6 ms·

Since there’s no server storing media, consider saving the stuff you want and dumping all the old photos and video you don’t. It’s a more secure communication t

by adfm 4y ago

Since there’s no server storing media, consider saving the stuff you want and dumping all the old photos and video you don’t. It’s a more secure communication tool, not an archive.

Y-bar 4y ago
Yeah, that would be nice. But an export-import. Or any backup function whatsoever is sorely missing on iOS.
xeromal 4y ago
People usually want both and that's what causes most people to ignore good tools.
- cassonmars 4y ago
  Doing so comes at a cost to privacy — by signal having a hosting server, even if the contents are E2EE, retrieving and storing these contents creates a metadata trail. I actually go over these drawbacks and tradeoffs in a recent blog post: https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    Who said anything about a hosting server? Why isn't there a simple option to export a conversation to local storage, encrypted or unencrypted, along with a warning that 'your conversation is now leaving the secure Signal zone.'
    - cassonmars 4y ago
      For starters, signal retains a conversation for the length of time you grant. That can be indefinite. The way it is retained is in a local storage database. It is intentionally guarded against export (although this is somewhat unavoidable with backup features on phones), so as to avoid companies like Cellebrite making it easy for LE to overstep their bounds and pull the message database when they take your phone. If you want some kind of export interface, your best option is a screenshot — signal does not take any action that threatens the mutual security between parties as explicitly agreed.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        I don't want to be handcuffed for my own security, thanks. An export facility has little bearing on the integrity of my communications since a counterparty could simply have their phone taken over if they forgot to set a PIN or gave the PIN up to law enforcement. A warning that the exported data can no longer be considered secure (just like when I save a file or photo) is sufficient. Meanwhile if my counterparty and I have communications in Signal that we want to preserve at scale, it's impossible to do so. A simple example would be that I have years' worth of conversations with my wife that I can't easily back up any where. We could export every picture and video by hand and screenshot or copy the text of every message, but that would be extremely time-consuming and tedious. That's the basic problem. The data is already only semi-secure in that it's subject to exfiltration without consent. It's just inconvenient. And where parties do consent, it's very inconvenient because it's many many hours of work; in the end, it's just more security theater.
    - chopin 4y ago
      It's not only your conversation but the one of others too. I like that it's hard to move it elsewhere.
      - daedalus_j 4y ago
        If you don't trust the other end then disappearing messages should be used, simple. This is one of the problems with Signal having a bit of confusion about what exactly it's use-case is. There are plenty of cases where locking down the ability to save/view/export messages are valuable, and Signal provides tools to be able to do that. Making that the mandatory case though means that it's harder to adopt as a general-purpose communication platform. The need to decide if the goal is still to get as many people off of SMS/facebook-messenger as possible, or if the goal is to provide extreme security to dissidents and protestors, or if they're going to spend the effort to be able to do both effectively and let you choose which conversations or messages get which level of protection.
      - anigbrowl 4y ago
        But I could just screenshot all of it, and you'd never know. There's a setting to prevent screenshots, but no way to tell if other persons have it enabled or when their setting change. It's like when Signal asks you to put in your PIN, but it's the same PIN you use to unlock your phone. There's a different Signal PIN, but that functions as a check for when you install Signal on a new device. Your regular PIN is just a repeat of your phone PIN, and thus adds exactly zero security.
- godelski 4y ago
  Signal is in a weird place where they can do no right by users. It's a team of like 25 developers building extremely complex software criticized by people that don't understand security and trivialize everything. Reddit has a lot of evangelists that can't even program. Their community forums are a dumpster fire where users act like "my way or the world is going to end" (see the current username discussion. Most people are fair but you see[0]). Anything they say on Twitter gets spammed with questions about usernames by people that can't be bothered to see that it is in alpha testing and available for custom builds. And on HN everyone criticizes Signal and compares it to Matrix which is always better for every single purpose. I do like Signal and I think they have done a lot of good. I do think they have a lot of valid criticism against them but also I think a lot of people aren't providing useful criticism (it is a shame that's happening here, on a forum that should be filled with tech experts). People also aren't realistic. A 25 person team working at a non-profit aren't going to have the same development capacity as a 250 person team. [0] (maybe go to the bottom) https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157 https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157
  - chaxor 4y ago
