Wire Server open sourced | Hacker News Reader

Wire Server open sourced

medium.com

128 pointshaarts31 comments

It is worth noting that this venture features an open sourced, Haskell implementation of a messaging server and Rust implementations of the underlying secure messaging protocol, Axolotl

Not only that, but the chat & calling actually work well too. Test it out yourself. My username on there is the same as my username on here.

I haven't used Wire [1] in a long time because it didn't have a way to backup and restore conversations when switching devices (Signal behaves the same way too). But I do look at the release notes whenever the client is updated. Recently I was happy to see that Wire allowed up to three accounts to be configured in the client!

I also like the fact that Wire doesn't need a phone number (unlike Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp and similar applications). You can sign up with an email address and use it. Of course, Wire is end-to-end encrypted, syncs across devices (unlike Signal) and has native^ multi-platform/multi-OS support where each device is independent and doesn't need the phone to be around (unlike Signal or WhatsApp).

On the topic of open sourcing the server, it's a good move from the security audit point of view. But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

^: As mentioned in a comment below, it's an Electron app, but I meant to indicate that there's an app that you can install for each platform without having more prerequisites (unlike Signal that requires Chrome/Chromium to be installed first).

[1]: https://wire.com

> native multi-platform/multi-OS support

Nope, just Electron.

In 2017 "native" mean "Chromium built as a library and bundled into (every) executable".

It really doesn't.

Some people use it that way sure, but they're wrong. You can either help point it out when they make the claim or you can be a part of the problem.

You can backup/restore Signal Desktop conversations from the Dev Tools console:

`Whisper.Backup.backupToDirectory()`

`Whisper.Backup.importFromDirectory()`

I can't do it on my phone though. And that's the device that might change after some time (years). AFAIK, Signal is coded explicitly to disallow backups of the data on iOS. Can't back it up with iTunes backup or on iCloud. I believe security was a reason (sacrificing UX deeply, IMO). I don't use Signal because of its comparatively poorer UX and feature set (the others I consider are Telegram and Wire). And without being able to backup conversations from an existing/old phone and restore them on a new phone, I'll never use it. I learned about this behavior the hard way during a previous switch and lost all my conversations (for some I had the patience to take screenshots).

> But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

Federation of self-hosted servers and the "official cloud" seems to be on Wire's road-map, cf:

* Third paragraph of OP

* https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/5vylls/wire_end...

* Last sentence on https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...

>But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

What's the use case for self hosting ? Since it's supposed to be e2e, does self-hosting buy you anything ?

Depending on the details of the protocol, it might defend against certain patterns of traffic & contact analysis.

It’s a requirement many organizations have - government institutions are a good example. Some might want to not leak any data to the outside world, run it only for internal use, etc.

> But until any of these new age apps/platforms support federation and decentralized communication, there's not much use for the masses to look for servers run by specific people.

Have you not heard of https://matrix.org?

100% open source server + client(s), decentralized, federated, easy to stand up your own server, end-to-end encryption, bridges to tons of other networks (IRC, telegram, slack, mattermost, etc), full history sync even when you log in from new devices, read receipts (even for individual users in group chats). They're by far (in my opinion) the most feature-rich of the "new-age" communication systems. I've been running my own homeserver for over a year now and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Thanks for the mention and the description of the features and benefits of Matrix. It sounds like music to my ears! I did hear about Matrix probably a year or two ago, but didn't think much of it at that time. I tend to look these up once every several months or so to see what's available and what improvements have happened. I'll have to check this out again.

To save people of a few seconds of confusion...

"Wire" is a secure messaging app. When I saw "wire server" I immediately though "wire protocol" which is a networking term and also something completely different.

while wire seems better than most alternatives I prefer matrix.org/riot.im - it is not quite geared at same function but it works just as well for it.

Wire is really, really exciting. I don't know if I trust its crypto anywhere near as much as I trust Signal's, and I don't know if I trust its business model as much, but featurewise it seems a healthy competitor.

Multi-device. Email-address-based. Federated [soon]. What's not to like?

Crypto - Wire’s Proteus is an independent implementation of Axolotl that was later renamed to Signal Protocol. There’s also an external audit available - info and links from Wire.com/privacy.

As to business model, Wire is VC funded by Iconical.com /Janus Friis (co-founder of Skype) and announced the first paid product in July - wire.com/teams.

Full disclosure: I work at Wire.

This is a compelling reason to use Wire over Telegram or whatsapp. I am assuming we can run our own instances though.

"The next step for the team is to remove dependencies on specific services to pave the road for an easily self-hostable server."

I would hope the sharply better security of Wire or WhatsApp would be a good reason to use them instead of Telegram.

there are plenty of factors at play. for example:

i would hope the "not being owned by a datamining advertising giant" of wire or telegram would be a good reason to use them instead of whatsapp.

If you're worried about supporting Facebook, use Wire. Facebook can't read WhatsApp messages, which are E2E encrypted (unlike Telegram's default). But it's a legit concern, and one that Wire addresses nicely.

You should be extremely suspicious of any messaging company that advertises client-server encryption as a privacy feature. It obviously is not.

you need only one reason to use app - your contacts there

if I will find only one my contact on Wire, it can be amazing as much they want, but it's useless, reason why I switched today from Hangouts to Facebook Whatsapp as my secondary messenger (primary is Signal), which I really don't like (especially bloated UI with 2 unnecessary tabs out of 4), but there is not really any other option, since nobody use Allo, Skype has horrible UI, and very few people use Telegram or Viber

telegram, wire or signal are fine for people working in IT, but if you have contacts outside your work circle they are pretty much useless

If they ship an API + a lowish cost proprietary license I could see them doing nicely from this. I'd go $100 or $1 per employee, whichever is greater.

We have the beginnings of an API - Wire.com/developer

Did anyone else end up ditching Wire on android due to an update about two months ago breaking notification sounds?

They're aware of it but no fix as yet.

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