If I use throwaway numbers: What happens if I lose access? Do I _need_ the number for anything in the future (say, device died)? Can someone else mess with me if they get access to this number, if the number gets reassigned? Searching for this kind of information is hard, because 'Signal' isn't exactly a word that search engines understand in context.
Chromium and Chrome are the same thing for me: A browser I don't care for and only install on a dev machine for some tests. I wouldn't install either on my personal rig, ignoring the suffixes. And certainly not for an 'app'. It's both 'Not liking Google' and 'No general web browser to run an IM client'. The latter isn't solved by Chromium.
As far as I'm aware there are no Google Play Services for FxOS (looking at this Flame right here) and I expect that there's no easy solution for SailfishOS either.
I understand that I'm not the target audience. Please believe me when I say that I don't feel that I can (as in, it suits me/feels okay to do so) use Signal right now. I'm writing these messages here not to hit on your work, but to express that there is an audience with other preferences/goals. It's Christmas soon, after all - consider this my public, unrealistic, idealistic wishlist.
(Edit: And I apologize that my critical comment ranks rather high right now. I might believe that I'm not completely bonkers and there are other people that feel the same way, but it still sucks to see this kind of feedback on an announcement post)
This is the world we live in: people do most of their communication on mobile devices running iOS or Android, use Chrome on the desktop, and expect contact discovery to be automatic in their social apps. The browser has won the desktop, iOS and Android have won mobile, and the velocity of the ecosystem is unlikely to make "distributed" communication mechanisms possible for some time.
We're trying to make mass surveillance impossible within this world of ours. We want to produce technology that is privacy preserving but feels just like everything else people already use, not somehow convince everyone to fundamentally change their workflow and their expectations.
It'd be sweet if we lived in an alternate reality where everyone ran SailfishOS or something (and maybe this year will be the year of Linux on the desktop!), but we can't just pretend that's already the case.
But honestly: I understand mobile support for iOS/Android only. I don't understand Chrome as a platform (FF isn't dead. And the biggest reason for that is that I fail to understand why that client needs to be 'web based' and then again not. A web app in a silo)
Mobile numbers.. Why? I mean, if 90% of the population WANT mum to see that they use a service and when they're online (or whatever metadata you want to exchange for contacts), just because they happen to know the phone number: Fine. But why isn't it possible to sign up, hit a box that says 'no phone number associated' and .. add contacts manually? I don't want the 99.999% to change, to make it harder for them. I just wish that Christmas brings an option that lets me opt-out of that. Chat contacts don't need my phone number. People that know my phone number are not chat contacts.
I'll get back pretending that Linux has won and will try to surf the web in FxOS for 30min just .. to prove you wrong. :)
I really think Signal might not be for you. Signal is not about building the most secure or private system, it's about building the first mass-market encrypted that that's Good Enough. Signal is a infinite percent improvement over plaintext/https. It's not supposed to be as good as OTR.
Making it a de facto requirement that users on your network be personally identified via a phone number ("get a burner number"? really?) and that you have a copy of their contact list and phone calls, all within US jurisdiction, means mass metadata surveillance a single judicial order away (as it is now with the telecoms).
Unlike POTS, Signal prevents phone taps, yes, but it does not hide your social network, and so does little to provide you with the ability to associate with someone anonymously.
Do you take this opportunity to point out to them that they do away with this privacy every time they install whatsapp / fb messenger / hangouts / skype / practically anything that asks for contacts permissions?
It's not as if that hasn't been done. twitter.com/darklajid is me (not worth checking it out). See? A name, tied to an identity. Same here. I used to have a FB account and even _there_ you can have a profile name that is unique and shareable. I really think you conflate things here: I DO NOT want to make life harder for mum/granny/the average WhatsApp fan. If you love that random people show up in your roster because you store their number (or vice versa: You show up on your Ex's roster because she didn't delete you yet) that's fine. And could continue to work like that.
I really have a hard time understanding why it isn't impossible to opt out. If I have a key, registered with Signal - why would I need a number on top? _Especially_ given that there's no federation to speak of, so I assume they don't need to 'shard' base on the identifier. [email protected] -> talk to example.com? That's not happening here. And I don't see why/how they'd shard on numbers? +49 -> route to a German server?
Why is a phone number (and all the things that come with it: Discoverability for example) a requirement? You didn't answer that.
Yes, Signal might not be for me. I'm reasonably sure that I mentioned that before in this thread ;-)
Hey, please consider finding a better way to say "the average person" than calling out women and old people as being groups you think of as non-technical. Thanks!
That said there's a lot of potential as the crypto libraries are known to be top notch and reviewed. I hope they progressively address these issues.
From http://www.computerworld.com/article/2893514/an-incredibly-s...:
> In the last 12 months, Firefox's user share -- an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser -- has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.
I love Firefox, but having used FxOS and mobile versions of Mobile Firefox, the Mozilla Foundations new products feel like the Netscape 6 / Mozilla Browser Firefox was created to replace, rather than the lightweight, user focused alternative.
> Mobile numbers.. Why?
Pidgin + OTR works on Linux, and doesn't relate to mobile numbers or Chrome at all. This might be a better fit for you.
If anyone is interested in taking a look (free, open source, code reviewed, Android) please feel free: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.secfirst.u...
It's also odd to me that privacy advocates would push people to Google's ecosystem.
