I don't think we have the right to hold them to high standards because you get what you pay for. Signal has always been a bad choice for messaging in practice. In theory it's really secure and all, in practice, they have security issues that don't get fixed and no real reason to provide a quality service.
Completely agree with this point. Unless you are paying for the service (by being the product or via donations) you have no particular right to get upset with the creators of said service.
> "What do you expect?"
Professionalism and an understanding of the impact this will have on Signal's users. Some will be cut off from necessary communication channels while others might literally have their life depended on the service working.
This very delayed response from Signal, coupled with some of the stranger behaviour of the last year and inability to host my own servers is really pushing me towards looking at Matrix as an alternative.
And for the record, I've donated to Signal for the last 3 years.
If your life literally depends on a service, make sure to pay for that service. Also, make sure to have a backup.
These individuals may not have the means or the option of paying for the service (either due to being blocked or by potentially exposing them selves to said regime if they would).
I know this point has been made repeatedly, but it's important to beat the drum, since it's recommended for journalists and dissidents, and that this "feature" will quite possibly get you killed if you're a dissident in a totalitarian system with a very simple two-part process:
1. All it takes is ONE of your fellow dissidents to turn snitch (or be tortured, or have their phone cracked) and disclose all their contacts.
2. Burners are NOT anonymous. Everything from location analysis to CCTV footage from the physical place you bought the SIM will give you away.
Signal is an obvious honeypot. Moxie's total refusal to even allow the option to use throwaway identifiers while burning precious development time on silly things like emoji support makes their purpose very evident.
Sure, use Signal to send cat pics. But stay far, far, far away if your life or freedom is at risk.
But that doesn't change the fact that there are non technical people who are using Signal in places where they believe it will protect them.
And I am not cynical enough to be ready to say that they are not being protected in some way by using Signal rather than say email/telegram/whatsapp/facebook etc.
But the points you raise stand, and I agree. I would never use Signal for things that are highly sensitive.
But we are tech literate individuals. We are a wast minority.
>For governments, federated organisations & regulated industries
One set of examples is online services and apps like Facebook, GMail, WhatsApp and such (although you could argue whether your life actually depends on any of these).
Another set of examples are things like transportation infrastructure, fire-fighting services, etc.
- I pay for mail service from Google.
- I don't depend on whatsapp. I have multiple alternatives, including SMS.
- I still have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts that I never actually use.
- I have multiple fire extinguishers, because I don't depend on fire fighters to arrive on time, they're a last resort.
My biggest dependency, by far, is the power grid. I really need to look into battery storage for my solar. Because my life literally depends on that... Ooh. And the supply chain for groceries I guess.
I don't think matrix is there yet as a good replacement, at least for my use case. It's just not mature enough.
I know, chicken and egg problem, but I don't want to be debugging my primary form of communication. It's too important.
After all there is a well funded foundation backing the development and operations of the platform.
And the same people would also complain about alternative apps finding ways to monetize while still offering the service for free and keeping it reliable.
How spoiled are we? :)
If we want people to switch from Whatsapp to Signal, "it's free lol" really isn't a response. From an end-user perspective, Whatsapp is free too [1], and generally wouldn't have issues with downtime. The fact is that to many people, Signal is the "new" thing, and any friction getting started with it is likely to make some people say "fuck this, I'm going back to Whatsapp."
This isn't a project by some random dev on Github that suddenly blew up, Signal has a foundation and millions of users, and if I'm going to convince my parents to use it, the sales pitch cannot be "it's like Whatsapp but doesn't work all the time, but hey it's got freedom or something".
[1] I know about data harvesting and whatnot, I'm talking nominally.
like, imagine if gmail announced they were shutting down...
but its free so you cant complain /s
Signal could easily start offering named, verified accounts as a paid service for say, businesses, to have secure texting to their customers. Heck, named personal accounts for this would be ideal to. This is a service which has direct value to me (I already pay for an email domain for the same sorts of reasons).
Signal's product is the sort of offering which ticks so many security textboxes that it would be a no brainer, and getting even 1 big enterprise pushing it out to their customers would guarantee adoption.
If not this, could another reason might be that they're still a small team and this, along with the other changes that would presumably need to come along with it (accounts that aren't tied to a phone number), are what are holding them back.
No, integrating a get rich quick for the founders shit coin into their app is what is holding them back.
Signal aren't allowing accounts not tied to phone numbers because it currently serves a very useful spam mitigation problem for them. There's no real alternative there that's going to solve it without more work on the business side. Technically the phone number requirement right now means they do charge for "named" accounts, they just don't get paid for them - the phone providers do, since in many countries even prepaid phones require proof of identity to activate.
It seems to me that all the alternatives are either free and suffer from some of the same issues Signal does, or don't have all these features.