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WhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears | Computer Weekly (www.computerweekly.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

There's a grain of truth in the claim: We don't know for sure if the original open source version is actually running on the server.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that true of all server side FOSS?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. We just have to trust them. Or selfhost, which I'm doing with almost everything.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why not use eg. Matrix then?

[+] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

we already had XMPP available and well developed.

XMPP as defined where?

For privacy, I guess OMEMO is the current gold standard regarding XMPP; however, agreeing on a feature set between clients apart from the most basic stuff wasn't always easy (and I guess it still isn't).

Also, I guess XML has fallen out of style for this kind of use case. Matrix is just JSON over REST, which I guess is kind of nice nowadays?

XML kind of suffers the jack of all trades curse. If you just have two sides exchanging messages using a well-defined protocol, why go for something that offers schema definition, DTD, XSL transformation? These come with costs, and if you don't use them, why XML in the first place?

All of this combined with the fact that the communication model of XMPP and Matrix is different - XMPP closer to email where a server relays messages between clients while in Matrix, everything is a synchronized (?) room, even direct messages between two participants - would have required bending or extending the spec so much that it wouldn't have been XMPP in the original spirit anyways. So instead, a new protocol was designed that incorporated a lot of lessons learned in the decade before it.

You're free to continue using XMPP, after all, bridges exist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

XMPP was doing great until Google and Meta EEE'd it, but it's still alive and well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

They've said that they release the source code after it's running in production:

sorry the source for one of our services was so far behind. We often don't push source until we release things, and there were a few overlapping releases that happened in that period which made it awkward to push at any moment and put us behind. Additionally, we've seen a large increase in spam, and a reluctance to immediately publish the exact anti-spam measures we were responding with to a place where spammers could immediately see them combined with the above to cause this extreme delay.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#issuecomment-815400676