We can do better than Signal

if you can afford to run your own servers, then you can afford to run a build server too and push your own releases with the server patched.

Your only point I disagree with is backups: there is simply no way for a non-for-profit company that doesn't monetize user data to afford providing cloud backups.

P.S. "New" groups in Signal support up to 1,000 users, did you need something bigger?

I am personally unaware of any communication service with a universally portable user identifier and that allows you to freely switch upstream providers other than phone service. I think this what you're talking about?

Signal requires and only supports a single mobile device, you can link multiple desktop clients to a mobile device. But one cannot have signal on multiple devices.

We've seen from previous subpoena that Signal really only does retain the limited data they claimed and the content is auditably correctly encrypted.

Because Signal's client is open source it's considered a unique-to-Signal downside that we don't have access to the server's source. I feel like some people would bring up the server source issue if someone was asking if it would be a good idea to migrate off of Facebook Messenger.

They do care about SMS fees, especially across international borders.

They do care about sending group texts between Android and iOS and not having things go slowly haywire as messages don’t come across.

They do care about sending messages over wifi if they’re somewhere without a cell signal. (OK, bit of a Canadian thing, but the cottage has wifi and no cell signal.)

I'm sure some people would disagree with my priorities above but for my experience as a user, that is what makes the most difference to me - not being boxed into what someone else thinks my client should look/act like or being locked into their server. Naturally I think more decentralization is better, but that's more a philosophical preference whereas wanting to run my own server or pick my own client is more about usability and control.

- you can use whatever client/server you want (or host your own)

- you can still communicate with your friends if they're on another server

- servers are run by separate entities in politically distinct regions

None of these things depend on there being a uniform spread of users across servers.

However, just as regular users want to get off the Facebook ecosystem, business's should want to get away from GSuite (Really, it's embarrassing if you are anything close to a google competitor) and I have some optimism there. The "element matrix services" of course isn't political decentralization, but is a helpful stepping stone, and still more isolated per tenant than GSuite (e.g. completely distinct accounts).

When did this E2EE failure happen (so I know if these are current bugs or ones fixed months/years ago)? What platforms was this (web, iOS & Android are entirely separate codebases)? What actually went wrong? The simple case of signing up and DMing someone should just work, and the E2EE should be transparent.

The main possible failure modes I'm aware of right now are:

* Risk of undecryptable messages during federation outages (due to messages being shared separately from their keys)

* Risk of verifying another user getting stuck if there are weird failures/edge cases we haven't spotted yet

* Verifying yourself when you log in on a new device has confusing UX, and there's a known bug that can stop keys being synced to the new login even once verified.

If anyone in the "I tried Matrix and it was awful" camp could give detailed feedback (either here, or on github.com/vector-im/element-{web,ios,android}/issues) then it would be genuinely useful for prioritising our work. At the moment the vast majority of negative feedback on HN has been "it sucked" without giving a hint of what actually went wrong.

We don't have any major technical challenges or problems running our own Synapse daemon server. It's a debian stable xen PV VM stored on a LVM logical volume, so easily moved between hypervisors, or cloned, if ever necessary. It runs at a load average of 0.01.

In my specific ISP environment it's the same person that admins the X.509 private root CA PKI so we're well equipped to deal with running it in a purely intranet environment with no access to the global routing table.

For widespread non technical random end user use? Totally agreed it's not ready yet.

The killer app for Matrix for most people won't be ability to run your own home server, but the easy generalization of Matrix to things like Reddit/HN with good integration with 1-1 chat someday will be. Also organizational usage. That of course is way cooler than Signal "not being facebook". So biding our time is fine.

When the time does come, we should probably campaign for HN to be officially bridged with Matrix too :D.

I agree that Element is not that good, but if you were to replace Signal's backend with Matrix, your experience would (could?) be nearly identical as Signal is now and we wouldn't have the issues of a closed ecosystem anymore.

another huge problem with using phone numbers as IDs, which software developers in the US/Canada often don't think about, is that in many developing nation environments there is no such thing as local number portability, or the ability to move your phone number between any of the major national-scale mobile phone network operators or VoIP providers as you wish.

As you can do in the USA if you become unsatisfied with your Tmobile service and want to move to ATT, keeping your phone number. This is one of the reasons why dual (and even triple) SIM phones are so popular outside of North America.

In a lot of countries I don't see number portability in the SS7/PSTN system ever becoming a political reality, due to regulatory capture on the part of the national telecom regulator. At least not before pure IP based communications and apps make the concept of a PSTN phone number irrelevant entirely.

