Signal’s Moxie Marlinspike calls out Telegram founder Pavel Durov
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Moxie:
"I understand that federation and defined protocols that third parties can develop clients for are great and important ideas, but unfortunately they no longer have a place in the modern world. Even less of a place for an organization the size of ours. Everyone outside the FOSS community seems to know it, but it took actually building the service for me to come to the same understanding, so I don't expect you to believe me."
Now, I understand Moxie's goal is to (quoting from further down that thread) "make mass surveillance impossible for the world we live in, not a fantasy land inhabited only by cryptonerds and moralists (...) to produce technology that is privacy preserving but feels just like everything else people already use, not somehow convince everyone to fundamentally change their workflow and their expectations.", but still - is that the consensus now? That federated protocols are dead and "no longer have a place in the modern world"?
--
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282380
[1] - https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
Having see what has happened (is happening?) to Mastodon, I can see where Moxie is coming from; as much as I hate to accept it.
Moxie also doesn't seem particularly happy with the situation; notes in the same post:
"Truly though, I wish you well in the endeavor, it's something that I'd love to be proven wrong about."
He notes two issue in particular:
- Degradation of UX
- Loss of development effort
From what I've seen, Mastodon suffered from similar problems (certainly as a user, I can attest to the first one). It seems those are inevitable consequences (along with performance/scalability issues) of the loss of control that comes from federation. Personally, I don't think those are necessarily insurmountable, but they are non-trivial, and will require effort and commitment -- including from the end users -- to resolve.
All other things being equal, a project focusing on federation will be at a disadvantage compared to a centralized one when it comes to delivering good UX. So lamentably, I don't see a federated platform becoming mainstream outside tech culture, and that is what Moxie's vision for Signal is...
[edit: grammar, formatting]
(And I'm sure some people are very happy GPG users. But the majority of email users are not and will probably never be)
Among corporate users, there are some rather big companies with 100% adoption. How they achieve it? With a simple policy "anybody sending unencrypted email is fired," and training to make sure that even least technically literate people on the company get it (a person is not let to handle anything until he is examined by a specialist).
To work on end to end privacy one really needs to control the experience end to end; trusted clients and a solid protocol, plus trusted discovery.
Email is not that thing. Email is postcards.
At a technical level, email works well from the perspective of "the mail must get through", although practically speaking, spammers ruined things to the point that most people are feudalised because defending spam raised the bar of technical expertise too high for most people.
And the small number left who can run their own infra are often locked out by the feudal overlords (big 4 + every isp ever) because an untrusted ingress is basically a spam loophole.
Ironically the closer you get to spam free the more you have to police, because the value of a spam injection point goes up commensurably when most people are no longer exposed to it.
Overall, the war on spam was won, but at the cost of freedom for the people who would like to run their own infra but aren't technical and patient enough to do it in today's environment.
The root problem of bare-bones email is that user identity and user-agent address (mbox) are conflated. (A social layer would effectively address this fundmental flaw.)
> one really needs ... trusted discovery
Or an 'introduction' protocol.
Yes, same; but that's kind of the point. Mastodon is the best effort I have seen so far; which is why it was disappointing to see it falter shortly after it started to really pick up.
There seem to be a mass exodus from Twitter (at least, among the people I follow), precipitated by Twitter's latest unwelcome UI tweaks. Initially, it seemed really cool -- it was specifically addressing Twitters biggest pain points (longer messages, chronological timeline, saner threading), and was OSS and federated to boot.
However, quickly the veiner started to crumble, with there appearing to be an increasing number of issues, such as undelivered DMs, scrambled threads, dropped mentions. A lot of them seemed specifically related to interactions between federated instances. To make matters worse, the UI seemed to be getting increasingly slower.
Eventually, the combined frustrations, and to some extent perhaps network effects, resulted to gradual return back to Twitter.
This is, admittedly, a skewed view based on the observation of the small slice of Twitter community that I follow, and my own limited experience with the platform (spanning a few weeks).
I am still hoping that Mastodon (or something like it) makes it, but I'm not holding my breath.
Conspiracy-theorist mode: spooks wanted to control the scene once it was obvious that it will be impossible to stop the proliferation of the idea of 'e2e encrypted secure messaging'. For this, they had to have an actually secure product without obvious backdoors (to gain and keep marketshare), but also some way to sidestep it. As long as they have the necessary metadata (who is contacting who, and the phone numbers they use), they can just sidestep the end-to-end encryption and hack the endpoints to access data. And moxie is insisting pretty hard on the 2 aspects of Signal that are unnecessary for the stated goal of the project, but are necessary for this purpose: 1) single central server, 2) having to share your phone number to communicate
(Or maybe there's a "Signal Lite" I'm not aware of?)
