25 ms·

On Privacy versus Freedom

255 points by Arathorn 7y ago

tialaramex 7y ago
I think the timing makes Moxie's point very well without him saying a thing. All these years later Matrix only has... The ambition to some day try to offer the core privacy features Signal already delivered back then. Some of the most basic stuff is, you believe, almost kinda sorta done. This is, to be clear, much better than just sitting back insisting you were right but not lifting a finger. But for an actual user who needed privacy and security any time between then and now - and for future users who need it between now and whenever you get this stuff working in the real world, it was Signal that delivered. Moxie was right so far.
- StudentStuff 7y ago
  >All these years later Matrix only has... The ambition to some day try to offer the core privacy features Signal already delivered back then. E2E on Matrix works, plus key verification is easier than on Signal. Managing metadata is hard, but my Matrix homeserver doesn't have my phone number (unlike Signal) and does not require Google Cloud Messaging. I can even run it on a PinePhone or Pocket CHIP! >But for an actual user who needed privacy and security any time between then and now - and for future users who need it between now and whenever you get this stuff working in the real world, it was Signal that delivered. Moxie was right so far. Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21747424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21747424
  - Boulth 7y ago
    > Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks Isn't this rather Twitter's metadata leaks in your source?
  - viro 7y ago
    bruh did you honestly just say home server.... might as well just say use "tor and pgp".
  - tptacek 7y ago
    E2E in Matrix "works" with which Matrix clients? The whole point of a decentralized federated messaging protocol is to allow people to build their own clients. Do Matrix clients uniformly and interoperably support E2E today?
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      Nearly; we’re aiming to force on E2E by default at end of Jan (but it’s getting tight). There are at least 6 complete independent implementations, and once cross-signing lands it’s good to go. For clients/bots/bridges without E2E we have pantalaimon (a clientside daemon which you proxy all the traffic through in order to encrypt it).
      - progval 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what are these implementations?
        Arathorn 7y ago
        matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk, matrix-android-sdk, matrix-androidx-sdk (soon to be refactored out of riotx), matrix-nio (py3), mtx-client (c++). In dev you also have libQuotient, metaolm and matrix-purple. matrix-python-sdk also has support, but got replaced by matrix-nio.
  - kick 7y ago
    ...that wasn't Signal leaking data, though, and unlike Twitter, which until last week allowed anyone to mass-check phone numbers, Signal doesn't publicly broadcast your number. I don't use Signal, and won't as long as they force a phone number, but at least be accurate.
  - topdancing 7y ago
    > Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks: Please explain how Signal leaks metadata given: - everything behind the client and the server goes over TLS - all Signal messages are end to end encrypted with the Signal protocol - the Signal server doesn't even know who is messaging whom in the majority of cases: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
- Arathorn 7y ago
  > Some of the most basic stuff is, you believe, almost kinda sorta done. The core Matrix stuff has been usable for years, and in many ways you've had better metadata and censorship protection available than Signal - given you have the option of running your own server which could be entirely off the grid, and used only for your own conversations. However, if your point is that Matrix focuses on freedom as well as privacy (rather than privacy at the expense of freedom), then we're agreed :D
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    No, a hypothetical option to never communicate with anybody on the network isn't "better protection" in any meaningful sense than a system designed from the outset to actually protect you when you communicate with other people. When you say we're trying to improve I want to believe you. When you stubbornly declare "we're better" in "many ways" while actually being much worse, what could I conclude? Only that your goal is to deceive people because you're not really interested in improving. Blergh. Back in February 2015 you did not understand the gravity of the mistake in leaving end-to-end encryption as a TODO item for Matrix and defended this decision as "Pragmatic" repeatedly. Matrix itself is a bit older, mid-2014 I think, but 2015 was the first time I ran into the arguments for Matrix. It's important to underscore those dates. I've moaned (including to his face) about Tim's choice not to do encryption out of the box in his toy hypermedia system, but that was almost 25 years earlier and whilst annoying a lot more understandable. 2014 on the other hand is after BCP #188 ("Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack") and all that implies so there are no excuses. Matrix was a defective design on day zero. 2020 begins with a promise that it'll be fixed soon, kinda, sorta and then a retreat to old arguments about how it's all worth it for "freedom". When I say "kinda sorta done" I am not referring to being able to send unprotected plaintext over the Internet in 2020. What's "kinda sorta done" is the basic task of sending messages between participants without anybody else knowing what was said, or preferably who by and who to. It sounds like Matrix's _ambition_ is still that in 2020 this will be the case for certain groups of participants, at least some of the time. Not everybody, and not all the time, and not yet unless you go out of your way which we know users will not do.
    - kixiQu 7y ago
- neilalexander 7y ago
  Building monoliths (like Signal) is easy and that's a core take-away point of Matthew's response in the blog post. Building Matrix is not and has not ever been a small task, but the effort gives us the freedom to run our own services and still be able to talk with our friends. Matrix is the "long game".
  - prophesi 7y ago
    And it's a worthwhile pursuit. Moxie's points simply don't make sense, and are infuriating / disrespectful to those who are working on solving decentralization's issues. _Of course_ it will be difficult. But the same argument could be made for building a completely unencrypted messenger app. You won't have to worry about managing keys, obfuscating metadata, or anything like that. At the end of the day, it's about realizing the importance of both privacy _and_ decentralization that our current infrastructure threatens.
    - viro 7y ago
      He's been anti-complexity for awhile. the matrix ecosystem is far more complex than signal.
      - sudosysgen 7y ago
        That complexity is useful and justified.
        viro 7y ago
        https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#kicking-and-banning-users https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#kicking-and-banni.... FFS that is a lot of text just to kick a nazi out of the cybersecurity chat .. who is the mod for that big ass chat? I have't the faintest clue. No easy way for me to tell.
        prophesi 7y ago
        For one, it's a lot of text for the myriad of ways you can moderate your server/chat. It's just a paragraph for kicking "a nazi out of the cybersecurity chat." And two, "In Riot, Admins are shown in the membership list with a golden shield, and Moderators are shown with a silver shield. Other clients use similar metaphors." If you actually used Matrix, you'd notice in whatever client that you're using that it's actually very easy to see who the mods are.
- alerighi 7y ago
  Talking about privacy of a system that requires you to sign up with a phone number, that in my country (and in most other European countries as far as I know, and without talking about non democratic regimes) is required to be associated with your ID (it's illegal to buy a SIM without registration) is nonsense. And you know another thing? Email works great to me, and it's decentralized. I have my email server, with my domain, so I don't depend on anyone to provide me a service. I have full control of my data that is on my server. I can even send encrypted emails with GnuPG without any problem, and it's as secure as Signal, if not better. I can use whatever client I want, a fancy application, a web interface, or as I do a small CLI program since I don't use graphical user interfaces. Sure, having a chat protocol that is decentralized like email would be great! I wish that Matrix will evolve in something usable in the following years, we need that. I need a chat application where I can have a client that I can use in my terminal, and Signal doesn't do that (Telegram does, for example, since the API is more open, and it's what I use second to email).
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    > I can even send encrypted emails with GnuPG without any problem, and it's as secure as Signal, if not better. Alas this requires a fairly contorted definition of "secure" to be true. The cryptography in GnuPG has plenty of problems even if you insist on manually doing everything from your own CLI tools which maybe don't suffer the problems from EFail. Mostly it's just kinda old, AEAD hadn't been conceived when Phil wrote PGP you know. That's a big foundational idea for modern crypto and instead PGP had to kind of fudge a separate MAC into the design and hope that's good enough. When you send your GnuPG encrypted mail, how do you decide which cryptographic primitives to use? With Signal the whole _point_ of Moxie's decision is that Signal gets to insist on all clients having whatever the best option is, so that's always used. But in GnuPG you've got to guess, what might the other participant's client be able to handle? If you guess wrong then your email is unreadable, or, worse, bad guys might be able to read it more easily. > in most other European countries as far as I know In England at least SIMs are available in the pound shop. You buy a SIM with cash (a single bright coin) and it comes with a phone number. British people do not carry any ID as a habit, and I make a point of never having ID unless I've been specifically asked to bring it for a good reason (e.g. to leave the country or when I got a job that required security clearance).
- xorcist 7y ago
  Well, XMPP had working e2e encryption a decade before Signal. That's not really a reason to consider something done. Axolotl and OMEMO improved on OTR, and it seems OTRv4 will improve on it further.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    Wait a minute. When you say "Axolotl improved OTR", what you're really saying is that Signal improved on OTR, because that's where Axolotl comes from. The same is true of OMEMO.
- skybrian 7y ago
  It seems like they are both right based on their values? Signal put privacy and security first, and Matrix put federation first. They are both idealistic in their own way.
  - jeltz 7y ago
    Security: sure, but privacy: no. An application focused on privacy should never require a phone number. In many countries phone numbers can easily be tied to individuals.
thesorrow 7y ago
Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I think Matrix is our second chance to build a secure federated communication suite. So far it's going in the right direction...
