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Comment by lqdc13 | Hacker News Reader

I love Signal and this seems to be a stab at Wickr since from what I've heard that is the reason people prefer it to Signal sometimes. Having said that, it has a couple of problems:

1. Images are downsampled without warning. There should be some sort of warning or mini info box for the times when the images are downsampled and there should be information about the changes in resolution.

2. If one uses it as the main messaging app, one has to search through history sometimes. But there is no chat search feature. I am forced to scroll all the way up and copy the message data to an editor. Even really basic case insensitive search would be great.

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It'd also be nice if the iOS or Chrome client had a chat history backup feature like they have on android. This is one of my biggest complaint with messaging apps in general. I'd like to be able to preserve and archive my chat history with people close to me.

What if the person you're chatting with does not want it archived? (I'm not questioning, but wondering what a protocol would be)

This issue is one of those that make it very difficult to build a single "secure chat" app that does everything for everyone.

Personally, I want an automatic, encrypted network backup of all my messages so I don't lose them if my device is lost or destroyed. But I know lots of folks around here are excited about the automatic delete thing too. It's going to be very hard to make something that all of us can be happy with.

You can't trust the client. It's the same fundamental flaw with DRM. If that person does not want it archived, you can make it difficult but not impossible.

I don't think it's nearly as difficult as DRM. That feature is mostly a gimmick. A lot like Snapchat's.

This might help with security if it takes as long to crack someone's phone as it takes to expire the messages.

Actually, I can get the source code for the client, delete the "auto expire" feature and compile it. So there's nothing stopping anyone from archiving messages you want them to be able to read.

Suppose that you are chatting to me. You don't want your messages archived in any way.

I really want to keep records, so I have a second device, and take a picture of the screen every time I get a message of you.

There is no software or protocol that can entirely eliminate this human problem. The two parties have to have some level of agreement and trust.

This is also why Data Loss Prevention software is truly useless in an employee environment. Sure it can spot you forwarding email, but I can take a picture of the email with my phone.

Doesn't downsampling have the affect of preventing the use of more popular stego apps? Makes me wonder if there's something hidden in 25519. According to recent publications, it's easy to create backdoored primes fashioned to simplify search methods. Although those were for SNFS and DH, there are likely applications for searching the ECDH space.

I know this is apple level 'file a radar', but you should also ping about this in the github issues page.

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