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Comment by corobo | Hacker News Reader

You've been downvoted but what you've said isn't wrong. For example

> Each RingID has 40 characters

picture an md5 string but with 40chrs to imagine what your userid looks like. Yes, you need to supply this userid to others for them to contact you.

> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage

Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts.

> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.

It can take minutes to set up a call. Long distance phonecalls in the 80s were faster

> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting

So no corporate use then.

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> Each RingID has 40 characters

To by-pass the 40 char ID you can use the name registration system offered by Ring and register a username as you like. The option is available at the account creation and in the settings. you can also use a QRcode on android

> We haven't had time to add contact managing features (adding, editing, etc.) to Ring yet as its not the priority in the alpha stage

The contacts are are present as an internal funtion in Ring, only external sources of contacts are not supported yet.

> The Ring OpenDHT network is new and it may take up to a few minutes to discover Ring nodes around and reach your partner's machine.

It is a worst case scenario, usually takes 10 seconds

> Ring can usually reach computers behind a NAT provided that you have checked the Allow UPnP setting

It also works without uPnP but with less quality (using STUN or TURN)

Fair enough, I didn't get that far. I saw the RingID part of the FAQ and backed out of giving it a go thinking ICQ and that sort of user interaction died in the early 2000s

re: your edit - if there are answers to these problems the FAQ really could do with an update

Who's paying for the TURN traffic?

> Each RingID has 40 characters

We can't escape this because the canonical user ID is a public key (IMHO, that's a good thing) however there are some ways to transfer this information easily among users -- copy and paste is trivial and so are QR-codes (which are also nice for face-to-face authentication, but making them obligatory as in Brian is counter-productive).

Tox solved this by having an optional DNS-based username registration system. Not completely distributed, but decentralized and no harder to use than an email address -- with a bonus that it may be an actual email address for people and organizations with their own domain.

Is somewhat sad Tox didn't got used, it was pretty advanced even years ago.

Indeed was expecting to see Tox moving forward. Instead, we see yet another decentralized messenger that will end up repeating the same as the former. Rinse and repeat in a couple of years.. :(

>> Dust off the old rolodex for those 40 character strings, there's no way to save your contacts.

This has me thinking that IDs could be images. And by images I mean QR codes, or better yet something like the little symbols used on stack overflow. In fact, how about a QR code that is your public key? Now you can send someone your key via a single image rather than copy/pasting a bunch of gibberish. The key image could also contain a fancy border or an actual photo above the QR of the key. So then if you text someone your image/QR and they add that to their contacts, any app that can access the contact info can also get your public key.

Just thinking out loud, er... in text.

And more thinking.. This does not address management of your private key at all.

Facebook messenger has a round profile photo with some kind of circle with a coded pattern in it around the photo. I never tried to scan one but I assume you can.

Snapchat does the same. If you point its camera at someone's profile icon, it will pop up on your phone so you can add them.

Twidere (the free software microblogging client app) supports a similar notion (though I couldn't scan the QR code when I tried.

They should put effort on the internals. Maybe if it's great, someone else might come and build a decent UI.

OP was downvoted because he didn't provide any valid criticism. Just FUD about GNU. Your post was much better.

The long user ID is a side effect of how (I assume) the protocol works - essentially the user ID is a public key.

However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username->user ID mapping. It'll allow people who want UX to use this while leaving the use of raw user IDs if people don't want to depend on a central directory server.

For the other issues it's very surprising that Skype (which used to be a P2P protocol) managed to solve them like 10 years ago and yet the Ring people still can't (or don't want to) solve those issues. But hey, freedom is more important than UX so screw it.

> However they can easily fix this by offering an official "directory" which allows you to sign up by email/username and stores the username

This is already the case, you can associate your ID with a user name. Perhaps their FAQ should be updated.

EDIT: It's mentioned in the announcement:

> Support of an Ethereum blockchain as a distributed public user database

So here we are again, using yet another obscure technology for a very simple problem solved years ago: a key value store.

Will I have to pay with ETH to have an username linked to my ID?

A decentralized key-value store that is tolerant to an active adversary is not a "very simple problem". A block-chain is actually a reasonable solution for this, see [1].

Not to say it's perfect, for sure.

[1]: http://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittor...

Thanks, was about to say. If there is a simple, non-obscure solution to this problem, I'd like to know what it is.

Skype didn't have unbreakable privacy as a main concern, this comment is not very fair

The problem is, there's little market for "unbreakable privacy" and that market is already taken by Signal, Threema, etc.. - however since Skype turned to shit there's been a huge market for an easy to use and ubiquitous chat solution. For now the only thing that comes close to that is iMessage but it's Mac-only.

Facebook has video chat and lots of nontechnical people get how to use it. Google has had one for a while but the name keeps changing and they'll likely kill off whatever the latest one is in a year (and it probably works better on android somehow)

Sucks that we can't just revive the design of classic Skype (but open source) before MS ruined it (not that it didn't have wiretapping capabilities before as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_security ). I guess the linked project is the closest thing to that.

was wondering the same thing, i.e. signal might be doing it already for most users?

I think it's extremely fair. "Unbreakable privacy" doesn't much matter if no one wants to use the system.

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