- rumanator 7y ago
  > Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I don't recall the last time I've received spam in my email inbox among the tens of emails I've receive daily, and newsletters/invoices are messages that users intend to subscribe. You might argue that instant messaging scratches an itch that email doesn't, but that's a bit shortsighted and doesn't make a case on why email is flawed.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Newsletters and other BS notifications are the new spam. Sure, you can technically opt-out and keep your inbox clean by spending 5 minutes opting out of the garbage every time you sign up to a new service, but that’s irrelevant considering nobody does this and most of my friends’ mailboxes are pretty much unusable because this kind of spam arrives every minute and they have tens of thousands of unread emails in their inbox. However, in this case I’m not sure Matrix or any other service would be the solution. If the service is neutral and doesn’t impose policies on the content then scum like marketers will just move to it. On the other hand actually having “acceptable use policies” would require centralisation and bring its own problems to the table. The real solution here is regulation, not technology.
    - samdixon 7y ago
      Most sites will allow you to opt out from account creation and also will allow you to unsubscribe without even having to login to your account. If your mailbox has 10k+ spam messages it is IMO a personal problem of either not opting out, or signing up for total garbage sites in the first place.
ksbakan 7y ago
I won't touch signal because I care about user freedom more than privacy. (Both are important) No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.
- est31 7y ago
  > mandatory google play services Note that since a while there is also the possibility of using web sockets. But they are an extreme battery drain, and thus google services are quasi-mandatory. Telegram solves this without being a battery drain, possibly at the cost of delivering messages with a delay, but why isn't that my choice.
  - jyrkesh 7y ago
    I can't tell you how they do it, but Telegram is lightning fast with push notifications across all kinds of devices, including Android. Been rocking it as my primary messenger for years. Whenever a few of us are sitting around in real life, and someone sends something to a group chat, all the phones on the table will buzz instantly together (iOS and Android). And on top of that, battery usage is really low on Android. I use it a TON, and it's never in the top n apps of battery usage. Meanwhile, I can just open Snapchat once, and I lose a few percent.
    - sudosysgen 7y ago
      Telegram is GPL, I think it would be worth it to see how they use it, because it honestly is absolutely incredible.
      - shmerl 7y ago
        Telegram server is closed.
        sudosysgen 7y ago
        Yes but the implementation of the notification handling is impressive on the client side. The server side software as far as this is concerned should be easily deducible and isn't the interesting part.
DygFiul 7y ago
Nice essay, Matthew, thanks! I'll stay with XMPP until they take it from my cold, dead hands.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  thanks :) (you can always use XMPP via Matrix via Bifröst - just sayin' ;D)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
maltewirz 7y ago
Actually Moxies talk "36C3 - The ecosystem is moving" was recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8
- liamcardenas 7y ago
  He didn’t want it to be, though. https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21
- novok 7y ago
  It was mostly stuff he has said in previous blog articles, so you are not missing too much.
ex3ndr 7y ago
When i asked if i could use his libraries in ios/android apps Moxie refused. He licensed them under GPL that prohibits distributing of software via app stores. Quite a strange for a guy who claim that he wants to spread encryption. Sure, but only on your own platform. Fastforward he sold such rights for a whatsapp. Just simple business, nothing about privacy itself.
- jlund 7y ago
  https://signal.org/blog/license-update/ https://signal.org/blog/license-update/
  - ex3ndr 7y ago
    Aha, yeah: https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-java/issues/5 https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-java/issues/5
    - slipheen 7y ago
      It sounds like he addressed the point you raised (App Stores) even though he'd prefer to keep it GPL so changes are required to be shared. What's the objection?
    - kick 7y ago
      GPL doesn't prevent you from using it on mobile devices, it prevents you from making changes to his code proprietary. You seem to just want to release proprietary software. You should say that out loud if so!
      - arianvanp 7y ago
        That's not what OP said at all. Apple _forces_ you to make proprietary changes to your application (and doesn't allow you to publish the source code of that modification). There is no way to have both a GPL-compliant app and have it on the app store at the same time.
- nirs 7y ago
d33 7y ago
> Moxie didn’t want the 36C3 talk recorded Curious why. Anyway it's there: https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270 https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-...
- arusahni 7y ago
  Here's his reasoning: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211443530335281153 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211443530335281153
  - dane-pgp 7y ago
    To save people a click, here is a line taken ironically out of context: "I have less faith in the internet as a place where a conversation can happen, and the timelessness of it decontextualizes."
  - daenney 7y ago
    > I just prefer to present something as part of a conversation that's happening in a place, rather than a webinar that I'm broadcasting forever to the world. To me it sounds an awful lot like not wanting to be scrutinized or held accountable for what he says. I also find this rather disappointing as it excludes anyone who is unable, for whatever reason, to be at his talks from hearing what he has to say. Given how influential he's been in this domain, this sadness me quite a bit. > I have less faith in the internet as a place where a conversation can happen This feels a bit ironic, given he's built an enterprise on enabling conversations to happen on the internet, though arguably only with a limited set of people. > , and the timelessness of it decontextualizes. Not quite sure what that's supposed to mean. Perhaps it's a language barrier thing, but I can't parse that into something sensible.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      In addition to writing on the Signal blog and on Twitter, he's on HN regularly addressing questions about what he's doing; you've had plenty of opportunities to engage with him directly. This seems like a swipe you're making for its own sake.
novok 7y ago
Moxie / signal chooses pragmatism over purity, and is striving towards improve the status quo bit by bit vs a pure perfect solution that never ships, even though that improvement has it's own vital problems. You can see it in his choices, and you can see how they want to eventually deliver improvements like no phone numbers, with them working on things like secure value recovery. I kind of wish he spelled it out fully for the nit picky peanut gallery out there, so he can just reference it instead of wasting energy on them. You can just feel the exasperation when you read his writing and see him speak about this.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  I'd argue that Matrix also chooses pragmatism over purity - the balance is more that we prioritise freedom as well as privacy. Signal's whole mantra of "only implement features which are privacy preserving" is a great mentality. It's just a shame it comes at the expense of locking down the platform.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    I'd argue you can't prioritise two things: prioritisation means deciding what comes first when you have to choose between two things. And it appears to me that Signal tries to ensure privacy first, and then sees if it can make that work with freedom later (see e.g. the delay in adding support for de-googled Android, or the ground work they're only doing now that might (or might not) lead to accounts without phone numbers), whereas Matrix does it the other way around (by first working on support for many different clients, and then trying to make that work with encryption). I hope that both succeed, and I'm happy that both paths are taken. As an aside, I'd like to voice my appreciation for how you respectfully acknowledged moxie's point of view, take effort to understand it, and then pinpoint why you reach different conclusions from the same observations. A pleasure to read.
- tptacek 7y ago
  I would make the opposite argument: that at pretty much every point along the way, Signal has chosen purity over pragmatism. Which is why they didn't even have user profiles until recently, why they're just now getting group access control for a Slack-y experience, and why it's taking a fairly spectacular amount of engineering to get them off of phone numbers. Signal has a track record of delaying features common to messenger applications in order to get them cryptographically right. No other mainstream messenger tool has a comparable track record.
Jerry2 7y ago
I saw Moxie Marlinspike's talk when it was posted on CCC's official channel [1] and was disgusted by it. The talk has been now censored and video was made private. It was one of the most defeatist talks I've ever come across when it comes to messaging and privacy. His message was basically that anything you do is pointless and that his and WhatsApp/Facebook's way is the right one. I've used Signal on few occasions in the past but his talk made me uninstall it. I simply do not trust him after hearing his opinions. I do not support centralization and other ideals he's now pushing (including the use of a phone number as Signal's primary ID). The talk was mirrored on few channels on YT [2] and you can still see it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c (it's a private video now) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 (working link, who knows for how long so mirror it).
- slipheen 7y ago
  I don't particularly like a centralized model either. Federation is much more difficult, but can create ecosystems which can survive longer/better than a single company can. But on the specific issue of phone numbers as ID, they have been making some substantial progress on a technological solution to address this, specifically without running central servers. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  Wire seemed like a decent alternative where you're not required a number, I think only an email. Also you can delete your account.
  - cren 7y ago
    I read on a privacy-oriented website that Wire was purchased by an American company not trusted for its record on privacy (or perhaps it was that since the company is American, their data can be read by the US govt.). I can't find it now though. There isn't anything mentioning it on the website of `www.privacytools.io`: https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
shmerl 7y ago
