Signal was experiencing technical difficulties | Hacker News Reader

Signal was experiencing technical difficulties

status.signal.org

69 pointsthsowers57 comments

What a horrible status page, for a project of 1 person or 1 million persons, this is slightly above useless.

Stripe [0] and Segment [1] have pretty useful status pages, which provide, in my opinion, the real reason for a status page -- to confirm there isn't a problem on your end or that an issue you're facing is or isn't a problem with the service so you can escalate accordingly.

0. https://status.stripe.com/

1. https://status.segment.com/

There's an interesting fork of Signal, called 'Session', that aims to remedy many of the flaws in Signal's infrastructure/strategic choices. It's young - needing a lot more analysis & track record before earning serious credibility – but you can check it out at: https://getsession.org/

Some of its Signal-contrasting goals include:

* no phone numbers needed

* onion-routed messages

* multi-device sync

* no central point of failure

I also don't see anything in Session's materials that they're placing Intel™ SGX™ at key points in mandatory introduction/contact-uploading/cloud-backup steps – as Signal likes to do.

> Intel™ SGX™

What difference does this make (genuine question)?

Many people don't trust Intel & the SGX technology.

Intel controls the initial attestation keys – so you're dependent on their goodwill. Much of the world will view Intel as being as cheerfully compliant with US government requests, including undisclosed & arguably-illegal requests. (That's just like how some in the US view Huawei as being compliant in undisclosed ways with the Chinese government's requests.)

Sophisticated, high-budget/state-supported attackers may be able to compromise SGX units, via physical analysis/disassembly/reassembly. (This might happen before a unit is placed in service, or just show up to the outside as a temporary service outage.) So any secrecy/security features provided by their qualities could be a false promise.

Numerous flaws have been discovered, and more are likely to be discovered, in SGX. Try: https://www.google.com/search?q=SGX+flaws

Some security experts deeply distrust both SGX specifically, and the general idea that such a piece of hardware could provide the touted benefits against sufficiently-sophisticated attackers.

I mean, SGX is strictly an improvement over the same protocol without SGX.

If the protocol were designed to require an SGX-like component, sure, leaving it out would be fatal. But not improved over alternative design choices!

how did i not know about this!?

This is awesome.. Looks like its Australian as well.. even better!

I have mixed feelings about that aspect - as the Australian government has often seemed more encryption-hostile than other countries, almost to the extent that it might be rehearsing limits that other countries would like to impose later.

But it does seem the Loki Foundation & Session project are attempting to engineer-around surveillance threats from local jurisdictions.

Explains why I was having issues this morning. Was receiving messages on the desktop app, but not my phone, and none of my messages where bring received regardless of where I sent them from.

Oh well, had they're working on it.

I presume it might be them struggling to deal with increased traffic from the quarantined crowd? Although I'm not sure how many users Signal has now and how much of an increase it's experienced.

Signal's quality issues are why I switched to telegram. The performance, quality, and UX are years ahead of Signal. Plus, I've never had a message drop on telegram, very much unlike Signal.

The one drawback is chats aren't e2e encrypted by default, but there is an option to have "Secret Chats" which are e2e encrypted.

Has it ever not been? I've been unable to receive messages on desktop for 6+ months. The mobile app constantly loses message history and fails to receive notifications as well.

I've submitted multiple detailed support tickets with screenshots, steps to reproduce, etc, to no avail, never even got a response.

Never had such issues with signal on android or iOS. Maybe you have bad luck?

Maybe, but I've never had any issues like this with iMessage or WhatsApp. Doesn't make me particularly keen on recommending my friends to use Signal.

I've used it across three different mobile phones and countless desktop devices over the years without any issues. Did you accidentally set the messages to expire after a short time? Are you using more than one mobile phone? I also recommend submitting an actual github issue to either their Desktop or Android/iOS repo with those detailed instructions.

Most definitely not using expiring messages, each message shows up as "Error handling incoming message" instead of the message text, but otherwise looks the same as a normal message.

Signals Works For Me, on iOS, and for many others. I get that you're frustrated, but Signal really can work.

Yeah, and a buggy clock works twice a day... I'm not going to recommend people use an app that's so fundamentally broken on multiple devices for so long, even if it works fine for some people.

I've been a Signal user on Desktop, iOS, and via the old chrome app for many years out of necessity, and I contantly encounter frustrating bugs that I've never seen on iMessage or WhatsApp.

I also have never had issues. (if mobile = Android) That sounds like you either didn't set it as the os default messaging app or some "battery saver" optimization is running wild. If you can truly reproduce the issue, you could always create your own patch (assuming you're a software dev since hn).

You can also set up automatic backups of conversations into an encrypted database. Certainly not a fix for whatever your problem is, but could be a workaround.

This is on desktop and iOS, I don't use Android. Incoming messages appear as "Error handling incoming message", and the automatic backups are unusable because you can't import the backups on another device. I shouldn't have to patch my messaging app to have it be usable...

this only serves to highlight how critical it is for signal to switch to a distributed design. Its a great technology, but worthless if regimes can just QoS it into oblivion or block it entirely.

Centralized services can experience outages, but federation does not automatically solve all of the availability issues.

> Signal is up and running.

Just updated the title, thanks!

For a tool that aspires to be critical privacy infrastructure, Signal is quite opaque in its operations.

Benefits of centralization.

Outages?

More like: "When it's down, it's just down for everyone and there's nothing you can do"

If most messaging systems were IRC, XMPP or Matrix then and the status quo was not that Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp were the most popular instant messaging solutions, then Signal being so centralised would look quite odd and we might have cause to criticise them.

The situation is not that, however we can still fault them for this.

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