10 ms·

Encryption is just a tip of the iceberg here. There are several major problems with Signal: - it is not that private after all since it requires a phone numbe

by nrvn 4y ago

Encryption is just a tip of the iceberg here. There are several major problems with Signal: - it is not that private after all since it requires a phone number. Yes, you can override this by using some virtual throwaway number if you are geeky enough but your account will be associated with this phone number anyways. - as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots fanning out messages to phone numbers. You can’t restrict your social circle to allow only chosen people or let’s say people only from your contact list to message you. - Signal protocol is probably great from the e2ee perspective but it is not federated and unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it. - Since the end product is not a protocol or a framework or a platform it is a product that is run by other people who you can only trust albeit you can verify and audit source code by yourself(or by hiring someone to do it on your behalf). And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run has been built from the source code you have audited. - Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. This leads to introducing workarounds like this https://signal.org/blog/run-a-proxy/ https://signal.org/blog/run-a-proxy/ to help people circumvent limitations in affected regions and territories.

nicce 4y ago
The solutions for the most of the issues you are describing comes with great usability costs. It is already hard to make non-tech people to switch from WhatsApp.
- jakecopp 4y ago
  > The solutions for the most of the issues you are describing comes with great usability costs. What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly! https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/ https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/ It really is just as easy to onboard to Element as Signal these days, the UX has come a long way. And you'll never have the move them again, because you can choose any client you like.
  - nicce 4y ago
    > What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly! Matrix is a great example where you need that one tech guy to create home server. Otherwise nobody of your friend group can use it as intended to.
    - jakecopp 4y ago
      It's easy to use the free server at matrix.org. For $5/month you can get a hosted server from EMS with optional bridges to Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp. Or another paid provider: https://matrix.org/hosting/ https://matrix.org/hosting/
      - nicce 4y ago
        Try to convince non-technial users to pay for something they already use for free… They don’t understand the benefits.
        fauigerzigerk 4y ago
        But why would you need to convince them? There's nothing wrong with using a free matrix.org account unless and until you do understand the benefits of using something else. The good thing about having the federated protocol is that people can use different providers and change providers without destroying the network effects. It's perfectly fine if most people end up using one of very few big providers as long as all providers support federation. I think we have to make a distinction between personal communication and mass communication. The former is a question of privacy. The latter is a question of political freedoms.
  - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
    That's very good to hear. I use Element a lot, but I found it very difficult to get non-technical friends and family to use it. A better onboarding experience is a real step in the right direction. Another constant stumbling block is this whole "verify session" business. No one understands what it means. I understand technically what it does but I can't explain why it is so important that it keeps popping up all the time. It creates a constant sense of "something isn't right here but I don't know what to do". I hope this was fixed as well.
- yeoldereason 4y ago
  How come, signal works exactly the same as whatsapp. I forced my friends and (older) relatives to change to signal and there has been no problems and everyone is happy.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Network effects and minor UX issues. “VERIFY PIN NOW” pop-up every week for example.
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      I love that feature
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    > How come, signal works exactly the same as whatsapp. I think right there is a powerful impediment. It's not compelling to switch for most, especially when people they know are still on whatsapp.
ignoramous 4y ago
> ...your account will be associated with this phone number anyways. Messages exchanged in Signal are repudiable. That said, in a recent blog post Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on. > ...unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it. Signal is a better alternative for the likes of PGP because it is centralized [0]. Spam notwithstanding, Matrix has made good of the federation model, however. So that's there too. > And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run... Valid but shallow. Case in point: Public CAs, though held to accountability by browsers, are no where near as transparent as Signal is, and yet they form the backbone of almost all sensitive communication on the Interwebs. > Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. This is the only major concern, but glad that Matrix exists, and so do other solutions. May be it isn't Signal's battle to fight. May be it is, and they'll figure something else out aside from building naive TLS proxies. [0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- mi_lk 4y ago
  > Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on. no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bilal4hmed 4y ago
    In the most recent beta they have enabled the backend infrastructure for usernames
