Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

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You can not tell me what accusations to make, based on your seniority of having been here longer than me or for any other reason.

Moxie is a member of HN and of Github, and I have read his posts and his discussions on github, his contempt for the common user is obvious and abundant.

Signal is dependent on Google. That is a fact.

It can be hard to swallow, but many people, just read the github issue page, consider that insecure.

For many people security means not feeding their data into USAs corporations and intelligence services data centers. For many users, like me, if the choice is between USA and others, Id prefer in fact to feed my data to Russian or Chinese or Indian corporations and intelligence services. Then its not a matter of "oh my encryption is better", it doesnt make a difference, in that position, Telegram is for me a better choice even if its encryption is not as good - if it at least makes it more difficult for USA (but very easy for Russia) then its better than Signal.

Both Signal and Telegram suck, to various degrees in different forms, but the choice is easy to stay away from Signal and similar Google-only "secure" apps.

It's got nothing to do with seniority.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:dang%20accusations%20sh...

How does it make more difficult for USA to get your data if encryption is not as good? This is pure nonsense, sorry. If you think the NSA is dependent on Google to suck up your data, oh boy... Sir, would you be interested in purchasing a fine bridge?

I upvoted this comment of yours because it seemed kind of unfair to me for it to be downvoted, and I don't like people being told what they can or can't do, but the gist of what you're trying to argue is complete nonsense. GCM dependence is a complete non-issue in context, and to say that because Telegram doesn't have that dependency it is safer from US intelligence is so over the top ridiculous. Signal-the-app has it's problems, and a fair share of questionable decisions, but GCM and Play Store are not among those.

That Moxie acts with contempt toward people on GitHub issues is true. It is also true that most of those people (in exchanges I have read) are complete ignorants who wouldn't know security if it hit them on the head, yet insist and yell with noble indignation that they're correct. The kind of people who were thought that more FOSS = more security is an axiom and go from there. Since he gets tons of that, I kinda understand why he might act like that. I understand, but do not condone, it's extremely off putting. In the end, one of Signal-the-app's biggest problems is that it's mostly criticized by unreasonable people.

Thank you.

There is 3 issues which Im trying to clear up here. With GCM and Signal:

1, Google and in turn USA based data-centers receive events/more-data to analyze. That this data is not the encrypted message, not the decrypted message doesnt matter. This data can be analyzed and used effectively. Its not impossible to think of "push-message for android phone available at X time - which looking through our other database shows it has Signal but doesnt have WhatsApp, hm, our other databse shows that android device has Signal app usage of X%". Oh boy.

2. Google has root on your phone, so even if the transport security is very good, it doesnt matter as the phone is effectively owned by Google and thus messages/keys can be stolen at will.

3. The choice should be with the users and not Moxie. Moxie has shown contempt and disregard for users wishes, see quote "annoy the fucking hell out of our users".

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