Hi all,
with the recent massive success of Signal due to the new privacy policy of facebook with respect to whatsapp, it may now make much more sense to create an official sailfish client for SFOSX. I understand that the jolla team cannot support just any random messenger, but signal seems to have displaced even telegram in popularity now. Hence this post.
M
I would consider Treema an even better option,
As I see Sailfish as the ultimate privacy aware OS which is completely separate from the dominating Big Tech corps, (MS, Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
I am following closely the impressive work of @rubdos who is making the whisperfish app so that sailfish users can use Signal. However as Iâm reading more about Signal and their use of US based cloudservices en the nagging mandatory reCapthca from Google. Which make me question if it is wise to use Signal. which is still linked with the âevilâ dominating US based Big Tech.
Threema has really no links with Google or the Patriot Act, and even made their source code completely available to use.
Weâd all love to see official apps, but Jolla has (almost) nothing to do with this, only Signal can create official clients, otherwise itâs called third-party. Thatâs a subject to bring directly to them: https://community.signalusers.org/
This has come up many times. And in my opinion Jolla shouldnât spend time on proprietary, centralized services. That includes Signal, Threema, Telegram, Wire, etc. Even though they might be open source, youâre still bound to a single provider.
Threema has [âŚ] even made their source code completely available to use.
threema has made their server FLOSS? thats news to me
Agreed.
The one true open protocol is XMPP, which is supported, albeit somewhat poorly. Which also has been discussed many times.
An official Signal client can only be done by Signal themselves. A Jolla-official client doesnât make sense because of a lot of reasons (trademarks, Signal wonât like that, integration into libpurple is going to be crazy difficult, centralised âŚ).
@Sakul, Threema has one single advantage over Signal, currently. This is that Signal needs your phone number for registration. However, Signal has email+username registration in their code base, and I expect them to release this very soon.
Your other arguments are void, in my opinion. Threema does not have a sound/consistent group system like Signal does (GroupV2 really is impressive), they do not have unidentified sending.
Threema may be using Swiss servers, but ultimately that should not matter if everything is E2E encrypted and when unidentified sending is implemented correctly (which isnât the case in Whisperfish, FYI, but wouldnât be in Threema either because it simply doesnât exist).
reCAPTCHA shouldnât need to be an issue either, since you can even, in principe, file the CAPTCHA over Tor/zeronet. Granted, using Google for that isnât cool. I suspect that registration via email and username might also void their need for a CAPTCHA.
I would really love the FUD about Signal to stop. The reason that thereâs so much negativity is not because others are better. Itâs because of a kind of selection bias: Signal is used so much, its flaws are getting fixed, and just because there are indeed a few things that still need to get better, others are getting a lot of unnecessary attention.
@nephros, I think Matrix can also be added to the list of âtruly open protocolsâ, and possibly Signal now that theyâve again synced their repository.
Signal is not proprietary, and you are not bound to a single provider, it just doesnât do federation. Iâm pretty sure weâve discussed this before, but federation doesnât work if you arenât âintoâ computers. People donât self-host their email, at most they pay some computer company to do so, and that computer company literally just outsources to Microsoft or Google. People donât sign up for âweirdâ email providers, they sign up for Gmail and Outlook. Older people still use the email address they got from their internet provider, but younger people are almost exclusively on Gmail. Practically, this means Google can introduce whichever breaking modifications to email they want, because 90% of the world population is already on Gmail, and the other 10% would then just have to suck it up and sign up for Gmail as well.
I donât see an open government for the Signal protocol. Also, can you even get a signal-account without telling them your phone number? Perhaps not âproprietaryâ in the full definition, but it sure smells as such.
Individuals using Matrix will default to matrix.org. Still, if you prefer, you can self-host or choose another provider, and still communicate with the rest of the world. Also, organizations can host and set-up accounts for their users, to keep control. Just like e-mail. The French government and German universities do this. If they were to use Signal, they had to run their own servers and build their own apps, to point to these servers. And even then there would be no federation at all.
Not yet, but if youâve read @rubdosâs post above, which you should have, itâs coming, because theyâre aware that a userâs phone number still reveals something about the user. Also, that is a ridiculously twisted definition of âproprietaryâ.
Yes, you can self-host, if youâre a computer person. Yes, you can choose another provider, until that provider gets lazy or doesnât agree with the latest changes to the protocol and decides not to implement them, instantly breaking compatibility. Matrix is nice, but please stop presenting it as an alternative to Signal or other âregularâ messengers. It has a different purpose and encryption is optional, shown off clearly by the fact that no other client even supports Matrixâs encryption, and for that matter no other client supports even half of the features of Element.
Letâs agree to disagree then.
Hi Rubdos,
Really nice that youâve taken the time to elaborate your viewpoints in this matter. As I assume that working on the whisperfish app is really time consuming. Iâll do my best to keep my response short and to the point.
