lucgommans

This point hides a lot of goodness in something that I didn't even understand on the first read:

> - We have added checksums for various backends so data uploaded to a backend can be checked there.

All data is already stored in files with as filename the sha256sum of the contents, so clearly it's all already checksummed and can be verified right?

Looking into the changelog entry[1], this is about verifying the integrity upon uploading:

> The verification works by informing the backend about the expected hash of the uploaded file. The backend then verifies the upload and thereby rules out any data corruption during upload. \n\n [...] besides integrity checking for uploads [this] also means that restic can now be used to store backups in S3 buckets which have Object Lock enabled.

Object lock is mentioned in passing somewhere down the changelog, but it's a big feature. S3 docs:

> Object Lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely.

i.e. ransomware protection. Good luck wiping backups if your file hoster refuses to overwrite or delete the files. And you know Amazon didn't mess with the files because they're authenticated.

Extortion is still a thing, but if people would use this, it more-or-less wipes out the attack vector of ransomware. The only risk is if the attacker is in your systems long enough to outlast your retention period and creates useless backups in the meantime so you're not tipped off. Did anyone say "test your backups"?

For self-hosting, restic has a custom back-end called rest-server[2] which supports a so-called "append-only mode" (no overwriting or deleting). I worked on the docs for this[3] together with rawtaz and MichaelEischer to make this more secure, because eventually, of course, your disks are full or you want to stop paying for outdated snapshots on S3, and an attacker could have added dummy backups to fool your automatic removal script into thinking it needs to leave only the dummy backups. Using the right retention options, this attack cannot happen.

Others are doing some pretty cool stuff in the backup sphere as well, e.g. bupstash[4] has public key encryption so you don't need to have the decryption keys as a backup client.

[1] https://github.com/restic/restic/releases/v0.13.0

[2] https://github.com/restic/rest-server/

[3] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/060_forget.html#secu...

[4] https://github.com/andrewchambers/bupstash/

"of course" thank you, yes this is really very obvious. As if Signal can't see whom I'm talking to if they wanted to. Yes, their marketing material says as much (and they genuinely try to make it hard for themselves), but you're not the kind of person who swallows those blog posts without thinking of the ways you would attack it. In both cases we trust the server not to snoop on our metadata.

Not everything government-funded must be government-backdoored, that is quite the conspiracy theory for an open source application.

You can also download the APK directly from the website (not using Google's store), which will self-update, and will function also if you don't have Google Play Service on your device.

There are caveats, like if you firewalled off Google services because outright removal will mess up other apps and an alternative ROM with µG means no more (proper) camera app: in that case Signal will detect Google Play, wait indefinitely for the push message via Google, and thus not function at all. So I don't like to defend them on this front, but it's simply not true that it's impossible to use without a Google backdoor on your phone.

That's what they claim to store (and I believe it), but that's not all they can be forced to collect.

As a simple example, they could easily log whenever account xyz connects to do a token exchange for using sealed sender. Asking that of Signal won't be something I'd expect a judge would consider excessive if there is a legitimate reason.

> who even cares whether the smiley face is white or black or whatever else?

If it doesn't matter, why not let people choose whatever they like? Personally I'm also wondering if having specifically white and specifically black thumbs-ups does not introduce more racial bias rather than the generic yellow default that I was used to, but I did notice people of color using specific colors so perhaps it does matter, at least for some of them. The rest of us can just be on (the afaik neutral) yellow, presuming that makes everyone happy.

"CNE" is a fancy word for "exploits" that I had to look up, for anyone else not in the know of this specific terminology...

And yeah this is a blanket statement you can use for any application: nation states can get at your data using "CNE" regardless of what app you're talking about, presuming there always exists an "E" for your client (which is indeed a fairly safe assumption with these featureful OSes and apps). Not sure why you're applying this argument to Wire but not Signal.

It does, but that's my point: it ships with its own updater rather than leaving me to just manage updates with a proper repository client (like apt, dnf, f-droid, google store, whatever).

I hadn't even thought of this, that's a good point and (afaik) negates the entire excuse of Signal's not to be on F-Droid.

Your comments sound pretty damning and got me curious if there was some conspiracy I didn't yet know about, but then I click to the source and it turns out that this is not a silent change to upload more data without users knowing anything, it's an announced feature to (afaik optionally) backup this data to Signal's servers, protected with a PIN. It may not be obvious to my mother, sure, but it's also not exactly rocket science that 4 digits will not be secure under any offline-attackable circumstances. (For that they add SGX which seems broken so that is moot.)

