8 ms·

Losing Signal

100 points by simongray 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gavinhoward 4y ago
This post was the last straw for me. I'll be moving myself and my wife off of Signal for our family messaging.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Over a bug? What will you me moving off to? I feel like there isn't anything that's better in terms of privacy and still accessible enough to be explained to parents and even grandparents. Does signal reliance on phone numbers, crypto garbage, SMS removal all suck for some people? Totally. But what else is there? Matrix? The fediverse? I don't know.
  - gavinhoward 4y ago
    I will be running a Matrix homeserver from a server I control.
  - Syonyk 4y ago
    > Matrix Yup. And it has first party support for bridges so that you can continue to mostly interoperate with other systems without too much hassle, should you care to go that route. I've got my Matrix homeserver running with various bridges to Signal, Google, Facebook, etc, and while I talk to people "Matrix native" if I can, I'm also not actively locking myself out of other systems. Yet...
barbazoo 4y ago
> I hate captcha. I consider the premises of captcha completely broken, stupid and an insult to all the people with disabilities. But those were the worst I had ever seen. I was asked to look on microscopic blurry pictures, obviously generated by AI, and to select only "fast cars" or "cows in their natural habitat" or "t-shirt for dogs" or "people playing soccer". I wholeheartedly agree. I think I have pretty good vision and fine cognitive abilities I'd say but over and over again I find myself unable to correctly enter the alphanumeric characters shown to me as part of those "are you human?" flows. It's very frustrating.
- extr0pian 4y ago
  The most obnoxious and frustrating captchas are the ones that make you count the dice and to choose the image with the dice that adds up to a specific number. You're given three images, but if you take too long solving, it gives you 10. I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to log into my Airbnb account. After having to deal with this, I said screw and closed my Airbnb account entirely (for this experience, as well as other reasons). I understand Airbnb is using a 3rd party CAPTCHA system, but trying to solve a math problem seems like something for a computer, not a human.
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  I don't think the captcha algorithm only wants to verify you can complete it accurately either. There are times where it seems like Google's captcha, and now CloudFlare also, have predetermined that you are a bot and they will make you complete challenges indefinitely to no avail. What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway? Mobile nets, Tor, and proxies are pretty much unusable in certain places now.
  - doodlesdev 4y ago
    > What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway? It's all about not letting scrapers or bots know that they have been blocked, similarly to something like always failing SSH attempts after a certain amount of failures to prevent brute-force attacks. By the way I should say I hate CAPTCHA too, not defending the practice.
dijit 4y ago
> What is interesting with corporatish marketing blog posts is how they usually say the exact opposite of what they mean. Signal blog post about differences is exactly that. They acknowledge the fact that there’s no way a single centralised authority could account for all the differences in the world. Then proceed to say they will do. Honestly, this is the truth of it. We are so paid in to the idea that walled gardens are the only way that we forget all the things that actually do federate properly and the ergonomics of those. Imagine not being able to send someone an SMS that was on another provider or phone manufacturer. That's absurd. Yet we put up with exactly that with iMessage/Signal and Whatsapp et al. I don't have any constructive answers, I know that email is the last federated system that didn't suck and.. well, now it sucks. Short of Matrix taking off and having a lot of different servers to choose from I suppose our only real answer is legislation. Why does Signal need to be centralised exactly? OMEMO security protocols used to work perfectly fine with pidgin across dozens of providers. meta: anybody else seeing the "I" merged with the next word in the text?
howinteresting 4y ago
Unlike competitors like iMessage, Signal makes a good faith effort to be available on commonly used platforms. Sucks to be left out. But if I send a message on Signal, I expect the receiving end to uphold some guarantees, such as that it won't be backed up in an unencrypted form on the other side. To me that is by some margin more important than any of the considerations raised in that post. FYI: > Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight Including statements like this makes people take you less seriously. There is no oppression going on here.
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  > I expect the receiving end to uphold some guarantees, such as that it won't be backed up in an unencrypted form on the other side. I am not interested in platforms that allow others to impose DRM on me, no matter how much the platform boasts about freedom and privacy.
  - howinteresting 4y ago
