Comment by b65e8bee43c2ed0
1 month ago
what did he do for messaging? Signal is hardly more private than goddamn Whatsapp. in fact, given that Whatsapp had not been heavily shilled as the "totally private messenger for journalists and whistleblowers :^)" by the establishment media, I distrust it less.
edit @ -4 points: please go ahead and explain why does Signal need your phone number and reject third party clients.
Yeah, it seems kind of funny how Signal is marketed as a somewhat paranoid solution, but most people run it on an iPhone out of the app store with no way to verify the source. All it takes is one villain to infiltrate one of a few offices and Signal falls apart.
Same goes for Whatsapp, but the marketing is different there.
Ok so which iPhone app can be verified from source?
Or is your problem that your peer might run the app on an insecure device? How would you exclude decade old Android devices with unpatched holes? I don't want to argue nirvana fallacy here but what is the solution you'd like to propose?
I don't think there is a solution -- Signal advertises itself as having a sort of security that isn't really possible with any commercially available device. You have to trust more people then just the person you're communicating with; if that's unacceptable then you need to give up a bunch of convenience and find another method of communicating.
Fortunately, the parties that you have to trust when you use signal haven't been malicious in any way, but that doesn't mean that they can't.
He implemented E2EE in Whatsapp as well.
Even if you discount Signal he did more or less design the protocol that WhatsApp is using https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/18/end-to-end-for-everyone/
Also while we would expect heavy promotion for a trapped app from some agency it's also a very reasonable situation for a protocol/app that actually was secure.
You can of course never be sure but the fact that it's heavily promoted/used by people on both the whistleblowers, large corporations and multiple different National Officials at the same time is probably the best trustworthyness signal we can ever get for something like this.
(if all of these can trust it somewhaat it has to be a ridiculously deep conspiracy to not have leaked at least to some national security agency and forbidden to use(
> Signal is hardly more private than goddamn Whatsapp
Kind of because Whatsapp adopted Signal's E2EE... And not even that long ago!
If by "not even that long ago" you mean "a few months short of a decade ago", sure.
Oof, for sure thought it wasn't that long ago
Time flies I guess, I feel old now
> Signal is hardly more private than goddamn Whatsapp.
To be fair, that is largely because WhatsApp partnered with Open Whisper to bring the Signal protocol into Whatsapp. So effectively, you're saying "Signal-the-app is hardly more private than another app that shares Signal-the-protocol".
In practical terms, the only way for Signal to be significantly more private than WhatsApp is if WhatsApp were deliberately breaking privacy through some alternative channel (e.g. exfiltrating messages through a separate connection to Meta).