Re:Signal: You were the chosen one [video]
by zaphar on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @08:16AM
(#32249543)
This feels like moving the goal posts a bit. Before Signal, literally all the other options were orders of magnitude worse on either the privacy or the usability dimensions. Which is why there was essentially no mainstream E2E messaging app to speak of. After Signal there were multiple. For any system someone creates there will be weaknesses. The question isn't and shouldn't be did they create a system with no weaknesses? The question instead is did they meaningfully improve the privacy of of a large number of mainstream users and the answer there for Signal is Yes.
Re:Signal: You were the chosen one [video]
by orangepurple on Wednesday July 27, 2022 @08:32AM
(#32249663)
Does nobody remember Pidgin OTR? It has been around for decades.
I remember it being a broken cluster fuck. Hell, even early TextSecure was a usability mess.
Not really. It has the same weakness that other E2EE schemes have when it comes to general usability. In a usability study involving Signal[1], 21 out of 28 computer science students failed to establish and maintain a secure end to end encrypted connection.
The usability issue is a huge ongoing problem but there is a tendency to want to talk about everything but usability. We are having an animated discussion about the paint scheme while the barn is on fire.
[1] https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09... | When SIGNAL hits the Fan: On the Usability and Security of State-of-the-Art Secure Mobile Messaging