i’ve just seen a comment in a post, in this very community, saying people trust signal because of missinformation (from what i could undertand).
if this is true, then i have a few questions:
-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.
-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?
-what this means for other apps in general?
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The problem is it isn’t Telegram, Whatsapp, or some other insecure platform that nefarious actors would rather privacy minded individuals use.
Signal is the best “easy” alternative. And DIY leaves many holes for rookie errors.
There is no problem
It’s fine as long as you don’t do something silly like invite a journalist to your top secret government group chat.
Or use a third party client that doesn’t have as much scrutiny on the source code and will Leak your message s
man imagine trusting in an israeli signal fork lmao
You, yes you, scrolling.
Here.
XMPP
I see you.
Perfect is the enemy of good. Moving to Signal would be way better than getting analysis paralysis and staying with Whatsapp.
The usual conspiracy theory is that Signal is funded by the CIA and therefore a honey pot.
what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.
Signal. I can do almost everything that i.e. WhatsApp or Telegram offer, is as easy to use as those and the client is verifiably encrypted and secure.
how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?
Explain what exactly? Why they should use it?
- It offers the same functionality as other messengers while being verifiably secure and encrypted.
- Signal collects only three datapoints of users
- Date of registration
- Date of last connection to the server
- Your encrypted backups if you enable cloud backups
- Compare that to messengers such as WhatsApp and Telegram where it is not clear which information they collect, whether they store it in an encrypted format or not or who they share it with.
- In the case of WhatsApp it is at least the US government as required by the Cloud Act.
- In case of Telegram the data is unencrypted by default and cooperation with various governments has been reported.
what this means for other apps in general?
Please clarify the question.
Given what you’ve said, Signal is still what you want and is good for it.
There are two main issues people have with Signal:
First is that it requires a phone number to sign up. That makes some people who want it to be truly anonymous unhappy. It’s not meant to be anonymous, though. It’s meant to be private. Those aren’t the same thing.
Second is that it runs on AWS. This isn’t a problem in the sense that it’s possible for it to still retain privacy while running on AWS. Some people don’t like it because they view the dependence on the infrastructure of an American company to be a risk to availability. They also believe that it would exacerbate a security flaw if one were found.
Personally, I know these risks and still find it to be the best balance between privacy, security, and ease of use.
Second is that it runs on AWS. This isn’t a problem in the sense that it’s possible for it to still retain privacy while running on AWS. Some people don’t like it because they view the dependence on the infrastructure of an American company to be a risk to availability. They also believe that it would exacerbate a security flaw if one were found.
Let’s not pretend the hypervisor doesn’t have full access to the VMs memory and execution. The only thing protecting the Signal server is Intel SGX.
I don’t think Signal trusts the AWS server either, that’s the point of E2EE encryption.
Maybe you should reply to that comment you’ve mentioned and ask them to explain why they’re spreading FUD.
I’ll start by saying that i don’t use signal.
if this is true
There are some concerns that other people in the comments explained. It’s up to you to decide if the trade off is good enough for you. There’s no silver bullet for this.
-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.
Signal is ok. Same as matrix, delta chat, xmpp, simplex. Avoid telegram, messenger, whatsapp, instagram, snapshat, max…
-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?
Most people mess up the concepts of anonymity with privacy.
-what this means for other apps in general?
There’s no silver bullet. All the apps have ups and downs. Most people don’t realize that if a state actor (I’m not talking about police but for example NSA, CIA, mossad, mi6) is after you, they will get you. Usually from a side channel, or from some stupid mistake you made years ago.
I’m put off by the centralized server. I’d want to self host without having to build a special client, something like nextcloud. That the company chose to prevent that gives me a bad impression. So I haven’t been using it so far.
I’ve played with GNU Jami a little but it was flaky when I tried it last year. Maybe it’s better now.
You can’t have it both ways. It’s hard enough to get people to switch to signal, or least also use it next to other messengers. Now imagine they’d have to connect to multiple servers to talk to multiple people. Possibly everyone connection details. Even if that’s done in the background, you have to somehow get the connection registered once, discovered if you will.
Anything and everything you send through their server is end-to-end encrypted. Some people hate on the phone number being required to create an account, but it’s also the reason it works at all: anyone in your contacts who also has signal you can talk to. Phone numbers are an international standard. If course this also has downsides…
Finally what you’re asking for exists. NextCloud has “talk”. Which is essentially a messenger app, it’s built in. Go use it. I have a NextCloud instance and I don’t use it either. What’s the point of having an app I can only use to talk with people so close to me that they’re in my NextCloud with an account already?
You can’t have it both ways.
Of course I can. Jitsi Meet lets you do it both ways. I don’t know if Nextcloud has an official hosted server but they could if they wanted. I use it self-hosted and it works, the Talk app is just not very good. Jami uses a DHT instead of a centralized server which is another approach, though it might be part of its flakiness. Linphone (a regular VOIP client, not a secure chat thing) is set up by default to point to Linphone’s own SIP servers but you can change that in Settings. No reason Signal can’t do similar. Heck, even Lemmy works that way (you choose your server).
Signal is simply being evil and your defending them is unconvincing. I could opt to self-host Signal and build a special client for my users, at the cost of hassle for everyone but no serious technical drawbacks. Signal chooses to create that hassle because they want to funnel users through their servers, not incidentally collecting metadata about ALL the user conversations.
There’s actually a configurable Signal client called Amanda or something like that, though I haven’t tried it. Someone here mentioned it last time this came up.
Also, Signal’s own client isn’t on F-droid, which raises more potential questions. I haven’t cared enough to look into it.
Added: oh re Nextcloud, I see what you mean, account creation is an obstacle, though that could be handled like Hipchat used to. You could generate a randomized URL to invite someone to your private chat without their needing an account. Nextcloud has that too, though just for file access, not for chat for some reason. Come to think of it, Signal could also work that way: it shouldn’t need accounts at all.
When I’ve invited people to my Nextcloud I’ve just enrolled the account for them myself and told them “please log in with username X password Y”.
Signal is alright IMO.
There is no perfect service. Thats why smarter people than me analyze this and talk about it: https://www.messenger-matrix.de/messenger-matrix-en.html
I think deltachat is pretty cool. Decentralised, open source and quite easy to use and setup.For me it is something for friends willing to try out new stuff and as a fallback when signal fails.
No one can break the encryption, so even though it routes through AWS sometimes it’s still completely E2EE with quantum resistant encryption that not even the feds could break
the only way it can be “hacked” is with phishing
why are you making a post instead of replying to a comment?
So i can open a discussion on this question (specificaly)
The problem is that you didn’t bring much, and it sounds like you’re trying to spread FUD yourself:
- didn’t quote the original comment
- didn’t elaborate on misinformation and how it could be a problem to signal
- the questions immediately assumed it (whatever it is) is true
Sorry if that’s the case, i’m just shocked to hear this, and i want help to clarify this question.
