Please Signal, use this opportunity. I really want to be on Signal AAAAH
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Technology
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They have already announced that they will not be interoperable with insecure messaging apps unfortunately.
Signal absolutely should not interoperate with other data-mining software.
And they won't, for the same reason they removed SMS (no insecure messaging options).
That's so short sided. Signal is useless if all your contacts only use WhatsApp.
It's not useless. It has a very specific use that does not coincide with interoperability with data-mining corporations.
It also does not coincide with most people
It doesn't have to. It does, however, have to remain private.
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Yeah I believe this to be a fallacy. If all your contacts use WhatsApp, they still haven't grasped the concept of installing two applications side-by-side. Or they don't fully understand why people are using signal over WhatsApp. If you fail both of those, congratulations, you've failed to be a self-aware tech user and you're now demoted to a braindead consumer.
I know, mind blowing right? Point is, society in general should not accept others forcing you to keep the WhatsApp monopoly in tact, which is exactly what's happening here.
It will take some time but eventually adoption will spread, even among your contacts. It's just a matter of critical mass, and there are some pretty compelling features within Signal that make it a worthy replacement.
Most people are indeed technically not savvy and don't understand why they would need more than WhatsApp and Instagram on their phone.
Why not convince people to use Signal as well? Even my family has a group chat on Signal. Of course, it's a slow move with most people sticking to non-open chats. But it's worth the effort I would say.
Yeah after two years even my parents and brother are on signal plus most of my close friends, the rest I just use regular sms
I really don't expect anyone would listen to me.
How could they, they aren't on signal
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I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn't, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there's stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn't leak even metadata because it doesn't have it.
Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.
A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don't think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.
The standard is about the protocol, not every bit of the implementation. 3DH / X3DH and double ratchet, etc, are among the best for E2EE.
Thanks for the tip about SimpleX, that looks interesting! I could never use Signal due to the way they operate and force you to rely on their and Google's servers, actively blocking forks from their network. So much for FOSS...
They do provide an apk outside of the Play Store, that uses a Web Socket for push notifications. Not he best way of going about it, but hey, it exists.
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Meta says that it will only allow third-party developers to use another protocol besides Signal, “if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.”
If matrix finally finishes implementing MLS, maybe they could convince meta to use it.
Last time they touched an open chat protocol, they hung it out to dry. That was XMPP. That's why more than half of the fediverse is reluctant or outright hostile to federate with anything meta.
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Does this mean third party apps will be able to interact with whatsapp?
only when the service specifically requests it and agrees to Whatsapp's terms.
Would this mean I could finally ditch what's app and use only Signal?
No, Signal announced they won’t implement interoperable messaging.
kind of dumb they could get huge market share
Yeah, this worked so well for XMPP when everybody federated with Gmail chat.
Well, it worked out for Google when it federated with Jabber, who first open sourced XMPP.
It's not. There is no privacy if you send your message to Whatsapp servers.
Would it not be E2EE? Isn't that one of the reasons for using the Signal protocol?
Yes, the "delivering" part would be E2EE. Do we really know the afterwards if they can read their users' messages? They probably can.
Whatsapp CANNOT read messages when e2ee is enabled, this client-side snooping was discussed when the protocol was first implemented. Whatsapp collects a ton of metadata and social graph info, but not message content.
Well you type messages in in plain text and they decrypt it to show you the messages at the other end. So they can do the nefarious processing on the client side and send back results to the mother ship. E2EE is only good when you trust the two ends, but with WhatsApp and Messenger you shouldn't trust the ends.
Sure, but any messaging app (including Signal) could have these backdoors in place. Heck, there's even vectors for unrelated apps on your phone to read this data once unencrypted.
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if i remember correctly, it would be E2EE (WhatsApp and Messenger are too) but Meta stores the encrypted message on their server
Signal does not care about "market share", they're a non-profit.
Not if signal doesn’t want to support WhatsApp, and I don’t think they’re going to unfortunately :(
Is there a reason this requirement doesn't apply to iMessage as well?
@Mysteriarch I deeply hope that there will be some connection to Matrix in the future.
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