    What in the world are you talking about? It's not DRM if you're given the encryption key.
tptacek 4y ago
People keep writing posts and comments like this that seem premised on the thought that nobody at Signal considered the downsides to centralization, and that they just rejected federation out of spite. If you're reading HN, Signal's design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base. If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that's part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can't have Signal's use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix's use cases. By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal's federation decision is tiresome. "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn't mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.
- gavinhoward 4y ago
  > "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. The Flash letter was vindicated, but I do not see how the Moxie blog post was vindicated. Unless you claim that federated E2EE is impossible, I believe you cannot claim that it has been vindicated. But I could be wrong.
  - pa7ch 4y ago
    Federated E2EE is possible but won't achieve widespread adoption. Signal's choices optimize usability of E2EE messaging for the masses.
thecrash 4y ago
> Like Larry Page and Serguei Brin before him, Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight This hyperbole exposes that the author is out of touch with the real world stakes of mass surveillance which Signal is intended to address. You are not being oppressed because you can't run Signal on a quirky e-ink phone. Signal isn't broken on your phone because the Signal Foundation wants to exploit you, it's broken because building software is hard and sometimes requires pragmatic compromises. Yes, decentralization is an important principle, both technically and politically. It's worth advocating for. But it's not the answer to every question ever.
- soiler 4y ago
  The common criticisms of Signal to me often come down to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, I want a perfectly secure and private messaging app, but Signal is an incredibly important stepping stone in that direction. It's moving the Overton window.
  - izacus 4y ago
    Except that it doesn't seem to be better than existing Whatsapp in any way? They even use the same protocol and it barely made a dent in WhatsApps market share. Outside the small % that rejects Meta... Who is it for and how exactly is it reaching it's objectives?
    - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
      Its for those who reject Meta. No one else. People who want to disconnect from the surveillance-advertisement network of Meta. Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not.
      - warkdarrior 4y ago
        > Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not. Signal does not uses your contacts web elsewhere, that you know of.
forty 4y ago
Having a messaging app that works well and is secure on a bunch of supported platforms is hard. Having a messaging app that works well and is secure on random exotic OSs is even harder. And having a messaging app that works well and is secure with third party software and federation has not yet proven to be feasible AFAIK. Signal seems to have choosen challenge #1 and making a good job at it. I'm not sure they should be blamed for not choosing challenge #2 and even less challenge #3. Now what I really don't understand is why they made signal open source. They clearly don't want third party redistribution/packaging of their software, so they should really have chosen a "source available" licence for code audit, which would have better set expectations
- izacus 4y ago
  For challenge #1 Whatsapp has already achieved that - what does Signal offer to users over that product?
  - _-david-_ 4y ago
    We don't really know that Whatsapp has achieved challenge #1. Regardless, here are two big reasons why Signal is superior. 1. Not owned by Facebook 2. Open Source
rvz 4y ago
Sigh. Just use good ol’ WhatsApp. It just works great.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  You forgot <sarcasm> the sarcasm tags </sarcasm>.
  - izacus 4y ago
    No he's right - Signal is currently a worse copy of Whatsapp that offers almost nothing better than that product. It seems to be outright failing with it's strategy at being better.
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      No, WhatsApp - in the hands of Zuckerberg - can never be better when it comes to the things which matter for those who choose Signal for its privacy-preserving traits. This is why I assume there should be <sarcasm/> tags around the claim of it being better.
      - rvz 4y ago
        > No, WhatsApp - in the hands of Zuckerberg - can never be better when it comes to the things which matter for those who choose Signal for its privacy-preserving traits. It already is better for the 2B+ people that still use WhatsApp over something that is demonstrably worse, hence why little to almost no-one bothered to switch to Signal in the first place. Given that you still need a phone number to use Signal, your privacy is out of the window since it sends that phone number to a third party (Twilio). At this point, you might as well use WhatsApp. Signal is a worse version of WhatsApp.
agambrahma 4y ago
