Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwyers | Hacker News Reader

Why is it, whenever Signal is brought up on Hacker News, we get inundated with the people who object to the core decisions of the Signal Project? Would Signal really be better if, instead of having a secure messenger available to the masses, it spent massive amounts of time implementing the things these people want? No. I would be comfortable recommending Signal (or WhatsApp) to a nontechnical friend and communicating with them on it, with the expectation of a certain level of privacy. I spend a lot of time on Hacker News and consider myself a very technical person, and I'm not sure I trust myself to use Matrix in a forward-secure way where it's at right now. If everybody spent the time they spent complaining about Signal working on getting Matrix or whatever to a point where it was usable... well, frankly I don't think it'd be much better off than it is right now, but it seems more likely to bring about results to me than endlessly lobbying to have Moxie do _the thing he thinks cannot be freaking done right_. Right now, Signal exists and can be used securely (given certain common threat profiles) by the typical smartphone user. I'm really tired of people comparing the security that Signal offers to the security of imagined hypothetical messengers.

A great deal of human communication is dedicated to signalling high rank/superiority, or demonstrating familiarity/intimacy.[1] In the case of HN, very few people know much about Moxie, so the only useful signal they can convey is expertise. Many people come here because of their technical or product development background/interests, and the way they show expertise is by second-guessing technical, user interface, and other issues.

As a result of this combination of constraint and desire, we get a bunch of comments where HNers talk about how they'd make Signal (as well as every other product) better/more useful.

[1] From Deborah Tannen's works

Huh. I did not expect a serious and insightful answer to my entirely rhetorical question. Thank you!

I think this is an uncharitable view, and while it might be true in some cases it is certainly not always the case. Many times the people who point out issues with Signal do it not because they think they want to show off, but because they honestly are frustrated that no product seems to meet their needs and Signal has specific issues that matter to them. I honestly believe “Signal is stupid for relying on phone numbers and SGX” is really just “I don’t trust this things, they have a track history of having issues, I would really like to use this service and am sad that you chose to do this”. Hacker News is often not very good at conveying what it is trying to say, but I remain optimistic that it’s more than a intellect measuring contest.

I remember the outrage quite well when Facebook started spamming ads to the phone numbers of people who were forced to give Facebook phone numbers for "security" purposes and promised to never been shown ads on those numbers. Or when Jack Dorsey's Twitter account was hacked because of SMS 2fA.

Last, phone numbers are general identifiers used in the search boxes of various data collection tools. Maybe you can search by the Threema ID as well, but that requires the tool to be a tiny bit more sophisticated, and that means the people who like to invade privacy of are a bit more frustrated.

That isn't "smartness signalling" or whatever, that's a real concern.

The phone number was the only thing that was preventing them from keeping metadata such as usernames on their servers(until they introduced the PIN). It was a tradeoff between two concerns.

> signalling high rank/superiority

Please leave this social darwinism propaganda out of HN.

I really don't think folks like nullc (one of the prominent critics here) need (or care) to signal rank here. Saying that's driving the criticism is an easy way to write it off.

He's got a master mariners license, which to me is way more cool than any of the computer stuff. Legally captain a merchant ship of any size, of any type, operating anywhere in the world.

Also made a neat documentary about getting a sailboat and gunk-holing in the Caribbean.

Signal only has any userbase due to advocacy; compared to the secure-enough-for-most WhatsApp which has literally billions of users and is the default choice, every user of Signal had to be convinced to install it.

So I think it's unfair to bash people who criticise the project. The 'drag' they apply to wider adoption is still miniscule.

Put it this way: why does Signal exist when WhatsApp is good enough? Wouldn't Mr Rosenfeld be better putting all that effort and ingenuity into a truly innovative new messenger?

WhatsApp... uses the Signal Protocol. I don't understand this line of thinking at all.

Well at least they used to. Who knows these days.

...anyone with a packet sniffer?

WhatsApp encourages people to back up their messages to either Apple Cloud or Google Drive which breaks the E2E encryption. There is no way to tell whether the other party is doing this and just one person in a group chat can accidentally / on purpose back up the chat at any time.

Signal allows chat backups but it's not the default option and the UX deliberately discourages this behaviour. They are also encrypted with a password which offers more security.

> why does Signal exist when WhatsApp is good enough?

WhatsApp sends all your contacts to Facebook instead of the Signal Foundation, and unlike Signal, doesn't use SGX to keep Facebook from knowing what they are.

Yeah, I wonder where they’d be without Snowden’s endorsement.

> No. I would be comfortable recommending Signal (or WhatsApp) to a nontechnical friend and communicating with them on it

I kind of like Signal. It seems like an honest effort for a really great goal and the dedication as well as some of the things they have achieved seems seriously impressive!

As for WhatsApp, you realize that they upload all your chats to the cloud, unencrypted, easily retrievable by you and whoever you chat with, and that getting rid of them will take effort on both sides?

You are aware that Facebook probably use your metadata to feed their algorithms?

Edit: my point is that as engineers and technologists it is so easy to be blinded by tbe technical rick solid technical implementation if an (important) part and forget that security depends on all parts of the puzzle.

- End-to-end doesn't matter if the endpoints by default upload everything to cloud storage unencrypted. If it is going to end up unencrypted in Googles cloud you can just as well use gmail. That way you won't make your metadata accessible to Facebook at the same time.

- End-to-end only means so much when an adversary is running the routing: they cannot know the contents of your messages as they fly through their networks but if you don't trust Facebook, do you really want them to know who you talk to and when?

In Dutch we have a saying: The best helmsmen stand on the shore. (Those who watch always know better than those who do.)

I also think there is some envy in it. Some people wish they had the same success and only can criticize in envy.

Fact is right now Signal is the only safe option for a messenger that hides your messages and other meta data.

> The best helmsmen stand on the shore.

The version I've heard is that taxi drivers are the ones who best know how to run a country. :)

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