  - em-bee 4y ago
    i think SMS support was part of the reason they could not do it before, since usernames would break that feature. removing SMS makes this a non-issue. the phone number is now just an arbitrary ID string which can be replaced by any other
drcongo 4y ago
I've never had a spam message on Signal in all the years I've been using it.
- popol12 4y ago
  Neither did I until a few months ago, had like 1 spam per week for about 2 months. Then it stopped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
jwr 4y ago
Also: - There is no way to back up your message history (with photos, etc). This could be done using their (annoyingly pushed to users) "PIN", but isn't. Few people realize that if your phone dies today, your history is GONE. From what I saw, once people do realize this, it's game over for Signal. WhatsApp is just easier, "everybody is there", and it does back up your history. EDIT: Yes, it's on iOS. Yes, I realize this might not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of people. And if Signal tries to "bring privacy to the masses", this needs to be fixed. I've seen multiple people stop using Signal after losing all their data.
- flipbrad 4y ago
  I do off-device Signal backups all the time, and have successfully restored.
  - dcormier 4y ago
    You have on Android, but not iOS.
- yeoldereason 4y ago
  I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Nor do any of my friends. One of the selling points of signal is the feature that it doesn't automatically save photos, this is a good feature. You manually save the photos you want to save. And I thought people regularly backed up everything worth saving from phones to non phone archive anyway.
  - JoshTriplett 4y ago
    > I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Every single time this comes up, someone chimes in saying they don't need it. That does not invalidate the users who do need it. If I can't keep my messages from device to device, I'm not going to use Signal. With far more manual effort than should be required, I can move my messages from Android device to Android device, if the old device is still functional. That's still not fully sufficient; I need a reliable automatic (encrypted) backup solution.
Barrin92 4y ago
>it is a product that is run by other people[...]Since it is centralized so are federated instances in reality because the vast majority of people are going to be on some popular node by virtue of how communication networks organize. And I'd rather trust Signal than having to trust some server in a guy's basement who I can only pray has a reasonable security setup, and is going to fold ten times more quickly to a court order than a foundation with a 50 million dollar check and nice lawyers.
Eumenes 4y ago
If you care about privacy, stop using your phone and any app. There, problem solved.
osigurdson 4y ago
>> Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. Yes, this. It might be "fighting for privacy" now, but they can change their mind at any point. With new management, eventual profit seeking, government coercion, etc, this could change with a simple app update. It is more likely to me that it remains private because it isn't particularly successful. I find a lot of people have it but rarely use it. It also isn't clear to me what is in it for donors such as EM. It is much easier to trust a system with correctly designed incentive structures.
hiq 4y ago
Your "major problems" are fair, but nothing's perfect, so unless you have a better solution with the same design constraints (e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#development-ideology https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/CONTRI...), they are rather moot, because they're not actionable. That being said: > - it is not that private after all since it requires a phone number. Yes, you can override this by using some virtual throwaway number if you are geeky enough but your account will be associated with this phone number anyways. You still leak very little because of their sealed sender feature. If you allow arbitrary usernames, you need to bootstrap your trusted channel from no assumption instead of a weak one (if I receive a message from @barack_obama for the first time, I have no clue if it's actually someone I know, while a message from @+1235312 indicates that the sender at least had access to this number at some point to register). All solutions have tradeoffs. > - as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots fanning out messages to phone numbers. There's very little spam now on Signal (I think I've had 2 spam messages in about 4 years). At one point there was a bit, but server-side measures are now preventing that. You can't really have no spam at all as long as you have a common id that's shared among your contacts, which is the case most of the time for usability, as any of these contacts can leak this id somehow. > - Signal protocol is probably great from the e2ee perspective but it is not federated and unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it. Signal's approach is that you shouldn't care about the server. Why do you? > And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run has been built from the source code you have audited. You can do that on the client code, which is reproducible, and again mostly what you should care about. > - Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. I'd say that their reliance on phone numbers is the main issue with censorship: if new users can't receive their registration text message, they cannot register. AFAICT people in censored countries still rely on WhatsApp, Signal and similar messengers instead of more niche but more decentralized alternatives like Tox. Again, however bad their current approach might be, it's a moot point until there's something that works better in practice.
notfed 4y ago
> requires a phone number ... as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots Weird take. Can you imagine the number of bots if it didn't require a phone number?

