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> owned by the creators of the largest social network in Russia Another way to describe them is people who lost the largest social network in Russia and are no
by zzzcpan 7y ago
> owned by the creators of the largest social network in Russia
Another way to describe them is people who lost the largest social network in Russia and are now Russian expats and dissidents.
> Signal, open source [...] With founders that are known to care about organizational transparency and user privacy.
Not open source, only partly, just like Telegram. And founders are known to have a radical position on trading privacy for centralizing as much control over the app as they can, tying identity to phone numbers, etc. They have exactly as much control over the app as Telegram has. But they are not dissidents or expats and who knows what they are going to do or did with covert or overt government backdooring attempts. Still, despite all the flaws both Signal and Telegram are in a bit better situation wrt privacy than Facebook owned Whatsapp, being in a business of compromising privacy and all.
- Xenograph 7y ago> Not open source, only partly, just like Telegram. Signal is completely open source. I'm not sure why you think it's only partly open source. Quoting Wikipedia[1]: > All Signal software are free and open-source. The clients are published under the GPLv3 license, while the server code is published under the AGPLv3 license. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
- zzzcpan 7y agoIt's not even on f-droid. You install the binary they control and connect to the servers they run, it's literally a proprietary app, just like Telegram.
- flixic 7y agoApp being open-source means you can compile and build it yourself. They've also gone to extreme lengths to prove that the software running on their servers has not been tampered with: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/#trust-but-verify https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/#trust-but... I think your doubts create very unreasonable expectations for Signal.
- techntoke 7y agoTelegram can be built locally too, and there are independent apps for it, and they have taken efforts within the security community to prove that it is secure.
- doomrobo 7y agoCan you build and run the server locally?
- newscracker 7y agoYou may be able to run Signal server from your build, but you won't be able to talk to users on Signal.org. Signal's official position is that it will never federate with others. So I don't understand how building and running a server locally is a step up in any way.
- jjeaff 7y agoYou can run your own signal server and compile the app to point to your own server instead of theirs. It doesn't get much more open source than that.