Citation for what exactly? Go read up on how networking works, entire textbooks are available. The server has access to all the data the client sends it. How do you think you get paired with another person to chat, by magic?

Except you have no idea what's actually running on the server. Only people who operate it know.

I don't think we're saying anything new here. I've explained my point and the problem with Signal collecting phone numbers. You can make your own decisions on whether you think that's acceptable practice or not.

yet another? what dou mean?

Yeah don't get me wrong, I despise meta and their facade pretending WhatsApp is private. Your example is evidence but not proof but it does not mean I doubt you because it really doesn't surprise me. Gmail likes to pretend it's secure and private too because data in transit is supposedly encrypted but they can still just read absolutely everything in your inbox themselves

Telegram had a good PR from Mr. Robot.

I think their point is that signal knows the phone number associated to each account, and in lots of countries nowadays phone numbers are only obtained after identity verification.

sealed sender is supposed to hide the identity of the sender from signal servers, but it's security is questionable as it's based on blackbox hardware not even signal staff can audit.

and doesn't require a phone number or even an email

wait, doesn't it rely on the email system?

I would rather have signal possibly collect my social graph than google through gmail.

I think it probably doesn't matter what he wants, it only matters that the data exists at all. If the owner is not giving permission, that's one thing. But I'm inclined to believe that those American 3-letter agencies aren't the sort to ask permission.

All it takes is one disgruntled systems engineer who thinks they don't get paid enough. An agency comes knocking with a sizable offer of cash, and they'll get the backdoor they want.

Lol of course

It uses a subset of the email protocol (which makes it very difficult for governments to block) but it no longer uses an an actual email address to function by default.

Even if someone did use a gmail exclusively for this (you can't use it with an email account you use for normal emails too), everything would be entirely encrypted, and only the app itself would be able to decrypt it (google would not be able to decrypt the messages). But again, no normal user is going to use an actual email address.

You can read more about how it works in their FAQ. But the short version is once you pick a username, it just gives you a QR code or link to send to people, which connects you immediately in an encrypted chat room with no faffing around with emails.

These people are foolish for reasons far worse than just using Telegram.

I agree, if majority of people would care, Linux PCs would be the most popular option. They care about convenience only, but not even that much. Instead of researching the best they are just ok with the advertised options. They eat what they get.

they definately installed signal and fucked afterward

It's a surname, he used to be a boat punk younger.

Unlike Signal, Telegram is successful in getting people to move away from Meta's Whatsapp.

Telegram is used by Ukrainian armed forces for military actions, ruskie pests use it too for the same… so its probably hard to hack, as these REALLY want to see the messages of each other…

You see, these arguments are just impolite when made against the man in the post going out of his way to provide you with an experiment based on logic that you don't need computer science knowledge to verify.

As far as I have heard, Ukrainian servicemen are forbidden to use Telegram. Ukrainian civilians do, and Ukrainian special services might do that sometimes perhaps.

And it will again be about someone added to the wrong group. Meaning - not a hack.

There's a commonly used Russian metaphor "to not see the forest behind the trees".

What you are calling a device is in fact a system. It's a local system, that you are carrying in your hand, but it's functioning due to a very complex global system which is not. That device in itself is like a 1960s' town in complexity. In itself, but there's also the global system.

And these are a result of quite a lot of people employed by various organizations with hierarchies and dependencies. And most of the power in those organizations doesn't want you to have privacy and autonomy as much and when you want. If you want those, you should produce your own hardware and everything above it. Or build organizations interested in your full privacy and autonomy which will do that. It's about structure, so just creating a few of them (a goal hardly reachable in itself) with manifests saying "we want to be good" won't change anything.

So, if you were wondering why contemporaries of Stalin's regime were reluctant to divorce it with Marxism and call it something else, - that's similar to this. They really wanted to believe there's a Marxist superpower, just like some people wanted to believe Google is a good corporation, and before that some people wanted to believe Apple is a counterculture corporation, and so on. And, at various moments in time and space, in various dimensions, sometimes these were. Just like in some ways the British Empire was really bringing civilization to the world.

The more life and diversity there is, the likelier we are to have good things. That doesn't mean we'll ever have full privacy, full autonomy, fully civilized, peaceful and honorable world, and so on. We won't.

Could you maybe resfresh my memory a bit and share a few previous signal hacks? Thanks

I think that metaphor is quite universal because it's also used very commonly in English and Estonian at the very least.

Depending on country you may be able to subsidize only part of the sauna as a business expense if it's a sauna at your home office, but actually hosting interviews in it would for sure help your case in claiming it to be operated for business.

I don't know how it is in the US though.

She's pretty hot for a programmer.

And with a name like that she was destined for greatness.

Didn’t JUST get this way, we been smart

The above poster is wrong. You can absolutely trust lemmy, because its open source and self hostable. You can build the project from source (like a cooking recipe), and run it yourself.

Moxie is the guy

What is a Moxie Marlinspike?

1. I can't find a link to this but I'm sure I've read an article about what happens when you "report" a message someone sent to you in WhatsApp. In this case some reviewer at Meta will look at your message and determine if it violated the rules. IIRC the article talked about them most likely being added to the chat but not visible.
2. There's a recent lawsuit that shows that Meta can view your messages through internal systems: https://proton.me/blog/whatsapp-encryption-lawsuit
3. Meta's AI assistant in WhatsApp leaves more questions about privacy. How closed-off is the data used in this AI from other parts of Meta's services?