Why not work like every other app and allow me to just enter the code from the SMS I received?
As someone whose primary motivation had little to do with "hiding my conversations" and much more to do with "not having my entire address book, unrelated SMS history, and identity sucked up and sent to some company I don't trust", Signal just wasn't a great onboarding process at all. In the time I spent waiting to see what happened when the SMS timed out, I'd already installed Telegram and gotten setup. And if I remember correctly, even once I went through the phonecall process Signal was basically non-functional without access to my contacts.
So Telegram it's been - shitty crypto and all. Though I'm open to other recommendations.
Just want to plug Tox: https://tox.chat/
I recommend "Isotoxin" client.
It is server-less, no phone numbers required (Sorry NSA :( )
I looked at all the "secure" chat clients (Facebook, WhatsApp, Riot, Matrix, etc.) and Tox seems to be the only one that is SECURE (read: encrypted) and more importantly PRIVACY-FOCUSED (no phone numbers & central servers).
After ICQ, MSN, AIM, XMPP, Jabber, GoogleTalk, etc. I learned my lesson: Not gonna trust any single entity EVER! No matter how "secure" they say they are.
What happens is that the person who does it effectively being cut out of the loop with maybe a handful of their contacts becoming partial converts that might serve as human routers for a while.
WhatsApp and Signal work because they are easy they are mom/grandpa proof and they have a huge user base.
Those are not single entity, but federated.
I wouldn't bet on that just yet. Tox is not secure right now. [0]
For now Riot (Matrix) through Tor fills this purpose nicely. It's completely encrypted end to end, and Tor avoids being identified from metadata. It does use servers, but you can choose any of the public servers available[1] or create one yourself and have people use it for plausible deniability (while you use it through Tor). There's interest in making Tor-only Matrix servers that can communicate with regular servers[2] but I think Matrix clients through Tor is secure enough.
Also, allowing using phone numbers for authentication is in my opinion very important for a service to reach some level of popularity (and therefore more work put into it, more audits, and not having to use a gazillion of clients yourself, etc). Riot main server has it but of course it's not required at all.
[0] https://github.com/TokTok/c-toxcore/issues/426
> you can run your own private Signal network and rewrite the authentication if you wanted or remove the sms verification.
You can. What's your point? Most important thing with IM is network effect, i.e. how many people can you contact with it.
You propose putting effort into rewriting the code, then running your own server, then only talking to people who you get to install your modified version of signal on their devices. This is not a solution to the problem, because if you're gonna put all that effort in, there already are viable alternatives.
My main point with my 'conspiracy theory' was that spooks would want to control the scene by being in control of the most popular IM networks. I do not see how you disprove that.
Tying things to a phone number makes sense in order to reduce Sybil attacks, but I think that OWS could operate a phone-number-based identity service which would be relied upon by federated Signal servers, reducing the degree centralisation while still preserving Sybil resistance. This matters because without Sybil resistance it'd be pretty easy for a malicious party to send a Signal user 10,000,000 messages per second, saturating his data connexion and depleting his battery; tying identity to phone number makes it easier to limit & block such bad actors.
I think people who are for anonymous use of Signal don't understand that the bulk of Signals users don't want anyone who is anonymous to contact them. If I don't know who you are or I can not track you down, then you can't contact me.
Getting that to work is tricky, but it'd be awesome.
I can imagine a system where users prove possession to OWS of their phone numbers via SMS — as they currently do — and OWS issues them certificates using some sort of blind signature scheme; they can then use those certificates to prove to any server they talk to that they are someone with an identity, and the server can use a subsidiary certificate to demonstrate to other servers that it's acting on behalf of someone with an identity (but not whose identity), and the recipient's server can rate-limit based on that identity, and potentially even record information to aid in manually tracking someone down — without revealing the identity in normal use.
I could be wrong, and I've definitely not proven that it can work. But I think it can be made to.
For the first part of your argument, the issues I mention do not affect the security of the product (signal) itself, they would just enable spooks to more easily sidestep the whole product.
