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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Signal is pretty awesome, it's by far the best that we have right now:

  • state of the art crypto
  • open source
  • free as in beer
  • Available for Android and iOS

There are a few minor features that are missing but I can live with that. However, there are also a couple of important shortcomings:

  • no decentralization
  • use of the phone number

I hope they can be fixed sooner or later.

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But the centralisation and use of the phone number is necessary to make it not shit. Anyway you forgot the important features:

* Nice modern UI

* Integrates with SMS

* Supports group chats

* Uses MMS for group chat if not all members have Signal

* Not really buggy or hard to use

Huge respect for Moxie, but the requirement of a phone number really is a dealkiller.

  1. Phone number requires a service provider
  2. Service provider owns the baseband and root of your phone.
  3. $government makes a "lawful request" of Verizon et. al.
     to install keyloggers/screenshotters on your phone.
  4. Your "secure" commms are compromised.

Signal needs to work on comprehensively rooted devices connected only via wifi for the above threat model to go away.

If we were going to rank our priorities, they would be in this order:

1) Make mass surveillance impossible. 2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.

It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions. It's totally possible for you to install Signal on an iPod touch with a VoIP number, for instance, but that takes more effort than the common case we're designing for.

Any chance of not requiring access to the whole contact list? I think there are pickers that allow selecting one contact - or better yet, one could allow adding contacts inside Signal.

Probably not because they check that against the list of people who have Signal installed so they can send encrypted messages to the people who support it. They talk more about how they try to do this privately in [0].

[0]: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

I had a problem where one of my contracts uninstalled Textsecure, and went back to the vanilla SMS app. Now all the messages he received from me are garbled. Somehow they need a way to disassociate phones AFTER the app has been uninstalled.

You can ask your contact to use the unregister app here https://whispersystems.org/textsecure/unregister/

Apple offer a similar tool when leaving iOS https://selfsolve.apple.com/deregister-imessage

This is one of the reasons why they don't do encrypted SMS anymore:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/

Wouldn't that be a huge security flaw? Someone with access to your phone could uninstall the app then read all the messages.

which is silly. that should be fine for people already advertising their contact list for facebook, wasapp, etc. but there should have been a isolated account setup for people not doing so

It is a little inconvenient but I have registered for Signal using Google Voice. Much more easily done on iOS than on Android though.

moxie,

Please consider my suggestions here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10501636

I would argue that an identifier is just that: an identifier. It does not need to be a number nor does it have to be for an indefinite amount of time.

Lastly, please consider disabling the debug log by default

Plus it still leaves people open to metadata analysis. The phone number has to be verified, meaning a text message is sent from Signal HQ to your device, clearly marking you as a Signal user.

Nitpick: Currently the verification text messages are sent via Twilio.

I'd say only being available on Google Play is an even greater dealkiller. Telegram (which is, to be honest, not quite comparable) is on F-droid, that I like.

TextSecure used to be on F-droid, but Moxie wanted them to take it down, because it was not him signing the packages (a disadvantage to Google Play).

> 2. Service provider owns the baseband and root of your phone.

My service provider doesn't own my baseband. They own the SIM I put in my phone, and that likely gives them a lot of access to my device, but I doubt it can be used to perform key or screen logging. (Nexus 4, bought SIM free)

This is why I still don't own a cellphone in 2015.

I disagree that a phone number is required. You don't have one here, nor on Facebook should you use that. Identity doesn't need to be tied to a phone number and arguably .. shouldn't be.

How is centrali[zs]ation important? Mail works transparently and you don't know a thing about the stack behind a random address, right?

I'd side with the GP: The 'one server, ours' and 'your phone number is your identity' limitations are what I'd like to see go away. Prioritizing the 'no phone number' over 'hosting my own server', as far as I'm concerned.

>use of the phone number is necessary to make it not shit

Why? People who actually care about encrypted communication the most will just see it as unnecessary leakage of private data.

One of the best things about internet based communication is that we don't have to rely on traditional concepts like phones and phone numbers. I should be able to sign up and chat with anyone on any internet capable device, phone or no phone.

Because you need something paid for underneath it to stop spam.

This fantastic post from Mike Hearn, who was on the GMail spam team and now makes P2P decentarlized stuff, explains it all:

https://moderncrypto.org/mail-archive/messaging/2014/000780....

Essentially, every large provider (e.g. Facebook, GMail) of network services ultimately uses phone numbers now as a common thing that can't be infinitely reproduced. They underpin all high quality antispam on large Internet systems.

Hmm? I'm relatively certain Signal removed all support for SMS/MMS and requires all parties to use the Signal app

https://whispersystems.org/blog/goodbye-encrypted-sms/

Incorrect. They removed support for encrypted SMS/MMS. You can still text normies who don't have Signal using it.

This is why I chose to switch to SMSSecure. I've encountered a "bug" where I can be autoconnected to a known wi-fi (at say the library or a coffee shop) that requires authentication. Since my phone sees me as connected to wi-fi, it tries to send my messages via that channel instead of 4G data. Since I haven't authenticated to the wifi (phone never left my pocket), I don't receive any messages.

When I arrive home a few hours later, my phone blows up with a bunch of missed messages.

For me, the big thing that will make signal usable as a chat system is multi-device access. I'm at a computer most of the time, and much rather use my keyboard. Hell I would even hack the iOS client and make it an OSX client once they have multidevice support baked in. The ability to seamlessly move between my phone, tablet & computer is vital, so I use iMessage.

Whisper is working on a chrome version, so I am excited for the eventual multi-device.

Then to make money, maybe Whisper can make Signal: The Slack Edition and sell it for $4/month/user. They will host your WhisperSlack servers, but with client side encryption, never know it's contents! Even with compliance exports.

They do plan to use other identifiers than the phone number but I don't know how high a priority it is. My knowledge about this is probably a year old.

I wonder if they opt-out of Google Now on Tap. Google has made its spying the default on Android 6.0, and developers have to know to opt-out of it, otherwise private Signal communications could be collected by Google.

This is nonsense. Now on Tap only scrapes the screen through explicit user action.

TextSecure also uses the FLAG_SECURE window flag by setting, so NoT among other things is blocked.

It is not opensource.

the client WAS. the server i don't think was ever.

These are the client (GPLv3) and server (AGPLv3) repositories:

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure

https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Server

sorry, i briefly followed the discussion on fdroid. from there it appeared that they couldn't build the latest versions from the provided sources.

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