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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised. Notice that all of those voices have less open-source-ness than Signal in virtually all cases.

Signal is doing its best to be a web scale company and also defend human rights. Individual dignity matters.

This is not a simple conversation.

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> There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised.

But compromised by whom? Russian, US Intelligence? I am really confused.

I just looked quickly on on the Signal Foundation website and the board members, I read things like:

> Maher is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project.

> She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board

> She received her Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2005 from New York University's College of Arts and Science, after studying at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Institut français d'études arabes de Damas (L'IFEAD) in Damascus, Syria.

Those type of people sound part of the intelligence world to me. What exactly are they doing on the board of Signal (an open source messaging app)?

> This is not a simple conversation.

I agree

And Telegram specifically bad here. Using custom crypto on custom protocol and dont have any E2EE by default whatsoever storing everything on server in plain text.

Also, it's a tricky environment of disinformation generally, and in particular for anything valuable like Signal. If Signal is secure, attackers on privacy would want people to believe Signal is compromised and to use something else. If it's not, then they would want people to believe Signal is secure.

I think the solution is to completely ignore any potential disinfo source, especially random people on social media (including HN). It's hard to do when that's where the social center is - you have to exclude yourself. Restrict yourself to legitimate, trusted voices.

I would also read it from another perspective. Attackers, especially at the level of nation states, will always try to get as many avenues for achieving their goals as possible.

If you have compromised a service, it would be in your interest to make it more popular (assuming you think you are the only one in possession of it).

If you cannot, you don't give up; you just go back to the drawing board (https://xkcd.com/538/). Maybe I don't need to break Signal if I can just rely on phishing or scare tactics to get what I want.

> web scale

I didn't realize anyone still used that term with a straight face.

"MongoDB is web scale, you turn it on and it scales right up."

I've struggled occasionally with trying to describe a similar concept without using that tainted term.

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