29 ms·

Signal is finally bringing its secure messaging to the masses

631 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

secfirstmd 7y ago
I've been following the team for years. They well deserve the plaudits for the work they have done. I work with people on a daily basis in countries where their lives depend on it.
typeformer 7y ago
This is very good news and a victory for civil privacy!
pgm8705 7y ago
The Signal iPhone app has made huge improvements over the years and is just about as user-friendly as WhatsApp as far as I can tell. I would love to see it match the smoothness and responsiveness of the animations found in iMessage. It seems silly, but the visual experience of messaging in iMessage is such a delight.
- konschubert 7y ago
  What I don’t like is that messages take more vertical space in Signal due to the alignment of the time stamps.
- GeneralTspoon 7y ago
  Pity it crashes for me 100% of the time when opening on an older iPhone. Haven't been able to receive my messages for over 2 months - which is insane for a messaging app (I'm not even sure if I'll receive the messages if/when they ever fix it). This is despite me contacting support and sending the crash logs to them when it happened. As much as I'd love to support Signal and switch everything from WhatsApp - it doesn't seem like a wise choice if this kind of thing is a possibility.
standardUser 7y ago
I was wondering why Signal hadn't caught on more. I only use it with a few people. I had no idea it was still in such heavy development! It may be a tough sell. There are many countries where WhatsApp is the default form of communication and has been for years.
- Y-bar 7y ago
  I stopped using Signal when it was clear i was not able to back up my message history (or transfer it to a new phone). My data is my data and I should be able to access and control it.
  - DCKing 7y ago
    Huh, but Signal does allow you to this [0]? It doesn't allow you to do this on iOS, but I'm guessing your stance on data portability makes your life very hard on iOS anyway. [0]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
    - djrogers 7y ago
      > I'm guessing your stance on data portability makes your life very hard on iOS anyway. Pretty much all of the data in the stock apps on my iPhone is easily portable, and most of it is API accessible, meaning I can use multiple apps to view and manipulate it. Apple even publishes a support doc on how to export your data using first-party tools. For any more complex needs, there are plenty of easily accessible 3rd party options. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204055 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204055
    - samatman 7y ago
      On the contrary, the vast majority of iPhone apps use iCloud and offer data export in addition to recovery/transfer to a new device. Signal is an outlier in this respect, and I hope they add this feature before I'm ready for another phone.
    - novia 7y ago
NikolaNovak 7y ago
I cannot fathom the proliferation of phone-only messaging apps. Am I really the only person who prefers to type on a full-sized keyboard, and see my multiple conversations on 27" screen, as opposed to one and a half inches of no-feedback glass surface? :-/ I went to Signal site, downloaded the Windows app, and once installed, it asks me to link my phone. No option for any other signup. NOwhere in the download process or on main site does it warn me that this is a phone-only app. The desktop app itself simply starts to a "Connect your phone" screen with no explanation why I have to do it, whether there are or aren't alternatives, etc. Nothing about this is remotely user friendly. I have half a dozen laptops, two phones, few tables at home alone; the notion that I must be crippled to only communicate via the smallest, least practical communication device I own; and then be horribly crippled in attaching one-at-a-time additional device but with crippling dependency on said phone... I guess I'm a negative focus group and completely out of touch with the realities of the world, but I cannot imagine or understand who wants to live like that :-/
- detaro 7y ago
  The Signal desktop apps at least are independent in that they do not require the phone after the initial setup, but yeah, it's annoying. They were far from perfect, but the multi-chat-protocol clients from the ICQ&co days had a lot going for them...
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    Having signal be tethered to a real phone number does give you a point to root your account around, and allow recovery. It must reduce spam, and it's always a way to find other users. But I do find it irritating that you can't have a virtual account too. When my phone busted, because I hadn't saved off all my security recovery info, it didn't matter that I had signal running on my laptop, etc, I had to reset my signal account on my new phone. It would have been nice if I could have "added" a new root account on my new phone from a working device. keybase allowed this.
    - Seenso 7y ago
dmix 7y ago
> and an experimental method for storing encrypted contacts in the cloud. Signal released an experimental encrypted contact syncing app for Android long ago (I can't remember the name). I wonder what the challenges have been to integrate this or release it as a full product. It's great they've grown from 3 to 20 people, now they can really start to address some of their wider goals from the beginning such as this.
- Forbo 7y ago
  It was called Flock: https://signal.org/blog/flock/ https://signal.org/blog/flock/
  - basicplus2 7y ago
    "Try Flock for free" Google Playstore - We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server.
throwaway8879 7y ago
Signal still requires a phone number. That alone should make it non-usable for people who are serious about their privacy. My alternate solution: stop using smartphones altogether. Technology is not a good solution to the privacy problem, especially when a collective such as the government can read your data anyway, or beat it out of you. If you're worried about drowning, don't go near water. There are no fullproof life vests.
- icebraining 7y ago
  What's the "privacy problem"? I suspect yours is different from many other people's.
  - jtl999 7y ago
    Some people might not want to give a phone linked to them to certain people while attempting to remain anonymous. I don't disagree this is less then the userbase of Signal, but I assume it shouldn't be hard to use a randomly generated ID (or similar) system as a fallback options for identifiers, and leave phone numbers as the default and recommended setting.
  - oh_boy 7y ago
    As far as I could tell from the article, absolute everything is encrypted on the server and they can't see your phone number. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    In many countries (an ever-expanding list), you cannot purchase a SIM card without showing ID, and a copy of your ID is made and sent to the state authorities. That is, mobile numbers are always connected with your identity, you cannot have an anonymous phone number. Consequently, the state can easily determine which of its citizens are using Signal. While communications on Signal are end-to-end encrypted, in authoritarian states merely using a secure messenger can draw police suspicion.
- pergadad 7y ago
  Phone number is convenient to find people and uniquely identify them with a standard info that you have anyway for most friends. If not for the phone-based account I'd have missed that many friends do already have signal.
flyinghamster 7y ago
I still have Signal on my phone (nobody I know uses it, though, as much as I wish otherwise), but there was one problem that I found vexing: if I set Signal up as the default messaging app, any severe weather alerts went nowhere - until I restored the stock SMS app as default and I saw several that I had missed.
dancemethis1 7y ago
"WhatsApp had used Signal's open-source protocol to encrypt all WhatsApp communications end-to-end by default" Allegedly*. Since Whatsapp is proprietary, it can't be proven that OpenWhisper wasn't tampered with on the server. And chances are always against the link that needs the most protection, the user.
- joshuaissac 7y ago
  It should be sufficient to inspect the client because end-to-end encryption prevents the server from seeing the message plaintexts. The worst it could do is send the wrong encryption keys to the clients (i.e., attempt a MITM attack, or add unauthorised participants to a group chat), but this can be checked out of band (e.g. QR code in person), and the client provides a message when a contact's public key changes. If the client implements the Signal protocol correctly, and the key pair is generated securely, private key not transmitted to the servers, etc., then the server should not be able to do anything nefarious without the client noticing.
  - mtgx 7y ago
    WhatsApp lacks authentication by default. Also, WhatsApp sometimes doe use a server key to encrypt your messages instead of e2e encryption, which basically means that if FB wanted to they could listen in on some communications at will (such as at request of law enforcement, etc): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-design-feature-encrypted-messages https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-...
- UncleMeat 7y ago
  You can audit the app. Bytecode isn’t hard to read. Pentesters aren’t idiots.
chimeracoder 7y ago
Out of all features, the one that really holds Signal back from mass adoption: there's no way to backup or transfer messages to a new phone from iOS. In order for Signal to reach "the masses", it needs to become popular with a large number of people who don't really understand encryption or care about it, but are using Signal anyway because they happen to communicate with people who do care about encryption. That's a good thing! Unfortunately, it's a really hard sell to tell someone, "Hey, download this new messaging app so you can talk to me. Oh, and by the way, when you get a new phone, you'll lose your entire chat history with me".
- Krasnol 7y ago
  Since when are Apple users = "the masses"? The masses use Android and backup works there so I doubt this is what holds Signal back from mass adoption.
  - novok 7y ago
    iOS users are the affluent, and the affluent have outsized influence.
    - Krasnol 7y ago
      This must be the most ridiculous thing I've ever read about the technology market. It is so far beyond delusional, it only can come from an Apple user. ...and than you wonder why people make fun of you.
