If you are not auditing the source code, you are trusting those that are.

You can take your rudeness and bugger off. I'm done with you.

Make all the accusations you want. You think you're smart, but you are not.

for the thumbnail :)

Ah yes clutching them pearls, when called out on outright lying.

Bye!

signal is open source no?

There are forks that don't require phone numbers.

you are gonna feel way too gross in the sauna to wanna have sex

Yes, but those are basically separate platforms like Session. Signal does not federate, and there's only a single server in the US that requires your phone number to sign up.

I not sure what you are trying to argue.

Even if you audit the code yourself, you still need to trust your OS, you need to trust the hardware the OS is running on, and you need to trust the proprietary drivers of each component in that hardware. Then at that point you gotta trust the person who sold you the hardware hasn't modified it.

Ok and?

I'm not misrepresenting anything you said. Meanwhile, it's very telling how you've pivoted to making personal attacks instead of actually addressing the problem I've now repeatedly explained. You're not fooling anyone here bud.

Damn that's brilliant.

Were you using it to catfish strangers via DM? If you weren't, maybe they banned you for misuse of the platform.

Herpes. It’s sexually transmitted, and it’s lifelong. You don’t want it.

well, duh. it is also deeply annoying to navigate. It is like even shittier and less engaging reddit

They've done a really amazing job of convincing the world that this is an encrypted messaging app.

This is a play on people's naivety. It is an encrypted messaging app in as much as regular messages are encrypted between the client and the server. It's just that this achieves nothing for the user in terms of privacy unless you can both completely trust the provider (you shouldn't) and be confident that the back-end can't be compromised (you can't).

They do also have "secret chats" that are apparently E2E encrypted, but you'd be mad at this point to give them the benefit of the doubt without at least looking at independent security audits of the client.

Why you say its Bad?

Oh, I was just making a cheap joke. I used Telegram for a while for a specific group, and in that time I was inundated with catfishing bot messages. The joke was that that's the purpose of Telegram and if you're doing any else on it, you're misusing it.

It was a very funny joke.

weird to compare telegram to reddit, one is a messaging app and the other one is a link aggregator

I stopped using Telegram as soon as I learned their chats aren't E2E encrypted unless you create a secret chat. Their advertising is so misleading. Even WhatsApp is more private than Telegram.

She who?

The body language in this video is wild.

There's a difference between trusting something written for general purpose use not to have harmful code vs. something written specifically for communications people want to keep private that would therefore be a target.

So either I felt I was making a valid point for consideration that I thought was valuable to make, or I'm a troll wasting everyone's time.

I know what I am. And I'm starting not to care what you or others think. Go blindly and trust whatever you want, it's no skin off my back. Frankly, I use Telegram because none of my comms are particularly sensitive, and I have no problem with that. I'd rather my private conversatiosn not be actively posted somewhere, but in the case of a breach, it wouldn't be the end of my world. So I've no problem trusting Telegram thus far, personally, in my case.

Anyway, have a nice time. Understand my point or don't.

afaik servers are in USA

You mean one of the few countries not currently trying to dismantle encryption?

Body language of the interviewer?

Not effectively, since it's centralized in the US and you have no idea what code the server is running.

Signal does claim to have their server code open, but they went a whole year one time without updating it, until they received some backlash for it.

but then both are used as forums

No, both. The interviewer seems extra comfortable at the start but by the end they both seem on the same level. I think in a good way, not sure it's a good method to get a read on either of them if i know my friends 😆

you can never validate what code a server is running, so having FOSS server code is kinda a moot point: it can’t add anything useful to the privacy conversation

the only way you can guarantee privacy is with the client code, and they have repeatable builds so you can validate the code that’s encrypting the messages, and in that case it barely even matters if their server is streaming all the data they receive to some shady other place… especially with sealed sender

nope… signal has sealed sender to prevent them from building a social graph

no, the technology in signal prevents it

Nope, sealed sender does not address the problem because the phone number is collected at sign up time. The whole sealed sender concept is just another trust me bro mechanic because, once again, nobody aside from people who are actually operating the server know what it’s doing. Signal is proof that vast majority of people don’t understand the basics of privacy and security, and they don’t actually care.