> So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today. IMO if federation could be aligned with "movement", we wouldn't have this issue. Possible comparison here with Urbit.
supermatou 4y ago
Session (https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/) would be a good alternative for someone like the author. No captcha, no SIM/phone no. needed, decentralized protocol. I'd been using Signal for a few years when I discovered Session. Yes, it doesn't have all the nice-to-have features that Signal seems to be adding recently, but it does secure messaging well.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Session... but it does secure messaging well. And it's got the best tag line ever: "Exchange encrypted messages, not metadata". Something like Signal, with this amazingly sad paragraph opening in TFA: "Signal asked for my phone number..." simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline.
  - supermatou 4y ago
    > Something like Signal, with this amazingly sad paragraph opening in TFA: > "Signal asked for my phone number..." > simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline. Plus: you can have the same Session conversations on as many Android devices as you want - something that's impossible with Signal, due to its reliance on a SIM.
rafram 4y ago
> I’m using an Hisense A5 Android phone. OK, but that puts you in the 0.0001th percentile of Signal users. Don't expect them to spend a lot of time debugging issues with your very exotic phone. > Signal is for everyone but you need to answer those idiocy first. It should be noted that I have a very good eyesight. I cannot imagine those with even minor disabilities. Captchas pretty much always have audio alternatives for blind users. > That’s also why I’ve always fought for the right to differences, why I’ve always been utterly frightened by "normalisation". Because I know nobody is immune. Think about it: I’m a white male, cis-gendered, married with children, with a good education, a good situation and no trauma, no disability. I’m mostly playing life with the "easy" setting. Right. And if a bug in the Signal app convinces you that you've finally experienced oppression, you really need to read up on what oppression means.
- omniglottal 4y ago
  Watch out, big brother, for ignoring the fact that this user experience is not from the unique phone, but is about universal for all those not running Google Play Services. Your regurgitation of dogma without having honest context - it's oppressive. Couple questions: how does the audio play without JavaScript? Who serves that? How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no?
  - rafram 4y ago
    > how does the audio play without JavaScript? The HTML <audio> tag. > Who serves that? Whoever serves the captcha. Often that's Google, because they run ReCAPTCHA. > How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no? The bug was fixed immediately. As the blog post says: "The bug was acknoweledged by the developers and fixed promptly."
parentheses 4y ago
Digital stoics should not complain that their stoicism presents hurdles. It’s dissonant. Instead they should revise their stance. Absolute idealism is counterproductive. Either be a digital stoic without complaining that your lifestyle choice limits your access OR have a more average “digital stance” and have no reason to complain.
clnq 4y ago
Sometimes I wonder — is it the internet, or did people overall became much too concerned about minor things in life? In the comments, I see a thread about hating captchas and closing an AirBnB account for it. I see people bashing Signal for being a walled garden, when they are free not to use it. Some are extrapolating political statements from a choice of a company to offer a centralized service, even if the centralized approach is simply enough for their goals. Another commenter says they'll be moving their family off of Signal because of the blog article. The author of the text piece connects white cis privilege to a problem caused by an unusual phone, and talks how a centralized service makes them feel hopeless — a very strong emotion! And HN leans into the conversation even though many people on HN probably have some understanding of how edge case support is de-prioritized in products, and that it's just that. The problems raised by the article and a lot of discussions here feel concerningly neurotic. Have people run out of big problems to address or lost focus? Is it just the internet, or have people in general become more tunnel-visioned on micro-problems and unaware of the broader context? Does this mean that we expect so much comfort in life now that we're becoming deeply affected by such inconsequential inconveniences?
- jfim 4y ago
  I'd wager it's because moderate/pragmatic viewpoints don't really make for interesting discussions. There wouldn't be much interest in "signal doesn't run on my very niche phone but it runs okay on another phone" but "signal developers are the worst because they don't support every possible niche device" attracts attention.
  - clnq 4y ago
    Imagine how much calmer our lives would be, and how much head space we'd have to focus on real, big problems, if we weren't so neurotically outraged by these small issues.
chriscappuccio 4y ago
I had identical problems trying to setup signal on my grapheneos a few days ago