I hope one day there will be Windows and Mac apps. And that instead of phone numbers, we can use email addresses.
What do you mean by "the velocity of the ecosystem is unlikely to make distributed communication mechanisms possible for some time"?
Lots of phone carriers whitelist that server of theirs to allow it to wake up phone unprompted from idle while typically only allowing phone-initiated connection to stay active, and they also tend to block most incoming connections once the phone has been inactive for a while.
While it isn't technically hard to make something distributed, to also make it work well can be troublesome...
Yet another reason I want home servers to become common, as your phone could automatically request that your carrier whitelist your chosen trusted nodes such as your home server.
By the way - the biggest problem with textsecure^Wsignal right now is the lack of encrypted export and import of the private key. Forget the issue about message history, the freaking private key is the most important thing. All the dumb users you may manage to reach with your current integrations and conveniences are just accepting a changed key for their contacts at any time, and now also smart and diligent people are doing the same thing because you can't keep private key continuity unless you root your android phone and use a root backup app. It's a basic core failing.
I will never convince my friends to use an internet-based messenger - I might as well try and get them to use Pidgin+OTR if that's the ball game. I have, however, switched a few of them over to SMSSecure, the SMS-only TextSecure fork, which is a perfectly serviceable SMS client.
I too think SMS transport should have been maintained, but I believe it only really matters when you're stuck without mobile data access (for example, when I was on a cruise ship earlier this year I had roaming SMS/voice but not data).
As long as you _do_ have mobile data access at both ends, then a message to another TextSecure user will be sent encrypted over the data connection; and a message to a non-TextSecure user wouldn't have been encrypted anyhow.
I currently pay €2 per month for my mobile bill. That is very little money. Notably, that includes no internet/data, but it does include unlimited text messages. Can you see why SMSSecure is something i would want?
Perhaps it would be possible to have a simple CLI app that is free from these dependencies (which should also be quite simple to develop).
We're not going to win, but at least I try to defend myself
It would also be much easier to allow federation with that mechanism, as your keybase.io account even could point to your chosen server together with the public key.
A worthy goal. But let's be real; to stop mass surveillance by writing a new chat program, you need mass adoption of your new program, and that means you need truly amazing UX.
If you write something which is technically perfect and would work if it was widely used, but nobody uses it because Telegram is just a little bit easier to get started with, and has nice cartoon drawings to explain their features (or whatever), then you've completely failed.
It's Sysadmins who make for a delicious muskrat lunch, not the crypto nerds.
I'm saying this as a sysadmin and crypto nerd who really wishes we had a secure messaging system that achieved both of Moxie's stated goals. Unfortunately, I don't want to use it in its current state for largely the same reasons as laid out by 'darklajid.
Both goals are important and feed into each other. If we don't have #2, it's easy for NSA and friends to backdoor the software or services for #1, for example like they did with their trusting-trust trojaned XCode.
Does anyone really believe these agencies will not react as we deploy "mass-surveillance-proof" software? What will be their next move to collect the data that they want? All of these attacks that people now write off as "crypto-nerd paranoia" will just become the new normal.
It seems to me, at least, it might be possible to do so if the API was consistently exposed and versioned.
#1 is essential, but you really need to cater to #2 as well because "crypto nerds" are likely those who will eagerly adopt the software and advertise and praise it to others.
Here is a simple non-exhaustive list of changes to better achieve #2:
1. If the phone number starts with +xx where xx is a reserved/invalid country code, the rest is the client's base10 public key. Verification happens by signing a challenge or simply successfully performing a DH handshake instead of by SMS.
2. Provide a "pull" notification socket in the Signal server, use it if GCM is not available
3. Package the mobile-sync Chrome app with node-webkit or simply as a standalone server that auto-opens your browser to localhost:port
4. Use libtextsecure-java to make a simple standalone desktop client that could either have a command line interface or a localhost web interface (please don't use the C library, since C is not suitable for secure software)
Obviously these changes could be done by third parties, not necessarily by Open Whisper Systems.
Moxie is probably going to hate you for it, but it works very well and doesn't require Google Services or anything else.
Overly dramatic...
I live between two countries, and have two phone numbers - friends and family in one country have the one, in the other have another.
In places like Myanmar, people regularly have several SIMs with several numbers due to poor connectivity.
Also can we please stop calling this a Desktop app? It requires Chrome to run, so it's neither Desktop nor Web app.
That's an extremely noble goal, and it seems you've made great progress towards it, but..
Will the US government really just let you do it? Have they not interfered yet? It seems highly unlikely that they wouldn't somehow neutralize the threat your work represents, so I'm just.. cautiously optimistic instead of really excited.
Of course they did: the recent propaganda wave against "encryption" is all about preventing the next wave of privacy-conscious communication tools, to which Signal belongs.
Smart governments don't have to "interfere": they just have to pass laws.
1) Make mass surveillance impossible.
2) Stop targeted attacks against crypto nerds.
It's not that we don't find #2 laudable, but optimizing for #1 takes precedence when we're making decisions.
If you don't want to use your phone number, don't use it. You can register with any GV, Twilio, Voicepulse, or other throwaway VoIP number.
If you don't want to run Chrome, use Chromium instead.
If you don't want to use Google Play Services, use GcmCore.
The world you want this software for is not the world that everyone else lives in. You can certainly make it work in that world with a little effort, but because of how we've prioritized our objectives, that's not the default experience.