Thatâs only if thereâs a back door.
Itâs time consuming, but itâs fun too. Itâs my main hobby now.
The group system is mainly interesting from an engineering and illustrative PoV. Signal is actively working on getting rid of current privacy violations, while I generally find that Threema and others donât spend this engineering effort. This is not limited to groups, thatâs why I also mention unidentified delivery, and their other 40 blog posts that illustrate their efforts. That said, any libsignal-based messenger is probably an upgrade over SMS in some regard. Maybe the main exception being WhatsApp, but we still have to find out why exactly itâs terribly bad.
Re Swiss-vs-US, you make a valid point if Iâm allowed to interpret your statement very broadly. Signal uses the principle of âtrust on first useâ. A US-hosted machine could actively intercept the first communication, which allows them to be a middle man. If they donât intercept the full line of communication, this will be detected. This is however a MITM attack, and not per se an attack on the server. If you use Threema to communicate with someone US-based, this attack also happens. TL;DR: you donât need a back-door to bypass e2e.
The only way to make sure, and this is a general thing for any messaging system ever, is that you need to check your âfingerprintâ of the derived key, or manually check and confirm the public key of the other party. TOFU is best-effort, and sadly will always be best-effort.
I agree that recaptcha is totally creepy and Googly, but I also see the need of Signal to implement such a system. My hope is that they add more options to verify that youâre a human being; currently they only have reCAPTCHA and GCM, both being Googly.
TL;DR for the full post: I think Signal is moving in the right general direction, while the other competitors feel like a fad or a grab for power, staying where they started. Please do inform me if I tell lies about Threema et al., Iâd be very interested in being proven wrong.
Lol, especially the âyou are not bound to a single provider, it just doesnât do federation.â: Hilarious. ;\
For the facts:
P.S.: It feels like I read and wrote this before: IIRC those promises (no phone number needed for registration, timely source releases, more openness in general) are quite old, and still only promises!?!
I donât know why you would quote me but then edit what I actually wrote. You might want to provide some (credible) sources for that outrageous first claim. Also, the âsomeone in this threadâ is the person who knows a lot more about Signal than any of the other people (including myself, of course) who commented combined, and it would be worth actually reading what heâs saying rather than spreading far-out conspiracy theories. Signal is more than just Moxie, and @rubdos is not just creating a third party Signal client (which the Signal developers are very much aware of ), heâs collaborating with the Signal developers to make it easier for third party clients to build upon work already done by Signal.
How much âopennessâ are you looking for, exactly? All of the source code is available and published under a free license, and they even do reproducible builds, making it possible to verify that the code distributed in their binaries is in fact the same code that you can see on their Github pages.
Hey @olf
Just FYI, Whisperfish is being developed with full awareness of what you say.
First point: the client source code has always been public. Itâs the server source code thatâs been hidden away for way too long, and thatâs finally been made public some weeks ago again. Of course, weâll have to see whether they can keep that up now.
Development in the open is being worked on, and itâs much better since you probably last checked.
Like @nthn already hinted, I am in contact with Jordan Rose (from Signal) about collaborating to get as much code as possible upstream.
Re legal action, weâre aware of that, and I have written quite extensively about it in the past. The fact that Iâm working together with Jordan doesnât really change that statement, except for the fact that they are aware of our existence, and that they seem to tolerate us.
Re federation: I tend to agree with Moxie, and that actually makes me sad. Federation helps in distributing power, but itâs actually terribly difficult to have the privacy properties that they have right now in a federated setting. Actually, I should write a master thesis topic about that for a future student, but Iâm afraid itâs more of a PhD-kinda-thing.
Re promises, they are quite old. The excuse there (and itâs just an excuse) is that itâs difficult to implement these things right and privately. However, they did implement these things a few months ago, and the only lacking thing is the actual exposure on the server (in terms of API) and on the UI. Itâs coming, and I expect it before the end of 2021.
Open source for client/server is not the same as open governance and open development for the protocol. Many things are open source these days (e.g. Android), and while thatâs nice, it still is one company holding all the marbles.
Regarding privacy: even if itâs true that Signals privacy really is great, it still can have access to a ton of metadata. A Matrix-provider might have even more metadata, but it cannot have metadata on the entire network. I run my own server, which I share with family. Iâm pretty sure no one has access to the metadata but me.
Also, Matrix is working on fully decentralized P2P communication.
Well, being from Switzerland may not mean that much after what happened to Crypto AG
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/national-security/cia-crypto-encryption-machines-espionage/
⌠which @olf also mentioned, and to which I responded âŚ
EDIT: Iâd like to stress again that Iâm not claiming that Signal Messenger LLC has become holy since three weeks. My point is that the situation is way better than what is generally portrayed by fans of Threema et al.