Comment by wkat4242
2 years ago
It's good enough when I don't need a number to sign up at all. Unfortunately they're not there yet. So for now.. meh
Without that it's just a slightly more private WhatsApp.
In fact I wish we could move to another kind of identifier than a "phone number" for things like this. It's probably pretty region-dependent but personally I never use my phone to actually make phone calls or text. All my voice, video and messaging traffic to friends goes through apps, though the number is unfortunately still used as an identifier. Unfortunately, because if I let a number lapse I lose access to the whatsapp and telegram accounts related to it. This way it makes it hard having multiple accounts.
I'd prefer if mobile providers would just become a dumb data pipe the same as landline providers have already become. My Spanish provider still forces me to take a "landline" with my internet but I don't even have a phone connected to it.
Signal will not publicly admit that, but they are using phone numbers as a cheap anti-spam measure. If anyone can sign up with an email, you will have same spam problems as with email, and will need to implement some spam filtering, and so on.
It's harder to spam with phones. Although, as they now do in Burma, they can just kidnap a lot of people from China and India and keep them as slaves and make them send spam from phones. But anyway that's a different story
I feel like Signal has been up front for many years about why they use phone numbers, and I get incessant spam on other phone number platforms (most especially: phones) so I'm not sure that holds water.
They seem to actually confirm it themselves, which I didn't know.
> We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. This is a critical step in helping to prevent spam accounts from signing up for the service and rendering it completely unusable—a non-trivial problem for any popular messaging app.
From their blogpost
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They've been pretty public about it. And it's not cheap.
> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427
They pay Twilio through the nose for this service, compared to using other vendors that are less than a tenth the cost.
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What if they allow non-phone-number-verified accounts to only place calls/texts to users only where the non-verified is already in that user's contacts?
That would prevent spam. The only people who would hear from the non-verified account is people who already took the effort to place the non-verified account username in their contacts.
(I've never used Signal and I have no idea what how it works.)
Whoa wait what? What's this about slavery?
see https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/asia/chinese-sca...
google kk park, fraud factory.
Burma/Myanmar is in a state of civil war, close to China and close to cheap Thai mobile internet access. Chinese started building fraud parks where they capture people and force them to serially scam people on fake bitcoin exchanges (it starts as online romance, turns to bitcoin scam). Mostly Chinese but also increasingly Europeans and Americans
nobody does anything because those fraud parks are tolerated by Burmese junta. They are on the border between Thailand and Burma
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They probably require phone numbers to be able to comply with the three-letter government agencies requirements and their requests on specific people. Metadata is specifically available "for free" (who calls/messages whom when).
> Metadata is specifically available "for free" (who calls/messages whom when).
That's completely incorrect. Signal has only the following data (backed up by what they have provided when served warrants[1], and what internal FBI documents state about Signal[2]:
[1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/central-california-grand-jury/
[2] https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2111...
This is simply not true. Signal implements sealed sender so they don’t know who is talking to who.
Signal has released demands for information and what they provided in response to those demands. It's not a hard question, it's on their website. Don't let yourself be yet another conspiracy theorist.
Source?
> Without that it's just a slightly more private WhatsApp.
They are not even comparable. WhatsApp does not encrypt metadata at all, which is the most interesting information you can leak.
Also WhatsApp is closed-source, so you can only take their word for whether the E2E is really E2E -- and it's owned by Facebook.
There’s really nothing stopping someone from publishing an instrumented / modded binary to a mobile App Store unless there’s a user-verifiable build chain, even if it is open-source. Even if the backend IS e2ee, the UI can be extended to keylog / etc. The App Store provider can be in on it too.
DNS can be filtered to provide some degree of control and traffic inspection, but there’s always DNS over HTTPS, tunneling, and so on and so forth.
I’d be surprised if Signal was doing it, since getting caught at it would totally destroy their reputation, but I’d honestly be surprised if WhatsApp didn’t have at least a backdoor for it.
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Why wouldn’t you trust Zuck’s word? He seems like an honourable
Neither does Signal, or any mainstream secure messenger. For that you’d have to look at MIT’s Vuvuzela/Alpenhorn.
Based on what?
Look at the source code.
Signal's vaunted double-ratchet encrypted groups have a severe weakness in the key exchange where the server can add itself as a participant.
Granted, this is pretty hard to solve when participants come online and offline at different times without having a trusted and always-online entity to handle the list of the current members (in the signal model, it's the server), but signal's still definitely not a silver bullet, even if people treat it like it is.
But if Signal gets pwned or captured, it can easily add itself into any group, or even add and remove instantly.
Wouldn't the group members at least be notified that someone joined the group? And the server would only have access to messages sent after that notification, right?
Do you evidence of that? Are you sure you aren’t confusing Signal and Matrix, which had that big? We would have heard about Signal after the Matrix bug if it also had it.
It's not really a bug. It's a design decision.
There's no clear solution for it from an encryption perspective without a big tradeoffs (like requiring all participants to be online at the same time).
Besides, the larger the group, the more likely that one of the nodes has been compromised anyway. Everything's a tradeoff -- don't depend on the security of a single solution if you're really trying to keep a secret; defense in depth.
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I also wish their desktop client doesn't need to update hundred megabytes every few days.
I solved this problem (and more) by switching to Matrix.
The amount of problems remains stable, as a universal constant . Problems are neither solved nor created, only transformed. By switching from Telegram to Matrix, new problems arose. By switching from Matrix to Session, by switching to Signal, where we are now, fewer problems arose
Records of precisely who you talk to are being kept serverside because of that decision. Maybe that's totally fine for you! Most people have pretty unserious secure messaging threat models (I don't mean that as a value judgement).
The same is likely true of Signal, no? Traffic analysis on AWS' edge would tell you precisely who is talking to who, and user identities are tied to legal identities via phone numbers. Maybe Signal doesn't store this data serverside, but there are entities with both the capability and motivation to obtain it. I bet there are Signal XKEYSCORE selectors.
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I guess it bears repeating, but you can sign up from a public phone booth.
So I do not understand what the problem is with needing a phone number. Is it because it's inconvenient to you?
[dead]
Surprised you did not mention Matrix/Element.
Or https://wire.com/en
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