  - thallada 7y ago
    You are referring to this backup restore process? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba... It involves a 6 step (with multiple sub-steps) process of navigating the sdcard contents and then transferring some obscure file over USB to a computer and then from that computer to the new phone. I doubt this is something that "the masses" will be able or willing to accomplish. Also, iOS has about 48% market share in the US, so it's at least half the masses there.
octorian 7y ago
What I think is most notable about this article is that they go out of their way to point out how its significantly more difficult to roll out all these "user nicety" features everyone expects, when you live in a world where you can't just "let the server know everything" (like many other apps people often compare with).
- stingraycharles 7y ago
  I think it’s a good case study on why the state of security in the world is the way it is right now; people want convenience more than security. I even fall victim to this myself: Signal not having a search history or losing message history when activating a new device is often too much of a show stopper. I really hope Signal will be able to pull this off somehow, but seeing how much these type of apps rely on a network effect, I am skeptical.
  - octorian 7y ago
    Lack of search is just a lack of a locally-implementable feature. There's really no security reason why it would be more difficult. Transferring to a new device, on the other hand, does get somewhat more complicated. For ease of use, the data needs to be placed somewhere intermediate. That being said, I can understand Signal's hesitation to embrace Google's cloud storage options for such a feature.
CtrlAltT5wpm 7y ago
I'm hoping someone here has some insight they can share, because I've not really seen it addressed elsewhere. As per the linked article: > Another new feature it's testing, called "secure value recovery," would let you create an address book of your Signal contacts and store them on a Signal server, rather than simply depend on the contact list from your phone. That server-stored contact list would be preserved even when you switch to a new phone. To prevent Signal's servers from seeing those contacts, it would encrypt them with a key stored in the SGX secure enclave that's meant to hide certain data even from the rest of the server's operating system [1]. I assume that this is an offshoot or a continuation of what Signal started a few years back with Private Contact Discovery, a truly difficult problem considering the amount of user data and metadata Signal wants to avoid collecting [2]. It's a hell of a job, and I commend Signal's efforts. Assuming I'm right, I'm curious as to why Signal is going down this road, specifically, relying on SGX (or any proprietary vendor solution) for security, or if they should. Due to the spate of speculative execution vulnerabilities in Intel hardware, it would seem to me (a layman) that this is a bad approach that will create more work for them down the line, and may rely too heavily on a single set of features. The Foreshadow attack was one that supposedly compromised SGX, with full mitigation only being possible with hardware revisions [3]. Even then, it may not be safe to assume that's the end of problems. Only recently, another attack on SGX was found, specifically, PlunderVolt [4], which at least can be supposedly mitigated via microcode update vs hardware refresh. Still, it seems like shaky ground, especially to be building additional Signal features upon. Much further down the list of concerns, it seems like all these SGX-reliant features lock them into using Intel's platform exclusively. It's probably neither here nor there, but is this something they should be concerned about, or is that just the price to be paid for the advanced privacy features Signal offers? Is there any effort to disconnect these features from the hardware platform? Is it even possible? Should they? Am I even asking the right questions? My worry is that Signal finally reaches some form of feature parity with the biggest messengers (I'd say it's there, mostly), SGX gets broken in a way that's not easy to fix, and all this time and effort will have been wasted, especially if they have to roll back user features which grow the platform in order to maintain safety. I ask all this having no solutions myself, unfortunately. I'm neither dev nor cryptographer, only someone curious with some mild technical leanings. I generally lump myself in with the average user crowd, knowing just enough to be saddled with the 'Family's IT Person' label, but not enough to actually work in the field...as such, forgive any ignorance or obvious mistakes on my part. I've just not seen these issues addressed, and figured you would be the crowd best able to do so. [1] - https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-features-mainstream/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-featu... [2] - https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [3] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/intels-sgx-blown-wide-open-by-you-guessed-it-a-speculative-execution-attack/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/intels-sgx-blown-wid... [4] - https://plundervolt.com/ https://plundervolt.com/
hvmonk 7y ago
Not to downplay this (infact I am a signal user), but What if fb buys Signal, as it did with WhatsApp?
- ancientworldnow 7y ago
  They would have to agree to sell themselves which they have no interest in doing. This seems like a silly fear.
  - MattJ100 7y ago
    Except that's basically what happened to WhatsApp. And this is always a risk of any centralized/propriety network. Some further reading for perspective: https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternative.html https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternat...
    - raquo 7y ago
      And the founder of whatsapp is bitter about what Facebook did to it, and is funding signal now. And Moxie is no fan of Facebook either. These aren't some random kids and a VC.
- snthd 7y ago
  It's owned by a non-profit.
alt_f4 7y ago
That's cool, but I'd rather Signal first did 2 other things: - Make it so notifications go through consistently, for both messages and calls. Right now, about 1/3rd of the time, I find out about new messages when I open the app. Doesn't matter if it's desktop or mobile. - On Desktop, please, please find a way to make it not feel extremely laggy. I'm typing and I'm getting like 10 fps, it's horrible. And it uses so much RAM. Jesus christ, it's 5GB and I've only got 2 contacts.
harry8 7y ago
Are we still allowed to have heroes? It's risky, sure. Moxie is one of mine, for all that I'm sure our politics are very, very different. He seems to have integrity. I really hope I'm not being deluded there.
oh_boy 7y ago
I recently achieved that quite a bunch of my friends switched from Whatsapp to Signal. It takes quite something to explain people why it isn't difficult to just chat in another app. But I'm happy those who came over never complained and now I have more 1:1 chats via Signal than via Whatsapp.
speedgoose 7y ago
Signal isn't on F-Droid, which is a red flag IMHO. It looks like they don't allow non official builds on their servers.
- apodysophilia 7y ago
  They have the APK available from their website[1] and they have reproducible builds[2]. [1] https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/ [2] https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/
- nelblu 7y ago
  I have wondered the same. I use both fdroid and signal, but never really understood why signal isn't on fdroid. Can anyone please comment?
  - snazz 7y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/bwuudc/why_isnt_signal_on_fdroid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/bwuudc/why_isnt_sig...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
novok 7y ago
The images of moxie are very nytimes gloomy ( Ex: https://twitter.com/nytimesgloom https://twitter.com/nytimesgloom ) Did moxie want it that way or did wired set it up that way.
pergadad 7y ago
Signal works great. The one big barrier to more uptake is a feature that many non-nerdy users seem to use: group video chat. You can one-on-one video chat, but not with a group. The moment that's there I imagine huge amount of people would be interested to move away from messenger/Skype. I've also been told by family that in some Asian countries you have to pay to get it on Android/iPhone, but maybe that's a copycat that is just using the name...
- ac29 7y ago
  > I've also been told by family that in some Asian countries you have to pay to get it on Android/iPhone That sounds extremely suspicious. If Signal isn't available in the Google Play Store in those countries, or the Play Store itself isn't available, it can be downloaded here: https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/
- snthd 7y ago
  https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si ?
shmerl 7y ago
I wouldn't recommend anyone using Signal, due to its anti-federation stance. Also being tied to a phone? Very bad idea. Stay away from it.
- snazz 7y ago
  Federation makes secure cryptography very difficult and is confusing to less technical people, which is Signal’s target audience. Also, SIM swap attacks don’t work if you set a registration lock PIN. A centralized phone number based service is a requirement for a messaging app to get any real traction. A messaging app is useless if no one you know in real life actually uses it.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Difficulty or "real traction" types of arguments are just an excuse to pursue walled garden approach. I find it unacceptable. And "confusing for non technical people" is a completely bogus argument which also hides real intent of those who oppose federation. Non technical people get e-mail idea just fine. And it's federated for the reference.
bpfrh 7y ago
Signal desktop is broken, since at least mid 2018. There is an open github issue, where the maintainers don't really respond: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2634 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2634 They statically link a openssl library for their forked version of sqlcipher, which makes it impossible to build signal on anything other than ubuntu. Static linking against an old openssl library is also not that good for security reasons, which imho is a bad sign if you say your chat programm stands for security and privacy. Edit: Link wrong, now corrected
- DavideNL 7y ago