I also do not have anything against using the phone number as uid, it's 'good enough' for most people, and it greatly simplifies things. It is a very sensible default. What I'm questioning is the hardline stance of not allowing anything else at all - while 90% of people would be fine with signal as is, why not give the remaining 10% of us kookoos a bit more freedom?
As for the Sybil attack, does signal allow users not in your 'buddy list' to send you messages?
I think Signal allows anyone to send messages; I don't think it only permits communication when both parties have one another in their contact lists.
Matrix/Riot is a good example of a federated chat protocol which supports all the latest and shiny things you could find on a chat service (cross-platform, E2E encryption, audio/video group calls, multimedia content, etc) and which is also very easy to use and which has great UX. I would say that Matrix/Riot is even more feature complete than Signal.
I get that the guy thinks non-federation makes things simpler for himself but the way he argues against federation is nonsensical.
Matrix/Riot is too new to have those, they have never deprecated a cipher yet.
Would love to have a chat with you about the issues the people you train have come across with Matrix
In other words, you are at the mercy of whoever owns the chat platform. To me, this is a bigger privacy issue than the issue with updating servers/clients on a non-federated network.
I think that he exaggerates the problem. Right now, it's possible for someone to install the Signal client, and then never upgrade it: the Signal servers must have a way, eventually, to refuse service to that client (upon which it will receive a message from the server stating something to the effect of 'your client is too outdated; please update it').
With a federated system, eventually some servers will be so out of date that other servers will refuse service to them. They'll have to send a message to those servers to the effect of 'you are too outdated; please update yourself'; the server can forward that message to its administrator. The clients of such servers might also receive a message stating 'your server is too outdated; please ask your administrator to upgrade or switch servers.'
A similar pattern exists with respect to client updates in a federated network.
Moxie's just wrong on this, I think: it's not significantly worse; the pattern with federation is very similar to the pattern with centralisation; and there are real benefits to federation & decentralisation.
I find it so ironic that he doesn't "support federated systems" when the Signal is tied to one.
Wait, but if telephony is regulated then so is our DNS system. After all, Verisign (I think) owns "dot com". I am not sure about the last statement but the point is that you have to go to a registrar to get a domain name. So, is email not truly federated either?
Thinking about the problem, we need some kind of identifier that is not controlled by a single entity and yet there is a consensus as to how we route traffic designated to that identifier. Ideally, we want to be able to designate multiple clients with the same identifier which only complicates the issue. Is there a solution to this?
What do you mean by "our"?
There is nothing that "forces" anyone to use ICANN DNS.
(There is certainly coercion and peer pressure to follow along, but as a technical matter anyone can break free at anytime. It is just a matter of changing some defaults and running some software yourself.)
People use ICANN DNS for one of the following reasons
1. because they do understand the technical details such as changing defaults and running a local authoritative server serving a root.zone file,
2. because their business relies on ICANN DNS somehow or
3. "because that is what everyone else is using" or some similar belief where any variance from status quo is per se failure.
The encryption that Signal uses is not likely to be broken. Because Marlinspike did not write it.
The protocol is a different matter. Uncertainties abound.
The author of the encryption is not the author of the protocol and if I recall the author of the encryption questioned why the distribution of the software has to be controlled by one company. (Answer: It doesn't.)
Signal is a classic example of some software (in this case written in Java) whose adoption on its own merits the author has deemed "inadequate" and so the author attaches it to some very widely adopted platform or other widely adopted software. This results in instant mass adoption.FN1 It is like entering into a distribution agreement.
Challenging this decision with respect to Signal results in mundane philosophical arguments about "user experience".
The beautiful thing about the encryption that Signal uses is that it is not attached to any particular software or platform. It gains adoption on it own merits, not by making a deal with a company like WhatsApp/Facebook.
Anyone can write software with the same encryption that Signal uses, and it does not have to be entwined with a protocol controlled by Facebook.
FN1. Another recent thread mentioned how web browser authors partner with popular software such as "CCleaner" to silently install their browser along with "CCleaner". As a result, every user who installs "CCleaner" also installs Chrome (and maybe some other malware). Parasitic software distribution. When it comes time to boast about browser "market share", the method of distribution, the presence or absence of conscious choice by the user, is not reported.
Actually you can quite easily, and quite a few people have done so. Including hacker clubs for events (the CCC operating a local custom GSM network with their own SIMs, and working numbers a few years back for their congress comes to mind), small ISPs with only a few hundred or thousand customers, and more.
