Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by newscracker | Hacker News Reader

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Or try Wire [1], which has a much richer feature set (voice calls, video calls, text chat and doodling) than Signal and is also slightly faster and more reliable in my experience. It's also multi-platform, provides multi-device sync and is end-to-end encrypted (although with a different custom protocol compared to Signal, albeit using the older and confusing name 'axolotl ratchet', which Signal no longer uses).

There's a table comparing Wire and other systems here. [2]

I still have Signal and update it whenever there are updates, mainly to see what's new or changed, but prefer Wire for the better feature set and UX. Telegram still remains my most used messaging client due to its UX and speed (even Wire is slow and lacks some basic features like message delivered and message read indicators).

I've been waiting for a long time to switch to Signal (or to Wire), but the improvement seen is quite slow over time (just my experience). Telegram has been moving rapidly on feature addition.

[1]: https://wire.com

[2]: https://wire.com/privacy/

Some of the "basic" stuff is actually surprisingly complex to do without compromising some other aspect IF we at Wire were to stick to always-E2EE-everything mantra. Case in point - delivery notifications. We're actually looking into them now.

Great. I understand that basic stuff could be complex, and I do prefer end-to-end encryption. I can't wait for these (and newer) features to be available so I can move out of Telegram. :)

I am not sure if Wire (another messaging app without clear monetization strategy) is better. We might end in the same situation in a few years.

Exactly. The most important reason to use Signal is the trustworthiness of the developers. Moxie is a highly esteemed security researcher / public figure. I trust him to (1) implement the protocol properly (which is really hard) and (2) respect my privacy and (3) not sell out like WhatsApp did.

The thing is, as long as we're using phone numbers as user handles, you have to trust the provider with your phone book. Signal tries as hard as possible to avoid it (all phone numbers are hashed), but if they wanted, they could simply brute force all the hashes since the search space is so small. There's no good solution to this.

Would salting the hashes be an improvement?

I ask knowing very little about their security model.

No, they're doing that already. The issue is that phone numbers are so short that you can just calculate the salted hash for all of them. You don't need any rainbow tables for that.

I agree on that point and would rather prefer something that is a viable business. But it doesn't seem feasible to implement because most people wouldn't pay for messaging anymore. As another data point, Signal doesn't have a monetization strategy either.

It seems like we (most humans who use communication devices) are doomed to be stuck in advertising-based-single-corporate-walled-garden solutions.

> Signal doesn't have a monetization strategy either

They don't have to - Open Whisper Systems is a non-profit with strong community support. It works out so well that they actually pay any contributor a few dollars per commit. That's the best monetization there is for an organization which serves the community.

Wire is VC funded by Iconical/Janus Friis (Skype co-founder who is also the co-founder of Wire) and will monetize with premium features. Can't share more at this point, I'm afraid.

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