Look no further than Signal's supboenas and how they respond to them. With all the information they hold about an account. Which is just the creation date and last connection date. https://signal.org/bigbrother/eastern-virginia-grand-jury/
Signal's subpoenas have always left a sour taste in my mouth. I just can't believe that they are getting so few, at least some cases they'll just send the standard letter out and will try to get something. Having no list of how many they have rejected would at least increase my confidence in them a bit.
But the bigger issue is, that they data they provide is just too good to be true for the majority of users. Signal has a push token for the vast majority of accounts otherwise they wouldn't be able to send out push notifications on iOS and would waste at least some battery on devices with Google Play services installed. The subpoenas always seem to affect people who have an Android phone without Google Play services installed. In my eyes is too strange of a coincidence to be true.
Signal does at least a bad job of explaining what kind of data they keep on an average user.
It's technically possible for them to not know which phone numbers correspond to which devices and tokens.
It doesn't matter. The problem with Signal is that it is vulnerable to being shutdown easily.
So Google or Amazon or where ever Signal is hosted can just shut it down and will receive a request by the authorities to show that it is aiding and facilitating in illegal activities and will blame it on the tons of criminal networks, terrorists, insurrectionists and gangs all using Signal.
Thus, Signal really is a centralized dead end in the long run. Anything that is decentralized or allows self-hosting is the way to go.
Exactly. It could be the truth or Russian psyops to undermine the trust among users, which happens very often from all sides involved, not just during war time. It should be noted that all governments hate private communications systems, except when they suit their needs. That's one more good reason to push for systems offering full e2e encryption by default.
Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage and Threema seem to do just fine.
Why not? You can encrypt a message with more than one key, no? It’s still e2e, just that there are multiple ends.
Apple’s Messages is e2e (until SMS is used) and they have group chats.
Easy to install, works on every platform I need it, super-simple bot support and the UX is very nice. You even have tools to make write-only groups (microblogs of sorts) and actual moderation tools for larger groups.
For a "community", I'd pick Discord though.
Matrix as a technology is a good competitor, but the UI/UX for every client I've tried rangers from "death by a thousand cuts" to atrocious.
Case in point: I got a notification about a message on a channel on my phone from my Element client. I open it and what do I see? Not the message. A "Syncing" -message that lasts longer than I can stand to wait. My phone actually falls back to sleep and turns off the screen while I'm waiting for it to sync. And after it has synced, does clicking the notification take me to the channel? Of course not and now I've already forgotten where the notification was from.
How come? It's completely proprietary and it's never been audited.
One paper tried to validate Telegram's protocol: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346702021_Automated... That seems to have gone well. The mechanisms used seem very similar to the mechanism used in Signal's last audit from 2017.
Another paper only verified part of the protocol in a specific way: https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings-article/sp/2022/13... This last paper found flaws that should allow some side channel attacks (though I find it hard to believe that 3 microsecond differences can be measured against the client unless the attacker controls the server) but concludes that the protocol should be secure enough with their proposed fixes, which Telegram seems to have implemented; the problems mainly stem from implementation bugs, something the Signal protocol wasn't necessarily checked for during their extensive audit.
Based on this research I can't say I can find much wrong with mtproto2. It's proprietary in the same way the Signal protocol is proprietary, in that it was originally invented for a specific purpose inside a specific app. Just because nobody has bothered to copy the protocol to their app like WhatsApp did with Signal doesn't mean it's any more or less secure.
In the context of an app that can't encrypt group messaging and doesn't encrypt private messaging by default, I don't think focusing on the potential insecurity of mtproto2 makes sense. Telegram made some dubious, foolish security theatre ("hack our server and win a prize!") but on a protocol level there are no glaring mistakes that necessarily invalidate the protocol itself. The big problem here is that only a fraction of users actually use this seemingly-secure protocol on the first place.
I always found it funny - here's a privacy focused alternative to Whatsapp! But we'll need your phone number, first. Why? Oh, y'know, to limit spam and stuff. 'cuz that definitely can't be done any other way.
Sure, I can get prepaid cards. Or I can just use Whatsapp. If I do anything illegal, I can do better than Telegram.
I feel that the average person would be inclined to use signal more if it required a phone number than otherwise.
* I decline Signal’s prompt to turn on notifications with the “Not now” button (there is no “No thanks” button). It responds with “We’ll remind you later” and nags me again in a few days.
* I decline Signal’s prompt to share my contacts with it using the “Not now” button (there is no “No thanks” button). It responds with “We’ll remind you later” and nags me again in a few days.
Signal may be good at security, but whoever designed the app has no respect for users’ time, and it doesn’t seem like they respect a user’s privacy choices either. Telegram, on the other hand, does not have E2EE chats by default, but the privacy features are far ahead.
The key here is to say "Yes" to the app's prompt, but "No" to the system prompt.
If you use 2 computers, a phone, and a tablet and you want to use 1 Signal account on all 4, it's painful.
BONUS: Signal uses crypto funded by the US govt and used by Facebook, so I don't really trust it.
A very specific way of saying what most would assume means their users' data is safe. Even if it's not an outright lie, allowing government agents to view user data in their office would not contradict their statement.
Always.
If tech companies operate with the territory of a country or provide services to citizens in that country, we can expect that they would have to do so under the laws of that land. Those tech companies can choose to withdraw services if they have a problem with doing so. Twitter / FB et al withdrew from the Chinese market (they were not banned by the PRC, as erroneously understood) precisely because they refused to the subject to data requisition laws of this kind from the PRC
Best would obviously be to use some FOSS true E2E encryption app that actually prompt you for accepting keys.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31619010 (210 points/182 comments)