The communication is not E2E encrypted (apart from a few GPG/SMIME users), no forward secrecy and barely any signature checks. Even if outlook, thunderbird maybe supports it, goodluck getting all the mobile versions to support it too.

The clients used to view emails suffer from the same problem with browsers so are subject to all the HTML/JS/CSS privacy attacks.

I wish all companies would move to something centralized solution where communication is guaranteed to only come from those within the same service. This way Sharon from HR won't open every link, download every crypto/ransomeware.

Maybe my IT could also save 150k a year by not having to send me phishing 'training' emails and instead deal with some decent forms of signature checking. Heck billions of dollars a year are wasted because of phishing, spam, crypto attacks because of email.

From my perspective, email is a shitty legacy tech from 1990s that should be moved to a modern solution that enables E2E encryption or signature checks at a minimum.

[1] https://github.com/kyokan/footnote/

I would love a tiny server I can run on my home server (for my tiny message volume), but Mastodon and Synapse are optimized for large servers.

Then you are essentially self-hosting on your phone/laptop when you run the client.

for example on two of north america's largest DOCSIS3/DOCSIS3.1 based cable modem operators, you can get 200-600 Mbps downstream speeds, but uploads may max out at 16-18 Mbps. Depending on your exact location. This is because of how RF channels are bonded together by the CMTS operator.

lots of other access technologies will face significant challenges and capacity constraints if a sizeable percentage of residential broadband end users start trying to actually use their upstream bandwidth at a greater rate than they do now, when averaged over the traffic for hundreds or thousands of individual end point users.

Even the cheapest phone plan will come with a phone number that's reachable from anywhere and can reach anywhere (provided you pay the call fee). Most consumer-grade internet plans come with a single, dynamic IPv4 and no IPv6 (or the IPv6 prefix is also dynamic). No end-to-end connectivity is possible unless you engage in some NAT traversal workarounds that require an external server.

Additionally, that ID+key would have to be updated somehow by the user and now you have a new problem: how do you verify that the user is who they say they are? Telling them to digitally sign something is possible, but what if the private key is gone?

The Signal protocol solves what it can solve for now. If cryptography experts have suggestions to improve it, I'm sure they can contribute.

Is there any protocol that solves the issue you're describing? And that has a good app? And that isn't centralized? We're asking for the "eierlegende Wollmilchsau" aka unicorn.

Indeed, EVERY decentralized communications system will have this problem. There's no way to establish trust over a compromised channel without either a centralized pre-trusted agent (like the CA system in TLS) or an out-of-band secure channel (like Signal, Matrix, PGP, etc).

If the attack happened after you have started communicating wouldn't you get a notification that the key of those you're communicating with has changed? An attack would only be invisible if it happened from the first communication. But unless it's very targeted someone somewhere would compare the keys and notice.

If they were eschewing some better option than "don't trust the server", that would be a problem, but is there a better option?

Looks like the situation is more complicated and still unresolved for iOS: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/641

Take any federated service: if you ban the servers accounting for 90% of users, you end up in a situation mostly similar to censoring Signal, you need to migrate servers and accounts somehow. This should be easier for a centralized service (Signal) since they control everything. Banning servers that belong to n entities where n > 1 might be a bit more of a hurdle, but if n < 20 it's also not that much harder. Do we really expect that many prominent matrix servers, given how centralized email has ended up being?

P2P on Matrix has been mentioned, and might be more resistant to censorship, but figuring out the UX in this case is pretty much an open problem (e.g. resetting your "address" whenever your reset your main device and lose your data is not acceptable).

Also good to remember regarding centralized services: The Pirate Bay is still up and running. Will there be more pressure on Signal to close than The Pirate Bay?

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

I don't know about Signal specifically but there is absolutely security benefits to hosting apks on F-Droid instead of your own home page.

F-Droid supports reproducible builds, so you can actively check that their build infrastructure is not compromised.

Signal seems to support some kind of reproducible builds on their own. Why that has not been integrated into the F-Droid build process I don't know. It seems like a large enough application to warrant the work.

But I suspect no one has stepped up to do the work, and given that Moxie has been quite clear that Signal is not to be distributed on F-Droid, that seems not likely to change.

Do you really think a homebrewed self-update mechanism is superior to the battle tested F-Droid?

Moxie has a complete stranglehold on the Signal system. You are completely at his mercy for all decisions affecting the platform

See:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

The solution is federation, like email has always been.

