Comment by dijit
17 hours ago
Weird, every time I mention Signal on HN tptacek responds.
But I'm having trouble discerning what you mean.
Either you're saying group chats are encrypted E2EE - which, I never claimed.
Or, you're mentioning that you can have multiple phones/devices on the same account, which doesn't work the last time I checked.
You replied to a claim that Telegram doesn't do E2EE for groups saying 'Neither does Whatsapp/Signal'.
That's wrong as `tptacek noted. If you meant something else, that wasn't clear.
> E) (I believe) don't enable E2EE with more than one device
my response was:
> E) Neither does Signal/Whatsapp.
The thread of the "E" topic is relevant here, i'm not claiming that Signal/Whatsapp support (or do not support) encryption for group chats.
Sorry that it wasn't clear, I thought referring to them directly by letter would make it easier to differentiate.
It does work. How do you think Signal desktop works?
I thought it worked the same as Whatsapp, whereby there's a sort of backdoor connection to the app running on your phone to send messages.
However, after doing a smidge more research it seems like somehow Signal is sharing it's key with the desktop app and only syncing history of messages directly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15596980
I'm not 100% sure how it works as the server is fake-open-source and not actual open-source.
Whatsapp doesn't need a connection to your phone anymore either. It used to be the case until a few years ago though.