> The ecosystem is moving It has been "moving" from the times of Compuserve and AOL trying to prevent e-mail federation. Good thing they failed then! Kudos to Matrix for pushing against such movement in IMs. Someone has to push against it, instead of looking for excuses to proliferate walled gardens. > If users don’t trust their app provider, they can always go switch apps, which gives them freedom. Sounds like Moxie meant it's a downside. It's a huge benefit! Forcing one to use something that's not trusted is horrendous.
samth 7y ago
One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS, carrier, or messaging app, Signal as designed wouldn't work. People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it.
- dublinben 7y ago
  >People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it. That's great and all, but because Signal takes advantage of that existing network of identifiers, it is able to deliver usable private messaging to many users today. Replacing phone numbers as identifiers is a much harder problem than what Signal has done so far. We shouldn't wait to solve this at some unknown point in the future before offering "huge amounts of value" to users.
  - samth 7y ago
    The position you're taking, roughly that with limited resources you have to aim for achievable goals and while distributed federated networks are the underlying reason Signal works, it can't try to replace them right now, is totally reasonable, although not everyone will agree. However, that isn't at all what Moxie said. Instead he made no acknowledgement of the distributed nature of the phone system, he suggested that everyone who disagreed lived in the imaginary past, and suggested that his approach was the only sensible one. So I'm not inclined to read it as charitably as I read your comment.
- 3xblah 7y ago
  In his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk at CCC, he had many presumptuous and dubious "arguments" but one regarding privacy of phone numbers was that a user's APN would be used to determine their phone number, so there was no point in trying to keep phone numbers private. This fails to account for the possibility of not using the cellular network. With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear any APN settings and access WiFi. That can be enough for a messaging app to work. The only identifier needed for iMessage and FaceTime is a working e-mail address (and only for sign up). No cellular account is required.
SamWhited 7y ago
"Democracy and republics are hard, so we should all just give up and have autocratic governments" It may sound flippant or unrelated, but I think this extreme projection of his argument makes it evident how silly it is. This is one of the reasons I switched away from using Signal, as much as I'd like better privacy on my text messages it's not worth handing that much control over to someone I shouldn't have to put my trust in. Instead I do my text messages over Jabber/XMPP with jmp.chat now and for others who have a proper XMPP address I use that (which gives me the option of OMEMO encryption which is basically the XMPP version of the signal double ratchet). For the average user, installing conversations.im and hitting "create account" or whatever and calling it a day is good enough, so it's not even significantly harder than dealing with Signal.
- nickik 7y ago
  How about that being in an atocracy might be much better when you have a population of 51% wolves and 49% sheep.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
viro 7y ago
Is no one going to talk about how much more complex matrix is than signal?
- Arathorn 7y ago
  overall it's more complex thanks to the decentralisation.
ddevault 7y ago
Moxie has always gaslit users with legitimate concerns because addressing them would mean giving up power. Signal is a self serving design and driven by self serving decisions. I've written about this in depth before: https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html I still stand by everything I said here, and lots more that goes unsaid in this article. Every single weird decision Signal makes is not because they've reasonably decided to come down on some side of the fence that others haven't - it's because their decisions serve moxie's wants above anyone else.
- dang 7y ago
  No personal attacks on HN, please, regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Maybe you don't owe that person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ddevault 7y ago
    Sorry, you're right. I've edited it to be about the behavior instead of the person.
    - tptacek 7y ago
      From the comment I see right now and the logic you're using here, "have you stopped beating your wife" wouldn't qualify as a personal attack.
      - ddevault 7y ago
        And if we extrapolate your logic, we can never comment on anyone's bad behavior at all. My complaints are on topic for the article in question, I'm not just swinging at Moxie at random here.
        tptacek 7y ago
blindgeek 7y ago
My biggest problem with messaging applications as a whole is that I need so many of them. I have a few contacts who are reachable with Signal, a few more who are reachable on Hangouts or whatever Google is calling its latest thing, and a few more who are reachable with Skype. That's three programs, to communicate with three different subsets of people. I'm sure if I used Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, I'd have two more subsets of people who are only reachable through those. XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early 2000s. But then all the big tech companies who build "ecosystems" decided to push their own applications, all incompatible with one another. So here we are again with this proliferation of programs that really only do one thing: communication. It's like the 90s / early 2000s with the proliferation of instant messengers: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and on and on and on. The players are different, but the game is still the same. I suspect that twenty years from now, when the players have all changed yet again, there will still be one reliable method of reaching me: IRC. If the Googles and Whatsapps and Facebooks of the world had been around in the early 90s, you'd have one email client from Facebook for mailing Joe and Fred, an email client from Google for mailing Mary and Jane, and an email client from Whatsapp for mailing Alice and Bob. Thankfully, email became entrenched before that could happen. I want messaging to be like email, where I use one and exactly one program to communicate with all of my contacts, regardless of what server they use. People say that federation is more complicated than centralization. I'm sure that's true for developers, but in fact, federation can be vastly simplifying for an end user. I'm a fundamentally lazy person. Having to learn all these different messaging tools is frankly a waste of my time. All I want is a federated protocol and an open system, be it Matrix, XMPP, or something else. As a final aside, you know what else that bugs me? The word "ecosystem". I worked for a big tech company for a while, and the only people I ever heard use that word were people out to build a walled garden.
- progval 7y ago
  > XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out That's also what Matrix said it would solve when it started. Except now it's yet another protocol with its own chatrooms that are not reachable from any other protocol by default (even rooms on matrix.org); and bridges are at best in "beta" (except the Telegram bridge, which is "late beta"): https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/
dancemethis 7y ago
Signal really tries hard to not be trustworthy. The way they defend WhatsApp is heart-breaking. It's cute to see them saying there is no backdoor when it can't be proven to be the case, since it's all proprietary. They can't show the server side wasn't tampered with. Same with Skype.
- evgen 7y ago
  The constant repetition of this ignorant claim is starting to be annoying. Think there is a client backdoor? Go find it. It is not like the binary is not available to you. It is not like there are not emulators in which you can step through the code. Please, show us the backdoor. Server side tampering? Show us how it can be done. Create a server that can tamper with a patched client. Demonstrate your chops.
  - hellcow 7y ago
    I see you're formerly from FB. It's not up to us to reverse engineer a binary every update to guess if it's secure... It's up to Facebook, which has time and again proven that it is absolutely not trustworthy, to open its code and make builds auditable, inspectable, and reproducible. This is what ANY secure software does. That's the cost of entry. Imagine if OpenSSH were closed and its devs issued the same response you just did. "Just reverse engineer the binary and prove that it's not secure!" Rediculous.
    - evgen 7y ago
      Actually it _is_ up to you; put up or shut up is a fairly well-known principle. Find the backdoor and make yourself famous, or continue to whine and listen to everyone laugh. I left FB because it was getting too creepy and I would not trust 99% of FB dev with a single shred of my personal info, but the code is right there for you and people who actually have skills to disassemble and examine. They are under no obligation to do your work for you and the people who can actually do the work make good money so maybe you will learn a useful skill or two.
      - 7y ago
maqp 7y ago
Matthew outlined much of the Matrix problems but not in the context of the latter part of his idealistic thoughts. Just going to point out that if agreeing on spec is six time slower, that's just the first car of traffic jam slowing down. The next car has to slow down more: The feature needs to move into SDKs. Then the next car, the client vendors need to actually implement and test their implementation of the feature and write documentation. That's even more slow. "HOWEVER: all of this completely ignores one critical thing - the value of freedom." I really value freedom. To me freedom means a non-technical dissident doesn't have to sit in jail when their messages weren't E2EE. It doesn't mean I can choose a value from a list of servers and have faceless entity #1, #2 or #3, or worse, Mike - the creepy IT guy from my peers - observe my metadata with everybody, and content with Karen who refuses to switch to Matrix client that supports E2EE. "Freedom to run your own server (perhaps invisibly in your app, in a P2P world)." Now this is something I can get behind. Which is why I've spent the last eight years working on P2P messaging system. Perhaps Matrix should move their efforts into being the change they want to see in the world instead of defending a bad solution of decentralization by saying they're thinking about implementing a better solution of P2P. "Freedom to pick which country your server runs in" Which you can't do if you're running P2P server on your device. I think every faceless service provider from Signal to any XMPP server has the same guarantee of privacy in practice. The only difference is Signal has to abide by the GDPR, independent users hosting servers don't. Before anyone screams about PRISM, I will point out that coercing insertion of a backdoor is the same as compelled speech, which would violate the constitution. "Freedom to select how much metadata and history to keep." We have precedence of Signal keeping none of that. With Matrix servers the server has access to all metadata by default, the server program doesn't attempt to hide anything, there's no sealed sender etc. Your only hope is to run your own server, somehow convince your peers you're the one they should trust with their