the tracking argument against signal is pretty weak imo… signal has no ability to build a social graph because in 2018 they implemented a feature called sealed sender which is a cryptographic mechanism that allows you to send a message without disclosing to signal who you are (the receiver still knows, and rate limiting still works)

the reality of signal having your phone number is they know you (as an identity/person) use signal and that’s it

the phone number being collected at sign up just proves that you use signal

they can’t build any kind of social graph from it… they can only use the information contained in the message for delivery and rate limiting

Again, the only people who actually know what the phone number is used for are the people who operate the server. I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for people to grasp. They don't need the information contained in the messages. Once the phone number is collected, it CAN be stored and associated with your account. There is no way for you to know whether that happens or not unless you have access to that server. There is no way for you to verify that the server does what people operating it say it does. That's what makes it a trust based system.

yes, i’m aware that you don’t know what the phone number is used for, but what we can guarantee is that it can’t be tied back to your message history, because again that’s what sealed sender is for. in order to send messages, you use a signed, derived value that has never been seen by the signal servers (since it’s derived) but is still signed (so signal knows it’s legitimate: they can validate your identity and rate limit without knowing it)

so whilst the phone number is associated with an account, that only allows them to know that you (person/identity) use signal… but that identity can verifiably not be tied back to any messages you send

nothing about that identity other than derived cryptographic data is ever sent along with your messages

*edit: i’ll slightly retract that: of course your IP address is also sent along with messages, and that may be able to be tied back to your identity… let’s say out of band, of course… so it’s on you to use a VPN or some other method to obfuscate your source IP address. i’d say that’s generally applicable to any other service too

So are the comment sections below pork and beans recipes.

Any public discussion is technically a forum.

Again, nowhere did I talk about message history. What I'm talking about the server having unique ids for each user, which is how it connects users to each other, and having a phone number collected initially which can be tied to that id. You don't need anything from the messages themselves to create a graph of people who talk to each other. The routing is done by the server.

I know about that and that's why I'm not worried about them having my phone number, but its still a pointless requirement. What if I don't have a phone number for privacy reasons? SimpleX is still better in every way other than simplicity.

I don't think, at this point, people who use Telegram do it for their privacy. I still use it, but I don't trust it one bit more than I trust WhatsApp.

Geeez, who are the other two?

the server having unique ids for each user, which is how it connects users to each other, and having a phone number collected initially which can be tied to that id

but in that chain what you really care about is your phone number that identifies you in the real world to your messages, right?

The routing is done by the server

yes, and the only thing you need to route is the receiver; not the sender

the sender is only used to validate the senders identity, and for rate limiting

sealed sender solves both of these problems whilst not including any sender information in messages… phone number or user id doesn’t matter: those things are not sent along with any of your messages, and that’s verifiable

your phone number and user id is only known by signal when you retrieve a temporary token (this solves rate limiting: the retrieval of the token is the rate limit, and each token has a limited number of messages it can send)… the client then derives a different key from it, which can still be verified as having been signed by the server, but does not contain any information that can be tied back to your phone number or user ID

Slow down, big daddy! You can be gentle at it sometimes.

To me, that is just clickbait.

That explains that awkward interaction in the interview. It's like an interview happening in the Black Lodge.

i’d agree that for privacy alone simplex is probably better, but until it scales i’m not sure we can say that it will be able to scale. i have my doubts, simply because if you can have unlimited anonymous profiles, when it becomes a high value target then spam becomes a real problem, and then there’s only 2 major solutions that i can think of:

• raising the barrier to creating new accounts so that accounts become relatively expensive (essentially what the phone number does)
• spam filters, like email, which is a whole separate system that can be abused like it has been with email

but in that chain what you really care about is your phone number that identifies you in the real world to your messages, right?

It doesn't matter, what matters is that the server has a unique id for you and the person you're talking to, and that id can then be mapped to the phone number that was initially collected. That's all the server needs to identify the real identity of the people you communicate with.

