5 ms·
"easily replaced by other methods" ... like what? How would this other method make it hard/expensive/infeasible for a malicious company to produce 100M account
by sliken 4y ago
"easily replaced by other methods" ... like what?
How would this other method make it hard/expensive/infeasible for a malicious company to produce 100M accounts to cause problems with spamming, DoS, and related issues? Phone numbers are finite, cheap, but not zero cost. If sending a spam email cost $0.01 much of spam would disappear.
How would this other method protect a user's social network without having to upload that meta data in signal? Currently this is handled by a user's address book hosted outside of signal. How many users would you lose if you required some key exchange in person?
Sure it's easy to think about generating a key pair, uploading the public key to a DHT, and allow people to communicate directly without a central server. However that has a fair number of practical issues that would be worse for the average signal user, not the least of which would be much worse battery life and bandwidth charges.
- vorpalhex 4y agoLet me pay $5 to get a private handle.
- joshuamorton 4y agoHow do you pay them without revealing your identity?
- sliken 4y agoSounds good, and it could help fund signal without getting advertisers involved. So you pay $5 on a credit card, which connects you to said handle, much like buying a SIM. How is that any better? Someone in your social network joins signal next week, how would they find you?
- vorpalhex 4y agoI don't want my social network to find me. I will give them a handle if I do. I know which of my coworkers use signal, despite them not telling me themselves. That seems wrong. Buying things anonymously is a solvable problem. Gift cards, cash, etc. Let people resell your $5 sign up card.
- sliken 4y agoWell signal is designed for secure communications for most people. Not designed for anonymous communication. So a key piece of that is easy to use, nice on boarding process, and being useful to new users in that first minute or two. So the reason signal is so useful is because so many people use it, which depends on things like contacts showing up immediately when you join. Seems like it's a common theme that people want a messaging client with a huge number of users, but don't want the features that made it popular in the first place.
- afiori 4y agoMullvad shows that it is possible to receive anonymous payments (eg by non refundable cash by mail) Signal could use payments (eg via Monero) as spam prevention and revenue stream. This would not damage any current feature/user
- godelski 4y agoGood news, they are free https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157/642 https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157...
- vorpalhex 4y agoThis is excellent news! Thanks for the link.
- stiray 4y agoIt is as simple as: I dont care. Signal requires a personally identifiable information while the keys can be extracted using rubber-hose cryptoanalysis ( https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/security.png ) once you know ---> WHO <--- to beat. This is not secure. Sorry. I understand the whole concept behind it. I understand why they want a phone number. BUT. This is not secure (oh, really, my phone number is hashed, how long do i need to brute force a few numbers in range of 0-9, a few seconds on my laptop, maybe?) On the other side, I can use a simple email/irc/counterstrike chat to be MORE secure. Why? As it doesnt require any PII from me. So why bother? Yes, sure, I can use it as a nice chat interface, I can use it as another way beside ~20 chat applications I need to use to contact people I know ( https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png ). But dont sell me security. With requiring PII they broke it.
- ubercore 4y agoI'll have my 70 year old parents on another continent install counterstrike so we can text each other. Thanks for the suggestion.
- stiray 4y agoYour 70 year old parents don't care about security of communication. Whatever http(without 's') chat is quite enough for them. They were talking on analog, unencrypted line for whole their life. Why should they care now? PRISM anyone ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM )?
- pwinnski 4y agoAre you suggesting that people who aren't devoted to the cause of secure communication are not allowed to derive any benefits from secure communication?
- mullen 4y agoThat is also not true either. My 80 year old mother uses Signal because she talks property management and money related issues to people. She does not trust WhatsApp because it is owned by Facebook (Which is weird because she uses Facebook all the time). For her, knowing that cell phone company employees can grab text messages is enough for her to switch to something that is secure.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago>How would this other method make it hard/expensive/infeasible for a malicious company to produce 100M accounts to cause problems with spamming, DoS, and related issues? Phone numbers are finite, cheap, but not zero cost. If sending a spam email cost $0.01 much of spam would disappear. complex captcha and/or expensive PoW. and an option to use a phone number instead >How would this other method protect a user's social network without having to upload that meta data in signal? Currently this is handled by a user's address book hosted outside of signal. How many users would you lose if you required some key exchange in person? store it on the server, encrypted by the client. jesus.
- THENATHE 4y agoI’ve always thought it is dumb for the same reason i think WhatsApp is dumb. In Latin America, WhatsApp exists as a way for people to message each other without paying per text, which is very much still a thing down there. In the US, we get all of our everything unlimited, so we don’t need a wacky app to send texts without paying more money. But why then do you even need a phone number to use WhatsApp? If it is a texting and calling service that is used to circumvent carrier fees, and is almost exclusively used on WiFi (because data is even more expensive than texts), why not just let them make an account and not use the phone number? That way they don’t have to pay a secondary company to use WhatsApp…
- sliken 4y agoSo you generate a handle, maybe even a key pair and upload the public half to a server. Then someone you know joins next week and does the same. How do you find each other? If it's feasible for an end user, say 30 seconds of a phone's CPU, you can be sure that a spammer could generate millions.
- throw10920 4y ago> How do you find each other? You don't, because that's something that's fundamentally impossible to do in a privacy-preserving way - no way around it. > If it's feasible for an end user, say 30 seconds of a phone's CPU, you can be sure that a spammer could generate millions. You're picking overly conservative numbers for "feasible". Choose parameters such that it takes something like half an hour on a phone. Inconvenient? Yes, but privacy is inconvenient in general. And yes, a spammer will still be able to generate lots of these fake identities, but now the cost is much higher, while the expected profit is roughly the same - and that's how you defeat spam.
- Rygian 4y agoSimply limit incoming traffic to users you've whitelisted yourself. Problem solved.
- layer8 4y agoThreema only requires an anonymous ID (and has done so for many years), so somehow it must be manageable. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Threema&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Threema&sort=byPopularity&type...
- godelski 4y agoDon't they store IDs on the server?
- layer8 4y agoNot sure what you’re getting at?
- sliken 4y agoRight, but they charge, which connects to your identity just like a sim does.
- layer8 4y agoIt’a one-time charge through the app store and unrelated to the Threema ID. You pay for the app, not for the ID. Threema doesn’t receive any PII about you.
- palata 4y agoAsk them how many users choose to sync their contacts :). I did.