metadata (there's a third party on every decentralized server with more than two users), and hope you don't grow enough to get hacked by nation state actors or criminals. "Freedom to choose which apps to use - while still having the freedom to talk to anyone you like. Freedom to connect your own functionality - bots, bridges, integrations etc" A nice idea, but everyone needs to have same features for it to work, so what you get is differences in UI, implementation language, and platform support. What matters most here is the programming language: Matrix client written in Rust is more secure that one written in C. But unless everyone uses the Rust version, the group chat is as secure as the weakest link. Same goes with bridges. You'll never have security because of this guy who likes to re-live their youth through irssi: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/ Also, what happens when Facebook implements their own Matrix client that steals your metadata from the endpoint, and what happens when they start bundling their app on every Samsung smartphone? Perhaps it's not your idealistic Riot client that's the problem, perhaps it's the bundled spyware on every peers' device used by people who just, don't care. I'm not saying Signal fixes the problem of user laziness, I'm saying it's better to know what's on the receiving end. "Freedom to select which identifiers (if any) to use to register your account." Which is kind of pointless considering the IP-address still leaks to the server by default. And the UUID means all your metadata can be tied together. The social graph is revealed to the server so unless everyone keeps rolling their IDs and exchanging them over some other channel, it's pretty much impossible to hide metadata from a malicious server running statistical analysis. Even if you're not malicious, there's no way to know if your server has been compromised. Or, if you somehow can harden your server against the NSAs of this world, please, go work for the Freedom of The Press Foundation or something. "Freedom to extend the protocol." When the protocol fails to mandate BASIC security features like E2EE, it's kind of pointless to talk about the possibilities of extendability. There's always going to be maintainers and theyneed to prioritize, so there's always going to be someone who decides whether something will be implemented by them. Signal doesn't forbid pull-requests if you want something done. The nice thing is, it's at least six times faster to do it for Signal. "Freedom to write your own client, or build whole new as-yet-unimagined systems on top." So it's the freedom of the developer we're talking about. Reminds me of BSD vs GPL (BSD says developer has freedom to fuck over users with proprietary fork, GPL says user has right to not be abused like that, and that developers have the obligation to not do that). It's the rights of the users that matter. That is, human rights. You can merge as-yet-unimagined systems to Signal. You might face initial criticism because it needs to be secure by default. But it's not like Moxie will show you the finger for proposing something before it's discovered or announced. I have first hand experience with this: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/4171 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/4171 "It’s true that if you’re writing a messaging app optimized for privacy at any cost, Moxie’s approach is one way to do it." If you consider privacy is a human right, developer freedom isn't, it's easier to see who has their priorities in order. "you end up thoroughly putting all your eggs in one basket, trusting past, present & future Signal to retain its values, stay up and somehow dodge compromise & censorship… despite probably being the single highest value attack target on the ‘net." So which one is easier to subvert, community of experts constantly under scrutiny by peer experts trying desperately to make a name for themselves, or open work group on protocol that still isn't secure by default, and that is much more susceptible to stagnation via bike-shedding and mission hijacking. OpenPGP work group still hasn't agreed on v5 fingerprint, the SHAppening happened five years ago. I'm going to have to disagree and say I don't have faith in unnecessarily large organizations. I'm just going to say this FUD is worth being pointed out, but that it's not worthy of dissection. "We owe the entire success of the Internet (let alone the Web) to openness, interoperability and decentralization." A thought that was denounced in the 36c3 talk whether you watched the stream or not. "To declare that openness, interoperability and decentralization is ‘too hard’ and not worth the effort when building a messaging solution is to throw away all the potential of the vibrancy, creativity and innovation that comes from an open network" The worth was not addressed by this writing in any way, and the practical problems that far outweigh the idealistic goals were discussed by Moxie because what matters is the human rights to privacy of the users of the tool, not whether the infrastructure is based on idealistic ideas that don't offer tangible security benefits in practice. Like Moxie said, prove that decentralization works by doing the bare necessities of implementing E2EE, then it's worth discussing whether the idealism part matters, and if decentralization has something useful to offer. "Sure, you may end up with a super-private messaging app - but one that starts to smell alarmingly like a walled garden like Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, or an AOL keyword, or Google’s AMP. " The negative connotations of these companies are about lack of respecting privacy. It's really weird to essentially say "you end up with super private app that shares other commonalities with privacy invading companies". Walled garden isn't ideal, but for now, it's more secure and that's what matters more to users. "So, we continue to gladly take up Moxie’s challenge to prove him wrong - to show that it’s both possible and imperative to create an open decentralized messaging platform which (if you use reputable apps and servers) can be as secure and metadata-protecting as Signal…" That's the attitude we need. Now go out there and use your preferred methods to make the idealistic protocol secure by default! Just don't expect me or anyone else to recommend its use before that happens. "and indeed more so, given you can run your server off the grid, and don’t need to register with a phone number" Will you be getting rid of IP-address leak to servers too? Quick jabs in closing notes that aren't thought out too well are not very nice. "and in future may not even need a server at all." Also maybe reconsider ending your refutal of criticism towards decentralized architecture by hinting that users should look towards upcoming P2P architecture.
badrabbit 7y ago
First off, I have to say this about matrix: they have by far the best foss community I have seen. Excellent work on managing the community, others should take note. Second, both signal and matrix collect too much metadata. signal means you're completely screwed by their dependency on phone numbers. I expect little metadata privacy from signal because to me, it is practically the same as using my SSN or fingerprint as my user name,same for all my contacts, this key field is used by everyone and their mother to track everything we do like 1984 was target practice. For matrix, it's the defaults and how easy it is for others to fingerprint you using your specific device (equivalent of a user-agent seen by everyone iirc?) and other profile details ,but none of this is easy to correlate and answer questions like "which social network demographic micro-group does this user belong to so we can perform targeted infiltration of their device?" or "Hey, let's use this phone number to look perform the equivalent of a background check on this person who is sending us a message because we now have their phone number". Oh and the best part is, you can't just get a burner to use for registration, and to link a signal desktop,you need the mobile app. Matrix has none of these issues. Third, consider your threat models carefully. As an individual, is it better if you have infrasructure diversity and protocol interoperability or is it better to put all your eggs in signal's basket. I never liked their use of google infra at the begining for example because I consider google more of a threat to me than most other parties. I can see the argument both ways. I personally consider the set of parties that have the most to benefit from targeting me as an individual plus those who have the most to benefit from dragnet surveillance where I reside. To me, matrix is more flexible to adopt to various threat models by for example self hosting compared to using a popular matrix server. Signal is better than the competition, if your fear is being exposed to unpatched vulnerabilities and/or if you are worried about metadata snooping (but you trust signal's infra provider, still google??) Then Signal makes more sense. For dragnet, I think matrix is better for me because implementation vulns only apply to a few users,making reliable dragnet attacks less likely. For anyone that might target me, my mobile phone is completely defenseless, so my concern is someone identifying my specific device for targeted attacks, with matrix they need to compromise the matrix server and even then they might need to do a lot more work to correlate which matrix user is me (real life "target worthy" identity). Where as with signal,they can easily micro target a group ,find out everyone's phone numbers (e.g.: hk protesters) and target their device for further exploitation via signal or any other pwnable app that is known to present on a device associated with that phone number.Practically, I am more worried about how each app fits in with everything else I do and matrix wins the security round for me. Last but not least, I use signal for 98% of my comms because the phone number usage by Signal means I can easily connect to and invite people who don't have signal. If there is a Matrix client app that can be used as an sms client and can discover contacts' matrix account/server over sms without communicating or collecting phone number/name details of the contact, I think i might jump ship. The way I envision this to work is: the matrix client would have an invite button for non-matrix contacts and it will have an option to initiate discovery of contacts. Both options would do a challenge-response with each contact and instead of associating with a phone number they would ask to create a new martrix only contact.
zzo38computer 7y ago
I think that protocols that are simple and open should be used, rather than very complicated and messy ones. Text-based also helps since it allows to use without specialized software. IRC is designed like this and I think it is good.
- aiphee 7y ago
  This is a very unpopular position from a security perspective. All messages should be exchanged by some type-safe structured container like protobuf to avoid a huge class of bugs that comes from quoting and odd character sets, manually implementing parsers, confusing types, and broken string arithmetic.
pcstl 7y ago
This reminds me of the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which is also about a father-son roadtrip, and which uses it as an excuse to talk about what happens when we do long, boring tasks requiring some focus but leaving enough of the brain unoccupied. It's a good book and I should probably reread it.