On the other hand, it's not exactly hard to find out who's talking to whom if the server owners want to (or are forced to). Traffic analysis without onion routing is trivial at least in theory, so tptacek isn't quite correct either that Signal does not allow any sort of social graph obtaining. Sealed sender helps a little, but is not a solid thing to rely on if you're the kind of target for whom they would even bother submitting a subpoena. Wire also doesn't keep a list of who's in a group with whom (your client handles that) so there, too, you have to do traffic analysis to find these relations -- just an easier form than you would have to do if Wire would have had sealed sender.

Hence I consider it all about equal, with a small asterisk for Signal that they try really hard to make it as good as possible (compared to Wire doing just the now-regular end-to-end encryption).

> The above discusses the marketed features

The above discusses what I notice in practical terms.

As a privacy nut, I want to use an encrypted messenger for my friends and family so I dove into the privacy aspect pretty deep. I work in security so I also understand the technical details. I also use Wire, Signal, Telegram, and Matrix/Element on a daily basis (and Threema ~weekly) so I know which practical pros and cons I run into for each of them.

> what I understand from people with actual IT security expertise

That would be me. Wire is solid. It's based on the same protocol as Signal and my employer (shortly before I started working there) audited the implementations and applications so I know the people that did this audit, and was later involved in a small architecture review as well. The reports are also open and available on the website of my employer as well as Wire's.

Signal goes one step further and does innovative stuff like sealed sender and private contact discovery, but this does not impact the security of your messages or calls. It has more to do with privacy, aka how much Signal is able to do with your metadata. All of the measures they implemented can be broken if they wanted to (SGX vulns, traffic analysis, ...), so I am hesitant to consider it a solid advantage, but it's now harder to get your metadata so it's still worth something.

On the other hand, there are the advantages (and disadvantages) I mentioned above. It's a trade-off and there's something to be said for each.

(Of course I speak for myself and my employer may have a different opinion yada yada)

> [Signal is] really the only option if you want real security

That's not really true as a strong blanket statement.

For message/call integrity and confidentiality: Wire and Signal are basically the same, because they use the same base protocol.

If you (also) mean privacy, then... it depends:

- Threema operates (app and infra) in a country with better privacy laws, and Cure53 audited them recently so their protocol should also be good. I'd go with them if I wanted the best privacy on a centralized service, though you don't get some of the fancier protocol features like plausible deniability (not that that's worth much, but it's nicer to have than not to have)

- Signal does innovative stuff but requires a phone number (in my country that's linked to a government-issued identity)

- Wire has infrastructure in the USA (big downside imo, I don't understand this choice) but their legal entity is iirc in Germany (which I would consider a similar jurisdiction as Threema's (Switzerland)) so that's still better than Signal in terms of coercion to hand over anything

- Keybase has none of these advantages but still many people choose it for their integrations

- Matrix-the-service I don't remember, but with federation it's fairly trivial to use your own home server so you're fully in control. This is obviously the best option, even if you'd not use e2ee and just encrypt-to-your-server because it's your server which can be in your house.

Pick your poison on that front, or go decentralized.

The aspect I cannot really speak to is exploitability, like how hard it would be to find an exploit that works on one of these apps. Best would be to have one that just shows plain text messages and doesn't do image parsing, video displaying, link resolving, peer to peer calling, etc. That is exactly none of the above and I assume that all of the above rely on system libraries for media/emoji/etc. parsing, so it should be about equal, but I don't know that for a fact.

Similar here. Just an hour ago I had to jiggle Signal to send a message, their implementation is super wonky compared to whatever Wire, Telegram, Threema, etc. uses and it'll often not work for hours. There is also zero indication on when it works and when it's broken, to find out I have to send a test message in a group with only me in it, and then delete that six times if I want to clean it up (2 removals on 3 devices: long tap, remove, yes I'm sure, get a placeholder "this message was removed", long tap, remove that placeholder).

Wire is a much better experience in that sense and has more features. But then those features each work just a little less well than they do on Signal. With the recently rolled-out conference calling they seem to have resolved one of the worst bugs: until a few months ago we'd often have one person not be able to hear another on a group call, while everyone else could hear them. Never had that problem on Signal. Or on iOS (unfortunately have to use that for work) it used to work fine, until an iOS update 2 years ago since which I have to open Wire (and leave it open) for it to download messages, which takes 5 minutes for 250 messages and in the meantime you just can't really use it. Notifications work, but it doesn't seem to download the contents. Signal updates fine on that iOS device, but then yeah on Android I have this other Signal connectivity issue so...

pros and cons, pros and cons

Overall though, compared to Signal, Wire is hugely underrated. It's just as good, if not better, but it just gets zero network effect. People are all on facebook's chat apps, and only if you're lucky Telegram and/or Signal, but Wire? Threema? Matrix?! Forget it :/. My family is now on Signal, I chose it for the network effect (so it would not be for only me, they would hopefully see more benefits than just talking to me), but it was quite a tough choice between mediocre choices after they were on Telegram for a while.