    What do you "Matrix is always better for every single purpose"? Are you saying that you really believe that, or characterizing others as saying that wrongly? I don't know much about either, but I thought both had somewhat new (less-tested) encryption algos (one is 'double-ratchet' or something? that recently has shown security vulnerabilities?)
    - godelski 4y ago
      I'm saying that people put Matrix/Element in competition with Signal. These used to be dominating voices here. I do think the Matrix == Slack and Signal == Text philosophy has become more prominent now (the philosophy I prescribe to). But there are also major discussions about decentralization and users would suggest Matrix was more secure because of that even though at the time group chats were not encrypted (they are now) and E2EE was not enabled by default. These are purely my observations of the discourse around Signal and should not be taken as a universal truth. Only my subjective reality. I'm not aware of any major vulnerabilities in Matrix (but I'm not following) closely. I'm also not aware of any in Signal, which I know is frequently audited. There is an SGX attack, but it is often blown out of proportion (highly technical attack that requires an unlocked phone to be in the physical hands of the attacker).
daedalus_j 4y ago
I'd take a decent "export my chats" option. I have chat history that goes back years that it's often convenient to be able to search. I'd love to be able to move it off the device, but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger and larger. To be clear, Signal allows you to backup and restore back into Signal on android, which is great. What I meant is that it would be helpful to be able to export that content out of signal and keep an accessible searchable archive off of the device.
- godelski 4y ago
  > I have chat history that goes back years that it's often convenient to be able to search. > but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger and larger... One begets the other. > I'd love to be able to move it off the device If you don't want infinite history, set a conversation length limit. It is in the storage settings. If you want to backup messages on iOS go complain here[0]. For Android, you already have this ability. [0]https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-message-history-when-switching-phones/1736/182 https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
  - daedalus_j 4y ago
    If I set a conversation length limit though it prevents my ability to search back through my history, which is the feature I'd like to preserve. I value that history, it's useful to me. My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS, ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Keep my history, keep the on-device space nice and small. I take advantage of the Android backup feature, and the backup syncs over to my NAS via SyncThing automatically, but that's only useful for restoring a brand new phone up to the latest state.
    - godelski 4y ago
      > My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this? > ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client? IIRC it is just reading from a file structure. I don't see why a small script couldn't resolve this. Obviously you wouldn't be able to search on your phone, but you said you didn't want that data on your phone anyways. If you did want to search on your phone from your computer's storage, I think you're asking way too much of them (and in danger of asking them to store data for you, which they never will do). But this is hacker news, and I don't see why you can't hack together that tool in a weekend. Probably just a few beers on a Friday is enough for it tbh.
andrepd 4y ago
Precisely! So just give me an option to export my stuff to a password-protected archive. Make me check a "yes I'm fully aware that this means I am now responsible for the security of this information" if you want. But Signal doesn't let me do this.
Waterluvian 4y ago
How do I dump all the old photos and videos? Because the in-app option to clear them all does not free the space.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Except that they make it a pain in the ass to save the stuff you want, because there isn't an easy 'export conversation' function. You can archive conversations so that old ones don't clutter up your chat list, but the only thing you can do with an archived conversation is...un-archive it. It has literally zero utility. Your only way of saving things is to either manually save every picture and video, or manually highlight and copy the text in your conversations. The latter defeats any security arguments (other than of inconvenience) but also throws away useful information like timestamps of messages. My Signal database takes up many GB on my phone, and it's constantly complaining about running out of space. Much of this is the years-long record of conversations with my wife. I'd like to back these up, but I can't. Are you gonna tell me that I shouldn't be using a secure messaging app to communicate with my own family members?
dangus 4y ago
How? I’m looking for a “delete all messages over X days old” option. Not “delete all my chats/delete an entire thread.”
- jay3ss 4y ago
  On Android: Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep messages then choose from the listed options
  - dangus 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the option isn’t available on iOS, unless it’s hiding somewhere else.
rjzzleep 4y ago
Telegram has huge amounts of video and audio data but they allow you to easily select and remove the cache for certain chats or sections of chats. It's a UX decision that Signal could "easily" copy.

by adfm 4y ago

Since there’s no server storing media, consider saving the stuff you want and dumping all the old photos and video you don’t. It’s a more secure communication tool, not an archive.

