Losing Signal
ploum.net
ploum.net
If you're reading HN, Signal's design goals are almost certainly not your design goals. Signal was designed to replace SMS and WhatsApp, the most widely-used messaging systems on the planet, with something end-to-end secure. Signal is not Telegram, Slack, Wire, or Matrix. They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base.
If you want to understand why Signal went this way, look at Matrix. Matrix was designed for federation from the beginning; that's part of the point. Federation delayed the rollout of default E2EE on Matrix by over a year. It will probably delay the resolution of the Nebuchadnezzar vulnerabilities --- which are very bad --- by some material amount of time as well. You can't have Signal's use cases and accept those downsides, but you can with Matrix's use cases.
By all means: use Matrix. But the constant psychologizing and theorizing about Signal's federation decision is tiresome. "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated. That doesn't mean everything, or even most things, should be centralized. But it does make clear why Signal needed to be.
The Flash letter was vindicated, but I do not see how the Moxie blog post was vindicated.
Unless you claim that federated E2EE is impossible, I believe you cannot claim that it has been vindicated. But I could be wrong.
Signal's choices optimize usability of E2EE messaging for the masses.
Again: you can get past this stuff, and Matrix will. But Matrix is going to get through this because their use cases (more or less: replace IRC and Slack) are forgiving. Signal's aren't.
My gripe isn't that HN users refuse to tough out Signal's rough edges; I certainly don't ask my own family to use Signal to talk to me (I use Signal for things that matter, and little else). My gripe is that HN people who should know better don't seem to respect, or at least understand, the painful decisions that Signal made to support its use cases, and instead write weird little essays about how Moxie Marlinspike, the "brilliant cryptographer", built Signal this way because it was fun. It doesn't look super fun to me.
Kind of hard to claim they've done it given their current level of adoption.
Well... yes, actually. Governments use a lot of things that don't have widespread adoption outside of governmental use cases.
If your goal is to build for that market -- for environments with very specific needs -- then you're doing a great job. But governmental use isn't the ringing endorsement that you seem to think, because it has no bearing on actual widespread adoption.
Whatever lesson you want to derive from this technical trade-off is up to you, but yeah the psychobabble about Moxie is absolutely tiresome.
The devs will tell you that requiring every feature to be E2EE will slow down adoption too much, that can always be added later as another MSC (Matrix Spec Change).
> The devs will tell you that requiring every feature to be E2EE will slow down adoption too much, that can always be added later as another MSC (Matrix Spec Change).
No?
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/254...
Or is that out of date and there is a new proposal with encryption?
I understand that the core team is busy but if big problems like this could be pointed out early it could save a lot of time all around.
Please be precise.
This is probably the most annoying thing about HN lately, the insistence on pretending that only end to end encryption matters.
Meanwhile we see end-to-end encrypted solutions like WhatsApp being cheered forward but ultimately failing badly because all incentives are aligned against security.
I hope you prove Moxie wrong, and once my business is off the ground, I'd like to contribute financially to that end.
And Signal makes plenty of user hostile moves: making backups is not supported. If your Android phone dies, you can kiss your previous conversations goodbye. That's working as intended according to the team.
If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).
So really, who is Signal for then? It's not for anonymity fans. It's not for people who care about long term discussions.
Although I think people like us (?) were some of the original proponents of Signal, and it could never have spread without us, I believe Signal's intention is more about capturing the wider market while simultaneously changing that market to be more privacy-aware. I think that they believe they can make private, encrypted messaging to be a household idea, and I hope they're right.
Signal is vulnerable to MITM attack. Our government has no problems with reading of my messages in Signal. I forced either to accept new certificate and be OK with wiretaping, or to lost communication channel with a friend.
The number of countries where the government would do that to your SMS but won't also just arrest you arbitrarily and seize your device and/or beat/threaten you, seems small. But I imagine there are some people in some places, who feel physically and/or legally secure from arbitrary government action against their devices proper, but not with their cellular service.
So in other words, such attacks aren't viable for dragnet surveillance and must be targeted. But if you have reason to believe that you'll be targeted by the government for surveillance, you'd be on the lookout for signs like "your safety number has changed"?
Me.
> If I receive a large number of photos via Signal, i have to long tap each of them and save them individually (several taps to do that).
No, you don't. You can select them all and export to Photos app (at least on Android, I have not tried on my iPhone).
> So really, who is Signal for then? It's not for anonymity fans. It's not for people who care about long term discussions.
My SO and I foster. New case, new numbers for everything. When I'm at the pediatrician and I can't remember an insurance number or a birth date, my SO can text it to me and after I say I have it, they can delete the message.
Signal is great. I love it. Warts and all.
>They make decisions that are certain to upset orangey-types like us (phone numbers, no federation, tethering to phones, and so on) because HN people aren't their core user base.
These decisions upset other people beyond your elitist dismissive "orangey-types", but upsetting "orangey-types" has its own cost. Nobody in my family, friends, or client organizations use Signal, because I advised them all against it. Sure that's <200 people but for network effect stuff it adds up.
>And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated
Huh? It's successfully replaced SMS completely? It's replaced email? It's beaten out iMessage and Whatsapp etc worldwide? Oh. I mean sure, tens of millions of users worldwide is nothing to sniff at. But that's not a story of domination and "we won so all of you are wrong and also stupid".
This hyperbole exposes that the author is out of touch with the real world stakes of mass surveillance which Signal is intended to address.
You are not being oppressed because you can't run Signal on a quirky e-ink phone. Signal isn't broken on your phone because the Signal Foundation wants to exploit you, it's broken because building software is hard and sometimes requires pragmatic compromises.
Yes, decentralization is an important principle, both technically and politically. It's worth advocating for. But it's not the answer to every question ever.
