We recently merged (the ground work of) processing group updates, which is a nice big leap towards feature-parity on Signal groups! This work spawned quite many new strings to translate (such as "[user] changed the group title to [new-title]). So if you’d like to help translating Whisperfsh into your language, now it’s the perfect time to go to our Weblate project page! There will be some changes to them later on, and another similar batch of strings to translate follows at a later time. Not to mention completing the features the changes are about. Some are properly implemented already, but there’s a lot of work to do still!
There’s no new release just yet, but we’re getting quite close already! As always, stay tuned!
ChatControl 2.0 threatens private messaging in the EU
As Whisperfish maintainer and privacy researcher, I’m alarmed by the new Danish version of the ChatControl proposal currently pushed in the Council. It would enforce automated scanning of everyone’s private messages and images, force client-side backdoors in encrypted apps, and use AI to detect “unknown” material, with government and military users conveniently exempt.
This doesn’t meaningfully protect children, but it does dismantle the fundamental right to secure, private communication. Like Signal, we believe this proposal would “break encryption as we know it”. Whisperfish, like many community-driven secure messaging projects, simply cannot and will not comply with such a system. Not ethically, not technically, and certainly not with the limited capacity we have as volunteers. Signal themselves repeatedly stated they will delist Signal in app stores where such legislation is present, and they will not comply with any backdooring requests.
The timeline is terrifyingly tight: by 12 September, EU governments will lock in their positions ahead of the scheduled vote on 14 October. If we want to stop this, we urgently need citizens in every member state to push back.
Please go to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/. This website allows you to easily contact your representatives to signal (pun intended) your concern in a personalized way.
Hello WF enthusiasts. In July I gave a talk about “Rust in the Unofficial Signal Client Whisperfish”, which I didn’t want to withhold from you. I hope you like it. It has been publicly available on YouTube for a few days now: https://youtu.be/ek8HRN_d8Os?si=F9ll1xlOH2lZWLzk .
Since today I have the problem that whisperfish does not start anymore. My device is a linked device Fresh install does not help. When I start it in shell with the option v, I receive error messages with Tokio I/O driver panicked at /home/mersdk/…
I am confused with my very limited knowledge, but /home/mersdk does not exist.
Is there something I can do to get Whisperfish running again?
FWIW: the panic backtrace should be safe to share on the forum, it shouldn’t contain any personal information. But I’m sure @direc85 will be able to help you out
The log was fine, but better err on the safe side.
The key lines are these:
thread ‘main’ panicked at /home/mersdk/cargo/registry/src/index.crates.io-1cd66030c949c28d/tokio-1.43.0/src/runtime/context/current.rs:93:33:already borrowed: BorrowMutError
and
thread ‘Tokio I/O driver’ panicked at /home/mersdk/cargo/git/checkouts/qmeta-async-7dbf291cde1b3a27/654a040/src/lib.rs:99:26:called Result::unwrap() on an Err value: Canceled
It’s similar but not identical with issue 739, but that happens on SFOS 3.4 on armv7hl, yours is SFOS 5.0 on aarch64… I suspect its cause is different.
Maybe the backtrace helps figuring out where this one is coming from. Could you send me the log again after you install the latest version with debuginfo and debugsource packages from OpenRepos?
I get an error with registering as primary device on Whisperfish 0.6.0-b35, SFOS 5.0.0.68, Jolla C2. After I enter my phone number and completing the captcha I get this message:
translated from screenshot:
Error
Failed to set up Signal client
Restart Whisperfish. If the problem persists and seems to be related to Whisperfish, please report it.
You’ll want to reset Whisperfish and then try again, while capturing logs. If it happens again, share either @direc85 or me the logs in a private message. I think @direc85 is a bit more responsive around this time
Is anyone else who’s running Whisperfish as a secondary client experiencing that their read notifications and typing indicators keep getting reset to off? Sometimes it’s a couple of days after I turned them on, sometimes it’s not even an hour, but they always turn back off. I can’t find anyone reporting anything similar even in the official client, so I’m stumped as to what could possibly be the problem.
Could it somehow be related to the problem of being unable to register as a primary client?
First time I heard that, @nthn. Do you enable them through WF or through the main client? If the former, try the latter, and vice versa. Either way, an issue report would be nice!
I doubt it’s related to registration issues though, those are vastly distinct APIs and code paths.
Yeah me too, I haven’t had time to report it, but on WF enabling the indicators is greyed out, and if I enable it on Signal it resets off .. quickly(?) again.
I think I’ve been experiencing some sync issues with SD <> WF lately, this may be the same issue. I mainly use WF and it’s the main device, so it hasn’t really exposed itself.
Thanks for opening a ticket for it, I try to have a look in a few days or so.
I’m happy to report that read receipts and typing indicators are now correctly synchronized from Whisperfish to Signal Desktop. This fixed a few more-or-less dormant issues along the way, including slow (incomplete, actually) linking of Signal Desktop.
There are a few things to finalize still here and there, but we’re aiming to make a new release sooner than later. Stay tuned!
Hello, is there a tried to install Ringrtc Library to try Voice and Video Calls I found the documents, but I did not understand the inauguration method. Is one of you donated a guide for the way I have a C2 phone
Is there a way to prevent the “Whisperfish is more than 90 days old, check updates” message?
Something like touch the main-binary or a config-file to update its timestamp in order to get rid of the message after every startup?
Background: I use the installed Messengers (Fernschreiber and Whisperfish) without configured Background-Daemon, so i can start them to check new messages and close them to have silence. I love this feature.
Thanks for your work on this great Messenger. Best feature is selecting more than one photo at a time for sending, sadly Fernschreiber lacks this feature.
The correct solution is for us to make the next release It’s possible to hide it by editing harbour-whisperfish-main.qml MainPage.qml and changing today’s date to the update age variable.
But you are right; it’s quite intrusive in that use case. We should have it appear e.g. weekly or something like that. Let’s see if we can improve the situation for the next release already… No promises though, after next update we have another 90 days to fix it
ChatControl 2.0 threatens private messaging in the EU
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