Y-bar 4y ago

Yeah, that would be nice. But an export-import. Or any backup function whatsoever is sorely missing on iOS.

xeromal 4y ago

People usually want both and that's what causes most people to ignore good tools.

cassonmars 4y ago
Doing so comes at a cost to privacy — by signal having a hosting server, even if the contents are E2EE, retrieving and storing these contents creates a metadata trail. I actually go over these drawbacks and tradeoffs in a recent blog post: https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee https://cassieheart.substack.com/p/notes-on-e2ee
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Who said anything about a hosting server? Why isn't there a simple option to export a conversation to local storage, encrypted or unencrypted, along with a warning that 'your conversation is now leaving the secure Signal zone.'
  - cassonmars 4y ago
    For starters, signal retains a conversation for the length of time you grant. That can be indefinite. The way it is retained is in a local storage database. It is intentionally guarded against export (although this is somewhat unavoidable with backup features on phones), so as to avoid companies like Cellebrite making it easy for LE to overstep their bounds and pull the message database when they take your phone. If you want some kind of export interface, your best option is a screenshot — signal does not take any action that threatens the mutual security between parties as explicitly agreed.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      I don't want to be handcuffed for my own security, thanks. An export facility has little bearing on the integrity of my communications since a counterparty could simply have their phone taken over if they forgot to set a PIN or gave the PIN up to law enforcement. A warning that the exported data can no longer be considered secure (just like when I save a file or photo) is sufficient. Meanwhile if my counterparty and I have communications in Signal that we want to preserve at scale, it's impossible to do so. A simple example would be that I have years' worth of conversations with my wife that I can't easily back up any where. We could export every picture and video by hand and screenshot or copy the text of every message, but that would be extremely time-consuming and tedious. That's the basic problem. The data is already only semi-secure in that it's subject to exfiltration without consent. It's just inconvenient. And where parties do consent, it's very inconvenient because it's many many hours of work; in the end, it's just more security theater.
  - chopin 4y ago
    It's not only your conversation but the one of others too. I like that it's hard to move it elsewhere.
    - daedalus_j 4y ago
      If you don't trust the other end then disappearing messages should be used, simple. This is one of the problems with Signal having a bit of confusion about what exactly it's use-case is. There are plenty of cases where locking down the ability to save/view/export messages are valuable, and Signal provides tools to be able to do that. Making that the mandatory case though means that it's harder to adopt as a general-purpose communication platform. The need to decide if the goal is still to get as many people off of SMS/facebook-messenger as possible, or if the goal is to provide extreme security to dissidents and protestors, or if they're going to spend the effort to be able to do both effectively and let you choose which conversations or messages get which level of protection.
    - anigbrowl 4y ago
      But I could just screenshot all of it, and you'd never know. There's a setting to prevent screenshots, but no way to tell if other persons have it enabled or when their setting change. It's like when Signal asks you to put in your PIN, but it's the same PIN you use to unlock your phone. There's a different Signal PIN, but that functions as a check for when you install Signal on a new device. Your regular PIN is just a repeat of your phone PIN, and thus adds exactly zero security.
godelski 4y ago
Signal is in a weird place where they can do no right by users. It's a team of like 25 developers building extremely complex software criticized by people that don't understand security and trivialize everything. Reddit has a lot of evangelists that can't even program. Their community forums are a dumpster fire where users act like "my way or the world is going to end" (see the current username discussion. Most people are fair but you see[0]). Anything they say on Twitter gets spammed with questions about usernames by people that can't be bothered to see that it is in alpha testing and available for custom builds. And on HN everyone criticizes Signal and compares it to Matrix which is always better for every single purpose. I do like Signal and I think they have done a lot of good. I do think they have a lot of valid criticism against them but also I think a lot of people aren't providing useful criticism (it is a shame that's happening here, on a forum that should be filled with tech experts). People also aren't realistic. A 25 person team working at a non-profit aren't going to have the same development capacity as a 250 person team. [0] (maybe go to the bottom) https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157 https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157
- chaxor 4y ago
  What do you "Matrix is always better for every single purpose"? Are you saying that you really believe that, or characterizing others as saying that wrongly? I don't know much about either, but I thought both had somewhat new (less-tested) encryption algos (one is 'double-ratchet' or something? that recently has shown security vulnerabilities?)
  - godelski 4y ago
    I'm saying that people put Matrix/Element in competition with Signal. These used to be dominating voices here. I do think the Matrix == Slack and Signal == Text philosophy has become more prominent now (the philosophy I prescribe to). But there are also major discussions about decentralization and users would suggest Matrix was more secure because of that even though at the time group chats were not encrypted (they are now) and E2EE was not enabled by default. These are purely my observations of the discourse around Signal and should not be taken as a universal truth. Only my subjective reality. I'm not aware of any major vulnerabilities in Matrix (but I'm not following) closely. I'm also not aware of any in Signal, which I know is frequently audited. There is an SGX attack, but it is often blown out of proportion (highly technical attack that requires an unlocked phone to be in the physical hands of the attacker).