Outside the small % that rejects Meta... Who is it for and how exactly is it reaching it's objectives?
Signal does not uses your contacts web elsewhere, that you know of.
On the plus side; existing familiarity with WhatsApp makes moving to Signal easy to understand for people as they are very similar apps.
Same, e.g. with Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. It something working, that normal people can migrate to and break the stanglehold of the true oppressive platforms. No harm to keep expectations high for those "alternatives", but lets keep a sense of proportion.
I wholeheartedly agree. I think I have pretty good vision and fine cognitive abilities I'd say but over and over again I find myself unable to correctly enter the alphanumeric characters shown to me as part of those "are you human?" flows. It's very frustrating.
> What's the point of a captcha if they are using some other metric anyway?
Honestly, this is the truth of it. We are so paid in to the idea that walled gardens are the only way that we forget all the things that actually do federate properly and the ergonomics of those.
Imagine not being able to send someone an SMS that was on another provider or phone manufacturer. That's absurd. Yet we put up with exactly that with iMessage/Signal and Whatsapp et al.
I don't have any constructive answers, I know that email is the last federated system that didn't suck and.. well, now it sucks.
Short of Matrix taking off and having a lot of different servers to choose from I suppose our only real answer is legislation. Why does Signal need to be centralised exactly? OMEMO security protocols used to work perfectly fine with pidgin across dozens of providers.
meta: anybody else seeing the "I" merged with the next word in the text?
OK, but that puts you in the 0.0001th percentile of Signal users. Don't expect them to spend a lot of time debugging issues with your very exotic phone.
> Signal is for everyone but you need to answer those idiocy first. It should be noted that I have a very good eyesight. I cannot imagine those with even minor disabilities.
Captchas pretty much always have audio alternatives for blind users.
> That’s also why I’ve always fought for the right to differences, why I’ve always been utterly frightened by "normalisation". Because I know nobody is immune. Think about it: I’m a white male, cis-gendered, married with children, with a good education, a good situation and no trauma, no disability. I’m mostly playing life with the "easy" setting.
Right. And if a bug in the Signal app convinces you that you've finally experienced oppression, you really need to read up on what oppression means.
Couple questions: how does the audio play without JavaScript? Who serves that? How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no?
The HTML <audio> tag.
> Who serves that?
Whoever serves the captcha. Often that's Google, because they run ReCAPTCHA.
> How about the fact that the standard workflow just failed? If that is a bug, it would be fixed - right now, it's a feature, no?
The bug was fixed immediately. As the blog post says: "The bug was acknoweledged by the developers and fixed promptly."
In the comments, I see a thread about hating captchas and closing an AirBnB account for it. I see people bashing Signal for being a walled garden, when they are free not to use it. Some are extrapolating political statements from a choice of a company to offer a centralized service, even if the centralized approach is simply enough for their goals. Another commenter says they'll be moving their family off of Signal because of the blog article.
The author of the text piece connects white cis privilege to a problem caused by an unusual phone, and talks how a centralized service makes them feel hopeless — a very strong emotion! And HN leans into the conversation even though many people on HN probably have some understanding of how edge case support is de-prioritized in products, and that it's just that.
The problems raised by the article and a lot of discussions here feel concerningly neurotic. Have people run out of big problems to address or lost focus? Is it just the internet, or have people in general become more tunnel-visioned on micro-problems and unaware of the broader context? Does this mean that we expect so much comfort in life now that we're becoming deeply affected by such inconsequential inconveniences?
There wouldn't be much interest in "signal doesn't run on my very niche phone but it runs okay on another phone" but "signal developers are the worst because they don't support every possible niche device" attracts attention.
Signal seems to have choosen challenge #1 and making a good job at it. I'm not sure they should be blamed for not choosing challenge #2 and even less challenge #3.
Now what I really don't understand is why they made signal open source. They clearly don't want third party redistribution/packaging of their software, so they should really have chosen a "source available" licence for code audit, which would have better set expectations
Regardless, here are two big reasons why Signal is superior.
1. Not owned by Facebook
2. Open Source
Either be a digital stoic without complaining that your lifestyle choice limits your access OR have a more average “digital stance” and have no reason to complain.
I'd been using Signal for a few years when I discovered Session. Yes, it doesn't have all the nice-to-have features that Signal seems to be adding recently, but it does secure messaging well.
And it's got the best tag line ever: "Exchange encrypted messages, not metadata".
Something like Signal, with this amazingly sad paragraph opening in TFA:
"Signal asked for my phone number..."
simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline.
> "Signal asked for my phone number..."
> simply cannot compete with Sessions' tagline.
Plus: you can have the same Session conversations on as many Android devices as you want - something that's impossible with Signal, due to its reliance on a SIM.
FYI:
> Moxie Marlinspike built the oppression tool he was initially trying to fight
Including statements like this makes people take you less seriously. There is no oppression going on here.
I am not interested in platforms that allow others to impose DRM on me, no matter how much the platform boasts about freedom and privacy.
IMO if federation could be aligned with "movement", we wouldn't have this issue.
Possible comparison here with Urbit.
Yup.
And it has first party support for bridges so that you can continue to mostly interoperate with other systems without too much hassle, should you care to go that route. I've got my Matrix homeserver running with various bridges to Signal, Google, Facebook, etc, and while I talk to people "Matrix native" if I can, I'm also not actively locking myself out of other systems. Yet...
It just works great.
It already is better for the 2B+ people that still use WhatsApp over something that is demonstrably worse, hence why little to almost no-one bothered to switch to Signal in the first place.
Given that you still need a phone number to use Signal, your privacy is out of the window since it sends that phone number to a third party (Twilio).
At this point, you might as well use WhatsApp. Signal is a worse version of WhatsApp.