255 points by Arathorn 7y ago

I think the timing makes Moxie's point very well without him saying a thing. All these years later Matrix only has... The ambition to some day try to offer the core privacy features Signal already delivered back then. Some of the most basic stuff is, you believe, almost kinda sorta done. This is, to be clear, much better than just sitting back insisting you were right but not lifting a finger. But for an actual user who needed privacy and security any time between then and now - and for future users who need it between now and whenever you get this stuff working in the real world, it was Signal that delivered. Moxie was right so far.

StudentStuff 7y ago
>All these years later Matrix only has... The ambition to some day try to offer the core privacy features Signal already delivered back then. E2E on Matrix works, plus key verification is easier than on Signal. Managing metadata is hard, but my Matrix homeserver doesn't have my phone number (unlike Signal) and does not require Google Cloud Messaging. I can even run it on a PinePhone or Pocket CHIP! >But for an actual user who needed privacy and security any time between then and now - and for future users who need it between now and whenever you get this stuff working in the real world, it was Signal that delivered. Moxie was right so far. Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21747424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21747424
- Boulth 7y ago
  > Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks Isn't this rather Twitter's metadata leaks in your source?
- viro 7y ago
  bruh did you honestly just say home server.... might as well just say use "tor and pgp".
- tptacek 7y ago
  E2E in Matrix "works" with which Matrix clients? The whole point of a decentralized federated messaging protocol is to allow people to build their own clients. Do Matrix clients uniformly and interoperably support E2E today?
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    Nearly; we’re aiming to force on E2E by default at end of Jan (but it’s getting tight). There are at least 6 complete independent implementations, and once cross-signing lands it’s good to go. For clients/bots/bridges without E2E we have pantalaimon (a clientside daemon which you proxy all the traffic through in order to encrypt it).
    - progval 7y ago
      Out of curiosity, what are these implementations?
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk, matrix-android-sdk, matrix-androidx-sdk (soon to be refactored out of riotx), matrix-nio (py3), mtx-client (c++). In dev you also have libQuotient, metaolm and matrix-purple. matrix-python-sdk also has support, but got replaced by matrix-nio.
- kick 7y ago
  ...that wasn't Signal leaking data, though, and unlike Twitter, which until last week allowed anyone to mass-check phone numbers, Signal doesn't publicly broadcast your number. I don't use Signal, and won't as long as they force a phone number, but at least be accurate.
- topdancing 7y ago
  > Tell that to the people getting imprisoned due to Signal's metadata leaks: Please explain how Signal leaks metadata given: - everything behind the client and the server goes over TLS - all Signal messages are end to end encrypted with the Signal protocol - the Signal server doesn't even know who is messaging whom in the majority of cases: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/ https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/
Arathorn 7y ago
> Some of the most basic stuff is, you believe, almost kinda sorta done. The core Matrix stuff has been usable for years, and in many ways you've had better metadata and censorship protection available than Signal - given you have the option of running your own server which could be entirely off the grid, and used only for your own conversations. However, if your point is that Matrix focuses on freedom as well as privacy (rather than privacy at the expense of freedom), then we're agreed :D
- tialaramex 7y ago
  No, a hypothetical option to never communicate with anybody on the network isn't "better protection" in any meaningful sense than a system designed from the outset to actually protect you when you communicate with other people. When you say we're trying to improve I want to believe you. When you stubbornly declare "we're better" in "many ways" while actually being much worse, what could I conclude? Only that your goal is to deceive people because you're not really interested in improving. Blergh. Back in February 2015 you did not understand the gravity of the mistake in leaving end-to-end encryption as a TODO item for Matrix and defended this decision as "Pragmatic" repeatedly. Matrix itself is a bit older, mid-2014 I think, but 2015 was the first time I ran into the arguments for Matrix. It's important to underscore those dates. I've moaned (including to his face) about Tim's choice not to do encryption out of the box in his toy hypermedia system, but that was almost 25 years earlier and whilst annoying a lot more understandable. 2014 on the other hand is after BCP #188 ("Pervasive Monitoring Is An Attack") and all that implies so there are no excuses. Matrix was a defective design on day zero. 2020 begins with a promise that it'll be fixed soon, kinda, sorta and then a retreat to old arguments about how it's all worth it for "freedom". When I say "kinda sorta done" I am not referring to being able to send unprotected plaintext over the Internet in 2020. What's "kinda sorta done" is the basic task of sending messages between participants without anybody else knowing what was said, or preferably who by and who to. It sounds like Matrix's _ambition_ is still that in 2020 this will be the case for certain groups of participants, at least some of the time. Not everybody, and not all the time, and not yet unless you go out of your way which we know users will not do.
  - kixiQu 7y ago
neilalexander 7y ago
Building monoliths (like Signal) is easy and that's a core take-away point of Matthew's response in the blog post. Building Matrix is not and has not ever been a small task, but the effort gives us the freedom to run our own services and still be able to talk with our friends. Matrix is the "long game".
- prophesi 7y ago
  And it's a worthwhile pursuit. Moxie's points simply don't make sense, and are infuriating / disrespectful to those who are working on solving decentralization's issues. _Of course_ it will be difficult. But the same argument could be made for building a completely unencrypted messenger app. You won't have to worry about managing keys, obfuscating metadata, or anything like that. At the end of the day, it's about realizing the importance of both privacy _and_ decentralization that our current infrastructure threatens.
  - viro 7y ago
    He's been anti-complexity for awhile. the matrix ecosystem is far more complex than signal.
    - sudosysgen 7y ago
      That complexity is useful and justified.
      - viro 7y ago
        https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#kicking-and-banning-users https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/#kicking-and-banni.... FFS that is a lot of text just to kick a nazi out of the cybersecurity chat .. who is the mod for that big ass chat? I have't the faintest clue. No easy way for me to tell.
        prophesi 7y ago
        For one, it's a lot of text for the myriad of ways you can moderate your server/chat. It's just a paragraph for kicking "a nazi out of the cybersecurity chat." And two, "In Riot, Admins are shown in the membership list with a golden shield, and Moderators are shown with a silver shield. Other clients use similar metaphors." If you actually used Matrix, you'd notice in whatever client that you're using that it's actually very easy to see who the mods are.
alerighi 7y ago
Talking about privacy of a system that requires you to sign up with a phone number, that in my country (and in most other European countries as far as I know, and without talking about non democratic regimes) is required to be associated with your ID (it's illegal to buy a SIM without registration) is nonsense. And you know another thing? Email works great to me, and it's decentralized. I have my email server, with my domain, so I don't depend on anyone to provide me a service. I have full control of my data that is on my server. I can even send encrypted emails with GnuPG without any problem, and it's as secure as Signal, if not better. I can use whatever client I want, a fancy application, a web interface, or as I do a small CLI program since I don't use graphical user interfaces. Sure, having a chat protocol that is decentralized like email would be great! I wish that Matrix will evolve in something usable in the following years, we need that. I need a chat application where I can have a client that I can use in my terminal, and Signal doesn't do that (Telegram does, for example, since the API is more open, and it's what I use second to email).
- tialaramex 7y ago
  > I can even send encrypted emails with GnuPG without any problem, and it's as secure as Signal, if not better. Alas this requires a fairly contorted definition of "secure" to be true. The cryptography in GnuPG has plenty of problems even if you insist on manually doing everything from your own CLI tools which maybe don't suffer the problems from EFail. Mostly it's just kinda old, AEAD hadn't been conceived when Phil wrote PGP you know. That's a big foundational idea for modern crypto and instead PGP had to kind of fudge a separate MAC into the design and hope that's good enough. When you send your GnuPG encrypted mail, how do you decide which cryptographic primitives to use? With Signal the whole _point_ of Moxie's decision is that Signal gets to insist on all clients having whatever the best option is, so that's always used. But in GnuPG you've got to guess, what might the other participant's client be able to handle? If you guess wrong then your email is unreadable, or, worse, bad guys might be able to read it more easily. > in most other European countries as far as I know In England at least SIMs are available in the pound shop. You buy a SIM with cash (a single bright coin) and it comes with a phone number. British people do not carry any ID as a habit, and I make a point of never having ID unless I've been specifically asked to bring it for a good reason (e.g. to leave the country or when I got a job that required security clearance).
xorcist 7y ago
Well, XMPP had working e2e encryption a decade before Signal. That's not really a reason to consider something done. Axolotl and OMEMO improved on OTR, and it seems OTRv4 will improve on it further.
- tptacek 7y ago
  Wait a minute. When you say "Axolotl improved OTR", what you're really saying is that Signal improved on OTR, because that's where Axolotl comes from. The same is true of OMEMO.
skybrian 7y ago
It seems like they are both right based on their values? Signal put privacy and security first, and Matrix put federation first. They are both idealistic in their own way.
- jeltz 7y ago
  Security: sure, but privacy: no. An application focused on privacy should never require a phone number. In many countries phone numbers can easily be tied to individuals.

thesorrow 7y ago

Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I think Matrix is our second chance to build a secure federated communication suite. So far it's going in the right direction...