I'm fairly sure you must have gotten a fake f-droid store that installs malware instead. I didn't know those were out there.

The real one can be found at: https://f-droid.org

You can also download individual apps (APK files) from the website, so you don't need the store if you don't want updates. Also note how Spotify is not listed if you use their search, because (like others already said) it's not open source and thus not on F-Droid.

The same advantage as having 30 updaters run in the background versus running

    apt update

Imagine every app you install, from your calculator to your chat applications, has to have its own updater. That's why I like F-Droid rather than downloading the Signal APK directly. Already have to do this for Threema unfortunately, as they're neither on F-Droid nor freely available on the Play store.

I did not mean to make this a political discussion when I submitted this news.

If there are other open source app stores that Wire is on, feel free to add those in a comment and/or a submission. Coming here just to hate on f-droid for a past decision does not seem productive to me.

> I have never heard of wire, I will check it out. Looks interesting on first glance.

It's basically Signal but without the popularity, despite predating it. Why Signal took off and Wire stagnated, I am not sure. The network effect is one part of it, probably caused by Moxie being popular in the community, but another part is that Wire does not seem to care as much about doing cool stuff like private contact discovery that Signal put some real R&D into (and no other service (Threema/Wire/etc.) even bothered to even copy, let alone build upon).

Main differences:

- Signal is better with metadata

- Wire needs no phone number

- Wire treats devices equivalently. If you want two phones, that's fine (Signal supports only 1 mobile device and N slave desktop devices; can't have desktop without mobile or more than one mobile) and is mostly feature-complete on each platform (Signal misses e.g. gifs on desktop)

- Signal's apps are a bit more polished than Wire's, slightly better UX

- Now that Signal has been gaining popularity and Wire, um, not as far as I can tell, Wire seems to be focusing more on corporate use. But it's still possible to register free accounts: https://app.wire.com/auth/?hl=en#createaccount

- I think Wire has a bots system that Signal does not (and is generally more open to integrations), but I could be wrong here

Exactly, this is only tangentially related to rooting. Google doesn't need root on your device for their closed Play Services to install software, but the component that you want to have this installation capability does need some system-level permission. Many people grant it that by rooting the device, but installing something like /e/OS (=Android with microG and a few other improvements) is also a way to do this.

I'd rather it keeps a username/password on their central service, than authenticate with my phone number.

End to end encryption is achieved through key verification, same as on Signal, Threema, tg secret chats, PGP, etc. Your password is just one barrier to accessing your account and the security of the chats/calls does not depend on this.

Don't be mislead: Telenot complex is not a mental diseases but an alarm system. It can use NFC tags to open doors.

TL;DR:

All we wanted was to read the logs to alert if e.g. the alarm company makes use of their key without actually responding to an alarm. Turns out that wasn't trivial, as there is only an old Windows GUI program using a custom protocol.

When my colleague (OP) looked further into it, it caught his eye that srand() and rand() were being called from a function responsible for making cryptographic keys. And with some further digging, it turns out those keys are the master keys to get into our office. A bit more digging and it turns out you can capture and offline crack one of those keys from a handshake, so a 32-bit key (even if rand() hadn't been seeded with a unix timestamp...) would have been easily crackable.

The technical details and PoC code are in the blog post.

Telenot responded quite well to all of this, but the roll-out to offline alarm systems could be faster. That is to say, many of these systems are internet-connected (also using AES-encrypted comms, no TLS), but you will also need to issue new NFC cards for people, so a remote update would only lead to denial of service.

Oh, thanks, that's a misunderstanding on my part.

Checking Wikipedia: Ogg is the container and Vorbis/Speex are the codecs. Vorbis and Speex have been superseded by Opus.

Unless there is a particular order, such as 0-5 stars ratings or whatever, one would randomize the choices to avoid people picking the first option they see or other psychological biases related to the list position.

And the answers are randomized for each pageload. Can be a good thing, or it can be annoying if it's more of a scale kind of thing. Then again, polls aren't used that much anyway so having this as only option is fine.

It depends what features you're looking for, but I've found VLC (available on F-Droid) to be one of the nicer ones. It does video playing also and has gestures like skipping forwards and backwards, so I'd have it installed anyway, and so I configured it to also scan my music folder. Mostly I just go into all songs and play on shuffle but you can also select by artist and stuff.

Depends what you're playing from. I don't have a terabyte of storage on my phone and I'd like to store more than just audio books and music. If you've got a desktop with magnetic storage then sure.

