Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jkvngt | Hacker News Reader

Signal needs your phone number and is run by a "former" Twitter person. It just smells funny.

On the other hand Signal is encouraged by people like Edward Snowden (who I assume is paranoid enough about American big corps). The clients are open source and feature a strong E2EE, which is called the Signal protocol and is used by many other clients nowadays because it has such a good reputation. There are lot of efforts to reduce metadata further.

Just dismissing it as "smells funny" is not a valid criticism.

> The clients are open source

But you can't verify that the open-source matches what's on the Play Store, you can't link to the official server with your own build, and you can't run your own because the server is no longer open source. (Last released a year ago)

> But you can't verify that the open-source matches what's on the Play Store

According to their blog, builds are reproducible[0]. Am I missing anything?

> you can't link to the official server with your own build

Why not? (I know Moxie discouraged publishing custom builds while linking them against the official Signal server but this is not the same thing.)

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/

Rosenfeld’s admitted that they don’t NEED need your phone number, so why does he still need it? I didn’t give Zucc my phone number, I didn’t give it to Suzy, Jeff, Larry, or Sergei. So why’s Rosenfeld need it? He doesn’t, but he does. It’s “easier” this way.

They started Signal "to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal's mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous". Yes, Marlinspike is highly talented and worked on the security at Twitter. I don't see anything bad about that.

Signal started of with not ONLY privacy in mind. In the beginning the app required even Google Play Services, which was dropped because of pushback from the community. It seems that his experience in sillicion valley startups, also reflects on how Signal manages growth and thinks about user adoption of their product. On top of that, they try to apply as much privacy as possible. If they would have started the other way around, they wouldn't have gotten so far. A certain spirit seems to be necessary to give privacy to the masses.

Next to that, they are paving the way to no longer require phone numbers: https://signal.org/blog/signal-pins/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com