It’s definitely possible, easy, and cheap.
The internet equivalent to what they are doing would be getting a business line with a fixed, provider-owned IP prefix. The equivalent to what the parent describes would be getting a prefix delegation from a registry and peering with other networks.
It's still really cool for island systems though, which is the more important thing for those events.
I mean, they ran their own full MVNO, with their own SIM cards, with their own code on the cards, and operated their own tower.
That isn’t a simple number.
Having the entire (mostly/entirely? open-source) GSM network is really really cool and important, but from the perspective of the wider phone network still "only" a "fancy internal phone system", with the limitations of control that come with that.
Signal has the worst app (on iOS) and worst UX of anything I regularly use. There's unlikely to be a desktop client which is actually usable (doesn't depend on a phone, works on platforms I care about). The app is less buggy on iOS than it used to be, but it's still not great. Also doesn't work well with groups. And tied to PSTN identities, and the "talk to a new person on the street" interaction sucks. But, the most widely audited crypto, a good development model, and good adoption within some activist communities.
Wire is great, although it's a little "game-like" vs. professional for certain UX. I know the developers and really like it, and it's great for group chat and desktop, but doesn't have much adoption. But, one big global system, too.
Riot/Matrix and Mattermost are nice because you can run them on private networks. Nice apps. I've not seen as much analysis of their security as Signal.
Whatsapp, Telegram, etc. have massive adoption. Whatsapp is now solid security for user to user.
Apple's stuff is great but is Apple-only, and I'm wary, even if I trust the security model, to let a single company own my OS (and update whenever, without really auditing it) and my "end to end encrypted" apps -- way too easy to slip in any kind of backdoor there if they want.
etc. I'd happily trade in 50 ok to good systems for one great standard and then OS/other-application integration -- but it seems like we don't do standards anymore.
Check out eul, it's a native desktop client for all major messaging platforms. Signal support is coming in October. It's only 4 MB, and it can handle thousands of messages without lag.
Looking at your comment history (on both your accounts), you say you plan to open-source it, but you're not sure under what license, and you also hope to make money off it but you're not sure how - possibly through a "paid option"? I commend your effort, but until the exact nature of the project is settled, I would expect confusion and reluctance on the part of your potential users.
Personally, I would never use a secure messenger I couldn't compile myself.
Some previous threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14778263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15081269
No IRC.
> doctor_evil_quote_fingers.jpg
I'm really sad it has to be downloaded, but there's no other way to do authentication. Will switch to Servo once it's ready, it's only ~20 MB.
WA communicates your address book to Facebook.
Strange. We have opposite conclusions from the same data. I figure I need to minimize the amount of people that "have root" so to speak. If I can't trust Apple, it doesn't matter if I trust Signal. Apple controls what actually gets downloaded to my phone.
I use signal for a different reason: mark certain conversations as "phone only" so notifications don't come up at inopportune times like when I'm at thanksgiving dinner with my extended family.
This article explains a lot better than I can some of the security tradeoffs with Whatsapp, particularly in regard to metadata and data collection.
Also, the worst UX? IMO Signal looks and feels much better and less cluttered than WhatsApp, Wire and Hangouts. Only Telegram has a superior UX (and a really nice QT native desktop app), IMO.
Either way I'm not surprised he is included here accusing Signal of colluding with the US gov merely because it indirectly took funding... all of those espionage fans see "US gov funding" and instantly assume collusion - but the reality is typically much more boring. Maybe not so much in Russia where money from the state often comes with expectation of favours in return (the opposite of America where money going in to the state demands favours in return)...
> Marlinspike reiterated that the whole point of end-to-end encryption is that users no longer need to trust anyone if the protocol works — and Signal does.
But it depended on the google play framework - and I don't trust google. So where does that leave me?
EDIT:
To reiterate: As far as I can tell Signal itself is secure enough. However, the most secure chat app is insecure if it is run on an insecure operating system.
Now, I don't want to start a discussion about android security. But:
- The update situation is quite bad, leaving (for example) my phone with exploitable bluetooth
- Google itself ... could at least be coerced by a state actor into compromising anyone's privacy
With those two facts given, the practical difference between signal and telegram seems... less relevant.
[1]: Look at the "conversations" app. Yes, it is for XMPP, which is old and uncool - but it (a) doesn't use the play framework either and (b) uses very little battery on my phone, despite holding an open connection most of the time. That IMO proves that depending on the play framework is unnecessary in this case.