rumanator 7y ago
> Email is flawed and will become a one way protocol to receive spam, newsletters and invoices just like paper mail. I don't recall the last time I've received spam in my email inbox among the tens of emails I've receive daily, and newsletters/invoices are messages that users intend to subscribe. You might argue that instant messaging scratches an itch that email doesn't, but that's a bit shortsighted and doesn't make a case on why email is flawed.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Newsletters and other BS notifications are the new spam. Sure, you can technically opt-out and keep your inbox clean by spending 5 minutes opting out of the garbage every time you sign up to a new service, but that’s irrelevant considering nobody does this and most of my friends’ mailboxes are pretty much unusable because this kind of spam arrives every minute and they have tens of thousands of unread emails in their inbox. However, in this case I’m not sure Matrix or any other service would be the solution. If the service is neutral and doesn’t impose policies on the content then scum like marketers will just move to it. On the other hand actually having “acceptable use policies” would require centralisation and bring its own problems to the table. The real solution here is regulation, not technology.
  - samdixon 7y ago
    Most sites will allow you to opt out from account creation and also will allow you to unsubscribe without even having to login to your account. If your mailbox has 10k+ spam messages it is IMO a personal problem of either not opting out, or signing up for total garbage sites in the first place.

ksbakan 7y ago

I won't touch signal because I care about user freedom more than privacy. (Both are important) No 3rd party clients, mandatory updates, mandatory google play services, and mobile only are all deal breakers.

est31 7y ago
> mandatory google play services Note that since a while there is also the possibility of using web sockets. But they are an extreme battery drain, and thus google services are quasi-mandatory. Telegram solves this without being a battery drain, possibly at the cost of delivering messages with a delay, but why isn't that my choice.
- jyrkesh 7y ago
  I can't tell you how they do it, but Telegram is lightning fast with push notifications across all kinds of devices, including Android. Been rocking it as my primary messenger for years. Whenever a few of us are sitting around in real life, and someone sends something to a group chat, all the phones on the table will buzz instantly together (iOS and Android). And on top of that, battery usage is really low on Android. I use it a TON, and it's never in the top n apps of battery usage. Meanwhile, I can just open Snapchat once, and I lose a few percent.
  - sudosysgen 7y ago
    Telegram is GPL, I think it would be worth it to see how they use it, because it honestly is absolutely incredible.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      Telegram server is closed.
      - sudosysgen 7y ago
        Yes but the implementation of the notification handling is impressive on the client side. The server side software as far as this is concerned should be easily deducible and isn't the interesting part.

DygFiul 7y ago

Nice essay, Matthew, thanks! I'll stay with XMPP until they take it from my cold, dead hands.

Arathorn 7y ago
thanks :) (you can always use XMPP via Matrix via Bifröst - just sayin' ;D)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

maltewirz 7y ago

Actually Moxies talk "36C3 - The ecosystem is moving" was recorded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

liamcardenas 7y ago
He didn’t want it to be, though. https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211427007596154881?s=21
novok 7y ago
It was mostly stuff he has said in previous blog articles, so you are not missing too much.

ex3ndr 7y ago

When i asked if i could use his libraries in ios/android apps Moxie refused. He licensed them under GPL that prohibits distributing of software via app stores. Quite a strange for a guy who claim that he wants to spread encryption. Sure, but only on your own platform. Fastforward he sold such rights for a whatsapp. Just simple business, nothing about privacy itself.

jlund 7y ago
https://signal.org/blog/license-update/ https://signal.org/blog/license-update/
- ex3ndr 7y ago
  Aha, yeah: https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-java/issues/5 https://github.com/signalapp/curve25519-java/issues/5
  - slipheen 7y ago
    It sounds like he addressed the point you raised (App Stores) even though he'd prefer to keep it GPL so changes are required to be shared. What's the objection?
  - kick 7y ago
    GPL doesn't prevent you from using it on mobile devices, it prevents you from making changes to his code proprietary. You seem to just want to release proprietary software. You should say that out loud if so!
    - arianvanp 7y ago
      That's not what OP said at all. Apple _forces_ you to make proprietary changes to your application (and doesn't allow you to publish the source code of that modification). There is no way to have both a GPL-compliant app and have it on the app store at the same time.
nirs 7y ago

d33 7y ago

> Moxie didn’t want the 36C3 talk recorded Curious why. Anyway it's there: https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-674b1cb6b270 https://peertube.co.uk/videos/watch/12be5396-2a25-4ec8-a92a-...

arusahni 7y ago
Here's his reasoning: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211443530335281153 https://twitter.com/moxie/status/1211443530335281153
- dane-pgp 7y ago
  To save people a click, here is a line taken ironically out of context: "I have less faith in the internet as a place where a conversation can happen, and the timelessness of it decontextualizes."
- daenney 7y ago
  > I just prefer to present something as part of a conversation that's happening in a place, rather than a webinar that I'm broadcasting forever to the world. To me it sounds an awful lot like not wanting to be scrutinized or held accountable for what he says. I also find this rather disappointing as it excludes anyone who is unable, for whatever reason, to be at his talks from hearing what he has to say. Given how influential he's been in this domain, this sadness me quite a bit. > I have less faith in the internet as a place where a conversation can happen This feels a bit ironic, given he's built an enterprise on enabling conversations to happen on the internet, though arguably only with a limited set of people. > , and the timelessness of it decontextualizes. Not quite sure what that's supposed to mean. Perhaps it's a language barrier thing, but I can't parse that into something sensible.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    In addition to writing on the Signal blog and on Twitter, he's on HN regularly addressing questions about what he's doing; you've had plenty of opportunities to engage with him directly. This seems like a swipe you're making for its own sake.

novok 7y ago

Moxie / signal chooses pragmatism over purity, and is striving towards improve the status quo bit by bit vs a pure perfect solution that never ships, even though that improvement has it's own vital problems. You can see it in his choices, and you can see how they want to eventually deliver improvements like no phone numbers, with them working on things like secure value recovery. I kind of wish he spelled it out fully for the nit picky peanut gallery out there, so he can just reference it instead of wasting energy on them. You can just feel the exasperation when you read his writing and see him speak about this.

Arathorn 7y ago
I'd argue that Matrix also chooses pragmatism over purity - the balance is more that we prioritise freedom as well as privacy. Signal's whole mantra of "only implement features which are privacy preserving" is a great mentality. It's just a shame it comes at the expense of locking down the platform.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  I'd argue you can't prioritise two things: prioritisation means deciding what comes first when you have to choose between two things. And it appears to me that Signal tries to ensure privacy first, and then sees if it can make that work with freedom later (see e.g. the delay in adding support for de-googled Android, or the ground work they're only doing now that might (or might not) lead to accounts without phone numbers), whereas Matrix does it the other way around (by first working on support for many different clients, and then trying to make that work with encryption). I hope that both succeed, and I'm happy that both paths are taken. As an aside, I'd like to voice my appreciation for how you respectfully acknowledged moxie's point of view, take effort to understand it, and then pinpoint why you reach different conclusions from the same observations. A pleasure to read.
tptacek 7y ago
I would make the opposite argument: that at pretty much every point along the way, Signal has chosen purity over pragmatism. Which is why they didn't even have user profiles until recently, why they're just now getting group access control for a Slack-y experience, and why it's taking a fairly spectacular amount of engineering to get them off of phone numbers. Signal has a track record of delaying features common to messenger applications in order to get them cryptographically right. No other mainstream messenger tool has a comparable track record.

Jerry2 7y ago

I saw Moxie Marlinspike's talk when it was posted on CCC's official channel [1] and was disgusted by it. The talk has been now censored and video was made private. It was one of the most defeatist talks I've ever come across when it comes to messaging and privacy. His message was basically that anything you do is pointless and that his and WhatsApp/Facebook's way is the right one. I've used Signal on few occasions in the past but his talk made me uninstall it. I simply do not trust him after hearing his opinions. I do not support centralization and other ideals he's now pushing (including the use of a phone number as Signal's primary ID). The talk was mirrored on few channels on YT [2] and you can still see it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdM-XTRyC9c (it's a private video now) [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8 (working link, who knows for how long so mirror it).

slipheen 7y ago
I don't particularly like a centralized model either. Federation is much more difficult, but can create ecosystems which can survive longer/better than a single company can. But on the specific issue of phone numbers as ID, they have been making some substantial progress on a technological solution to address this, specifically without running central servers. https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/ https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 7y ago
Wire seemed like a decent alternative where you're not required a number, I think only an email. Also you can delete your account.
- cren 7y ago
  I read on a privacy-oriented website that Wire was purchased by an American company not trusted for its record on privacy (or perhaps it was that since the company is American, their data can be read by the US govt.). I can't find it now though. There isn't anything mentioning it on the website of `www.privacytools.io`: https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacytools.io/software/real-time-communication...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

shmerl 7y ago

> The ecosystem is moving It has been "moving" from the times of Compuserve and AOL trying to prevent e-mail federation. Good thing they failed then! Kudos to Matrix for pushing against such movement in IMs. Someone has to push against it, instead of looking for excuses to proliferate walled gardens. > If users don’t trust their app provider, they can always go switch apps, which gives them freedom. Sounds like Moxie meant it's a downside. It's a huge benefit! Forcing one to use something that's not trusted is horrendous.

