I recently read an interesting article from someone that helped with the initial design of Signal and who left in anger over Moxie Marlinspike refusing to even discuss the option to not require phone numbers. From the article it was very clear that this was apparently non-negotiable from the start...

The other interesting detail was that apparently there was enough money involved to fly developers from all over the US to Hawaii for a week long hackathon in a rented fancy villa for building the initial Signal prototype, coincidentally very close to the NSA facilities that Edward Snowden used to work in... and this was way before they got the large donations from the WhatsApp founder.

Of course this isn't proof of anything, but it has a certain smell to it.

Yes, just like it isn't the Signal Foundation that collects the connection metadata, but AWS on which Signal runs and Signal is collecting just enough metadata that it is possible to correlate the metadata AWS has with the account details that Signal has. Or Google and the notification metadata and device hardware identifies, etc. Or the metadata that Cloudflare collects when Signal uses them as a CDN...

Just a heads up that the SimpleX founder, Evgeny Poberezkin, unfortunately has ties to right-wing groups.

Evgeny is a supporter of the far-right populist Reform UK party, and the Donald Trump administration. In 2024, he donated to the Reform UK party on behalf of SimpleX chat and boosted Tommy Robinson, a far-right, anti-Islam activist and convicted violent criminal, and his support of violent far-right riots in the UK.[

On X, Evgeny frequently boosts far-right politicians, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, climate change denial, and transphobic and otherwise bigoted rhetoric.

SimpleX has received a $1M donation from Jack Dorsey in the wake of changes to Telegram that promised to crack down on far-right extremism on the app.

Also @sonalder@lemmy.ml and @lonesomeCat@lemmy.ml

Delta chat assumes the relays are evil and of course doesn’t send private keys there

there is a spam problem??

Session seems pretty good for this! Not sure if forward secrecy is fully implemented yet but it's in the works. User interface seems really easy so far.

Not sure about the stability of the maintainers but the FOSS community has been actively supporting it.

i just wish folks would use threema

I've tried simplex a while ago. It felt the most private IM I could find. It's hard to get people to use it tho

Another centralized silo is not the solution, and Threema was recently sold to a dodgy investment consortium that seems to have been purely set up to hide the true owners (and all the original founders of the company left).

good to know.

there would be if it allowed unrestricted free accounts with zero barriers to entry, same with anything else like that.

they can’t link the account

Google can, since it's their OS and their payments.

But even if you're not using Play Store to pay, the vast majority of people who are paying are going to be using the same device/IP/fingerprint/etc. where Signal is running, so it's not impossible to put the two together to link an account to a specific payment, if say, a government forced them to do so in order to track someone. It's just a bad idea for several different privacy reasons.

I mean simple X doesn't have this problem, I think. It has literally no identifiers.

I think we're talking past each other. To refer to your previous comment:

Forward secrecy protects against intercepting now and decrypting later when you get access to the users private key: this is only possible on delta chat if you get access to the client database at which point you can read all undeleted messages anyway

Or if you run an evil relay that logs encrypted messages, and later you get the single necessary private key. Which is the problem.

Here is a basic explanation for how zero-knowledge proofs can work in a very similar context as Signal.

Google can know you've paid but they can't link it to your Signal account thanks to zero-knowledge proofs.

Except for tracing IP addresses, timing etc... as you've mentioned, but that's much more involved and cannot be done retroactively.

They can... as I said they control the entire OS. They can see you're running Signal with account# XYZ, that you clicked the pay button, that Signal generated the ZKP (which they can read in memory or network packets), and all the key clicks and numbers entered of the payment details for that ZKP, the entire process.

That's just conspiracy theories at this point. If you assume google is constantly spying on the memory of all applications on your phone there is no reason at all to believe that.

I never said they were doing it or that people should assume it, just that it's possible. Whether or not that matters is up to each individual's own threat model and should be weighed accordingly.

Yes and I’m saying that since the only way to get access to that private key on delta chat is to get access to an unlocked device at which point you have access to all the messages on that device anyway (on signal too)

What do you think makes Delta Chat uniquely impervious to leaking your private key compared to the other E2EE messaging apps that do implement forward secrecy?

I’m saying those others that pretend to implement pfs, still leak all chats the user didn’t delete (and in some cases even then) when an attacker has access to the private key because that’s stored in the same database.

Can we focus on the apps that do implement it instead? I'm getting more and more lost in the point you're trying to make here.

E2EE messaging puts encrypted messages on a server without the private keys. The concern PFS addresses is to prevent a server from getting one private key and using it to decrypt all messages. This is a vulnerability of Delta Chat, and not one of Signal.

Okay and how would you get that private key?

By having access to an unlocked device: which means you also have access to all messages. Therefor this attack vector is not as big a deal as you are making it.

You are, by extension, saying that PFS is not as big a deal as you are making it. Do you have anything to back this up that Signal et al aren't aware of? Would you like to argue Delta Chat should stop arguing in favor of it too?

Seems super dangerous to assume security due to ignorance of harm, but okay, I guess, we can play "look for why".

With DeltaChat, you can get a private key just by accessing a file on a desktop client. Or a backup file . Then you can pass that onto a compromised server and restore chat history that wasn't present on the client or backup file.

That's so unfortunate. At least SimpleX probably isn't a honeypot... :-/