4 ms·

Bitten again by centralization. There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol.

harry8 5y ago
>There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol. This is just false. You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case but he has been very clear on the reasons why he hasn't gone that way and the success of his project among non-technical users where so many others have failed suggests he's doing something right. I will applaud and cheer if you show his concerns on federation aren't really a problem by making a federated, e2e encrypted message app work as well for users as moxie has with his. Seriously. I will cheer you like you won't believe. Go do it! Or do you have an excuse?
- ddevault 5y ago
  Sorry, I was not aware that you were not permitted to criticize anyone unless you invested tens of thousands of hours into building a competing product to demonstrate your point. Something to remember for next time.
  - maqp 5y ago
    You're of course allowed to criticize but, as your "There is no excuse" shows you're not aware of the tradeoffs, especially to security agility centralized platforms do, there isn't too much insight in your categorical dismissal. As someone with tens of thousands of hours of building a secure messaging system, I can say it helps a bit wrt perspective.
  - harry8 5y ago
    > You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case ... I never made you aware of any such limitation, quite the contrary, in fact.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- zaik 5y ago
  Here is the opinion of someone who actually made such an app: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html
  - growse 5y ago
    It's a thoughtful rebuttal, but I'm not sure it hits the point. As usual, there's nuance here. The top selling points of Signal are security and privacy. If you want these things, then there's a lot of things that maintaining complete control of the protocol gives you. From the original "Ecosystem is moving" essay: "By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update". That's the point of centralisation. Control means agility in the face of adversary, which when you're trying to optimize for security and privacy is pretty useful. The comparison to HTML is therefore wide of the mark, because the whole point of HTML is to be interoperable. A better comparison would be with something like TLS/SSL, and then you can judge how effective the combination of slow-moving protocol evolution and a security focus has worked over the last few decades. There is no bad choice. There are just compromises that you have to make depending on what you choose, and some of those compromises are more suited to some objectives than others.
    - ddevault 5y ago
      TLS/SSL is a better comparison, and it's a protocol which has enjoyed widespread and unprecedented success in securing the privacy of users worldwide, despite being decentralized. The tradeoffs Moxie was thinking of when rejecting federation had more to do with centralizing his power over Signal rather than any kind of technical limitations.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        For TLS we've had to drag everybody along, kicking and screaming. You call this "widespread and unprecedented success" but the reality is that later this week you're going to see even more outrage and despair from people who didn't like being centralized and so, of course, they're screwed because the price of their "freedom" is the eternal vigilance they couldn't be bothered with. draft-moriarty-tls-oldversions-diediedie (now RFC 8996) only exists because of this. Moxie doesn't need to worry about security problems with a protocol he shipped last century but for TLS we had to actually document that people should stop using that - because of course they are anyway. In the Web PKI we have in practice even more centralization, in principle it would be possible to operate a public CA that simply isn't trusted by Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google, but in practice you need all of them to have a viable service. The de facto situation is that you need logging with Google (and any other service, but Google is mandatory) and you need a sign-off from Mozilla, or you are dead in the water. Now, I think the Web PKI is arguably the only global PKI with something approaching public oversight and it's a huge success. But it's not decentralized in the way you mean, not at all.
- kitkat_new 5y ago
  I'll make one based on the Matrix protocol once I find someone who gives me 100 million dollars

>There's no excuse for not making Signal an open, federated protocol. This is just false. You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case but he has been very clear on the reasons why he hasn't gone that way and the success of his project among non-technical users where so many others have failed suggests he's doing something right. I will applaud and cheer if you show his concerns on federation aren't really a problem by making a federated, e2e encrypted message app work as well for users as moxie has with his. Seriously. I will cheer you like you won't believe. Go do it! Or do you have an excuse?

ddevault 5y ago
Sorry, I was not aware that you were not permitted to criticize anyone unless you invested tens of thousands of hours into building a competing product to demonstrate your point. Something to remember for next time.
- maqp 5y ago
  You're of course allowed to criticize but, as your "There is no excuse" shows you're not aware of the tradeoffs, especially to security agility centralized platforms do, there isn't too much insight in your categorical dismissal. As someone with tens of thousands of hours of building a secure messaging system, I can say it helps a bit wrt perspective.
- harry8 5y ago
  > You can disagree with moxie all you like and make your case ... I never made you aware of any such limitation, quite the contrary, in fact.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zaik 5y ago
Here is the opinion of someone who actually made such an app: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html
- growse 5y ago
  It's a thoughtful rebuttal, but I'm not sure it hits the point. As usual, there's nuance here. The top selling points of Signal are security and privacy. If you want these things, then there's a lot of things that maintaining complete control of the protocol gives you. From the original "Ecosystem is moving" essay: "By contrast, WhatsApp was able to introduce end-to-end encryption to over a billion users with a single software update". That's the point of centralisation. Control means agility in the face of adversary, which when you're trying to optimize for security and privacy is pretty useful. The comparison to HTML is therefore wide of the mark, because the whole point of HTML is to be interoperable. A better comparison would be with something like TLS/SSL, and then you can judge how effective the combination of slow-moving protocol evolution and a security focus has worked over the last few decades. There is no bad choice. There are just compromises that you have to make depending on what you choose, and some of those compromises are more suited to some objectives than others.
  - ddevault 5y ago
    TLS/SSL is a better comparison, and it's a protocol which has enjoyed widespread and unprecedented success in securing the privacy of users worldwide, despite being decentralized. The tradeoffs Moxie was thinking of when rejecting federation had more to do with centralizing his power over Signal rather than any kind of technical limitations.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      For TLS we've had to drag everybody along, kicking and screaming. You call this "widespread and unprecedented success" but the reality is that later this week you're going to see even more outrage and despair from people who didn't like being centralized and so, of course, they're screwed because the price of their "freedom" is the eternal vigilance they couldn't be bothered with. draft-moriarty-tls-oldversions-diediedie (now RFC 8996) only exists because of this. Moxie doesn't need to worry about security problems with a protocol he shipped last century but for TLS we had to actually document that people should stop using that - because of course they are anyway. In the Web PKI we have in practice even more centralization, in principle it would be possible to operate a public CA that simply isn't trusted by Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google, but in practice you need all of them to have a viable service. The de facto situation is that you need logging with Google (and any other service, but Google is mandatory) and you need a sign-off from Mozilla, or you are dead in the water. Now, I think the Web PKI is arguably the only global PKI with something approaching public oversight and it's a huge success. But it's not decentralized in the way you mean, not at all.
kitkat_new 5y ago
I'll make one based on the Matrix protocol once I find someone who gives me 100 million dollars