samth 7y ago

One frustrating thing about Moxie's original post is that Signal derives huge amounts of value by piggybacking on an existing distributed federated network: the phone system. If phone numbers weren't an existing working identifiers that people had regardless of what OS, carrier, or messaging app, Signal as designed wouldn't work. People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it.

dublinben 7y ago
>People should think harder about how to replicate that experience, instead of how to appropriate it and then abandon it. That's great and all, but because Signal takes advantage of that existing network of identifiers, it is able to deliver usable private messaging to many users today. Replacing phone numbers as identifiers is a much harder problem than what Signal has done so far. We shouldn't wait to solve this at some unknown point in the future before offering "huge amounts of value" to users.
- samth 7y ago
  The position you're taking, roughly that with limited resources you have to aim for achievable goals and while distributed federated networks are the underlying reason Signal works, it can't try to replace them right now, is totally reasonable, although not everyone will agree. However, that isn't at all what Moxie said. Instead he made no acknowledgement of the distributed nature of the phone system, he suggested that everyone who disagreed lived in the imaginary past, and suggested that his approach was the only sensible one. So I'm not inclined to read it as charitably as I read your comment.
3xblah 7y ago
In his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk at CCC, he had many presumptuous and dubious "arguments" but one regarding privacy of phone numbers was that a user's APN would be used to determine their phone number, so there was no point in trying to keep phone numbers private. This fails to account for the possibility of not using the cellular network. With unlocked smartphones, it is possible to remove the SIM card, clear any APN settings and access WiFi. That can be enough for a messaging app to work. The only identifier needed for iMessage and FaceTime is a working e-mail address (and only for sign up). No cellular account is required.

SamWhited 7y ago

"Democracy and republics are hard, so we should all just give up and have autocratic governments" It may sound flippant or unrelated, but I think this extreme projection of his argument makes it evident how silly it is. This is one of the reasons I switched away from using Signal, as much as I'd like better privacy on my text messages it's not worth handing that much control over to someone I shouldn't have to put my trust in. Instead I do my text messages over Jabber/XMPP with jmp.chat now and for others who have a proper XMPP address I use that (which gives me the option of OMEMO encryption which is basically the XMPP version of the signal double ratchet). For the average user, installing conversations.im and hitting "create account" or whatever and calling it a day is good enough, so it's not even significantly harder than dealing with Signal.

nickik 7y ago
How about that being in an atocracy might be much better when you have a population of 51% wolves and 49% sheep.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

viro 7y ago

Is no one going to talk about how much more complex matrix is than signal?

Arathorn 7y ago
overall it's more complex thanks to the decentralisation.

ddevault 7y ago

Moxie has always gaslit users with legitimate concerns because addressing them would mean giving up power. Signal is a self serving design and driven by self serving decisions. I've written about this in depth before: https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html I still stand by everything I said here, and lots more that goes unsaid in this article. Every single weird decision Signal makes is not because they've reasonably decided to come down on some side of the fence that others haven't - it's because their decisions serve moxie's wants above anyone else.

dang 7y ago
No personal attacks on HN, please, regardless of how right you are or feel, or how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Maybe you don't owe that person better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ddevault 7y ago
  Sorry, you're right. I've edited it to be about the behavior instead of the person.
  - tptacek 7y ago
    From the comment I see right now and the logic you're using here, "have you stopped beating your wife" wouldn't qualify as a personal attack.
    - ddevault 7y ago
      And if we extrapolate your logic, we can never comment on anyone's bad behavior at all. My complaints are on topic for the article in question, I'm not just swinging at Moxie at random here.
      - tptacek 7y ago

blindgeek 7y ago

My biggest problem with messaging applications as a whole is that I need so many of them. I have a few contacts who are reachable with Signal, a few more who are reachable on Hangouts or whatever Google is calling its latest thing, and a few more who are reachable with Skype. That's three programs, to communicate with three different subsets of people. I'm sure if I used Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp, I'd have two more subsets of people who are only reachable through those. XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out in the early 2000s. But then all the big tech companies who build "ecosystems" decided to push their own applications, all incompatible with one another. So here we are again with this proliferation of programs that really only do one thing: communication. It's like the 90s / early 2000s with the proliferation of instant messengers: ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and on and on and on. The players are different, but the game is still the same. I suspect that twenty years from now, when the players have all changed yet again, there will still be one reliable method of reaching me: IRC. If the Googles and Whatsapps and Facebooks of the world had been around in the early 90s, you'd have one email client from Facebook for mailing Joe and Fred, an email client from Google for mailing Mary and Jane, and an email client from Whatsapp for mailing Alice and Bob. Thankfully, email became entrenched before that could happen. I want messaging to be like email, where I use one and exactly one program to communicate with all of my contacts, regardless of what server they use. People say that federation is more complicated than centralization. I'm sure that's true for developers, but in fact, federation can be vastly simplifying for an end user. I'm a fundamentally lazy person. Having to learn all these different messaging tools is frankly a waste of my time. All I want is a federated protocol and an open system, be it Matrix, XMPP, or something else. As a final aside, you know what else that bugs me? The word "ecosystem". I worked for a big tech company for a while, and the only people I ever heard use that word were people out to build a walled garden.

progval 7y ago
> XMPP was supposed to solve all those problems when it came out That's also what Matrix said it would solve when it started. Except now it's yet another protocol with its own chatrooms that are not reachable from any other protocol by default (even rooms on matrix.org); and bridges are at best in "beta" (except the Telegram bridge, which is "late beta"): https://matrix.org/bridges/ https://matrix.org/bridges/

dancemethis 7y ago

Signal really tries hard to not be trustworthy. The way they defend WhatsApp is heart-breaking. It's cute to see them saying there is no backdoor when it can't be proven to be the case, since it's all proprietary. They can't show the server side wasn't tampered with. Same with Skype.

evgen 7y ago
The constant repetition of this ignorant claim is starting to be annoying. Think there is a client backdoor? Go find it. It is not like the binary is not available to you. It is not like there are not emulators in which you can step through the code. Please, show us the backdoor. Server side tampering? Show us how it can be done. Create a server that can tamper with a patched client. Demonstrate your chops.
- hellcow 7y ago
  I see you're formerly from FB. It's not up to us to reverse engineer a binary every update to guess if it's secure... It's up to Facebook, which has time and again proven that it is absolutely not trustworthy, to open its code and make builds auditable, inspectable, and reproducible. This is what ANY secure software does. That's the cost of entry. Imagine if OpenSSH were closed and its devs issued the same response you just did. "Just reverse engineer the binary and prove that it's not secure!" Rediculous.
  - evgen 7y ago
    Actually it _is_ up to you; put up or shut up is a fairly well-known principle. Find the backdoor and make yourself famous, or continue to whine and listen to everyone laugh. I left FB because it was getting too creepy and I would not trust 99% of FB dev with a single shred of my personal info, but the code is right there for you and people who actually have skills to disassemble and examine. They are under no obligation to do your work for you and the people who can actually do the work make good money so maybe you will learn a useful skill or two.
    - 7y ago

