regular number with this? Why would it do that? Every phone has perfectly good sms app. What would that even mean? Using sms as a transport layer? Or making messages passed through internet look like pseudo sms messages to someones phone number?

FWIW, Signal can send SMS to a regular number on Android. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca...

Thanks for the reminder. The idea was to use signal with a degoogled phone. It would be great if signal could send SMS without the cell network. There are places and devices, without cell connections.

Re: You can change your number

#247

Post by Yeroc »

haffenloher wrote: post #221
scgtrp wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big thing Signal is bad at for me is using from a computer. They have a desktop client, but it's just a weird thing that proxies through my phone in a sort of bizarre backwards self-hosting sort of way.

It does not proxy through your phone. After the initial setup, you can switch off your phone and the desktop client will work just fine.

Except (unless something has changed very recently) you can't backup/restore your chat history to a new desktop client... Security over general usability.

Re: You can change your number

#248

Post by godelski »

scotty79 wrote: post #182
raspyberr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal started off as a secure SMS replacement. Also, they mainly used numbers so they could leverage the social graph of phone contact lists. That way they didn't need to store any social graphs on their systems.

They must store something to route messages. Graph of random numbers is even better than the graph of actual numbers. They just wanted to piggyback on already existing network of people contacts. Standard startup "growth hack".

> Graph of random numbers is even better than the graph of actual numbers.

,,To Signal'' it is a graph of random numbers.

Re: You can change your number

#249

Post by 0xdeadb00f »

scotty79 wrote: post #67

Why would supposedly secure communicator use actual phone number as identifier is beyond me. And everybody does that, either phone number or email. The only software I could find for anonymous communication was old Polish communicator http://gg.pl which uses arbitrary numbers as identifiers I understand that startups are scared that they won't be able to build up userbase from scratch but come on! Discord and Slack d…

> Why would supposedly secure communicator use actual phone number as identifier is beyond me.

It's pretty simple - user friendliness and sign-up friction.

Signal's main market is not us HN user tech bros who want (pseudo)anonymity. It's main market is closer to regular people, the same people who are fine with using WhatsApp or Facebook messenger or whatever, with their phone number.

They also want it to be as easy as possible for new users to sign up. Simply enter your phone number and boom you have a signal account. With email the sign up process is not insanely difficult - but its still more steps than phone signup for the regular person.

Re: You can change your number

#250

Post by lordofgibbons »

mlissner wrote: post #15

This is fine, but signal still doesn't tell you when the person you're sending to has uninstalled signal. Instead, your messages go into ether and you think the person is ignoring you. It blows my mind they haven't prioritized this. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11164

Exactly, I messaged someone multiple times and didn't get a response. I assumed they weren't interested in hanging out any more.

I found out many months later when we ran into each other by chance that they don't use Signal anymore and my messages had gone to a blackhole..

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