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Nobody thinks about it but the most professionally used communication medium is the email, and part if not all of its success if not all its success is that is
by alerighi 6y ago
Nobody thinks about it but the most professionally used communication medium is the email, and part if not all of its success if not all its success is that is decentralized.
A company cannot afford to use a service that can be closed and loose all the communications. Centralized services are single point of failure, and in that regard Signal is no better than WhatsApp, because yes, in theory you can run your own server, but have you tried to do so?
It's not practical or even endorsed by the Signal creators themself, since there is no way in the clients to make them connect to your server instead of the centralized one.
Another bad thing of Signal is the use of a phone number as the authentication method. A phone number is not something that preserves your privacy. Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID. Another aspect in which email is just better.
- walrus01 6y ago> Well in theory in countries where you can go into a shop and buy a SIM card cash yes, but in a lot of countries you have to give your ID another huge problem with using phone numbers as IDs, which software developers in the US/Canada often don't think about, is that in many developing nation environments there is no such thing as local number portability, or the ability to move your phone number between any of the major national-scale mobile phone network operators or VoIP providers as you wish. As you can do in the USA if you become unsatisfied with your Tmobile service and want to move to ATT, keeping your phone number. This is one of the reasons why dual (and even triple) SIM phones are so popular outside of North America. In a lot of countries I don't see number portability in the SS7/PSTN system ever becoming a political reality, due to regulatory capture on the part of the national telecom regulator. At least not before pure IP based communications and apps make the concept of a PSTN phone number irrelevant entirely.
- kd913 6y agoOn the other hand, email is the single largest causes of cyber attacks. The communication is not E2E encrypted (apart from a few GPG/SMIME users), no forward secrecy and barely any signature checks. Even if outlook, thunderbird maybe supports it, goodluck getting all the mobile versions to support it too. The clients used to view emails suffer from the same problem with browsers so are subject to all the HTML/JS/CSS privacy attacks. I wish all companies would move to something centralized solution where communication is guaranteed to only come from those within the same service. This way Sharon from HR won't open every link, download every crypto/ransomeware. Maybe my IT could also save 150k a year by not having to send me phishing 'training' emails and instead deal with some decent forms of signature checking. Heck billions of dollars a year are wasted because of phishing, spam, crypto attacks because of email. From my perspective, email is a shitty legacy tech from 1990s that should be moved to a modern solution that enables E2E encryption or signature checks at a minimum.
- walrus01 6y ago> I wish all companies would move to something centralized solution where communication is guaranteed to only come from those within the same service. This way Sharon from HR won't open every link, download every crypto/ransomeware. It's totally possible to set up 'email' for intranet purposes only, using your own DNS setup, standards compliant smtpd and imap daemons over TLS. The persons using it just need to know it can't send or receive emails from outside of the organization.
- kd913 6y agoIt's possible, but every company security, tech otherwise is not setup like this. Frankly, I am just happy slack is picking up the slack here.
- indymike 6y agoA Lets Encrypt for email certs is badly needed.