maqp 7y ago

Matthew outlined much of the Matrix problems but not in the context of the latter part of his idealistic thoughts. Just going to point out that if agreeing on spec is six time slower, that's just the first car of traffic jam slowing down. The next car has to slow down more: The feature needs to move into SDKs. Then the next car, the client vendors need to actually implement and test their implementation of the feature and write documentation. That's even more slow. "HOWEVER: all of this completely ignores one critical thing - the value of freedom." I really value freedom. To me freedom means a non-technical dissident doesn't have to sit in jail when their messages weren't E2EE. It doesn't mean I can choose a value from a list of servers and have faceless entity #1, #2 or #3, or worse, Mike - the creepy IT guy from my peers - observe my metadata with everybody, and content with Karen who refuses to switch to Matrix client that supports E2EE. "Freedom to run your own server (perhaps invisibly in your app, in a P2P world)." Now this is something I can get behind. Which is why I've spent the last eight years working on P2P messaging system. Perhaps Matrix should move their efforts into being the change they want to see in the world instead of defending a bad solution of decentralization by saying they're thinking about implementing a better solution of P2P. "Freedom to pick which country your server runs in" Which you can't do if you're running P2P server on your device. I think every faceless service provider from Signal to any XMPP server has the same guarantee of privacy in practice. The only difference is Signal has to abide by the GDPR, independent users hosting servers don't. Before anyone screams about PRISM, I will point out that coercing insertion of a backdoor is the same as compelled speech, which would violate the constitution. "Freedom to select how much metadata and history to keep." We have precedence of Signal keeping none of that. With Matrix servers the server has access to all metadata by default, the server program doesn't attempt to hide anything, there's no sealed sender etc. Your only hope is to run your own server, somehow convince your peers you're the one they should trust with their metadata (there's a third party on every decentralized server with more than two users), and hope you don't grow enough to get hacked by nation state actors or criminals. "Freedom to choose which apps to use - while still having the freedom to talk to anyone you like. Freedom to connect your own functionality - bots, bridges, integrations etc" A nice idea, but everyone needs to have same features for it to work, so what you get is differences in UI, implementation language, and platform support. What matters most here is the programming language: Matrix client written in Rust is more secure that one written in C. But unless everyone uses the Rust version, the group chat is as secure as the weakest link. Same goes with bridges. You'll never have security because of this guy who likes to re-live their youth through irssi: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/ Also, what happens when Facebook implements their own Matrix client that steals your metadata from the endpoint, and what happens when they start bundling their app on every Samsung smartphone? Perhaps it's not your idealistic Riot client that's the problem, perhaps it's the bundled spyware on every peers' device used by people who just, don't care. I'm not saying Signal fixes the problem of user laziness, I'm saying it's better to know what's on the receiving end. "Freedom to select which identifiers (if any) to use to register your account." Which is kind of pointless considering the IP-address still leaks to the server by default. And the UUID means all your metadata can be tied together. The social graph is revealed to the server so unless everyone keeps rolling their IDs and exchanging them over some other channel, it's pretty much impossible to hide metadata from a malicious server running statistical analysis. Even if you're not malicious, there's no way to know if your server has been compromised. Or, if you somehow can harden your server against the NSAs of this world, please, go work for the Freedom of The Press Foundation or something. "Freedom to extend the protocol." When the protocol fails to mandate BASIC security features like E2EE, it's kind of pointless to talk about the possibilities of extendability. There's always going to be maintainers and theyneed to prioritize, so there's always going to be someone who decides whether something will be implemented by them. Signal doesn't forbid pull-requests if you want something done. The nice thing is, it's at least six times faster to do it for Signal. "Freedom to write your own client, or build whole new as-yet-unimagined systems on top." So it's the freedom of the developer we're talking about. Reminds me of BSD vs GPL (BSD says developer has freedom to fuck over users with proprietary fork, GPL says user has right to not be abused like that, and that developers have the obligation to not do that). It's the rights of the users that matter. That is, human rights. You can merge as-yet-unimagined systems to Signal. You might face initial criticism because it needs to be secure by default. But it's not like Moxie will show you the finger for proposing something before it's discovered or announced. I have first hand experience with this: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/4171 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/4171 "It’s true that if you’re writing a messaging app optimized for privacy at any cost, Moxie’s approach is one way to do it." If you consider privacy is a human right, developer freedom isn't, it's easier to see who has their priorities in order. "you end up thoroughly putting all your eggs in one basket, trusting past, present & future Signal to retain its values, stay up and somehow dodge compromise & censorship… despite probably being the single highest value attack target on the ‘net." So which one is easier to subvert, community of experts constantly under scrutiny by peer experts trying desperately to make a name for themselves, or open work group on protocol that still isn't secure by default, and that is much more susceptible to stagnation via bike-shedding and mission hijacking. OpenPGP work group still hasn't agreed on v5 fingerprint, the SHAppening happened five years ago. I'm going to have to disagree and say I don't have faith in unnecessarily large organizations. I'm just going to say this FUD is worth being pointed out, but that it's not worthy of dissection. "We owe the entire success of the Internet (let alone the Web) to openness, interoperability and decentralization." A thought that was denounced in the 36c3 talk whether you watched the stream or not. "To declare that openness, interoperability and decentralization is ‘too hard’ and not worth the effort when building a messaging solution is to throw away all the potential of the vibrancy, creativity and innovation that comes from an open network" The worth was not addressed by this writing in any way, and the practical problems that far outweigh the idealistic goals were discussed by Moxie because what matters is the human rights to privacy of the users of the tool, not whether the infrastructure is based on idealistic ideas that don't offer tangible security benefits in practice. Like Moxie said, prove that decentralization works by doing the bare necessities of implementing E2EE, then it's worth discussing whether the idealism part matters, and if decentralization has something useful to offer. "Sure, you may end up with a super-private messaging app - but one that starts to smell alarmingly like a walled garden like Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, or an AOL keyword, or Google’s AMP. " The negative connotations of these companies are about lack of respecting privacy. It's really weird to essentially say "you end up with super private app that shares other commonalities with privacy invading companies". Walled garden isn't ideal, but for now, it's more secure and that's what matters more to users. "So, we continue to gladly take up Moxie’s challenge to prove him wrong - to show that it’s both possible and imperative to create an open decentralized messaging platform which (if you use reputable apps and servers) can be as secure and metadata-protecting as Signal…" That's the attitude we need. Now go out there and use your preferred methods to make the idealistic protocol secure by default! Just don't expect me or anyone else to recommend its use before that happens. "and indeed more so, given you can run your server off the grid, and don’t need to register with a phone number" Will you be getting rid of IP-address leak to servers too? Quick jabs in closing notes that aren't thought out too well are not very nice. "and in future may not even need a server at all." Also maybe reconsider ending your refutal of criticism towards decentralized architecture by hinting that users should look towards upcoming P2P architecture.

badrabbit 7y ago

First off, I have to say this about matrix: they have by far the best foss community I have seen. Excellent work on managing the community, others should take note. Second, both signal and matrix collect too much metadata. signal means you're completely screwed by their dependency on phone numbers. I expect little metadata privacy from signal because to me, it is practically the same as using my SSN or fingerprint as my user name,same for all my contacts, this key field is used by everyone and their mother to track everything we do like 1984 was target practice. For matrix, it's the defaults and how easy it is for others to fingerprint you using your specific device (equivalent of a user-agent seen by everyone iirc?) and other profile details ,but none of this is easy to correlate and answer questions like "which social network demographic micro-group does this user belong to so we can perform targeted infiltration of their device?" or "Hey, let's use this phone number to look perform the equivalent of a background check on this person who is sending us a message because we now have their phone number". Oh and the best part is, you can't just get a burner to use for registration, and to link a signal desktop,you need the mobile app. Matrix has none of these issues. Third, consider your threat models carefully. As an individual, is it better if you have infrasructure diversity and protocol interoperability or is it better to put all your eggs in signal's basket. I never liked their use of google infra at the begining for example because I consider google more of a threat to me than most other parties. I can see the argument both ways. I personally consider the set of parties that have the most to benefit from targeting me as an individual plus those who have the most to benefit from dragnet surveillance where I reside. To me, matrix is more flexible to adopt to various threat models by for example self hosting compared to using a popular matrix server. Signal is better than the competition, if your fear is being exposed to unpatched vulnerabilities and/or if you are worried about metadata snooping (but you trust signal's infra provider, still google??) Then Signal makes more sense. For dragnet, I think matrix is better for me because implementation vulns only apply to a few users,making reliable dragnet attacks less likely. For anyone that might target me, my mobile phone is completely defenseless, so my concern is someone identifying my specific device for targeted attacks, with matrix they need to compromise the matrix server and even then they might need to do a lot more work to correlate which matrix user is me (real life "target worthy" identity). Where as with signal,they can easily micro target a group ,find out everyone's phone numbers (e.g.: hk protesters) and target their device for further exploitation via signal or any other pwnable app that is known to present on a device associated with that phone number.Practically, I am more worried about how each app fits in with everything else I do and matrix wins the security round for me. Last but not least, I use signal for 98% of my comms because the phone number usage by Signal means I can easily connect to and invite people who don't have signal. If there is a Matrix client app that can be used as an sms client and can discover contacts' matrix account/server over sms without communicating or collecting phone number/name details of the contact, I think i might jump ship. The way I envision this to work is: the matrix client would have an invite button for non-matrix contacts and it will have an option to initiate discovery of contacts. Both options would do a challenge-response with each contact and instead of associating with a phone number they would ask to create a new martrix only contact.

zzo38computer 7y ago

I think that protocols that are simple and open should be used, rather than very complicated and messy ones. Text-based also helps since it allows to use without specialized software. IRC is designed like this and I think it is good.

aiphee 7y ago
This is a very unpopular position from a security perspective. All messages should be exchanged by some type-safe structured container like protobuf to avoid a huge class of bugs that comes from quoting and odd character sets, manually implementing parsers, confusing types, and broken string arithmetic.

pcstl 7y ago

This reminds me of the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", which is also about a father-son roadtrip, and which uses it as an excuse to talk about what happens when we do long, boring tasks requiring some focus but leaving enough of the brain unoccupied. It's a good book and I should probably reread it.