WhatsApp Status to convince your family and friends to switch to Signal
teddit.net
teddit.net
There is VERY SERIOUS security flaw associated with any "non-paranoid" use of Signal, which Telegram addresses superbly. This is the "I don't want to lose my wedding photos because I dropped my phone in the toilet" scenario.
Telegram addresses this in the following manner: "Anything you want backed up and aren't too worried about existing in the cloud, goes on our cloud, encrypted, enabling you to access it from a new untoileted phone if necessary. Anything you don't want going in our cloud, you can be in control of, either by chatting in secret, or by backing up and deleting bilaterally.". Telegram has been audited frequently enough to be trustworthy that this in fact is true.
Signal addresses this by .. well, they don't. They hope that you will have the good sense of transferring the backup from your phone to an external disk before dropping your phone in the toilet. Which means the only reliable way to back things up automatically if you're an average use is? You guessed it. Dropbox / Google. So effectively exactly back to the Whatsapp leaky backup model.
I'd rather we convince people jump the Whatsapp ship first, before we start dividing into factions that will hurt that message. You can have your civil war later if you really want to.
https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1349236175773462532?s=2...
I feel like it's the curse of popularity. As soon as one of these companies get big enough, it will get bought it, and this nonsense will happen again.
I think only decentralized systems are the answer, but they have their own challenges. I don't think there is a lot of value in switching to yet another centralized service.
Also, when will it be possible to use Signal on the desktop without having it on a phone first?
90s called and we want our internet back. Now I hope that we will see a revival of the simplicity of the 90s, where the power is handed back to the people, where you could write desktop apps using Visual Basic and write a webpage in HTML with frames.
The truth is that they became big in geographies like India (population 1.3 billion) because they didn't actually enforce the fee for most users, and because Whatsapp worked very well with low data usage across all platforms including Symbian and offered free messaging at a time when Indians were used to having to pay per SMS.
It's convenient for the founders to grandstand now that Whatsapp is someone else's responsibility, but it was their responsibility once, and they never converted it into a profitable company, and when they got a offer too big to refuse, sold.