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Comment by edhelas | Hacker News Reader

Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution.

But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "what they are doing" and deliver a crappy platform that no one will use :) It already happened too many times.

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The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find:

> We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia

and

> The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet.

I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open implementation for most of it.

+1 on that. Based on the article I hope they’re using signal or some other reputable crypto. Ideally they’ll host it in France and provide a good UI

I think it is intended for the government only, you'll never see it as a citizen.

As per another comment, the project is 100% FOSS (other than the operational bits) and is built on Matrix.org

Because it's not about building an encrypted solution, it's about building "our" encryption solution, so that we can break it when needed and infringe on privacy of citizens. Western European countries are going full speed ahead on censorship and surveillance, so no wonder they are trying to fight 'pesky' foreign encryption schemes.

This is a boring middlebrow dismissal. Please provide some evidence, or shut the hell up.

XMPP is legacy, and rightfully so. With it, by default, communication is in cleartext, there is no way to ensure message reliability and integrity without privacy implications, and multi-device support is arkward.

That's why OP said "XMPP + OMEMO".

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