I think that is a good thing, kudos to them.
The thing that would make me really happy is a play-framework-free build on f-droid. I'm not holding my breath, though...
f-droid would be nice, I agree. I did not really follow the whole political discussion about why moxie refuses to cooperate, but at least I can use signal again after some years without gapps.
F-Droid offers two options (a) they build your app, or (b) you use reproducible builds, they rebuild your app, and verify that it produces the same result.
Moxie raged that people should trust him instead of F-Droid for builds, so (a) wouldn’t be an option, and was awfully silent about (b), especially considering that Signal now has reproducible builds, but he refuses to allow that option, too.
Do you mean "signal"? Telegram is very specifically the pseudo-secure messenger shit-talking Signal and Marlinspike.
m(
Telegram doesn't drain battery at all and doesn't need Google. Not sure what Signal and others do, but of Wire I know that they drain battery as fast as if I had a game running constantly in the background.
Signal I'd use, but it (still) doesn't work on my phone because I've got many Google software firewalled. When reporting this bug years ago it was a WONTFIX. I also heard they removed that dependency months ago and I keep trying every few months, but Signal won't even let me confirm my phone number because it relies on Google so deeply, so I can't use it.
So unfortunately Telegram is still my messenger of choice: high usability, everyone has it, it's not owned by some big corporation and it's not of the USA, and optional encryption (for non-group chats) is better than nothing.
It's strictly worse than nothing. Opting to use optional end-to-end encryption basically shouts to your local friendly dictatorship, "Hey, look at this person!" Would you like that kind of attention? There are no such concerns with mandatory end-to-end encryption. It probably would be banned altogether, but that's a different problem.
They came up with their own encryption protocol and they are not trained or known as cryptographers, that's a warning sign.
> [Durov] The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now...
That's another red flag, needing to spread fud and lies about Signal. Another reason not to trust Telegram. Indicates that maybe their ethics and integrity are a bit too flexible.
> During our team's 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI.
Some people might read it as "these guys are so good, FBI is begging to backdoor them". But it can also be read as FBI suspects they are ethically compromised and they have a chance of succeeding.
To emphasize even more why this is silly: nobody from the government (well, at least nobody who has said they're from the US or any other government) was involved with the actual development of the Signal Protocol. It was just funded by the government, through the Open Technology Fund, a project of Radio Free Asia (which is itself under the Department of State; the OTF was largely an initiative of Sec. Clinton). This is an extremely different part of the government from either NIST or any of the three-letter agencies.
There has been exactly one backdoor found in crypto relating to the US government (Dual_EC_DRBG), and it was in crypto developed by the NSA and basically pushed into a standard. It was also crypto that looked extremely suspicious, immediately, to any cryptographer who looked at it: it had a contrived design for no good reason, ran much slower than the existing options in the space, and appeared to support a backdoor. A lot of people have looked at the Signal Protocol and found nothing like this.
The US government has been accused of hiding backdoors before in one case, DES. It turned out that they were hiding a way of strengthening DES against an attack that was not yet public (differential cryptanalysis) but had been discovered by the NSA. Nothing like this happened to Signal: the developers were not told by the government "Great, just use these S-boxes instead."
(In fact, it occurs to me that there's not much room in Signal for a backdoor along the above lines: no S-boxes, no constants, etc. The closest it gets to that is picking Curve25519 and Curve448, both of which are well-known curves, predating Signal, with simple mathematical descriptions that make them essentially impossible to have backdoors. Perhaps he means that the Signal software is backdoored? But that wouldn't make sense with the reference to WhatsApp and Facebook, and also is a much more easily disprovable assertion than that crypto is backdoored.)
The US government also, of course, weakened crypto with the ridiculous export rules of the '90s. But that wasn't a backdoor, and they were pretty explicit that the intention was to weaken crypto. The OTF has no such motivation here; their goal was to produce secure tools that can be used by dissidents around the world, and intentionally-weakened crypto would be dangerous in such a context.
(Despite having some security experience I'm not a cryptographer, and I feel kind of silly speaking up here. But the FUD is even sillier.)
I honestly don't think it matters. The fact they lie about a large number of items, such as the nature of their relationship/business and have repeatedly is proof enough they can't be trusted.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11...
