Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
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Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#2I'm starting to look through the code right now. A scroll through their open source page indicates they're using libsodium, which is a good sign that they avoided most of the foot-cannons alluded to on this page: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#3Downloadable here: https://spideroak.com/opendownload
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#4I'm starting to look through the code right now. A scroll through their open source page indicates they're using libsodium, which is a good sign that they avoided most of the foot-cannons alluded to on this page: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad
The SpiderOak folks seem to know what they're doing. But if you don't trust them, here's a completely open secure communications tool:
https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4
It's based on TweetNaCl, libsodium's smaller sibling. It can run standalone, i.e. no server required.
No group chat yet, but that's a relatively straightforward extension. I have two-party chat working in private beta. (Chat does require a server, though.)
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#5I'm starting to look through the code right now. A scroll through their open source page indicates they're using libsodium, which is a good sign that they avoided most of the foot-cannons alluded to on this page: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad
I wonder why they don't use golang.org/x/crypto/nacl instead of bindings to C library (libsodium-go). All primitives in it are implemented in assembly (for amd64 arch), so speed shouldn't be a concern.
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#6Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server.
Article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/go-ahead-make-some-f...
Security: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2756350-Wire-Securit...
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#7SpiderOak describes this as "Collaboration and messaging for teams." It seems like it's for (for-profit) business teams and not for personal "teams" or groups or non-profits/social groups. I guess the pricing model mentioned in the article is to get businesses that use Slack or Hipchat or other system.
I don't like SpiderOak's pricing models in general because of how it seems to oversell and upsell services. For personal teams/groups, there are free services like Telegram (awesome user experience that keeps improving at a fast pace but poorer homegrown crypto with normal messages stored in plaintext on the servers) and Signal (great crypto but awful user experience, slow and buggy app and slow and unreliable message delivery).
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#8Source code: https://spideroak.com/solutions/semaphor/source
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#9Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com ) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server. Article: http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/03/go-ahead-make-some-f... Security: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2756350-Wire…
How's the UX of wire?
I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things:
1. Secure. A few of them exist
2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1
3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of course, Telegram fails #1.. making temporary communication all the more troublesome.
[1]: This may be limited to certain systems, such as Android. But yea, don't save an image of an important document in a "secret" chat on Android.. it saves it to your filesystem.
Re: Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App
#10I'm starting to look through the code right now. A scroll through their open source page indicates they're using libsodium, which is a good sign that they avoided most of the foot-cannons alluded to on this page: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/be58d2d39690c3b366ad
The SpiderOak folks seem to know what they're doing. But if you don't trust them, here's a completely open secure communications tool: https://github.com/Spark-Innovations/SC4 It's based on TweetNaCl, libsodium's smaller sibling. It can run standalone, i.e. no server required. No group chat yet, but that's a relatively straightforward extension. I have two-party chat working in private beta. (Chat does require a serv…
> The SpiderOak folks seem to know what they're doing.
I'm inclined to agree with that assessment.
> But if you don't trust them
Trust, but verify.
IIRC they were discussing hiring a friend of mine (whose knowledge in software security is something I respect greatly).