Well, she’s not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It’s really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the “VC community” isn’t our only hope.
But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly
Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.
There’s already something like this and it’s called SimpleX. Messages are sent through relays and a very familiar form of ratcheting encryption is used.
It’s still in its infancy, but anyone can run and use their own relay.
Simplex is a great example of why trying to force apps to work with each over is bad for a number of reasons.
Simplex chat would be massively compromised as a messager if it was required to work with Telegram. Imagine the amount of spam you would get if nothing else.
IMO a better example is Matrix bridging - in order for an app like Signal to work on your Matrix account, you do have to compromise your Signal messages on it.
But otherwise, yeah, I definitely agree with your assessment. Even if Signal and SimpleX used an identical protocol, the nature of sealed sender messages would make spam prevention and server abuse more difficult to handle IMO. SimpleX is still relatively obscure, and I’m not sure what scaling up will look like for it.
The problem with trying to be compatible with everything is that no one can agree on what a good protocol should be. Trying to force apps to work together is problematic as you end up creating a large attack surface.
I appreciated what they want to do but the GDPR has kind of gone over the top in my opinion.
I run a matrix server that interoperates with signal, whatsapp and discord so people who need to use those platforms are able to use one app instead of three and also keep their info private.
How’s that keep people’s info private? Every Signal-Matrix integration I’ve seen decrypts the data and just holds it unencrypted on a (Matrix) server.
I‘m talking about apps like discord or whatsapp that have a lot of info on you when you open them. The open source clients are a lot less data hungry afaik.
But yes, the encryption between the apps is not seamless so you‘d need to activate encryption again for this if you want it.
free software doesn’t necessarily mean federating with other services.
They have stated their reasons why they don’t wanna do it. You might disagree with them or not. But the technology they built is still open. Anybody could take what they created and use it as a foundation that does federate.
Why is Signal not on FDroid, or heavily use Google services?
Signal doesn’t “heavily use Google services”. They only use proprietary libraries and integrations for 2 purposes: Donations and push notifications. Signal uses the platform’s native way of handling push notifications, on iOS it’s APNs and on Android it’s FCM. This is also the reason why it’s not available on F-Droid. You can use a fork of the app like Signal-FOSS or Molly. These remove all proprietary dependencies and you can download them from their custom F-Droid repositories.
Molly is wonderful but I use signal-foss because it shares openstreetmap location by default 🤩
Molly claims to use OSM in their FOSS builds: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android/blob/main/README.md#dependency-comparison. I can’t confirm this because I never use any Signal features that require map integration.
I have to be misunderstanding what you’re saying because it sounds like you’re happy that app shares your location by default? Or do you mean it uses that format by default when you decide to share a location?
there is a fork with proprietary dependencies removed called Signal-FOSS, whose repo you can add to F-Droid if you decide to trust it
Might as well use whatsapp in that case which is debatably on par or better than signal for encryption.
We don’t have any clue on how good whatsapp encryption is. It’s closed source.
The whitepaper explains it in detail. Closed source doesn’t mean worse by default. In a lot of cases the opposite since professionals were hired and paid for their work and the company thinks they have an edge on the competition. Open source is more of a grab bag. Commercial use of open source is plagued by abandoned projects and lack of support obligations, even though it might be better in certain instances.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker.
“We’re seeing a number of, I would say, parochial and very politically motivated pieces of legislation often indexed on the idea of protecting children And these have been used to push for something that’s actually a very old wish of security services, governments autocrats, which is to systematically backdoor strong encryption,” said Whittaker.
” ‘Accountability’ looks like more monitors, more oversights, more backdoors, more elimination of places where people can express or communicate freely, instead of actually checking on the business models that have created, you know, massive platforms whose surveillance advertising modalities can be easily weaponized for information ops, or doxing, or whatever it is, right?
One specific such proposal is comes via the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom, under which the government there threatens to prevent any app updates — globally — that it deems a threat to its national security.
“And honestly,” she added, “I think we need the VC community, and the larger tech companies more involved in naming what a threat this is to the industry, and pushing back.”
But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly,” even ones like WhatsApp that support end-to-end encryption and already partly utilize the protocol.
The original article contains 1,027 words, the summary contains 238 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
