Among other features, it has end-to-end encryption, federation, comprehensive support for multiple devices and doesn't require a phone number. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, it has all of Signal's security but none of its flaws.
For the Android folks, it's available on F-Droid as well as the Play Store.
Surprisingly, despite the features and security, it's approachable enough that my mostly tech illiterate wife is able to handle it without issues.
[0]: https://matrix.org/
[1]: https://element.io/
What about metadata protection? Whenever I hear people talk about how unsupportive Signal / Moxie is of federation and how federation would be better for everyone's privacy, my question is this: In case of Signal you only need to trust one provider (Signal) with your metadata (who's talking to whom) whereas with a federated network you have to trust your provider and all providers your friends use.
On top of that Signal has a track record of standing in for their users' privacy[0]. That probably can't be said about the administrator of some random Matrix server.
[0]: https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/
I think the OWS/Moxie hate is misplaced. They’re competing with iMessage and WhatsApp and Instagram and Facebook, and Signal is a much better option than all of those.
Let’s be honest: the alternative is that Facebook gets all of our chats in cleartext.
It is on us with tech skills to help others to get out of any centralized alternative. Ease of use will come with the less technical user base.
> Off the bat, let me explain that I expect a tool which claims to be secure to actually be secure. I don’t view “but that makes it harder for the average person” as an acceptable excuse. If Edward Snowden and Bruce Schneier are going to spout the virtues of the app, I expect it to actually be secure when it matters - when vulnerable people using it to encrypt sensitive communications are targeted by smart and powerful adversaries....it’s your responsibility to clearly explain the drawbacks and advantages of the tradeoffs you make. If you make broad and inaccurate statements about your communications product being “secure”, then when the political prisoners who believed you are being tortured and hanged, it’s on you.
To me, messaging is a mess at the moment, somewhat like IoT because of lack of solid widely adopted standards (either de facto or de jure).
It's extremely difficult to get friends and family to use something. Most decisions are driven by secondary considerations, like it comes with an OS, or as part of an email or office system, or a gaming system. In some cases it's because "it's what everyone is using".
This shifts the threshold a bit in terms of concerns. What I mean by that is given the inertia involved in moving people to use a messaging system, the bar gets raised in terms of moving people off because of network effects. It's hard enough to get any friends or family to use Signal as an alternative to other things; convincing them to switch again introduces other problems.
I'd prefer something that can be used in more decentralized way, but that has its own issues in terms of syncing and always-on problems. And as security increases, more and more inconveniences are introduced -- it might be worth it, but the case still has to be made implicitly or explicitly to friends and family.
Again, not saying these kinds of discussions shouldn't happen, but they often seem kind of theoretical to me or like they're missing the point because of bigger issues with the messaging ecosystem in general. If you're not going to be able to use Signal anyway because everyone you know is using Whatsapp or iMessaging, or feel like messenger use is driven by "whatever is most popular" it feels like it's difficult to weigh things like "won't put on fdroid". I'd love to see it on fdroid but where does that rank?
I think --- I have no special knowledge here --- that nobody wants to do away with phone numbers more than Signal itself. That's what the "secure value storage" drama is about: using SGX to optionally vouchsafe an encrypted contact database, which would allow Signal to operate with opaque identifiers rather than contacts.
My contacts aren't all my buddies and conversely many of my buddies in WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever aren't in my contact list.
Trying to repurpose one data silo that contains contacts such as my dentist and a taxi firm and reusing it as 'buddies' is clumsy and ill-considered.
That said, in my time following his blog and Mastodon toots, he's prone to making these hot-takes that take down successful projects that do a lot of public good, but don't tick every check. His repeated criticism of Mozilla is a good example of this.
It often feels like cutting off ones nose to spite the face. Without the Mozillas and OpenWhispers of this world, we've no hope for the DeVaults which create incredible feats of engineering that tick all the ideal boxes but lack some of the creature comforts (e.g. sr.ht, wayland, etc..)
I'm optimistic for the future, and the projects started by Moxie and DeVault are a large part of it.
Thanks. It's important that projects are held to high standards, even if they're hard to achieve. Otherwise there'd be no pushback against pure pragmatism.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141027143819/https://github.co...
> What’s the legal theory behind warrant canaries?
> The First Amendment protects against compelled speech. For example, a court held that the New Hampshire state government could not require its citizens to have “Live Free or Die” on their license plates. While the government may be able to compel silence through a gag order, it may not be able to compel an ISP to lie by falsely stating that it has not received legal process when in fact it has.
> Have courts upheld compelled speech?
> Rarely. In a few instances, the courts have upheld compelled speech in the commercial context, where the government shows that the compelled statements convey important truthful information to consumers. For example, warnings on cigarette packs are a form of compelled commercial speech that have sometimes been upheld, and sometimes struck down, depending on whether the government shows there is a rational basis for the warning.
> Have courts upheld compelled false speech?
> No, and the cases on compelled speech have tended to rely on truth as a minimum requirement. For example, Planned Parenthood challenged a requirement that physicians tell patients seeking abortions of an increased risk of suicidal ideation. The court found that Planned Parenthood did not meet its burden of showing that the disclosure was untruthful, misleading, or not relevant to the patent’s decision to have an abortion.
> Are there any cases upholding warrant canaries?
> Not yet. EFF believes that warrant canaries are legal, and the government should not be able to compel a lie. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, no one can guarantee success in litigation, but only deserve it.
There is, of course, the vague language of the CFAA, so I’m not sure I’d want to test this theory, but his demands that forks not use the main centralized servers are, in my opinion, unenforceable bluster.
[1]: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-th...
https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-want-pin-dont-want-...
https://community.signalusers.org/t/mandatory-pin-without-cl...