Losing Signal

100 points by simongray 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

gavinhoward 4y ago

This post was the last straw for me. I'll be moving myself and my wife off of Signal for our family messaging.

barbazoo 4y ago
Over a bug? What will you me moving off to? I feel like there isn't anything that's better in terms of privacy and still accessible enough to be explained to parents and even grandparents. Does signal reliance on phone numbers, crypto garbage, SMS removal all suck for some people? Totally. But what else is there? Matrix? The fediverse? I don't know.
- gavinhoward 4y ago
  I will be running a Matrix homeserver from a server I control.
- Syonyk 4y ago
  > Matrix Yup. And it has first party support for bridges so that you can continue to mostly interoperate with other systems without too much hassle, should you care to go that route. I've got my Matrix homeserver running with various bridges to Signal, Google, Facebook, etc, and while I talk to people "Matrix native" if I can, I'm also not actively locking myself out of other systems. Yet...

barbazoo 4y ago

> I hate captcha. I consider the premises of captcha completely broken, stupid and an insult to all the people with disabilities. But those were the worst I had ever seen. I was asked to look on microscopic blurry pictures, obviously generated by AI, and to select only "fast cars" or "cows in their natural habitat" or "t-shirt for dogs" or "people playing soccer". I wholeheartedly agree. I think I have pretty good vision and fine cognitive abilities I'd say but over and over again I find myself unable to correctly enter the alphanumeric characters shown to me as part of those "are you human?" flows. It's very frustrating.

extr0pian 4y ago
The most obnoxious and frustrating captchas are the ones that make you count the dice and to choose the image with the dice that adds up to a specific number. You're given three images, but if you take too long solving, it gives you 10. I spent nearly 30 minutes trying to log into my Airbnb account. After having to deal with this, I said screw and closed my Airbnb account entirely (for this experience, as well as other reasons). I understand Airbnb is using a 3rd party CAPTCHA system, but trying to solve a math problem seems like something for a computer, not a human.
onetimeusename 4y ago
I don't think the captcha algorithm only wants to verify you can complete it accurately either. There are times where it seems like Google's captcha, and now CloudFlare also, have predetermined that you are a bot and they will make you complete challenges indefinitely to no avail. What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway? Mobile nets, Tor, and proxies are pretty much unusable in certain places now.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  > What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway? It's all about not letting scrapers or bots know that they have been blocked, similarly to something like always failing SSH attempts after a certain amount of failures to prevent brute-force attacks. By the way I should say I hate CAPTCHA too, not defending the practice.

dijit 4y ago

> What is interesting with corporatish marketing blog posts is how they usually say the exact opposite of what they mean. Signal blog post about differences is exactly that. They acknowledge the fact that there’s no way a single centralised authority could account for all the differences in the world. Then proceed to say they will do. Honestly, this is the truth of it. We are so paid in to the idea that walled gardens are the only way that we forget all the things that actually do federate properly and the ergonomics of those. Imagine not being able to send someone an SMS that was on another provider or phone manufacturer. That's absurd. Yet we put up with exactly that with iMessage/Signal and Whatsapp et al. I don't have any constructive answers, I know that email is the last federated system that didn't suck and.. well, now it sucks. Short of Matrix taking off and having a lot of different servers to choose from I suppose our only real answer is legislation. Why does Signal need to be centralised exactly? OMEMO security protocols used to work perfectly fine with pidgin across dozens of providers. meta: anybody else seeing the "I" merged with the next word in the text?

howinteresting 4y ago

Unlike competitors like iMessage, Signal makes a good faith effort to be available on commonly used platforms. Sucks to be left out. But if I send a message on Signal, I expect the receiving end to uphold some guarantees, such as that it won't be backed up in an unencrypted form on the other side. To me that is by some margin more important than any of the considerations raised in that post. FYI: > Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight Including statements like this makes people take you less seriously. There is no oppression going on here.

warkdarrior 4y ago
> I expect the receiving end to uphold some guarantees, such as that it won't be backed up in an unencrypted form on the other side. I am not interested in platforms that allow others to impose DRM on me, no matter how much the platform boasts about freedom and privacy.
- howinteresting 4y ago
  What in the world are you talking about? It's not DRM if you're given the encryption key.