  The url you posted doesn't work/point to a specific issue...
- Kaze404 7y ago
  Can you link to the specific issue? You linked to a search, not sure if by accident.
- godelski 7y ago
  > which makes it impossible to build signal on anything other than ubuntu. I've never had a problem on Arch or Manjaro
  - bpfrh 7y ago
    You did a git clone and then a build without issue? Because the repo on arch patches the issue with the statically linked openssl library: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/openssl-linking.patch?h=signal https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/openssl-linking... So if you just install signal from the aur, then you use the patched version.
    - godelski 7y ago
      Sorry, let me rephrase that. The AUR has a working patch so it clearly isn't impossible. You can probably follow the same procedure. So I just wouldn't say that it is impossible to install it on non-Ubuntu distros, just not trivial. But this seriously doesn't look complex. Also, wasn't Signal pushed into the main repos recently?
diebeforei485 7y ago
Verification with a real cellphone number (non-VoIP) is statistically/numerically a good anti-abuse tool. If Signal wants to allow no-phone-number accounts, it should mark them as such to the other participants in the conversation. Discord does that, and it seems to work well. But this is a separate argument from using your actual phone number in-app and allowing anyone who has your number to find you in the app.
gojomo 7y ago
It's good to see Acton quoted; he'd been so silent since his donation-to/association-with Signal that I was beginning to wonder if behind the scenes, there'd been a falling out. However, these "enrichment features" from Signal over the last 2 years are less than what competitors like Telegram put out in 2 months. Really basic things remain undone. Like being able to carry your contacts/message-history forward across planned device-upgrades on iOS – https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542 – 4.5 years after it was "on the roadmap". Many of Signal's novel cryptographic innovations, while cool, depend on trusting Intel SGX: both as a technology & in Intel's stewardship of the master keys/attestation-chains. Many cryptographers don't believe SGX will be technologically reliable anytime soon, and much of the world will probably see US-based Intel Corp similar to how the US sees China-based Huawei.
- balladeer 7y ago
  Kind of unfortunate that Matrix is probably not focussing on making the protocol and apps easy to get on and use Matrix/Riot as a WhatsApp, Signal replacement for end users (person to person comm). It seems to be just for teams and orgs (Slack, Discord).
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    RiotX (the next gen of Riot) is a Matrix client from the core team, designed to go up against WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage by default... and then expand into Slack/Discord style use cases for powerusers who want that. It's currently in the final stages of beta on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riotx https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot... Meanwhile there are lots of other promising Matrix clients emerging which are aiming for person-to-person comms - e.g. http://dittochat.org http://dittochat.org, https://pattle.im https://pattle.im, https://fluffy.chat https://fluffy.chat etc.
    - fladd 7y ago
      The fact that there exist other clients that are specifically "built with user experience in mind" (Ditto) or built "to be a Matrix app that everyone can use" (Pattle) sometimes makes me wonder why that would not also be the goal of the official client?
dogo22 7y ago
Is chat history across new phones really important to people?
openplatypus 7y ago
It is great and I root for Signal. I only wish Moxie was less polarizing and actually stepped down from being its face. He often makes subpar and inaccurate statements about other technologies. He is famous for his derogatory comments about PGP. His talk at recent CCC was anything but dismissive of others. The thing is, Signal is not special. Matrix, Wire and others sorted problems of encryption while remaining open (Wire is commercial but that good for some). So congratulations Signal. But we should think really hard whether we want another centralized behemoth. I would prefer donate to Matrix. Support project building client with great UX for masses on top of open, extensible protocol rather than hand over more control to centralized organization led by individual speaking in absolutes.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  I think we see in this that Signal's success is less about tech and more about some product-driven superiority, insofar as it actually reached users and is used a lot already. It's the old mantra that you may need a Wozniak to do it but you need a Jobs to package it into a great product and sell it. I feel like Moxie is opinionated like a product leader, even more so than as a technologist. He's polarizing. And while it rubs everyone the wrong way on occasion, it's also the story of many a great success.
  - mbowcutt 7y ago
    The Snowden endorsement sure helped.
    - maqp 7y ago
      Good thing Snowden thinks twice before recommending anything.
- kick 7y ago
  His statements about PGP are right, though. It's using terrible, outdated cryptography. The odds of finding one who's actually got a setup that isn't full of holes for it is slim, even among programmers. It's barely been used. It's a UX and technical disaster. Matrix still hasn't gotten E2E encryption rolled out by default, or something like half of the stuff they want to have done before doing it: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 Wire keeps track of everyone that every user has contacted for the entirety of the lifespan of their account (not to mention only released it as Free Software after someone found a bunch of glaring holes in their platform, including sending passwords to the server in plain text), and is a U.S. company that goes out of its way to store excessive amounts of metadata. For that matter, actually, Signal's just as open as Wire. Wire's more or less as centralized, but with way greater risks in the event of Wire's datacenter getting raided. Tox is the best thing trying to do a similar thing that Signal is doing, and even Tox isn't even very good.
gavreh 7y ago
Try Keybase!
Borlands 7y ago
I installed Signal a few years ago, and pretty much never touched it again. Today I open the app and closed it. After a few minutes, there were a lot of hello ‘messages which got me intrigued. It seems when I opened the app, all my contacts using Signal got a notification! What gives? Obviously uninstalled it straightaway...
- driverdan 7y ago
  By default Signal notifies users when someone in their contacts starts using Signal. You may have installed it before that feature existed so it triggered when you opened it.
- mechnesium 7y ago
  Sounds like malware if you take it out of context. That’s unacceptable behavior (unless maybe there’s an opt-out for the mass notification).
- distances 7y ago
  Isn't that what all chat apps do? Telegram as t least, and I keep getting notifications of people joining for names I've never ever heard before, so seems like they were a bit overeager even.
mechnesium 7y ago
This my professional opinion since I lack the resources to perform a true analysis, so instead I speculate based on current nation state trends and the US government’s surveillance track record. Signal is a big red flag to me. I choose not to trust it. Signal specifically targets an audience of interest for the NSA—those who are actively trying to encrypt their communication. I have an eking suspicion that Signal could be a surveillance tool similar to the UAE’s ToTok messaging app. I don’t care if it is open source or uses E2E encryption. Unless you’re jailbroken or rooted and can install unsigned binaries, the binary you installed from the Play Store or App Store could contain backdoors. Your decision to trust and use this should be judiciously evaluated based on your threat model.
- thosakwe 7y ago
  This is literally the definition of FUD.
  - mechnesium 7y ago
    How? Can you prove the binaries on the Play Store/App Store do not have backdoors? Most nation states engage in domestic surveillance. Here is a story about ToTok: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/us/politics/totok-app-uae.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/us/politics/totok-app-uae.... Logically, chat applications are an ideal platform to engage in surveillance. There is no FUD here.
    - jblwps 7y ago
      As greysonp points out, yes; Signal has had reproducible builds since March 2016. So we can prove that those published binaries do not have backdoors insofar as we can prove that the corresponding source code does not have backdoors.
      - mechnesium 7y ago
        If you didn’t create the binary yourself how can you trust it?
gramakri 7y ago
IMO, the best way for an alternate messaging app to catch on (to WhatsApp) is federation. If we can figure out a way to have a common signaling protocol across apps and users can choose whatever clients they want, then they have a chance of competing against WhatsApp. At this point, there is no real reason to move out of WhatApp, given it just works?
- dependenttypes 7y ago
  Moxie is against federating signal. https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217339450 https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...
- distances 7y ago
  I think that would be among the best ways to kill the app. With federation and multiple clients you'll never be sure what feature set the other end is using, and the service stagnates to the lowest common denominator of features.
narsil 7y ago
I really hope the UX improves considerably and basic features actually function as expected. Notifications for new messages on OS X were broken for several months last year, for example, and notifications on Android are still hit-or-miss (literally "miss" when you miss a message for several hours!).
- 416chad 7y ago
  I haven't really had any issues per se, at height about a year ago I had just over a dozen contacts on signal. The biggest UX deal breaker was no profile pictures. You can set one, but almost no one will ever see it since almost everyone uses Gmail or another cloudy email provider that will sync or store ancient Google+ (or equivalent) avatars to your contacts. Signal chooses to display a contact photo from your device over what a user sets. This is insanely counterintuitive approach and no other app works that way, meaning no one expects it to work that way. My family and all but two contacts moved back to WhatsApp. I'm glad to read they're focusing on UX now, but I can't bring up switching again with these people. Maybe when or if phone numbers are abandoned, then I won't have to link/associate contacts to my address book and see those old avatars.
JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I’ve got pretty much all my important friends and family on Signal now and it is great feeling private and secure.
aaron695 7y ago
Slack took over the world in part because you could edit and delete messages. I don't get why this isn't rolled out across messaging yet.
- distances 7y ago
  Slack definitely didn't take off because of that, and ~all messaging apps sans IRC and SMS have message deletion, sometimes editing too.
  - aaron695 7y ago
    Signal doesn't have deletion. I just tried. All it seems to have is delete on my device and set timeout on all messages. Messenger only got delete last year. Neither have editing. If ~all messaging apps sans IRC and SMS have message deletion why does Signal not have it? It's like IT people live in a bubble. Why on earth would you not allow users to edit a sent message. It's like they believe some indoctrinated idea where a sent message is untouchable not matter what users want or some cargo cult ideas about IT security. Slack gave users what they wanted, not what IT nerds wanted them to want. How in the 21st century can we not be able to edit sent messages? Are we connected or not?
    - distances 7y ago
      > Signal doesn't have deletion. I just tried. All it seems to have is delete on my device and set timeout on all messages. I see. I definitely assumed it's deleting on both ends of the conversation. Slack didn't win because of features, but because of marketing, free tier, and network effects. It never was and still isn't the best chat service when it comes to features -- the trainwreck of their threading implementation is one of the more prominent examples.
- ub 7y ago
  Slack took over the world ? They only have 12M DAU. Sure, they’re successful in the enterprise market in the US, but by no means they have taken over the world.
charliebrownau 7y ago
Does signal still force "require" people hand over your personal phone number to use an internet message platform ? Out of Signal + Wire + Telegram - I've found wire better for my personal individual case Still self hosted SIP and XMPP are better then Wire/Signal/Telegram
RedComet 7y ago
I'll never cease to be amused by the synthetic love for "Moxie Marlinspike" - that is, Matthew Rosenfeld. Funny what a little publicity and millions of dollars of government money can do.
_bxg1 7y ago
I first started using Signal not because of its hard-core encryption, but because it was the only messaging app I could find that: - Wasn't SMS - Had a quality interface and feature set - Had a desktop app - Wasn't overly clunky for direct messages (Slack and Discord) - Wasn't affiliated with any major tech company Its encryption pedigree was just a bonus. I think it's well on its way to becoming a WhatsApp replacement (it already is for me of course, but for the average joe too), especially with the recent breaches the latter has had.
gorgoiler 7y ago
Does Signal have or plan to have an open source client? Not necessarily freely licensed, just with some minimal auditable component available (like Tarsnap.) I have no reason not to trust the app, but it would be great if the trust in Signal was strengthened by knowing that (at least) the client source code had been publicly audited and could be verified and built by end users. Too tin-foil-hatty?
- cyphar 7y ago
  Signal's server[1] and client source code[2,3,4] has been publicly available for many years and are even licensed under the (A)GPL-3.0 (with an exception to allow distribution via Google Play and the Apple App Store). I don't know where you got the impression this wasn't the case. An earlier VOIP product of theirs (RedPhone) had a proprietary server implementation, but ever since the feature was added to Signal proper it has been free software. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server [2]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android [3]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS [4]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop
  - gorgoiler 7y ago
    I genuinely didn’t know either way though I hadn’t ever heard of it being open source so I admit to assuming a little pessimism, for sure. Thanks for the links. It will be a very interesting project to build my own Signal.app!
- stickac 7y ago
  Signal is open-source, no? https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp
asiachick 7y ago
if it needs my phone number to sign up then it is not remotely making me more secure. the mere fact they get my phone number makes me less secure in multiple ways
eitland 7y ago
I was kind of an early and enthusiastic WhatsApp adaptor. Started migrating everything and everyone shortly after it turned out Facebook hadn't bought it to be nice. I was kind of an early (and current) Telegram user. I've already installed Signal a while ago and I'm happy to see more and more names showing up there and I'll be happy to move a number of groups in that direction soon I guess. That said I don't think it will be perfect. As a one to one messenger it will be close to ideal. I also guess short-lived groups will work. I have doubts about how easy it will be to export all photos from 2019 from a group to create a online photo book or just post it to my familys (private) blog, so I think the last two will live side by side for a while: Telegram for postcard level security (hi grandma, this is what the garden looks like now).
newscracker 7y ago
> The difference, today, is that Signal is finally reaching that mass audience it was always been intended for—not just the privacy diehards, activists, and cybersecurity nerds that formed its core user base for years—thanks in part to a concerted effort to make the app more accessible and appealing to the mainstream. Seriously, Signal is probably the app that’s focusing least (and also slowly) on being more appealing to the mainstream and to large groups of people (protesters and activists) who might benefit from it, because: 1. It relies on a phone number for signing up. Worse, it exposes your phone number to everyone who has your number in their contacts list, thus allowing enumeration attacks (like what was done with Telegram in Hong Kong, where Telegram quickly pushed a fix). 2. It’s 2020, and it has no chat backups on iOS. Change your device and you lose not only all your old chats, but also group memberships (you have to figure out how to rejoin groups and then face issues like not seeing other members). Overall, the “breakneck speed” of development that the article speaks of doesn’t actually exist. If they want to see real breakneck speed in adding features, they have to look at Telegram for comparison and then decide what words to use. If you want better accessible alternatives and E2E and cross device sync and backups, take a look at Wire. Support wise you don’t get much from it, since the company is focused on paying clients. For the free tier users, it already provides more than Signal can in 2020.
- santiagobasulto 7y ago
  I see “no backups” as a feature, not an issue. If there are backups, that means that someone can a) steal them b) or ask to see them (government). I use signal a lot with a few friends, and we all know that the what we share might immediately disappear, and that’s ok. The issue about phone number is real.
  - saurik 7y ago
    And yet, on Android they support backing up your data.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    I don’t disagree with your stance, but my argument is against the claim that they’re developing features to appeal to mainstream users. No backups is not a mainstream feature.
jokoon 7y ago
Must have a smartphone to use on desktop, to me it's a little weird, I wish I could have an explanation for this.
squarefoot 7y ago
Still it needs a phone number to be used, which is a huge privacy vulnerability, also by encouraging to be used on some of the most spyware ridden platforms out there: a malicious tap/key-logger is much much much easier to hide in a 90% closed source phone than in a FOSS oerating system install on a PC. FOSS phones hopefully might/will change this, but they're a few months away, and we should also assume most users would rather wait for them to be available than go the easy Android/iOS path.
- bootlooped 7y ago
  > we should also assume most users would rather wait for them (FOSS phones) to be available than go the easy Android/iOS path Why should we assume that? In my estimation, 99% of people in the world are never going to own a FOSS phone. 99% of people probably don't know what FOSS even means.
  - squarefoot 7y ago
    That was exactly my point (the average user not caring at all about privacy).
badrabbit 7y ago
Signal's quality has gone down for me in the past few months. Delayed messages(<insert paranoid fears of MITM>),UI quirks and other instabilities. It was not like this for the past few years.
yannovitch 7y ago
Sorry, but I still fail to see how it's considered a good to have used $50 million to make "yet another messaging app" (because anything "for the masses" is "yet another thing" because of network effect). With 50 million, one would have hoped instead that they would have helped improve XMPP, that they would have developed the "perfect" XMPP client that everybody could and would use, and that they would run "for free" one XMPP server with all the features one can expect of a good messaging service while letting the hard-core base have their own server if they want (no need to support the hard-core base, they do it already on their own). Or maybe with Matrix if one really don't want to contribute to XMPP, but still, with OMEMO, ... I feel like all the "security features" are coming to the XMPP world. I still believe that if you're not in control of the whole chain (open source client + open source server), you're not in control at all, because you still have to believe the they are doing what they are promising they do, without being able to verify it.
pensatoio 7y ago
I don’t care about stickers. Signal is my messenger of choice, but I can’t recommend it to people because it is SO SLOW. Seriously guys. Backups, persistent history by distributing identity across multiple devices, and fix the app load time.