by nrvn 4y ago

nicce 4y ago

The solutions for the most of the issues you are describing comes with great usability costs. It is already hard to make non-tech people to switch from WhatsApp.

jakecopp 4y ago
> The solutions for the most of the issues you are describing comes with great usability costs. What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly! https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/ https://element.io/blog/all-aboard-better-ftue-for-less-wtf/ It really is just as easy to onboard to Element as Signal these days, the UX has come a long way. And you'll never have the move them again, because you can choose any client you like.
- nicce 4y ago
  > What costs? Element (a popular Matrix client) has recently improved their onboarding greatly! Matrix is a great example where you need that one tech guy to create home server. Otherwise nobody of your friend group can use it as intended to.
  - jakecopp 4y ago
    It's easy to use the free server at matrix.org. For $5/month you can get a hosted server from EMS with optional bridges to Signal/Telegram/WhatsApp. Or another paid provider: https://matrix.org/hosting/ https://matrix.org/hosting/
    - nicce 4y ago
      Try to convince non-technial users to pay for something they already use for free… They don’t understand the benefits.
      - fauigerzigerk 4y ago
        But why would you need to convince them? There's nothing wrong with using a free matrix.org account unless and until you do understand the benefits of using something else. The good thing about having the federated protocol is that people can use different providers and change providers without destroying the network effects. It's perfectly fine if most people end up using one of very few big providers as long as all providers support federation. I think we have to make a distinction between personal communication and mass communication. The former is a question of privacy. The latter is a question of political freedoms.
- fauigerzigerk 4y ago
  That's very good to hear. I use Element a lot, but I found it very difficult to get non-technical friends and family to use it. A better onboarding experience is a real step in the right direction. Another constant stumbling block is this whole "verify session" business. No one understands what it means. I understand technically what it does but I can't explain why it is so important that it keeps popping up all the time. It creates a constant sense of "something isn't right here but I don't know what to do". I hope this was fixed as well.
yeoldereason 4y ago
How come, signal works exactly the same as whatsapp. I forced my friends and (older) relatives to change to signal and there has been no problems and everyone is happy.
- dijit 4y ago
  Network effects and minor UX issues. “VERIFY PIN NOW” pop-up every week for example.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    I love that feature
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  > How come, signal works exactly the same as whatsapp. I think right there is a powerful impediment. It's not compelling to switch for most, especially when people they know are still on whatsapp.

ignoramous 4y ago

> ...your account will be associated with this phone number anyways. Messages exchanged in Signal are repudiable. That said, in a recent blog post Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on. > ...unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it. Signal is a better alternative for the likes of PGP because it is centralized [0]. Spam notwithstanding, Matrix has made good of the federation model, however. So that's there too. > And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run... Valid but shallow. Case in point: Public CAs, though held to accountability by browsers, are no where near as transparent as Signal is, and yet they form the backbone of almost all sensitive communication on the Interwebs. > Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. This is the only major concern, but glad that Matrix exists, and so do other solutions. May be it isn't Signal's battle to fight. May be it is, and they'll figure something else out aside from building naive TLS proxies. [0] https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

mi_lk 4y ago
> Signal indicated that arbitrary usernames is something they're working on. no offense but they've been saying this for years, the feature may eventually come but I'm not holding my breath
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bilal4hmed 4y ago
  In the most recent beta they have enabled the backend infrastructure for usernames
- em-bee 4y ago
  i think SMS support was part of the reason they could not do it before, since usernames would break that feature. removing SMS makes this a non-issue. the phone number is now just an arbitrary ID string which can be replaced by any other

drcongo 4y ago

I've never had a spam message on Signal in all the years I've been using it.

popol12 4y ago
Neither did I until a few months ago, had like 1 spam per week for about 2 months. Then it stopped ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jwr 4y ago