Hmm. Looks more like a Bill

I appreciate the comment on the matter. This is good information to know and consider.

People should know that Signal is encrypted and private, but won't make you a ghost.

That being said, the majority of people are not interested in privacy so getting them to use Signal over WhatsApp or SMS is a 99% win.

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm pretty sure moxie identifies as a guy. I think the person i was replying to was trying to talk about the interviewer, Sabrina Halper.

Again, as I said, whatsapp doesn't feel like a genuine messenger app as much as an oversimplified garbage made for tracking users on the background for profiting.
Even the deal of "giving" Llama LLMs (Meta AI) to everyone feels sketchy and look abusive the way it is pushed to users.

Likewise all of meta's services, the only catch with whatsapp that it used to be good and it's a well-spread application, that's why they bought it instead of improving FB's messenger, as meta want to benefit of it's naive userbase who think whatsapp is "As fine as ever";

To you, publicity is nothing important and it doesn't make a good product, to meta however, publicity is "everything" and it shall be all-time high, they have more analytical data about their userbase and have a good idea of what they would do and what decision they would take.

I'm fully convinced its just like apple's support: they make some vagueish unprovable claims about privacy, and have a functional and shiny app. That's enough for people to overlook all the privacy issues, and build a cult-like fanbase.

Like if anyone walked into a privacy conference and said, "Hey everyone, I'm going to make a private messaging service. I need everyone's phone number!", they'd get laughed out of the room. But because their app looks nice, then people need to develop the cult-like following whenever it gets attacked, because its touching on an unresolved cognitive dissonance of this being a terrible idea.

agreed!

It's common in Russia. It's common a lot of places, but it's common in Russia

But yeah, I've used that and the inverse depending on the context plenty of time.

You mean the messenger that requires you give them your phone number to make an account? Yeah, fuck that.

That's absurd coming from the founder of a FOSS messaging app who actively decided not to let Signal federate and rejected any other open source Signal client. Not only that, even now you can't truly use Signal's new "username" feature. If any of the recipients have your number stored in their phonebook, irrespective of whether you know them or not, the username goes for a toss. This was/is the problem with Telegram's username feature. Signal knew this and still decided to go ahead with it. Not to mention never doing anything about completely removing the phone number from the account after its creation. This has been, by design, a privacy and hence safety threat, and even after the username feature was implemented, this not getting implemented is very concerning.

Pretty much yeah, and they've had a really good marketing campaign too. They got a whole bunch of prominent tech influencers incessantly pushing it, and it just feels like a massive astroturf campaign to me. Like you said, if a random person pitched this idea, they'd be laughed at, but you get some people with clout to do it, and it sticks because everybody respects them and trusts them.

I don't understand his point about restoring your messages to a new phone. How does that prove it isn't encrypted? Couldn't Telegram store the encrypted data on their server, send the encrypted data back to you and then you automatically decrypt it because you have the key?

The question here is why not get people to switch to a better platform like SimpleX or even matrix with something like Element. I don't find that Signal does anything better in practice.

No windows, therefore quiet, and good acoustics.

And I'm not arguing not to.

But I tried to get everybody I know to contact me on signal or simplex. For a year.
Only one person switched and they did so to signal.
Because it was easier and more people were on it. I myself stopped using simplex because not enough people are using it that I know.

So where the rubber meets the road, if anybody wants to use signal I'm good with that because its good for 99% of all things.

If we (as privacy enthusiasts) want to promote the better apps, they need to be and appear less niche so they're more acceptable.

Think that was a joke playing on the possibility that Moxie could be a trans woman.

Yeah, there are network effects at play here. Getting people to move off a platform is very difficult because they need their contacts to move to, and their contacts need theirs in turn. Some people are willing to use multiple messaging apps, but most don't. I'd argue that's why it's important to promote alternatives to Signal. The more popular they become the easier it is to get people to move to them.

Why don't we all just truly go FOSS and use matrix?

Don't forget not allowing you to sync historical messages between your phone and PC. Apparently somehow that's just too complicated.

Why not? If the service is fully decentralized and e2e enceyptwe with metadata included how is this not fully private?

I suppose someone with access to the network could see were the traffic is going to and from, in that case add a trusted vpn + tor. Ok sure it is possible for tor to be tracked and it is possible for a team to hijack your vpn providers servers forecefully and take logs. So technically possible. But even then they will only find who you are talking to, not what you are saying.

But it is also much easier to use countless tracking techiques to locate you, find were you are going and find who you are talking to.

Both of these are very unlikely to happen unless you are being personally targeted by govenment agencies.

See this is why I’m reluctant to start listing them because I don’t want to get dragged into an interminable discussion about how hacks like https://thehackernews.com/2025/02/hackers-exploit-signals-linked-devices.html?m=1 somehow “don’t count” because it was the user’s fault, or https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4850133017242-Twilio-Incident-What-Signal-Users-Need-to-Know doesn’t count because it didn’t include chat messages.

The irony is I very carefully chose my words when I said “Signal-related hack” instead of “Signal hack” because I knew fanbois would show up to argue that anything short of a central database leak isn’t really a hack.