631 points by jmsflknr 7y ago

I've been following the team for years. They well deserve the plaudits for the work they have done. I work with people on a daily basis in countries where their lives depend on it.

typeformer 7y ago

This is very good news and a victory for civil privacy!

pgm8705 7y ago

The Signal iPhone app has made huge improvements over the years and is just about as user-friendly as WhatsApp as far as I can tell. I would love to see it match the smoothness and responsiveness of the animations found in iMessage. It seems silly, but the visual experience of messaging in iMessage is such a delight.

konschubert 7y ago
What I don’t like is that messages take more vertical space in Signal due to the alignment of the time stamps.
GeneralTspoon 7y ago
Pity it crashes for me 100% of the time when opening on an older iPhone. Haven't been able to receive my messages for over 2 months - which is insane for a messaging app (I'm not even sure if I'll receive the messages if/when they ever fix it). This is despite me contacting support and sending the crash logs to them when it happened. As much as I'd love to support Signal and switch everything from WhatsApp - it doesn't seem like a wise choice if this kind of thing is a possibility.

standardUser 7y ago

I was wondering why Signal hadn't caught on more. I only use it with a few people. I had no idea it was still in such heavy development! It may be a tough sell. There are many countries where WhatsApp is the default form of communication and has been for years.

Y-bar 7y ago
I stopped using Signal when it was clear i was not able to back up my message history (or transfer it to a new phone). My data is my data and I should be able to access and control it.
- DCKing 7y ago
  Huh, but Signal does allow you to this [0]? It doesn't allow you to do this on iOS, but I'm guessing your stance on data portability makes your life very hard on iOS anyway. [0]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...
  - djrogers 7y ago
    > I'm guessing your stance on data portability makes your life very hard on iOS anyway. Pretty much all of the data in the stock apps on my iPhone is easily portable, and most of it is API accessible, meaning I can use multiple apps to view and manipulate it. Apple even publishes a support doc on how to export your data using first-party tools. For any more complex needs, there are plenty of easily accessible 3rd party options. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204055 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204055
  - samatman 7y ago
    On the contrary, the vast majority of iPhone apps use iCloud and offer data export in addition to recovery/transfer to a new device. Signal is an outlier in this respect, and I hope they add this feature before I'm ready for another phone.
  - novia 7y ago

NikolaNovak 7y ago

I cannot fathom the proliferation of phone-only messaging apps. Am I really the only person who prefers to type on a full-sized keyboard, and see my multiple conversations on 27" screen, as opposed to one and a half inches of no-feedback glass surface? :-/ I went to Signal site, downloaded the Windows app, and once installed, it asks me to link my phone. No option for any other signup. NOwhere in the download process or on main site does it warn me that this is a phone-only app. The desktop app itself simply starts to a "Connect your phone" screen with no explanation why I have to do it, whether there are or aren't alternatives, etc. Nothing about this is remotely user friendly. I have half a dozen laptops, two phones, few tables at home alone; the notion that I must be crippled to only communicate via the smallest, least practical communication device I own; and then be horribly crippled in attaching one-at-a-time additional device but with crippling dependency on said phone... I guess I'm a negative focus group and completely out of touch with the realities of the world, but I cannot imagine or understand who wants to live like that :-/

detaro 7y ago
The Signal desktop apps at least are independent in that they do not require the phone after the initial setup, but yeah, it's annoying. They were far from perfect, but the multi-chat-protocol clients from the ICQ&co days had a lot going for them...
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  Having signal be tethered to a real phone number does give you a point to root your account around, and allow recovery. It must reduce spam, and it's always a way to find other users. But I do find it irritating that you can't have a virtual account too. When my phone busted, because I hadn't saved off all my security recovery info, it didn't matter that I had signal running on my laptop, etc, I had to reset my signal account on my new phone. It would have been nice if I could have "added" a new root account on my new phone from a working device. keybase allowed this.
  - Seenso 7y ago

dmix 7y ago

> and an experimental method for storing encrypted contacts in the cloud. Signal released an experimental encrypted contact syncing app for Android long ago (I can't remember the name). I wonder what the challenges have been to integrate this or release it as a full product. It's great they've grown from 3 to 20 people, now they can really start to address some of their wider goals from the beginning such as this.

Forbo 7y ago
It was called Flock: https://signal.org/blog/flock/ https://signal.org/blog/flock/
- basicplus2 7y ago
  "Try Flock for free" Google Playstore - We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server.

throwaway8879 7y ago

Signal still requires a phone number. That alone should make it non-usable for people who are serious about their privacy. My alternate solution: stop using smartphones altogether. Technology is not a good solution to the privacy problem, especially when a collective such as the government can read your data anyway, or beat it out of you. If you're worried about drowning, don't go near water. There are no fullproof life vests.

icebraining 7y ago
What's the "privacy problem"? I suspect yours is different from many other people's.
- jtl999 7y ago
  Some people might not want to give a phone linked to them to certain people while attempting to remain anonymous. I don't disagree this is less then the userbase of Signal, but I assume it shouldn't be hard to use a randomly generated ID (or similar) system as a fallback options for identifiers, and leave phone numbers as the default and recommended setting.
- oh_boy 7y ago
  As far as I could tell from the article, absolute everything is encrypted on the server and they can't see your phone number. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  In many countries (an ever-expanding list), you cannot purchase a SIM card without showing ID, and a copy of your ID is made and sent to the state authorities. That is, mobile numbers are always connected with your identity, you cannot have an anonymous phone number. Consequently, the state can easily determine which of its citizens are using Signal. While communications on Signal are end-to-end encrypted, in authoritarian states merely using a secure messenger can draw police suspicion.
pergadad 7y ago
Phone number is convenient to find people and uniquely identify them with a standard info that you have anyway for most friends. If not for the phone-based account I'd have missed that many friends do already have signal.

flyinghamster 7y ago

I still have Signal on my phone (nobody I know uses it, though, as much as I wish otherwise), but there was one problem that I found vexing: if I set Signal up as the default messaging app, any severe weather alerts went nowhere - until I restored the stock SMS app as default and I saw several that I had missed.

dancemethis1 7y ago

"WhatsApp had used Signal's open-source protocol to encrypt all WhatsApp communications end-to-end by default" Allegedly*. Since Whatsapp is proprietary, it can't be proven that OpenWhisper wasn't tampered with on the server. And chances are always against the link that needs the most protection, the user.

joshuaissac 7y ago
It should be sufficient to inspect the client because end-to-end encryption prevents the server from seeing the message plaintexts. The worst it could do is send the wrong encryption keys to the clients (i.e., attempt a MITM attack, or add unauthorised participants to a group chat), but this can be checked out of band (e.g. QR code in person), and the client provides a message when a contact's public key changes. If the client implements the Signal protocol correctly, and the key pair is generated securely, private key not transmitted to the servers, etc., then the server should not be able to do anything nefarious without the client noticing.
- mtgx 7y ago
  WhatsApp lacks authentication by default. Also, WhatsApp sometimes doe use a server key to encrypt your messages instead of e2e encryption, which basically means that if FB wanted to they could listen in on some communications at will (such as at request of law enforcement, etc): https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-design-feature-encrypted-messages https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-...
UncleMeat 7y ago
You can audit the app. Bytecode isn’t hard to read. Pentesters aren’t idiots.

chimeracoder 7y ago

Out of all features, the one that really holds Signal back from mass adoption: there's no way to backup or transfer messages to a new phone from iOS. In order for Signal to reach "the masses", it needs to become popular with a large number of people who don't really understand encryption or care about it, but are using Signal anyway because they happen to communicate with people who do care about encryption. That's a good thing! Unfortunately, it's a really hard sell to tell someone, "Hey, download this new messaging app so you can talk to me. Oh, and by the way, when you get a new phone, you'll lose your entire chat history with me".