tptacek 4y ago

People keep writing posts and comments like this that seem premised on the thought that nobody at Signal considered the downsides to centralization, and that they just rejected federation out of spite. If you're reading HN, Signal's design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base. If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that's part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can't have Signal's use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix's use cases. By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal's federation decision is tiresome. "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn't mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.

gavinhoward 4y ago
> "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. The Flash letter was vindicated, but I do not see how the Moxie blog post was vindicated. Unless you claim that federated E2EE is impossible, I believe you cannot claim that it has been vindicated. But I could be wrong.
- pa7ch 4y ago
  Federated E2EE is possible but won't achieve widespread adoption. Signal's choices optimize usability of E2EE messaging for the masses.

thecrash 4y ago

> Like Larry Page and Serguei Brin before him, Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight This hyperbole exposes that the author is out of touch with the real world stakes of mass surveillance which Signal is intended to address. You are not being oppressed because you can't run Signal on a quirky e-ink phone. Signal isn't broken on your phone because the Signal Foundation wants to exploit you, it's broken because building software is hard and sometimes requires pragmatic compromises. Yes, decentralization is an important principle, both technically and politically. It's worth advocating for. But it's not the answer to every question ever.

soiler 4y ago
The common criticisms of Signal to me often come down to letting perfect be the enemy of good. Yes, I want a perfectly secure and private messaging app, but Signal is an incredibly important stepping stone in that direction. It's moving the Overton window.
- izacus 4y ago
  Except that it doesn't seem to be better than existing Whatsapp in any way? They even use the same protocol and it barely made a dent in WhatsApps market share. Outside the small % that rejects Meta... Who is it for and how exactly is it reaching it's objectives?
  - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    Its for those who reject Meta. No one else. People who want to disconnect from the surveillance-advertisement network of Meta. Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not.
    - warkdarrior 4y ago
      > Remember that Meta likely uses your Whatsapp contacts web for its advertisements elsewhere. Signal does not. Signal does not uses your contacts web elsewhere, that you know of.

forty 4y ago

Having a messaging app that works well and is secure on a bunch of supported platforms is hard. Having a messaging app that works well and is secure on random exotic OSs is even harder. And having a messaging app that works well and is secure with third party software and federation has not yet proven to be feasible AFAIK. Signal seems to have choosen challenge #1 and making a good job at it. I'm not sure they should be blamed for not choosing challenge #2 and even less challenge #3. Now what I really don't understand is why they made signal open source. They clearly don't want third party redistribution/packaging of their software, so they should really have chosen a "source available" licence for code audit, which would have better set expectations

izacus 4y ago
For challenge #1 Whatsapp has already achieved that - what does Signal offer to users over that product?
- _-david-_ 4y ago
  We don't really know that Whatsapp has achieved challenge #1. Regardless, here are two big reasons why Signal is superior. 1. Not owned by Facebook 2. Open Source

rvz 4y ago

Sigh. Just use good ol’ WhatsApp. It just works great.

the_third_wave 4y ago
You forgot <sarcasm> the sarcasm tags </sarcasm>.
- izacus 4y ago
  No he's right - Signal is currently a worse copy of Whatsapp that offers almost nothing better than that product. It seems to be outright failing with it's strategy at being better.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    No, WhatsApp - in the hands of Zuckerberg - can never be better when it comes to the things which matter for those who choose Signal for its privacy-preserving traits. This is why I assume there should be <sarcasm/> tags around the claim of it being better.
    - rvz 4y ago
      > No, WhatsApp - in the hands of Zuckerberg - can never be better when it comes to the things which matter for those who choose Signal for its privacy-preserving traits. It already is better for the 2B+ people that still use WhatsApp over something that is demonstrably worse, hence why little to almost no-one bothered to switch to Signal in the first place. Given that you still need a phone number to use Signal, your privacy is out of the window since it sends that phone number to a third party (Twilio). At this point, you might as well use WhatsApp. Signal is a worse version of WhatsApp.

agambrahma 4y ago

> So long as federation means stasis while centralization means movement, federated protocols are going to have trouble existing in a software climate that demands movement as it does today. IMO if federation could be aligned with "movement", we wouldn't have this issue. Possible comparison here with Urbit.