I'd also be curious if you can tell the difference between a 128 kbps Opus and a lossless flac file (in a blind test of course, easy way to test yourself: cp a.flac $RANDOM.flac; cp a.opus $RANDOM.opus; play both with cvlc or something, make your guess, then look at the file size to get the result, repeat at least five times). I could see the argument for having a lossless copy somewhere, just in case you get better audio playback equipment in the future, but for a hot copy (especially on a mobile device) I'm not sure flac is beneficial.

It's used under the hood indeed, but among hackers (let alone an average person) it's barely known.

Until two days ago, I had heard of the term and knew it was some music format, or perhaps speech encoding, but I had no idea if it was a legacy 90s format or what.

Hence the PSA because I'm blown away by the quality difference (for speech at least, I haven't tried music but Wikipedia says that blind tests also showed better bitrate:quality ratios for music). I've always been using mp3 at ~160 for music and 64kbps for speech (or sometimes AMR in the past) but those days are over now. AAC already should have made me upgrade, but the support is less good (e.g. Android has some lag issues with certain AAC files). Opus works perfectly fine everywhere so far, does great compression on both speech and music, so now I have zero reason to ever go with anything other than MP3 anymore.

> XBMC is a popular open-source multimedia center

Is that what you mean? Does this software not play MP3 files? I'm confused.

For what it's worth, the title did confuse me. What the author seems to mean is audio files as opposed to physical media, not the MP3 format in any specific way. I thought it would be a technical discussion of the MP3 format when I clicked the thread. Your example seems much harder to misunderstand in typical contexts so I'm not sure the comparison really works.

(Then to add to the confusion, the article starts with: ``by “MP3s” I mean any fixed digital documents of audio. So, by “MP3s,” I also mean WAV files, and FLAC, and ALAC, etc. Actually, I specifically don’t mean WAV`` err so what's it gonna be...)

Of course, I do see your point in general. It's like cryptography vs. cryptocurrency (crypto=?) or some people objecting to the media's use of the word "hacker" to mean "criminal as applied to the digital domain". Those battles are lost and that's just how the language evolved: everyone knows that crypto in an investment context doesn't refer to public key encryption and that hackers on the news don't mean painters (reference: http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html). But for MP3s, in this particular case, I think the author caused more confusion than clarity.

Adding to this a secondary public service announcement:

I recently learned of Opus (audio codec) and it's amazing. If you've been using mp3, ogg, speex, aac, or any other lossy format: time to upgrade. Opus is freely licensed and I'm blown away by the quality per bitrate. Released in 2012 and I don't see anyone using it yet! Device support is good nowadays and you can either have smaller files or better quality in the same amount of space.

Last night I re-encoded a lot of my audio books (they were mainly mono mp3 64kbps with a few exceptions) and it takes like half the space. One of the larger books went from 1.5GB to 350MB and I can't tell the difference in quality at all.

What I used is apt install opus-tools && opusenc --bitrate x --framesize 60 in.flac out.opus; or choose the Opus export format in Audacity if you're more GUI-inclined.

I thought this was super interesting. Initially saw it on Wikipedia but this is the best article I could find that puts most of the info in one spot. Wikipedia[1] describes it as:

> A unique strain within the population is the Leader sheep, which carries a hereditary ability or predisposition to lead other sheep safely over dangerous ground.

Picture of such a sheep: https://www.animalgeneticresources.net/wp-content/uploads/20... (from [2])

When looking for leader sheep, Iceland immediately comes up so it does seem to be unique to that environment. I can only imagine the evolutionary pressures that led to this, and it makes me wonder if other animals (including humans) have hereditary traits. (Perhaps there is some logic to a royal line after all! (jk)) Sheep aren't even native to that island; they were introduced only a few hundred years ago yet this trait apparently doesn't exist elsewhere.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_sheep

[2] https://www.animalgeneticresources.net/index.php/country/ice...

Also using AntennaPod from F-Droid here: it gets its data from CDNs. The CDN is in a position to log data from a lot of people, that's why I think they are on the block list.

It depends on which podcasts you listen to which services you need to unblock I think. The 'essential' category is usually a good starting point but you might need more, especially for the search which iirc comes from Apple/iTunes.

You can also just whitelist AntennaPod completely of course, being an open source app from F-Droid that's relatively trustworthy.

If you install TrackerControl, no root needed (it pretends to be a VPN to capture your traffic, but is not a real VPN), you will see which apps try to talk to tracking services and thus also which ones talk to Google.

It also as a 'traffic log' feature which, when turned on, shows live which app is talking to which tracker.

Note that, especially if you turn on blocking services marked as essential in the setup, you will need to unblock a lot of CDNs and tracking services for many apps to work including Spotify, your browser, etc. Of course you can also just whitelist apps completely, or temporarily turn all blocking off altogether. But by default it will block trackers, since that's kind of its point. This has the side effect of blocking virtually all advertisements.