Krasnol 7y ago
Since when are Apple users = "the masses"? The masses use Android and backup works there so I doubt this is what holds Signal back from mass adoption.
- novok 7y ago
  iOS users are the affluent, and the affluent have outsized influence.
  - Krasnol 7y ago
    This must be the most ridiculous thing I've ever read about the technology market. It is so far beyond delusional, it only can come from an Apple user. ...and than you wonder why people make fun of you.
- thallada 7y ago
  You are referring to this backup restore process? https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba... It involves a 6 step (with multiple sub-steps) process of navigating the sdcard contents and then transferring some obscure file over USB to a computer and then from that computer to the new phone. I doubt this is something that "the masses" will be able or willing to accomplish. Also, iOS has about 48% market share in the US, so it's at least half the masses there.

octorian 7y ago

What I think is most notable about this article is that they go out of their way to point out how its significantly more difficult to roll out all these "user nicety" features everyone expects, when you live in a world where you can't just "let the server know everything" (like many other apps people often compare with).

stingraycharles 7y ago
I think it’s a good case study on why the state of security in the world is the way it is right now; people want convenience more than security. I even fall victim to this myself: Signal not having a search history or losing message history when activating a new device is often too much of a show stopper. I really hope Signal will be able to pull this off somehow, but seeing how much these type of apps rely on a network effect, I am skeptical.
- octorian 7y ago
  Lack of search is just a lack of a locally-implementable feature. There's really no security reason why it would be more difficult. Transferring to a new device, on the other hand, does get somewhat more complicated. For ease of use, the data needs to be placed somewhere intermediate. That being said, I can understand Signal's hesitation to embrace Google's cloud storage options for such a feature.

CtrlAltT5wpm 7y ago

I'm hoping someone here has some insight they can share, because I've not really seen it addressed elsewhere. As per the linked article: > Another new feature it's testing, called "secure value recovery," would let you create an address book of your Signal contacts and store them on a Signal server, rather than simply depend on the contact list from your phone. That server-stored contact list would be preserved even when you switch to a new phone. To prevent Signal's servers from seeing those contacts, it would encrypt them with a key stored in the SGX secure enclave that's meant to hide certain data even from the rest of the server's operating system [1]. I assume that this is an offshoot or a continuation of what Signal started a few years back with Private Contact Discovery, a truly difficult problem considering the amount of user data and metadata Signal wants to avoid collecting [2]. It's a hell of a job, and I commend Signal's efforts. Assuming I'm right, I'm curious as to why Signal is going down this road, specifically, relying on SGX (or any proprietary vendor solution) for security, or if they should. Due to the spate of speculative execution vulnerabilities in Intel hardware, it would seem to me (a layman) that this is a bad approach that will create more work for them down the line, and may rely too heavily on a single set of features. The Foreshadow attack was one that supposedly compromised SGX, with full mitigation only being possible with hardware revisions [3]. Even then, it may not be safe to assume that's the end of problems. Only recently, another attack on SGX was found, specifically, PlunderVolt [4], which at least can be supposedly mitigated via microcode update vs hardware refresh. Still, it seems like shaky ground, especially to be building additional Signal features upon. Much further down the list of concerns, it seems like all these SGX-reliant features lock them into using Intel's platform exclusively. It's probably neither here nor there, but is this something they should be concerned about, or is that just the price to be paid for the advanced privacy features Signal offers? Is there any effort to disconnect these features from the hardware platform? Is it even possible? Should they? Am I even asking the right questions? My worry is that Signal finally reaches some form of feature parity with the biggest messengers (I'd say it's there, mostly), SGX gets broken in a way that's not easy to fix, and all this time and effort will have been wasted, especially if they have to roll back user features which grow the platform in order to maintain safety. I ask all this having no solutions myself, unfortunately. I'm neither dev nor cryptographer, only someone curious with some mild technical leanings. I generally lump myself in with the average user crowd, knowing just enough to be saddled with the 'Family's IT Person' label, but not enough to actually work in the field...as such, forgive any ignorance or obvious mistakes on my part. I've just not seen these issues addressed, and figured you would be the crowd best able to do so. [1] - https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-features-mainstream/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encrypted-messaging-featu... [2] - https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/ [3] - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/intels-sgx-blown-wide-open-by-you-guessed-it-a-speculative-execution-attack/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/08/intels-sgx-blown-wid... [4] - https://plundervolt.com/ https://plundervolt.com/

hvmonk 7y ago

Not to downplay this (infact I am a signal user), but What if fb buys Signal, as it did with WhatsApp?

ancientworldnow 7y ago
They would have to agree to sell themselves which they have no interest in doing. This seems like a silly fear.
- MattJ100 7y ago
  Except that's basically what happened to WhatsApp. And this is always a risk of any centralized/propriety network. Some further reading for perspective: https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternative.html https://homebrewserver.club/have-you-considered-the-alternat...
  - raquo 7y ago
    And the founder of whatsapp is bitter about what Facebook did to it, and is funding signal now. And Moxie is no fan of Facebook either. These aren't some random kids and a VC.
snthd 7y ago
It's owned by a non-profit.

alt_f4 7y ago

That's cool, but I'd rather Signal first did 2 other things: - Make it so notifications go through consistently, for both messages and calls. Right now, about 1/3rd of the time, I find out about new messages when I open the app. Doesn't matter if it's desktop or mobile. - On Desktop, please, please find a way to make it not feel extremely laggy. I'm typing and I'm getting like 10 fps, it's horrible. And it uses so much RAM. Jesus christ, it's 5GB and I've only got 2 contacts.

harry8 7y ago

Are we still allowed to have heroes? It's risky, sure. Moxie is one of mine, for all that I'm sure our politics are very, very different. He seems to have integrity. I really hope I'm not being deluded there.

oh_boy 7y ago

I recently achieved that quite a bunch of my friends switched from Whatsapp to Signal. It takes quite something to explain people why it isn't difficult to just chat in another app. But I'm happy those who came over never complained and now I have more 1:1 chats via Signal than via Whatsapp.

speedgoose 7y ago

Signal isn't on F-Droid, which is a red flag IMHO. It looks like they don't allow non official builds on their servers.

apodysophilia 7y ago
They have the APK available from their website[1] and they have reproducible builds[2]. [1] https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/ [2] https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/ https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/
nelblu 7y ago
I have wondered the same. I use both fdroid and signal, but never really understood why signal isn't on fdroid. Can anyone please comment?
- snazz 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/bwuudc/why_isnt_signal_on_fdroid/ https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/bwuudc/why_isnt_sig...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

novok 7y ago

The images of moxie are very nytimes gloomy ( Ex: https://twitter.com/nytimesgloom https://twitter.com/nytimesgloom ) Did moxie want it that way or did wired set it up that way.

pergadad 7y ago

Signal works great. The one big barrier to more uptake is a feature that many non-nerdy users seem to use: group video chat. You can one-on-one video chat, but not with a group. The moment that's there I imagine huge amount of people would be interested to move away from messenger/Skype. I've also been told by family that in some Asian countries you have to pay to get it on Android/iPhone, but maybe that's a copycat that is just using the name...

ac29 7y ago
> I've also been told by family that in some Asian countries you have to pay to get it on Android/iPhone That sounds extremely suspicious. If Signal isn't available in the Google Play Store in those countries, or the Play Store itself isn't available, it can be downloaded here: https://signal.org/android/apk/ https://signal.org/android/apk/
snthd 7y ago
https://meet.jit.si https://meet.jit.si ?

shmerl 7y ago

I wouldn't recommend anyone using Signal, due to its anti-federation stance. Also being tied to a phone? Very bad idea. Stay away from it.

snazz 7y ago
Federation makes secure cryptography very difficult and is confusing to less technical people, which is Signal’s target audience. Also, SIM swap attacks don’t work if you set a registration lock PIN. A centralized phone number based service is a requirement for a messaging app to get any real traction. A messaging app is useless if no one you know in real life actually uses it.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Difficulty or "real traction" types of arguments are just an excuse to pursue walled garden approach. I find it unacceptable. And "confusing for non technical people" is a completely bogus argument which also hides real intent of those who oppose federation. Non technical people get e-mail idea just fine. And it's federated for the reference.

bpfrh 7y ago

Signal desktop is broken, since at least mid 2018. There is an open github issue, where the maintainers don't really respond: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2634 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/2634 They statically link a openssl library for their forked version of sqlcipher, which makes it impossible to build signal on anything other than ubuntu. Static linking against an old openssl library is also not that good for security reasons, which imho is a bad sign if you say your chat programm stands for security and privacy. Edit: Link wrong, now corrected