It's not a question of what the server needs minimally, it's a question of what the server could be doing if it was set up maliciously. The sealed sender does not solve this problem in any way shape of form.

what matters is that the server has a unique id for you and the person you're talking to, and that id can then be mapped to the phone number that was initially collected. That's all the server needs to identify the real identity of the people you communicate with

the key point missing in the middle here though is that the IDs aren’t what matters: it’s having the ability to link those IDs

and i agree, being able to link you->your phone number->your user ID->message->recipient ID->recipient phone number->recipient as an individual is a problem

but again, sealed sender break that chain: there is cryptographically no way to link your user ID to the message you’ve sent

it’s literally impossible for them to build a social graph from your messages

It's not a question of what the server needs minimally

again, i agree… kinda… i put that there to show that you don’t actually need the sender to achieve the goal of delivering the message. it was part of the explanation of why sealed sender works, rather than a point to be made by itself

what the server could be doing if it was set up maliciously. The sealed sender does not solve this problem in any way shape of form

would you be able to explain how it doesn’t?

sealed sender divorces your user ID from any message you send… your messages can not be tied back to your user ID or phone number without having decrypted the message content

so even with a malicious server, because you can verify your client behaviour (that it derives keys, and that you can verify the message payload contains nothing outside the ciphertext which is unexpected), then even a malicious server (without IP information) doesn’t have the information necessary to infer the sender from the sent message

Again, sealed sender has nothing to do with it. If I run a server, I have access to the raw requests coming in. I can do whatever I want with them even outside Signal protocol. You can't verify that my server is set up to work the way I say it is. You get that right?

You're confusing what Signal team says their server does, and the open source server implementation they released with what's actually running. The latter, you have no idea about.

The core issue is trusting the physical infrastructure rather than just the cryptography. The protocol design for sealed sender assumes the server behaves exactly as the published open source code dictates. A malicious operator can simply run modified server software that entirely ignores those privacy protections. Even if the cryptographic payload lacks a sender ID, the server still receives the raw network request and all the metadata attached to it. Your client has to talk to the server and identify itself before any messages are even sent.

When your device connects to send that sealed message, it inevitably reveals your IP address and connection timing to the server. The server also knows your IP address from when you initially registered your phone number or when you requested those temporary rate limiting tokens. By logging the raw incoming requests at the network level, a malicious server can easily correlate the IP address sending the sealed message with the IP address tied to the phone number.

Since the server must know the destination to route the message, it just links your incoming IP address to the recipient ID. Over time this builds a complete social graph of who is talking to whom. The cryptographic token merely proves you are allowed to send a message without explicitly stating who you are inside the payload. It does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata of the network connection itself from the machine receiving the data.

Well spam seems pretty easy to combat. A lot of the groups make you talk to the admins and wait before you can talk, and you can have it so you approve contacts before they can contact you using one of your links. And if one of your links falls to spam, you can just delete it. I'd say spam isn't really an issue.

Yeah there's a reason they don't allow you to use your own self hosted server.

People just accepting what companies say is how we ended up in the current mess. But here we are again. Companies work around how people perceive things to be secure and private all the time. It's just one small cog in the big machine.

It's how some NGOs are part of a intelligence and surveillance network but people only focus on the social work and it becomes immoral to criticize the good things they do as a cover.

There's also reluctance to release it in f-droid. They say they want to becontrol the distribution, but they have no problem with Apple and Google being the main distribution platforms. They haven't even looked at unified push. And that just adds to the "there's something else going on" factors.

Signal protocol might be bullet proof but the app supplier, centralized server, and phone number requirement and the most mainstream OS aren't. When you combine with how mainstream OS companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google work together with the feds, there's ways that the bulletproof protocol may not be sufficient and is only a part of the bigger picture. There's also US government spying on notification.

They may work without them but the inconvenience will deter 99% of people. Being dependent these external factors, It just doesn't feel as bullet proof as a whole.

Whatsapp also uses the signal protocol, but you wouldn't trust them because they're under facebook, would you?