261–270 of 283 posts
Not being funny, but when Signal gets enough users, what’s stopping them relenting on their promises of privacy and punting the company to Facebook just like what happened with WhatsApp? It would almost be a good business plan.
Signal is owned by a nonprofit organization that cannot legally be sold to a for-profit organization.
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For me, they literally mean "history". Some conversation with a friend who passed away, chats with an ex-lover, remembering school years, tons of memories. I believe at this point those messages are an important part of my past. In other words, if I had a chance to record, search and navigate through real life conversations, I would have done that too; it is way better to have records than to try to remember things.
As someone who has saved no chat logs, and just deleted pics, letters, and such from a long gone marriage; IMO, they’re not that important. In fact, shedding that memory shed cognitive distraction I did not know I had. If I want to connect to people I do it here and now. Talking to the past in my head is unhealthy.
The issue with Signal that annoys me most is the complete lack of any meaningful backup/export on iOS. I lost my entire chat history when I got a new phone because their bizarre "proximity based" solution failed.
Why is keeping a chat history important? I don't take notes of IRL conversation I have, they're ephemeral. Not trolling, honestly curious :-)
People I have lived with, adventures I've been on, jobs I've done, projects I've engaged with, academic papers I'm an author on, and especially special moments and times with loved ones. Intimate conversations. Photos with great stories behind them.
Bear in mind also that some special photos, long personal messages and even videos and voice recordings only exist in chat platforms these days. Although I find it is mainly text that has the most profound triggering of memories.
I can't make a long enough list of the kinds of things I don't realise are in my memory until it's jogged, and I can't emphasise enough how rich the tapestry of past life parts seems to be.
I simply forget how rich my life has been. How much I've done with other people (despite the fact I don't spend much time with people). How many places I've been, how many wonderful people I've been with.
When reminded, by accident, it's an amazing feeling, like having a whole past self come to life for a few minutes.
I'm, like, "wow, I'd completely forgotten", and enjoying the full VR-in-my-head experience while myriad connections are activated.
It's an immensely touching and pleasurable thing to have things like that brought back, and it's completely different from ordinary remembering. It's much more vivid, accompanied by wow feelings, and just does not happen with ordinary recall.
In an interesting comparison to day to day thinking, it tends to be very consistently good feeling too. Most things day to day feel like a grind. There are many awful past experiences. But the kinds of memory activation I'm talking about tend to be associated with immensely positive, glad feelings - it's as if those feelings need years to pass and change to happen to "brew" into something that is felt in a different way.
Dwelling in the past excessively is unhealthy. But occasionally stumbling across something that awakens a completely forgotten and yet cherished long-lost memory-network is like getting to know myself, who I am now and who I was then, and be amazed at how much larger my life has been than I normally think of it day to day, no matter what I'm doing each day.
It only happens about twice a year I guess, if that. When it does I'm also reminded how much larger must the set of other things be that are not being remembered, that would completely and vividly transform my view of my life, and feelings about my life, if they were to be activated. I feel a sense of awe to recognise that my perception of myself in the present is, in some sense, tiny, blinkered and mundane compared to my actual real life, and not at all representative of the fullness of who I am, have been, and therefore will probably be in future.
I'm trying to say that, for me, some kinds of accidentally prompted memory-networks are incredibly valuable for obtaining perspective on life; my life, and life of people in general.
For me that helps me to connect better to people here and now, and I think it makes me a better person to others, in the now, to be reminded of such things.
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I seriously can't understand why a billion dollar company with hundreds of engineers can't and won't prioritize the abilitynto seamlessly transfer messages cross-OS. Its been years since the need for such a "feature", when it shouldn't even be a "feature" in the first place, it should be baked in!
I agree. It should not be that seamless since it needs explicit consent to break end-to-end encryption. But to force you to use iCloud or Google Drive for backup is weird. They should have a proprietary format and hosting for it.
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There's even a third-party software that is able to do this: https://www.backuptrans.com/android-whatsapp-to-iphone-trans... I've used it myself.
That looks pretty dubious
in addition, even though the wikipedia has been operating with donations but would it also be a sustainable way to run a chat service too?
https://github.com/zikani03/pakadali
Heroku dyno here: https://pakadali.herokuapp.com/wa2json.html
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> I fundamentally distrust any program which claims E2E encryption and is capable of recovering my chat history onto a new device. I would expect a Signal implementation of this to allow recovering chat history if you restore a backup onto the new device and if you re-enter your PIN .
Your pin is not your key, even through a KDF. That would allow guessing with only 10**4 guesses. Signal exports an unencrypted backup to a formatted text file, which can then be imported by another signal instance.
(Also, your Signal PIN can be an alphanumeric passphrase.)
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The downside of that attitude is that if a chat program is only used for what governments consider subversive activities then it will be targeted to be shutdown. It is much better to have a general-purpose, secure chat program that IS mainstream making it more difficult for oppressive regimes to target.
Or we can use a number of different programs for different purposes like I do: - exchanging passwords? encrypted mail, Signal or something else E2E-encrypted - work: whatever work says. Mostly slack. - discussions with friends and family: Telegram - online shouting competitions: twitter - showing off: Instagram - telling Facebook who my friends are and how often I talk to them: WhatsApp ;-)
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I can be wrong, but on Telegram E2E is not default. Those are used only in 'secret chats', which I believe are not recoverable. So you can use regular texting for everything you don't care much about, like sending youtube videos and memes to your friends, and use the secret chat to things that re more sensitive. That's great for most people that currently use Whatsapp
Not my field but: https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end