DavideNL 7y ago
The url you posted doesn't work/point to a specific issue...
Kaze404 7y ago
Can you link to the specific issue? You linked to a search, not sure if by accident.
godelski 7y ago
> which makes it impossible to build signal on anything other than ubuntu. I've never had a problem on Arch or Manjaro
- bpfrh 7y ago
  You did a git clone and then a build without issue? Because the repo on arch patches the issue with the statically linked openssl library: https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/openssl-linking.patch?h=signal https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/plain/openssl-linking... So if you just install signal from the aur, then you use the patched version.
  - godelski 7y ago
    Sorry, let me rephrase that. The AUR has a working patch so it clearly isn't impossible. You can probably follow the same procedure. So I just wouldn't say that it is impossible to install it on non-Ubuntu distros, just not trivial. But this seriously doesn't look complex. Also, wasn't Signal pushed into the main repos recently?

diebeforei485 7y ago

Verification with a real cellphone number (non-VoIP) is statistically/numerically a good anti-abuse tool. If Signal wants to allow no-phone-number accounts, it should mark them as such to the other participants in the conversation. Discord does that, and it seems to work well. But this is a separate argument from using your actual phone number in-app and allowing anyone who has your number to find you in the app.

gojomo 7y ago

It's good to see Acton quoted; he'd been so silent since his donation-to/association-with Signal that I was beginning to wonder if behind the scenes, there'd been a falling out. However, these "enrichment features" from Signal over the last 2 years are less than what competitors like Telegram put out in 2 months. Really basic things remain undone. Like being able to carry your contacts/message-history forward across planned device-upgrades on iOS – https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542 – 4.5 years after it was "on the roadmap". Many of Signal's novel cryptographic innovations, while cool, depend on trusting Intel SGX: both as a technology & in Intel's stewardship of the master keys/attestation-chains. Many cryptographers don't believe SGX will be technologically reliable anytime soon, and much of the world will probably see US-based Intel Corp similar to how the US sees China-based Huawei.

balladeer 7y ago
Kind of unfortunate that Matrix is probably not focussing on making the protocol and apps easy to get on and use Matrix/Riot as a WhatsApp, Signal replacement for end users (person to person comm). It seems to be just for teams and orgs (Slack, Discord).
- Arathorn 7y ago
  RiotX (the next gen of Riot) is a Matrix client from the core team, designed to go up against WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage by default... and then expand into Slack/Discord style use cases for powerusers who want that. It's currently in the final stages of beta on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riotx https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.riot... Meanwhile there are lots of other promising Matrix clients emerging which are aiming for person-to-person comms - e.g. http://dittochat.org http://dittochat.org, https://pattle.im https://pattle.im, https://fluffy.chat https://fluffy.chat etc.
  - fladd 7y ago
    The fact that there exist other clients that are specifically "built with user experience in mind" (Ditto) or built "to be a Matrix app that everyone can use" (Pattle) sometimes makes me wonder why that would not also be the goal of the official client?

dogo22 7y ago

Is chat history across new phones really important to people?

openplatypus 7y ago

It is great and I root for Signal. I only wish Moxie was less polarizing and actually stepped down from being its face. He often makes subpar and inaccurate statements about other technologies. He is famous for his derogatory comments about PGP. His talk at recent CCC was anything but dismissive of others. The thing is, Signal is not special. Matrix, Wire and others sorted problems of encryption while remaining open (Wire is commercial but that good for some). So congratulations Signal. But we should think really hard whether we want another centralized behemoth. I would prefer donate to Matrix. Support project building client with great UX for masses on top of open, extensible protocol rather than hand over more control to centralized organization led by individual speaking in absolutes.

K0SM0S 7y ago
I think we see in this that Signal's success is less about tech and more about some product-driven superiority, insofar as it actually reached users and is used a lot already. It's the old mantra that you may need a Wozniak to do it but you need a Jobs to package it into a great product and sell it. I feel like Moxie is opinionated like a product leader, even more so than as a technologist. He's polarizing. And while it rubs everyone the wrong way on occasion, it's also the story of many a great success.
- mbowcutt 7y ago
  The Snowden endorsement sure helped.
  - maqp 7y ago
    Good thing Snowden thinks twice before recommending anything.
kick 7y ago
His statements about PGP are right, though. It's using terrible, outdated cryptography. The odds of finding one who's actually got a setup that isn't full of holes for it is slim, even among programmers. It's barely been used. It's a UX and technical disaster. Matrix still hasn't gotten E2E encryption rolled out by default, or something like half of the stuff they want to have done before doing it: https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/6779 Wire keeps track of everyone that every user has contacted for the entirety of the lifespan of their account (not to mention only released it as Free Software after someone found a bunch of glaring holes in their platform, including sending passwords to the server in plain text), and is a U.S. company that goes out of its way to store excessive amounts of metadata. For that matter, actually, Signal's just as open as Wire. Wire's more or less as centralized, but with way greater risks in the event of Wire's datacenter getting raided. Tox is the best thing trying to do a similar thing that Signal is doing, and even Tox isn't even very good.

gavreh 7y ago

Try Keybase!

Borlands 7y ago

I installed Signal a few years ago, and pretty much never touched it again. Today I open the app and closed it. After a few minutes, there were a lot of hello ‘messages which got me intrigued. It seems when I opened the app, all my contacts using Signal got a notification! What gives? Obviously uninstalled it straightaway...

driverdan 7y ago
By default Signal notifies users when someone in their contacts starts using Signal. You may have installed it before that feature existed so it triggered when you opened it.
mechnesium 7y ago
Sounds like malware if you take it out of context. That’s unacceptable behavior (unless maybe there’s an opt-out for the mass notification).
distances 7y ago
Isn't that what all chat apps do? Telegram as t least, and I keep getting notifications of people joining for names I've never ever heard before, so seems like they were a bit overeager even.

mechnesium 7y ago

This my professional opinion since I lack the resources to perform a true analysis, so instead I speculate based on current nation state trends and the US government’s surveillance track record. Signal is a big red flag to me. I choose not to trust it. Signal specifically targets an audience of interest for the NSA—those who are actively trying to encrypt their communication. I have an eking suspicion that Signal could be a surveillance tool similar to the UAE’s ToTok messaging app. I don’t care if it is open source or uses E2E encryption. Unless you’re jailbroken or rooted and can install unsigned binaries, the binary you installed from the Play Store or App Store could contain backdoors. Your decision to trust and use this should be judiciously evaluated based on your threat model.

thosakwe 7y ago
This is literally the definition of FUD.
- mechnesium 7y ago
  How? Can you prove the binaries on the Play Store/App Store do not have backdoors? Most nation states engage in domestic surveillance. Here is a story about ToTok: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/us/politics/totok-app-uae.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/22/us/politics/totok-app-uae.... Logically, chat applications are an ideal platform to engage in surveillance. There is no FUD here.
  - jblwps 7y ago
    As greysonp points out, yes; Signal has had reproducible builds since March 2016. So we can prove that those published binaries do not have backdoors insofar as we can prove that the corresponding source code does not have backdoors.
    - mechnesium 7y ago
      If you didn’t create the binary yourself how can you trust it?

gramakri 7y ago

IMO, the best way for an alternate messaging app to catch on (to WhatsApp) is federation. If we can figure out a way to have a common signaling protocol across apps and users can choose whatever clients they want, then they have a chance of competing against WhatsApp. At this point, there is no real reason to move out of WhatApp, given it just works?

dependenttypes 7y ago
Moxie is against federating signal. https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issuecomment-217339450 https://github.com/libresignal/libresignal/issues/37#issueco...
distances 7y ago
I think that would be among the best ways to kill the app. With federation and multiple clients you'll never be sure what feature set the other end is using, and the service stagnates to the lowest common denominator of features.

narsil 7y ago

I really hope the UX improves considerably and basic features actually function as expected. Notifications for new messages on OS X were broken for several months last year, for example, and notifications on Android are still hit-or-miss (literally "miss" when you miss a message for several hours!).

