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Comment by tasuki | Hacker News Reader

Yes sure. There isn't much a userland app can actually do if your OS wants to spy on you. I wonder why they spend their time on this?

Meanwhile, Signal still requires a phone number to register and use. It's terrible: phone numbers are easy to lose, and not everyone has a phone number.

I like the ideas behind the Session[0] messenger: create an account with no authentication (no phone number, no email, no nothing), get a list-of-words-to-note-down, which allows you to access your account from any device. You get a UUID or something as your user id. Share that with a QR code or send a link over an existing channel to connect to someone.

To me this seems way ahead of Signal. I'm not affiliated with Session and haven't actually persuaded anyone to start using it just yet, so I don't really know how it is in practice. But the UX of creating an account made me weep tears of joy and hope <3

[0]: https://getsession.org/

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Except for the fact that the security of Session is drastically worse than Signal.

https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ https://soatok.blog/2025/01/20/session-round-2/

Ah that's too bad then!

At least you should admit it's conceptually much nicer than Signal, even if they got the details wrong and/or intentionally backdoored.

I'll continue using Facebook messenger then, until someone figures out secure messaging without requiring me to hand over my phone number and/or email...

>It's terrible: phone numbers are easy to lose

At least in the US they're nearly impossible to lose because of phone number portability.

>and not everyone has a phone number

Most people do, not least because plenty of other services (eg. banks) require a phone number.

> At least in the US they're nearly impossible to lose because of phone number portability.

If you miss a few payments, you'll be at risk of losing your phone number.

Is this a socioeconomic status thing? Cellphone plans are dirt cheap, on the order of $20-30 for a modest plan. I guess it's theoretically easier to lose than a free email plan, but I don't see either actually occurring.

This requires planning ahead for a disconnection though. Porting out your number requires the source number still be active.

It's just so weird to require a paid service to access a free service. Why not just a free service like email that can be accessed via free wifi.

> At least in the US

I'm not in the US. My current phone number is from a different country than the one I'm currently residing in. Endless headaches. Could I get a local phone number? Sure, but different kinds of headaches: updating all those asshole services who required me to give them a phone number.

> phone number portability

Portability? That makes me think "possible to hijack", ie "easy to lose".

Are you immune to SIM swap? If so, how have you achieved that?

> To me this seems way ahead of Signal. I'm not affiliated with Session and haven't actually persuaded anyone to start using it just yet, so I don't really know how it is in practice.

Begone, fed.

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