There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, which can be used in tandem. We can stop Signal from knowing when we’re talking to each other by using peer-to-peer chats. This has some significant drawbacks, namely that both users have to be online at the same time for their messages to be delivered to each other. You can still fall back to peer-to-server-to-peer when one peer is offline, however. But this isn’t the most important of the two solutions.

The most important change is federation. Federated services are like email, in that Alice can send an email from gmail.com to Bob’s yahoo.com address. I should be able to stand up a Signal server, on my own hardware where I am in control of the logs, and communicate freely with other Signal servers, including Open Whisper’s servers. This distributes the security risks across hundreds of operators in many countries with various data extradition laws. This turns what would today be easy for the United States government to break and makes it much, much more difficult. Federation would also open the possibility for bridging the gap with several other open source secure chat platforms to all talk on the same federated network - which would spurn competition and be a great move for users of all chat platforms.

Moxie forbids you from distributing branded builds of the Signal app, and if you rebrand he forbids you from using the official Open Whisper servers. Because his servers don’t federate, that means that users of Signal forks cannot talk to Signal users. This is a truly genius move. No fork of Signal4 to date has ever gained any traction, and never will, because you can’t talk to any Signal users with them. In fact, there are no third-party applications which can interact with Signal users in any way. Moxie can write as many blog posts which appeal to wispy ideals and “moving ecosystems” as he wants5, but those are all really convenient excuses for an argument which allows him to design systems which serve his own interests

Oh, I’ll grant you the UI of these clients can be terrible. Facebook Messenger takes a shocking amount of resources.

But what’s the job to be done for most people? Chatting with friends. FB Messenger has the network effect built in. You can just message your friends. And send them goofy stickers.

What will get people to transition to an encrypted messenger where they have to duplicate their social network? Privacy? Yeah, OK, I am definitely going to get a friend to download a new app, create a new account, and go through whatever dance is necessary for encryption to ask if we want Mexican or Thai for dinner.

The iOS app is a the most confusing chat app I've tried, especially if you run your own identity server.

> Does Signal send my number to my contacts? Signal does not send your phone number to anyone unless you send them a message or make a call to them. The Signal service does not have any knowledge of your contacts. Data is all owned by your phone. Registration notifications are never transmitted by anyone in any direction at all; these notifications are created by your phone.

> How does Signal know my contact is using Signal? Signal periodically sends truncated cryptographically hashed phone numbers for contact discovery. Names are never transmitted, and the information is not stored on the servers. The server responds with the contacts that are Signal users and then immediately discards this information. Your phone now knows which of your contacts is a Signal user and notifies you if your contact just started using Signal.

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007061452-Do...

(Btw, I think that first sentence is a bit confusing and should be classified/reworded.)

Two experiences: Among highly technical users in my peer group, when somebody upgrades or replaces their phone, if we're chatting with somebody who has a new signal device private key, I'll chat with them a bit by voice to confirm it really is them using a new phone. We've had a number of discussions about how it's apparently impossible to manually move ones' own signal private keys from disk storage on an android device onto a new android device. This works among people I know closely and recognize the sound of their voice.

Among non technical users, they'll just click the equivalent of "okay" and continue chatting without even thinking about what the error message means.

Network effects are hugely important, but they aren’t enough. Even if you have most of your social graph on both signal and WhatsApp, you need to not only change your habits, but also outages and bugs will quickly scare you away. And there’s tons of subtle tweaks that are done to keep you more sticky to one app.

Big tech isn’t usually that scared of other apps trying to do the same things as they do successfully. They’re scared of new paradigms that they can miss the boat on, and you can see that in what acquisitions they do. They don’t pay big bucks for copies of their services, but for new ideas that can be/are taking off.

If you click the "Download Omnii Beta" button on the website, it should take you to the Google Play Store listing and allow you to download the Beta version of the app.

One restriction at the moment is that the app is closed to the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and India. If you do not reside in one of the listed countries, shoot me an email with the country you live in and I can see if we can open up the Beta to your country.

My email is: tyler@omnii.co

It's a philosophical/conceptual problem with encryption, not one restricted to signal.

Also I tried Matrix, and it started asking questions from me instead of showing my friend list, so it already failed being a competitor to WhatsApp. The only question it should ask is to get permission to access my contact list.

I know that interopability is very hard to do, and having multiple clients in 1 app is boring work (especially with features like voice and video calling), but it would be amazing.