416chad 7y ago
I haven't really had any issues per se, at height about a year ago I had just over a dozen contacts on signal. The biggest UX deal breaker was no profile pictures. You can set one, but almost no one will ever see it since almost everyone uses Gmail or another cloudy email provider that will sync or store ancient Google+ (or equivalent) avatars to your contacts. Signal chooses to display a contact photo from your device over what a user sets. This is insanely counterintuitive approach and no other app works that way, meaning no one expects it to work that way. My family and all but two contacts moved back to WhatsApp. I'm glad to read they're focusing on UX now, but I can't bring up switching again with these people. Maybe when or if phone numbers are abandoned, then I won't have to link/associate contacts to my address book and see those old avatars.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I’ve got pretty much all my important friends and family on Signal now and it is great feeling private and secure.

aaron695 7y ago

Slack took over the world in part because you could edit and delete messages. I don't get why this isn't rolled out across messaging yet.

distances 7y ago
Slack definitely didn't take off because of that, and ~all messaging apps sans IRC and SMS have message deletion, sometimes editing too.
- aaron695 7y ago
  Signal doesn't have deletion. I just tried. All it seems to have is delete on my device and set timeout on all messages. Messenger only got delete last year. Neither have editing. If ~all messaging apps sans IRC and SMS have message deletion why does Signal not have it? It's like IT people live in a bubble. Why on earth would you not allow users to edit a sent message. It's like they believe some indoctrinated idea where a sent message is untouchable not matter what users want or some cargo cult ideas about IT security. Slack gave users what they wanted, not what IT nerds wanted them to want. How in the 21st century can we not be able to edit sent messages? Are we connected or not?
  - distances 7y ago
    > Signal doesn't have deletion. I just tried. All it seems to have is delete on my device and set timeout on all messages. I see. I definitely assumed it's deleting on both ends of the conversation. Slack didn't win because of features, but because of marketing, free tier, and network effects. It never was and still isn't the best chat service when it comes to features -- the trainwreck of their threading implementation is one of the more prominent examples.
ub 7y ago
Slack took over the world ? They only have 12M DAU. Sure, they’re successful in the enterprise market in the US, but by no means they have taken over the world.

charliebrownau 7y ago

Does signal still force "require" people hand over your personal phone number to use an internet message platform ? Out of Signal + Wire + Telegram - I've found wire better for my personal individual case Still self hosted SIP and XMPP are better then Wire/Signal/Telegram

RedComet 7y ago

I'll never cease to be amused by the synthetic love for "Moxie Marlinspike" - that is, Matthew Rosenfeld. Funny what a little publicity and millions of dollars of government money can do.

_bxg1 7y ago

I first started using Signal not because of its hard-core encryption, but because it was the only messaging app I could find that: - Wasn't SMS - Had a quality interface and feature set - Had a desktop app - Wasn't overly clunky for direct messages (Slack and Discord) - Wasn't affiliated with any major tech company Its encryption pedigree was just a bonus. I think it's well on its way to becoming a WhatsApp replacement (it already is for me of course, but for the average joe too), especially with the recent breaches the latter has had.

gorgoiler 7y ago

Does Signal have or plan to have an open source client? Not necessarily freely licensed, just with some minimal auditable component available (like Tarsnap.) I have no reason not to trust the app, but it would be great if the trust in Signal was strengthened by knowing that (at least) the client source code had been publicly audited and could be verified and built by end users. Too tin-foil-hatty?

cyphar 7y ago
Signal's server[1] and client source code[2,3,4] has been publicly available for many years and are even licensed under the (A)GPL-3.0 (with an exception to allow distribution via Google Play and the Apple App Store). I don't know where you got the impression this wasn't the case. An earlier VOIP product of theirs (RedPhone) had a proprietary server implementation, but ever since the feature was added to Signal proper it has been free software. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server [2]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android [3]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS [4]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop
- gorgoiler 7y ago
  I genuinely didn’t know either way though I hadn’t ever heard of it being open source so I admit to assuming a little pessimism, for sure. Thanks for the links. It will be a very interesting project to build my own Signal.app!
stickac 7y ago
Signal is open-source, no? https://github.com/signalapp https://github.com/signalapp

asiachick 7y ago

if it needs my phone number to sign up then it is not remotely making me more secure. the mere fact they get my phone number makes me less secure in multiple ways

eitland 7y ago

I was kind of an early and enthusiastic WhatsApp adaptor. Started migrating everything and everyone shortly after it turned out Facebook hadn't bought it to be nice. I was kind of an early (and current) Telegram user. I've already installed Signal a while ago and I'm happy to see more and more names showing up there and I'll be happy to move a number of groups in that direction soon I guess. That said I don't think it will be perfect. As a one to one messenger it will be close to ideal. I also guess short-lived groups will work. I have doubts about how easy it will be to export all photos from 2019 from a group to create a online photo book or just post it to my familys (private) blog, so I think the last two will live side by side for a while: Telegram for postcard level security (hi grandma, this is what the garden looks like now).

newscracker 7y ago

> The difference, today, is that Signal is finally reaching that mass audience it was always been intended for—not just the privacy diehards, activists, and cybersecurity nerds that formed its core user base for years—thanks in part to a concerted effort to make the app more accessible and appealing to the mainstream. Seriously, Signal is probably the app that’s focusing least (and also slowly) on being more appealing to the mainstream and to large groups of people (protesters and activists) who might benefit from it, because: 1. It relies on a phone number for signing up. Worse, it exposes your phone number to everyone who has your number in their contacts list, thus allowing enumeration attacks (like what was done with Telegram in Hong Kong, where Telegram quickly pushed a fix). 2. It’s 2020, and it has no chat backups on iOS. Change your device and you lose not only all your old chats, but also group memberships (you have to figure out how to rejoin groups and then face issues like not seeing other members). Overall, the “breakneck speed” of development that the article speaks of doesn’t actually exist. If they want to see real breakneck speed in adding features, they have to look at Telegram for comparison and then decide what words to use. If you want better accessible alternatives and E2E and cross device sync and backups, take a look at Wire. Support wise you don’t get much from it, since the company is focused on paying clients. For the free tier users, it already provides more than Signal can in 2020.

santiagobasulto 7y ago
I see “no backups” as a feature, not an issue. If there are backups, that means that someone can a) steal them b) or ask to see them (government). I use signal a lot with a few friends, and we all know that the what we share might immediately disappear, and that’s ok. The issue about phone number is real.
- saurik 7y ago
  And yet, on Android they support backing up your data.
- newscracker 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with your stance, but my argument is against the claim that they’re developing features to appeal to mainstream users. No backups is not a mainstream feature.

jokoon 7y ago

Must have a smartphone to use on desktop, to me it's a little weird, I wish I could have an explanation for this.

squarefoot 7y ago

Still it needs a phone number to be used, which is a huge privacy vulnerability, also by encouraging to be used on some of the most spyware ridden platforms out there: a malicious tap/key-logger is much much much easier to hide in a 90% closed source phone than in a FOSS oerating system install on a PC. FOSS phones hopefully might/will change this, but they're a few months away, and we should also assume most users would rather wait for them to be available than go the easy Android/iOS path.

bootlooped 7y ago
> we should also assume most users would rather wait for them (FOSS phones) to be available than go the easy Android/iOS path Why should we assume that? In my estimation, 99% of people in the world are never going to own a FOSS phone. 99% of people probably don't know what FOSS even means.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  That was exactly my point (the average user not caring at all about privacy).

badrabbit 7y ago

Signal's quality has gone down for me in the past few months. Delayed messages(<insert paranoid fears of MITM>),UI quirks and other instabilities. It was not like this for the past few years.

yannovitch 7y ago

Sorry, but I still fail to see how it's considered a good to have used $50 million to make "yet another messaging app" (because anything "for the masses" is "yet another thing" because of network effect). With 50 million, one would have hoped instead that they would have helped improve XMPP, that they would have developed the "perfect" XMPP client that everybody could and would use, and that they would run "for free" one XMPP server with all the features one can expect of a good messaging service while letting the hard-core base have their own server if they want (no need to support the hard-core base, they do it already on their own). Or maybe with Matrix if one really don't want to contribute to XMPP, but still, with OMEMO, ... I feel like all the "security features" are coming to the XMPP world. I still believe that if you're not in control of the whole chain (open source client + open source server), you're not in control at all, because you still have to believe the they are doing what they are promising they do, without being able to verify it.

pensatoio 7y ago

I don’t care about stickers. Signal is my messenger of choice, but I can’t recommend it to people because it is SO SLOW. Seriously guys. Backups, persistent history by distributing identity across multiple devices, and fix the app load time.