TL;DR:
- Signal introduced mandatory PINs to store certain user information (profile, contact list) on their servers in an encrypted fashion (protected by the user's PIN and, if the user chooses a short PIN, Intel SGX enclaves that Signal uses)
- PIN UI was/is exceptionally bad, didn't explain what PIN was for and came with annoying Do-you-still-remember-your-PIN popups which made zero sense when user chooses long passphrase.
- Most importantly: If user chooses a short PIN, protection of their information will hinge purely on Intel SGX enclaves. But: The PIN UI didn't recommend choosing a long passphrase and also didn't explain this point.
- Lots of users didn't want any of their information on Signal servers to begin with, were annoyed by popups and/or didn't trust SGX and ran amok (see the above two links)
- It seems PINs can now be disabled[0]
[0]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059792-Si...
For more details, see the post by Matthew Green that was posted in a sibling comment.
I'll note the irony of calling my critique overly personalized, when the original article is based on the logic that Moxie's disagreement with DeVault's opinion about F-Droid --- a controversy that is meaningful to less than 1% of Signal's Android user base --- implies inexorably that Moxie is untrustworthy and disingenuous.
I like pre-paid cellphone plans which give me a small number of text messages, a small amount of airtime. Using these I can communicate with people when I am not near a WiFi AP. I do not want to pay for data and would prefer to use my and my friends' access points and the free wifi in the small number of commercial locations that I visit.
In Canada all of the major carriers disable WiFi Calling² on pre-paid plans. They essentially only enable it as crutch to leach off public infrastructure to take up the slack on their insufficient private infrastructure.
So I infrequently (but enough to be annoyed) find myself in the situation that I am not near a WiFi access point and wish to communicate with someone else. Currently Signal will only allow me to do this via insecure SMS messages.
I read their original explanation in 2015 for disabling this functionality. Namely SMS leaks too much metadata¹ and we are only catering to needs of real-activists in real-dictatorships, and anyway SMS is too expensive there so this is a 1st World Problem.
As an explanation it leaves me wondering why I would bother with Signal: if I bite the bullet and sign up for a circa CA$50/month plan with data I may as well just use Element Matrix over WiFi. Signal brings nothing to the table except the possibility of accidentally sending an insecure SMS message and incurring a 30c charge for it.
1. https://signal.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/ 2. https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca...
As noted on this article, your compatible device must have been purchased from Fido. If you have a non-Fido device and no conflicting services, Wi-Fi Calling may work, but we can’t assure that the feature will work properly!
Without WiFi Calling enabled sending Secure Signal messages will not work. The only option left is sending a normal insecure SMS to which the message text has been input using the veneer of the "secure" Signal app.
I use Signal because I think it protects my SMS messages from:
a) being harvested and read by other apps on my phone
b) being read by someone who unlocks my phone
c) being passively intercepted and stored by carriers and their snoopy employees
d) opposition researchers or private investigators targeting my friends, acquaintances, and business associates.
For anything targeted and state level, all bets are off anyway, so it's not a solution for people who have that problem. What am I missing?
It depends. I think calling them simply SMS messages instead of being more precise is misleading because: Text messages sent through your mobile SMS/MMS plan are insecure and need your phone to be connected to your mobile network.
and
Signal Desktop does not send or receive SMS/MMS messages. Only Signal messages will be sent or received. The desktop app is an independent client that works whether or not your mobile device is present or online. We also want to encourage users to move away from insecure legacy protocols.
https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007321171-Ca...
I find it very confusing.
The secondary feature it it ostensibly encrypts messages at rest on your device so they cannot be decrypted and read by other apps. (Assuming that's true.)
If you want a more secure messenger, use Wickr, Riot/Matrix/whatever it's called now, or protonmail or something similar, as these don't depend on the phone directory for identity and so they resist some traffic analysis and contact tracing as well.
The threat model is both the business model and use case for security products, so talking about the features or implementations outside the context of the threat model is going to just add uncertainty, imo.
When it was first published, it included an emphatic recommendation to use Matrix, and, later, Tox --- in fact, the post even included a changelog at the bottom recording the inclusion of Tox. After it was pointed out to the author that Matrix didn't even do E2E by default, the recommendations (and the changelog) were ghost-edited out of the post, but you can still see them on Archive.org.
I don't understand why people take this post seriously.
(Previously, I had a Librem.one account, but they don't maintain their server, so I dropped it.)
It works... Still waiting for anyone else I know to come over.
Element really needs to set up as an optional SMS handler, on phones. Probably building in a Signal gateway is needed too. Signal would be nowhere today if it didn't also do SMS. Separate gateways are too clunky.
As for privacytools.io, I can't really agree. They have made a number of suggestions which are less about actual privacy and more about a trend I've come to think of as "privacy roleplaying" - trendy software & services which use privacy and security as a selling point but whose implementation doesn't back it up. An example is Protonmail. When it comes to the privacy vs usability debate I come down hard on the side of privacy. Doesn't matter how pretty it is if it's going to get you rubber hosed.
I had thought that parking on a homeserver was not trusting them.
I wouldn't trust such an app for anything actually secret due to the mentioned issues (and phone number req), but I think it's great that we're using high grade encryption to talk about what we had for dinner.
Encrypted and private should be the default no matter what!
Texting, on the other hand, used to be the bane of my existence, as--especially in its current form (free, nested layout, etcetera)--it's one of the most distracting, inefficient, absurdly redundant and useless communication mediums I know.
We just need a really good app that uses SMTP as the underlying protocol to send messages that aren't MIME / HTML email, but rather are a simple new format for chat, and then start using email as a chat mechanism. There's no real reason why it can't be fast enough.