daedalus_j 4y ago

I'd take a decent "export my chats" option. I have chat history that goes back years that it's often convenient to be able to search. I'd love to be able to move it off the device, but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger and larger. To be clear, Signal allows you to backup and restore back into Signal on android, which is great. What I meant is that it would be helpful to be able to export that content out of signal and keep an accessible searchable archive off of the device.

godelski 4y ago
> I have chat history that goes back years that it's often convenient to be able to search. > but instead the Signal backup just keeps getting larger and larger... One begets the other. > I'd love to be able to move it off the device If you don't want infinite history, set a conversation length limit. It is in the storage settings. If you want to backup messages on iOS go complain here[0]. For Android, you already have this ability. [0]https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-message-history-when-switching-phones/1736/182 https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
- daedalus_j 4y ago
  If I set a conversation length limit though it prevents my ability to search back through my history, which is the feature I'd like to preserve. I value that history, it's useful to me. My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS, ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Keep my history, keep the on-device space nice and small. I take advantage of the Android backup feature, and the backup syncs over to my NAS via SyncThing automatically, but that's only useful for restoring a brand new phone up to the latest state.
  - godelski 4y ago
    > My ideal solution would be to export any message older than a month to an archive on my NAS I'm confused at what is stopping you from doing this? > ideally in a format that the app could search on request. Are you not able to import these backups into the desktop client? IIRC it is just reading from a file structure. I don't see why a small script couldn't resolve this. Obviously you wouldn't be able to search on your phone, but you said you didn't want that data on your phone anyways. If you did want to search on your phone from your computer's storage, I think you're asking way too much of them (and in danger of asking them to store data for you, which they never will do). But this is hacker news, and I don't see why you can't hack together that tool in a weekend. Probably just a few beers on a Friday is enough for it tbh.

andrepd 4y ago

Precisely! So just give me an option to export my stuff to a password-protected archive. Make me check a "yes I'm fully aware that this means I am now responsible for the security of this information" if you want. But Signal doesn't let me do this.

Waterluvian 4y ago

How do I dump all the old photos and videos? Because the in-app option to clear them all does not free the space.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Except that they make it a pain in the ass to save the stuff you want, because there isn't an easy 'export conversation' function. You can archive conversations so that old ones don't clutter up your chat list, but the only thing you can do with an archived conversation is...un-archive it. It has literally zero utility. Your only way of saving things is to either manually save every picture and video, or manually highlight and copy the text in your conversations. The latter defeats any security arguments (other than of inconvenience) but also throws away useful information like timestamps of messages. My Signal database takes up many GB on my phone, and it's constantly complaining about running out of space. Much of this is the years-long record of conversations with my wife. I'd like to back these up, but I can't. Are you gonna tell me that I shouldn't be using a secure messaging app to communicate with my own family members?

dangus 4y ago

How? I’m looking for a “delete all messages over X days old” option. Not “delete all my chats/delete an entire thread.”

jay3ss 4y ago
On Android: Settings > Data and storage > Manage storage > Keep messages then choose from the listed options
- dangus 4y ago
  Unfortunately, the option isn’t available on iOS, unless it’s hiding somewhere else.

rjzzleep 4y ago

Telegram has huge amounts of video and audio data but they allow you to easily select and remove the cache for certain chats or sections of chats. It's a UX decision that Signal could "easily" copy.