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Comment by OhMeadhbh | Hacker News Reader

I talked to Moxie about this 20 years ago at DefCon and he shrugged his shoulders and said "well... it's better than the alternative." He has a point. Signal is probably better than Facebook Messenger or SMS. Maybe there's a market for something better.

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Is there any reason they didn't use email? It seems like something that would have been easier to keep some anonymity., while still allowing the person to authenticate.

email is notoriously insecure and goes through servers that allow it to be archived. also, email UIs tend not to be optimized for instantaneous delivery of messages.

I wasn't assuming the actual messages would go through email. I assumed they just needed that for a onetime setup. Isn't that the only reason for using a phone number currently?

Briar and Session are the better encrypted messengers.

Session lacks forward secrecy, which isn't ideal.

I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.

> He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure

I assume because of the baseband stuff to be FCC compliant? Last I checked that meant DMA channels, etc. to access the real phone processor. All easily activated over the air.

Any citation on this? I’ve never heard that.

There are hobbyist groups that tinker with these things. They are just as lazy as me and do not publish much. One has to find and participate in their semi-private .onion forums. Not my cup of tea. Most of it goes over my head and requires special hardware I am not interested in tinkering with.

47 CFR Part 2 and Part 15

FCC devices are certified / allowed to use a spectrum, but you must maintain compliance. If you're a mobile phone manufacturer you have to be certain that if a bug occurs, the devices don't start becoming wifi jammers or anything like that.

This means you need to be able to push firmware updates over the air (OTA). These must be signed to avoid just anyone to push out such an OTA.

The government has a history of compelling companies to push out signed updates.

All easily activated over the air.

Indeed. The only reason this is not used by customer support for more casual access, firmware upgrades and debugging is a matter of policy and the risk of mass bricking phones and as such this is not exposed to them. There are other access avenues as well including JTAG debugging over USB and Bluetooth.

I don't think the FCC requires DMA channels. That's done out of convenience because it's how PCIe works.

The FCC doesn't require DMA channels, but the baseband processor may have access to it among anything else.

That's done for convenience because that's how PCIe works.

I have no idea if that was true 20 years ago, but it's not true now. XMPP doesn't have this problem; your host instance knows your IP but you can connect via Tor.

OTR has been on XMPP for so long now

Is that good? According to the wikipedia page it seems last stable release was 9 years ago. Is anyone using that? Last time I had a look at XMPP everybody was using OMEMO.

OMEMO has its own flaws too

https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/

Sorry, I don't pay attention to anyone who disses PGP. I don't care if it's easy to misuse. I focus on using it well instead of bitching about misusing it.

If there's one thing we learned from Snowden is that the NSA can't break PGP, so these people who live in the world of theory have no credibility with me.

Before my arrest (CFAA) I operated on Tor and PGP for years. I had property seized and I had a long look at my discovery material, as I was curious which elements they had obtained.

I never saw a single speck of anything I ever sent to anyone via PGP in there. They had access to my SIGAINT e-mail and my BitMessage unlocked, but I used PGP for everything on top of that.

Stay safe!

Would be curious to know (if you're willing to share) how you were found if you were working to obscure / encrypt your communications. What _was_ it that ultimately gave you away or allowed them to ID you?

I'd be curious as well, though I completely understand if they don't want to talk. Someone should write a book just listing the usual mistakes.

if you sign PGP messages with a key you associated with your identity, the have high confidence you sent emails signed with that key. i.e. - PGP does not offer group deniable signatures as a default option.

So what? Whether this matters depends on your threat model, but you present this as a universal concern. Yes, we know, and we use it appropriately.

wow. that's a phenomenally bad policy. There are many legit critiques which can be leveled at PGP, depending on your use case. [Open]PGP is not a silver bullet. You have to use it correctly.

"You have to use it correctly" is true for everything. Stop parroting garbage you read and exercise some critical thinking.

says the 8 day old sock puppet.

It's not a sock puppet in the usual sense. Every time I log in I create a new account, and it lasts until I get logged out for whatever reason. But I'm not having conversations between multiple accounts that I control, if that's what you mean.

my mom can use signal no problem. she doesnt know what half the words in your comment mean, though.

Tor has the problem that you frequently don't know who's running all the nodes in the network. For a while the FBI was running Tor exit nodes in an attempt to see who messages were being sent to. maybe they still are.

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