Bleep: Chat securely | Hacker News Reader

Bleep: Chat securely

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16 pointsarunc13 comments

I played with this application with a friend and it is horrific, don't waste your time. You inexplicably can't communicate between the different platforms without having isolated accounts on each one. The very first thing it does as an "encrypted" "private" communication system is call home over plaintext HTTP with a UUID. https://i.imgur.com/HPadlpr.png Total failure right off the bat.

A fantastic and widely recognised alternative is Signal for iOS, (and its counterpart for Android, TextSecure), created by Open Whisper Systems. People like Edward Snowden have been praising it.

iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/signal-private-messenger/id8...

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...

> Signal uses your existing phone number and address book.

Failure, why restrict your users to their phone numbers?

WhatsApp does this too. I find it very inconvenient since I have many devices. I think it's not for security as much as theft/identity. It's a lazy way of forcing what is essentially 2fa on a user. Just give me real 2fa and let me use all my devices please.

It's a closed source proprietary chat client claiming to be end to end encrypted.

Chat securely on a closed source client?

I can't take a solution that claims that sent messages "disappear" seriously, especially when it accompany with an elaborate depiction showing a fancy effect of that, as it only gives its user a false sense of security.

What sent is sent, and you can't recall them, whether encrypted or not.

Meanwhile heml.is has died

https://hemlismessenger.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/sometimes-y...

What's the betting this will be become like BitTorrent Sync where it gets limited and a 'pro' version is introduced?

It's in the ToS already that there may be paid features.

I don't generally mind Pro version that offers additional values, but the case of the Sync was massive disappointment, when they chose to limit its core functionality so badly for non-Pro user. (And I actually would have bought Pro version if this wasn't the case.)

I don't know what they'll do to "Bleep Pro" but I just don't have any hope for it, given their track record...

All limits were removed in 2.2 http://blog.bittorrent.com/2015/09/09/sync-2-2-now-available...

Just hoped these changes came way earlier than 192 days. I don't know about everyone else, but that was long enough for me to seek for alternatives. (which I moved to Syncthing -- it still got rough edges, but it's functional enough for my usage, and it seems to have more parity to version 1.4.x of the btsync were, which I liked.)

This is a shame as I was a big fan of the btsync before their 2.0 announcement.

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