Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency
threema.chOver the past days, two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Let’s be honest, Signal is not perfect either:
(UPD: It was funded by CIA)
(UPD2: Here I will quote www.securemessagingapps.com:
((UPD)Source: https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/04/06/it-looks-like-signal-isnt-as-open-source-as-you-thought-it-was-anymore/#update-2021-04-06-1-39pm-pdt-by-ryne-hager)
(I’m gonna find sources for the last two statements a bit later to not be unsubstantiated)Done.
Although, we all can agree, that Signal is still better than Telegram, or WhatsApp, or Threema, or whatever.
Still, we probably want to look at the better alternatives, like Simplex or Session.
Wait until you find out where computers, the Internet, GPS, weather satellites and Tor came from.
Telegram requires a phone number too? I mean yeah there’s the option to use that blockchain phone number service, but you can do the same for Signal. 🤷
Yes, it does. And yes, it is equally bad in both cases.
Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.
Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven’t gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven’t actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.
That’s not true. A phone number is still required to register, you can just set it not to be public.
Source: I just tried to register and it asked for my phone number.
Last I have seen, it still requires a number to register - it just doesn’t have to be public.
What gets me the most is the requirement of a smartphone to register. No way I am trusting my non-public chats to a phone, so that means either Waydroid/VM (which creates issues with copypasting) or signal-cli (which is fairly inconvenient).
Which lines of its libre software source code are malicious?
It’s centralised
It’s not about code, but about funding.
Yes, and it’s the downside, no matter how you look at it.
So, which malicious lines of libre software source code have been funded? This is how we stop FUD. Don’t let them derail us.
Don’t get me wrong. As far as we know, no malicious code have been funded. The very fact that the Signal was sponsored by the CIA is suspicious (maybe I used some incorrect words, sorry if so). Of course, it’s totally up to you whether you think that fact is sus or not.
It’s not. Our devices run software, not funding.
Session is also sus because you effectively cannot host a node, last I have seen. They claim it is “against a Sybil attack” but all it does is making sure only people wih large disposable funds can have nodes, and the effect might be the exact opposite.
Simplex is more interesting in this regard because while I am concerned with initial centralization (the default servers), they made hosting your own easy. But I personally stick with imperfect yet trusty XMPP.
SimpleX is great. BUT it’s not user friendly. Thus general adoption for the average user will be hard. Don’t get me wrong using the app itself is easy but as soon as someone switches their phone that doesn’t have technical knowledge they will loose their chats because they won’t understand the concept of moving their DB. Since you don’t have an identifier like a phone number with SimpleX those people could even lose contacts as a whole since they generate a new DB, hurting their social connections.
That’s the reason I personally never recommend SimpleX to anyone who doesn’t have the technical knowledge to understand stuff like that.
Not anymore, right? Or does it still need your number for signing up?
Just to sign up