supermatou 4y ago

Session (https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/) would be a good alternative for someone like the author. No captcha, no SIM/phone no. needed, decentralized protocol. I'd been using Signal for a few years when I discovered Session. Yes, it doesn't have all the nice-to-have features that Signal seems to be adding recently, but it does secure messaging well.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Session... but it does secure messaging well. And it's got the best tag line ever: "Exchange encrypted messages, not metadata". Something like Signal, with this amazingly sad paragraph opening in TFA: "Signal asked for my phone number..." simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline.
- supermatou 4y ago
  > Something like Signal, with this amazingly sad paragraph opening in TFA: > "Signal asked for my phone number..." > simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline. Plus: you can have the same Session conversations on as many Android devices as you want - something that's impossible with Signal, due to its reliance on a SIM.

rafram 4y ago

> I’m using an Hisense A5 Android phone. OK, but that puts you in the 0.0001th percentile of Signal users. Don't expect them to spend a lot of time debugging issues with your very exotic phone. > Signal is for everyone but you need to answer those idiocy first. It should be noted that I have a very good eyesight. I cannot imagine those with even minor disabilities. Captchas pretty much always have audio alternatives for blind users. > That’s also why I’ve always fought for the right to differences, why I’ve always been utterly frightened by "normalisation". Because I know nobody is immune. Think about it: I’m a white male, cis-gendered, married with children, with a good education, a good situation and no trauma, no disability. I’m mostly playing life with the "easy" setting. Right. And if a bug in the Signal app convinces you that you've finally experienced oppression, you really need to read up on what oppression means.

omniglottal 4y ago
Watch out, big brother, for ignoring the fact that this user experience is not from the unique phone, but is about universal for all those not running Google Play Services. Your regurgitation of dogma without having honest context - it's oppressive. Couple questions: how does the audio play without JavaScript? Who serves that? How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no?
- rafram 4y ago
  > how does the audio play without JavaScript? The HTML <audio> tag. > Who serves that? Whoever serves the captcha. Often that's Google, because they run ReCAPTCHA. > How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no? The bug was fixed immediately. As the blog post says: "The bug was acknoweledged by the developers and fixed promptly."

parentheses 4y ago

Digital stoics should not complain that their stoicism presents hurdles. It’s dissonant. Instead they should revise their stance. Absolute idealism is counterproductive. Either be a digital stoic without complaining that your lifestyle choice limits your access OR have a more average “digital stance” and have no reason to complain.

clnq 4y ago

Sometimes I wonder — is it the internet, or did people overall became much too concerned about minor things in life? In the comments, I see a thread about hating captchas and closing an AirBnB account for it. I see people bashing Signal for being a walled garden, when they are free not to use it. Some are extrapolating political statements from a choice of a company to offer a centralized service, even if the centralized approach is simply enough for their goals. Another commenter says they'll be moving their family off of Signal because of the blog article. The author of the text piece connects white cis privilege to a problem caused by an unusual phone, and talks how a centralized service makes them feel hopeless — a very strong emotion! And HN leans into the conversation even though many people on HN probably have some understanding of how edge case support is de-prioritized in products, and that it's just that. The problems raised by the article and a lot of discussions here feel concerningly neurotic. Have people run out of big problems to address or lost focus? Is it just the internet, or have people in general become more tunnel-visioned on micro-problems and unaware of the broader context? Does this mean that we expect so much comfort in life now that we're becoming deeply affected by such inconsequential inconveniences?

jfim 4y ago
I'd wager it's because moderate/pragmatic viewpoints don't really make for interesting discussions. There wouldn't be much interest in "signal doesn't run on my very niche phone but it runs okay on another phone" but "signal developers are the worst because they don't support every possible niche device" attracts attention.
- clnq 4y ago
  Imagine how much calmer our lives would be, and how much head space we'd have to focus on real, big problems, if we weren't so neurotically outraged by these small issues.

chriscappuccio 4y ago

I had identical problems trying to setup signal on my grapheneos a few days ago