Also: - There is no way to back up your message history (with photos, etc). This could be done using their (annoyingly pushed to users) "PIN", but isn't. Few people realize that if your phone dies today, your history is GONE. From what I saw, once people do realize this, it's game over for Signal. WhatsApp is just easier, "everybody is there", and it does back up your history. EDIT: Yes, it's on iOS. Yes, I realize this might not matter to you, but it matters to a lot of people. And if Signal tries to "bring privacy to the masses", this needs to be fixed. I've seen multiple people stop using Signal after losing all their data.

flipbrad 4y ago
I do off-device Signal backups all the time, and have successfully restored.
- dcormier 4y ago
  You have on Android, but not iOS.
yeoldereason 4y ago
I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Nor do any of my friends. One of the selling points of signal is the feature that it doesn't automatically save photos, this is a good feature. You manually save the photos you want to save. And I thought people regularly backed up everything worth saving from phones to non phone archive anyway.
- JoshTriplett 4y ago
  > I see no reason to back-up my history ever. I don't use signal for anything that needs to be archived. Every single time this comes up, someone chimes in saying they don't need it. That does not invalidate the users who do need it. If I can't keep my messages from device to device, I'm not going to use Signal. With far more manual effort than should be required, I can move my messages from Android device to Android device, if the old device is still functional. That's still not fully sufficient; I need a reliable automatic (encrypted) backup solution.

Barrin92 4y ago

>it is a product that is run by other people[...]Since it is centralized so are federated instances in reality because the vast majority of people are going to be on some popular node by virtue of how communication networks organize. And I'd rather trust Signal than having to trust some server in a guy's basement who I can only pray has a reasonable security setup, and is going to fold ten times more quickly to a court order than a foundation with a 50 million dollar check and nice lawyers.

Eumenes 4y ago

If you care about privacy, stop using your phone and any app. There, problem solved.

osigurdson 4y ago

>> Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. Yes, this. It might be "fighting for privacy" now, but they can change their mind at any point. With new management, eventual profit seeking, government coercion, etc, this could change with a simple app update. It is more likely to me that it remains private because it isn't particularly successful. I find a lot of people have it but rarely use it. It also isn't clear to me what is in it for donors such as EM. It is much easier to trust a system with correctly designed incentive structures.

hiq 4y ago

Your "major problems" are fair, but nothing's perfect, so unless you have a better solution with the same design constraints (e.g. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#development-ideology https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/CONTRI...), they are rather moot, because they're not actionable. That being said: > - it is not that private after all since it requires a phone number. Yes, you can override this by using some virtual throwaway number if you are geeky enough but your account will be associated with this phone number anyways. You still leak very little because of their sealed sender feature. If you allow arbitrary usernames, you need to bootstrap your trusted channel from no assumption instead of a weak one (if I receive a message from @barack_obama for the first time, I have no clue if it's actually someone I know, while a message from @+1235312 indicates that the sender at least had access to this number at some point to register). All solutions have tradeoffs. > - as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots fanning out messages to phone numbers. There's very little spam now on Signal (I think I've had 2 spam messages in about 4 years). At one point there was a bit, but server-side measures are now preventing that. You can't really have no spam at all as long as you have a common id that's shared among your contacts, which is the case most of the time for usability, as any of these contacts can leak this id somehow. > - Signal protocol is probably great from the e2ee perspective but it is not federated and unlike XMPP you cannot spin up your own server and have full control over it. Signal's approach is that you shouldn't care about the server. Why do you? > And I am sure you cannot run an end-to-end audit of the whole Signal platform to verify that what they actually run has been built from the source code you have audited. You can do that on the client code, which is reproducible, and again mostly what you should care about. > - Since it is centralized, Signal is prone to censorship in those countries that decide to fight it. I'd say that their reliance on phone numbers is the main issue with censorship: if new users can't receive their registration text message, they cannot register. AFAICT people in censored countries still rely on WhatsApp, Signal and similar messengers instead of more niche but more decentralized alternatives like Tox. Again, however bad their current approach might be, it's a moot point until there's something that works better in practice.

notfed 4y ago

> requires a phone number ... as a consequence you _will_ receive spam from bots Weird take. Can you imagine the number of bots if it didn't require a phone number?