Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a workaround. SMS are not encrypted, cost money, have a length limit, don’t support images or groups...
I didn't know some places still charge for SMS
It's the reason why Whatsapp became so big in Europe.
Signal is having technical difficulties
641–650 of 750 posts
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#642Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#643Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp's encryption scheme was designed by Open Whisper Systems, which is now Signal, and even uses the Signal protocol library: http://www.cdn.whatsapp.net/security/WhatsApp-Security-White... Of course you got all the metadata going to FB, but it's still a good messenger feature-wise for now, so I'll keep it as a backup in case my favorite privacy-conscious messenger is down again for 10 hours.
What good is e2e encryption that is essentially becomes mere in transit encryption, since WhatsApp will filter your messages BEFORE they are sent to see if it needs to take any action? (Which action is of course phoning home, outside the precious Signal Protocol)
source?
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#644Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just saying, but WhatsApp encrypt communications the same way Signal does, it's good enough for me.
WhatsApp uses dark patterns to encourage unencrypted cloud backups.
... and it doesn't matter if you know how to avoid those unless your friends also do so.
BTW, is there an authoritative source whether these cloud backups to Google Drive are unencrypted/encrypted with Google keys, or encrypted with keys held by Facebook?
I see no reason not to encrypt them the same as local backups (with a key that is held by Facebook, and provided to your phone once they verify your phone number).
The difference between these against the US government filing warrants is just one piece of paper, but against an attacker that compromises your Google account, it does make a significant difference.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#645This is a good sign. Thanks to Zuckerberg's mistake, Signal reaps all the rewards. What can we learn from this? Just because you own a platform doesn't mean you have an economic moat. The crowd's sentiment can change overnight and I think Zuck is honestly out of touch with public sentiments. He probably thinks that he can run for US presidency using Facebook as a launchpad but all the money in the world won't fix myo…
They do have a massive moat. It's just that if you keep piling up shit, your moat, no matter how deep, will eventually fill up and your users might escape.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would things work in practice for a decentralized network? Regular people won't host their own servers.
Probably like email or all the other decentralized services the federated people talk about. Email didn't get mass adoption until centralized servers like Hotmail and Yahoo came online. People don't want to run their own servers and now a days it's a lot more work to do so.
As a "federated person", yes, an email sort of scenario is exactly what I'd like, or at least it would be many times better than what we currently have for im systems. The most important thing to me (and I suspect many other people in favor of decentralization/federation) is the ability to host my own service. I couldn't care less if 90% of email users are on gmail as long as I can run own email server or pay someone else to run one for me while still communicating with everyone.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wonder about the process and the results. I mean, it doesn't look to me, as if there is a management behind this, that actually has a goal. It looks more like they are giving funds to projects who apply for them. IMO, they should state 3 clear goals and sponsor specific projects which reach those goals. To give some example how those could look like: - create a decentralized, federated instant messaging platfo…
I work in EU research funding programs. The process is very bureaucratic, making it difficult for any small company to apply. Not to mention projects without a company. It's also quite ineffective at giving money to the projects that are meaningful. Large companies and large university projects rake in plenty.
I hope it won’t become like Canada’s SRED credits where the consultant that helps you make it look like you’re eligible costs 1/3 of the credits you get. These credits in turn keep otherwise completely unprofitable and doomed startups funded while the product delivers no value whatsoever. It’s borderline a scam and the program’s spirit has been completely abused by now.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#648I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
Just dropped them a couple bucks and a nice message. Thanks for posting!
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#649I'm afraid Signal really dropped the ball on this one. I'd be surprised if any of the new 50M users stick around after this fiasco. Also, this doesn't seem to actually be a scaling/hardware issue like they claim. They're running on AWS so they should be able to throw more hardware at it in a matter of minutes, hours tops. As of now, they've been down for 14 hours! Not sure what's going on but it's the absolute worst time to have this happen :/
Edit: worth noting that I've been a Signal user since ~2015, and I've stood by them through multiple amateur-hour mistakes (including one where the iOS app would simply crash on boot for about a week, rendering it unusable to me and every other iOS user). The app was just starting to get into a non-insanely-buggy state that I was quite happy with, so it's upsetting to know that these sorts of mistakes are still being made.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not as impactful as a realtime donation but I recently changed my Amazon Smile charity to the Signal Foundation after a few years with my previous selection. I was surprised to learn they were an available option. I also installed a browser extension to automatically bring me to smile.amazon when buying anything on Amazon - so far it has had no weird glitchiness when not buying something and works exactly as advertis…
I was jumping through similar hoops for a while to get Amazon smile donations, but then I looked at their numbers for how much gets donated and it was a pretty trivial amount. I don't remember what I found (anyone have any stats on Amazon smile donation percentages?) but I decided it wasn't worth my effort compared to adding an extra few dollars to my direct donations.
It's not bad if you connect it to an Amazon Business account. I give hundreds of dollars to the charity I select. Also it's a thing that's easy to opt-into with an extension and just goes on forever, so totally worth doing it.