> For starters, Durov and other Telegram employees had repeatedly claimed their app was nonprofit, which wasn’t technically true. (“The Telegram team declared numerous times in its FAQs and public statements that Telegram was a non-profit,” Durov wrote to Neff in an email made public in court documents. “… The for-profit entity that we currently have, especially a U.S.-based one, raises questions among our audience.”)
> That's another red flag, needing to spread fud and lies about Signal. Another reason not to trust Telegram. Indicates that maybe their ethics and integrity are a bit too flexible.
Lying has been their modus operandi since the start.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6948742
> You must not have followed Telegram much. From the beginning they've done nothing but pretend their protocol is absolutely secure ("military-grade encryption", "world's most secure protocol", etc) and rejected any attempt from the crypto community to help them fix problems before they endanger people.
The sheer pervasiveness of their lies and the fact it ranges from the quality of their cryptographic skills to the nature of their business should have prevented its adoption. Unfortunately, lying at scale appears to work because most people simply dismiss it as "competitors" attacking their competition. :\
If you can't win an argument on the merits, spew unfounded sensational accusations to confuse and distract the technically illiterate and conspiracy minded.
Actually, they are. Or a few of Durov's family members are. IIRC it was his brother that developed Telegram's cryptography. His family has a pretty impressive academic mathematical background.
The warning sign is that, academic credentials or not, they still rolled their own crypto, and didn't use common ( = "crypto community" vetted/approved) cryptographic primitives and techniques, but came up with new stuff that isn't vetted properly. And that is a warning sign.
What is also problematic is that Telegram's encryption is not enabled by default. Even if the crypto turns out to be flawless, that is still a big problem.
One other thing I wonder sometimes myself--though I'm not knowledgeable enough to lean either way--is about this crypto community. I know it's international, in principle. But how inclusive is it in practice? I'm probably biased from reading most on the topic via HN, but how much of it is US-based? Does Russian academia take part in it too? Honest question.
BTW I use Telegram (also Whatsapp, Signal and recently Matrix) myself. I just don't consider any of it (Telegram) encrypted. Really fast postcards. But the UI and functionality (especially with the desktop app) is a joy. Why can't they all just team up or something and have the Telegram guys do the UX part? :)
Telegram's crypto is a complete question mark. I wouldn't be surprised if it's backdoored by Russian intelligence.
Why Telegram crypto is a complete question mark but Signal crypto is unquestionable?
Maybe otherwise, Signal backdoored to US intelligence?
I'm using Telegram client compiled from sources right now...
Edit: The main problem with Telegram is not the crypto, but the fact that end-to-end crypto is not used by default. Except with calls, those are always end to end encrypted.
And it was used few times already. Some of such occurrences were well documented.
In 2015, in a lobby discussion on DEFCON two people confronted Marlinspike about the retransmission vulnerability in the Signal. He was asked to give a _yes or no answer_ to whether the central server can trigger the key renegotiation by sending the "I lost my phone" command to both parties. And he answered this question _no_. This was long before the Guardian lashed at FB with the backdoor article.
I personally verified this account with 2 people.
Marlinspike Moxie is a liar.
Still, _it is possible to trigger this process for a third party_, and then to MITM the key exchange.
I'm not exactly comfortable with this now - it seems like someone may be able to spam messages to hide the key change.
This is all very unfortunate, because the success of this type of services depend strongly on its initial user-base size. For a while, with the rise of mobile there seemed to appear a critical window (from the public perspective: ICQ forgotten, XMPP not even noticed, Skype annoyed everyone, Google talk ?) for a new IM to fit itself, but it seems lost. I fear enticing users to switch to the reasonable solutions, like those mentioned, is already a Sisyphean task. Don't know about you, but I'm not valuable enough contact to keep one more application installed on someone's smartphone to contact me exclusively. "Cut showing off, use what everyone's using!" Even in a rarest occasion when I manage to successively tempt anyone, with the first bug or UX flaw they jump ship and become even more opposite to the idea of trying what's supposed to be a better solution.
[1] https://ring.cx/
I tried it in 3 different plaforms (OSX, Android, Linux) and in every case I found (different) experience-breaking bugs (>30min to find a contact, registration timeouts, missing GUI buttons, and so on). Also, you can have multiple devices connected but not all messages will reach all devices, and of course an offline device will not receive messages sent since it was last online.
I really wanted to like it and push for it, but I just can't in its state :(
[0] Tip: name the devices and remove any you don't recognize, I just have three devices with Riot.im installed but during setup some others appeared, maybe duplicates or a web session, I got rid of those. Less devices is less verifications.
