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Comment by samtoday | Hacker News Reader

Signal is built on top of the phone number system (ie. falling back to SMS, phone numbers as ids). Telephony is pretty clearly a federated system - somebody on one carrier can talk to another; even internationally.

I find it so ironic that he doesn't "support federated systems" when the Signal is tied to one.

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And yet you can't create your own small phone network, assign whatever numbers you want to your users, and expect others to interconnect with you or honor your numbers. Telephony is federated within an internationally regulated system, to claim that this in any way supports federation in a similar manner as what is being discussed is to fundamentally misunderstand how the system works.

> And yet you can't create your own small phone network, assign whatever numbers you want to your users, and expect others to interconnect with you or honor your numbers. Telephony is federated within an internationally regulated system, to claim that this in any way supports federation in a similar manner as what is being discussed is to fundamentally misunderstand how the system works.

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?

"Wait, but if telephony is regulated then so is our DNS system."

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.

> And yet you can't create your own small phone network, assign whatever numbers you want to your users, and expect others to interconnect with you or honor your numbers.

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.

I wouldn't call these event networks "part of the federated phone system". They are clients of companies that are part of it. External numbers into these networks are extensions of a public number they get from the upstream - just like any company having a PBX, they do not participate in any of the inter-provider infrastructure, do not own the phone numbers, ...

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 wouldn't call these event networks "part of the federated phone system". They are clients of companies that are part of it. External numbers into these networks are extensions of a public number they get from the upstream - just like any company having a PBX, they do not participate in any of the inter-provider infrastructure, do not own the phone numbers, ...

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.

I meant purely from a "connection to the general phone system" perspective - at all events I've been they only had internal numbers and you could be called from the outside through an extension. If there was an event where that wasn't the case I stand corrected.

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.

Telephony is federated, in some senses. But not as is generally accepted when speaking about internet communication protocols. Compared to SMTP or IRC, the average person can't start their own telephony service provider - to do so is highly regulated and involves organisations such as the ITU. I'm sure, given such an infrastructure, Signal could be relatively easily moved to a "federated" set-up. But that wouldn't solve the issues that people who complain "Signal isn't federated" want fixed.

Signal does not fall back to sms.

Good one!

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