An honest analysis would be that the Signal protocol will survive as a part of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and the rest of the secure comm protocols and apps are doomed to a slow slide into irrelevance. Most will linger as a mechanism for making traffic analysis of their users just a bit easier, but in general their future is grim.
AFAIK the Signal voice/video server is still kept private so you can't run your own. Only the text server is freely available.
Every 6 months or so I try pushing it onto "normal" people, and then I realize something is not working quite right. A while ago it was the Signal desktop app that wasn't importing contacts. I also have an issue now where I can't delete/hide a contact from the contacts list in there, even though it doesn't appear on the mobile app.
Speaking of which, I wonder what's their plan for the desktop app, as I believe Google has deprecated those types of apps in Chrome and I don't think it will work anymore in about a year. I've also used WhatsApp more because the native desktop app seems much more reliable.
Then it was messages arriving too slow (waiting many minutes to be "pushed" as a notification, which is pretty bad for a chat application). I think it still has this issue.
The video call still doesn't seem to work as well as the WhatsApp video call. It seems buggy and the connection is not of the same quality. WhatsApp video calls are more resilient than Google's Duo, too, which switches to audio often.
Even the ringtone the video call uses by default is worse than the one WhatsApp uses. I know it seems like a little thing to complain about, and if it was just this one little thing, I probably wouldn't complain about it. But it's all of these together that still stop me from pressing others too much to use it.
I would also like to complain about OWS/Moxie's inability to "build a community". Yes, many cryptographers and security people like the app for the good tech it uses and such, but the organization is not actively trying to build a community or care much for it from what I've noticed. I think Durov and Telegram work on that much more, and it's important. In fact, it may be one of the primary reasons why Telegram is so much more popular.
OWS/Moxie barely even post on Twitter anymore. They release a blog post every few months. It's hard to "get excited" about the app or want to follow them closely too much when they do this.
I think this is also the reason why they're losing/have already lost an opportunity to become the default secure messenger in the Democratic party to Wickr, which is much more active on outreach and stuff like that, even though Clinton's team used Signal in the campaign and they got a lot of good press for it. But they're now blowing all of that away because of their "silence" and non-marketing focus.
Video calling on Signal works a little differently than WhatsApp to my understanding; it's decentralized and so the quality is lower, but the Signal server manages to keep from collecting any data, and backdoors can't be added (it just sets up the call and then bows out).
In the sense of having a separate instance of Chrome, dedicated to Signal, open all the time:-)
It's probably still the best, quickest cross-platform solution — which is just sad. Although I wonder how bad the current Java compatibility story is: if they used Java maybe they could reuse some of their Android code.
When I tried it in 2015, it frequently broke, lost chats, lost history, etc. Security means nothing if the secure app itself is unusable.
Signal does nothing of the sort - it's impossible to backup conversations, they won't sync to a new device, it won't work on a tablet, it's SMS support is buggy and incomplete and their desktop client is based on a dead technology (and limited to a single machine without SMS support). It also doesn't offer anything over builtin SMS/call support like Telegram does. To top it off, it hijacks SMS store meaning you can't even use OS-based software to backup at least SMS conversations.
I can't give Signal to non-tech users and just say "hey, use this instead of SMS", because it won't work and it'll lose their conversations. I can do so with iMessage.
They're working on an Electron version (Chrome apps aren't dead yet, so they still have some time), and I'm using Signal Desktop on two machines.
Absolutely disgusting.
I'd be surprised if some state actors don't have access most Telegram messages.
I'm dubious about Signal, it has the same issues as most other encrypted communication channels (metadata leakage) but surely competition in this space is good.
Being "owned" by Facebook for me is a large red flag, as Facebook have an incentive to gobble up data- not saying the same is not true for telegram either- the only messenger I actually trust is iMessage but that's purely for reasons of: "Apple has no incentive at all to snoop".
It's not FUD to criticise Signal.
It's not FUD to question Telegrams crypto.
Holding Moxie and Durov to account for releasing servers that can actually be used would be a great help in being able to independently assess their claims. And even then, I might still err on the side of Durov purely for the fact that after doing what he did (telling the Russian government they couldn't do anything to Telegram) he fled the country, lost most of his fortune, his company. Etc.
I can't find public information about this interestingly but he's on the internal roster of employees.