So you pay $5 on a credit card, which connects you to said handle, much like buying a SIM. How is that any better?
Someone in your social network joins signal next week, how would they find you?
I know which of my coworkers use signal, despite them not telling me themselves. That seems wrong.
Buying things anonymously is a solvable problem. Gift cards, cash, etc. Let people resell your $5 sign up card.
So the reason signal is so useful is because so many people use it, which depends on things like contacts showing up immediately when you join.
Seems like it's a common theme that people want a messaging client with a huge number of users, but don't want the features that made it popular in the first place.
Signal could use payments (eg via Monero) as spam prevention and revenue stream.
This would not damage any current feature/user
https://community.signalusers.org/t/usernames-in-signal/9157...
complex captcha and/or expensive PoW. and an option to use a phone number instead
>How would this other method protect a user's social network without having to upload that meta data in signal? Currently this is handled by a user's address book hosted outside of signal. How many users would you lose if you required some key exchange in person?
store it on the server, encrypted by the client. jesus.
How do you find each other?
If it's feasible for an end user, say 30 seconds of a phone's CPU, you can be sure that a spammer could generate millions.
You don't, because that's something that's fundamentally impossible to do in a privacy-preserving way - no way around it.
> If it's feasible for an end user, say 30 seconds of a phone's CPU, you can be sure that a spammer could generate millions.
You're picking overly conservative numbers for "feasible". Choose parameters such that it takes something like half an hour on a phone. Inconvenient? Yes, but privacy is inconvenient in general.
And yes, a spammer will still be able to generate lots of these fake identities, but now the cost is much higher, while the expected profit is roughly the same - and that's how you defeat spam.
So if signal was privacy preserving, didn't show or tell contacts about others using the service, do you think it would be as popular? Or do you think we'd be discussing a different popular e2e encrypted app and complaining about the very features that made it popular?
by exchanging public keys over an established communication channel
>If it's feasible for an end user, say 30 seconds of a phone's CPU, you can be sure that a spammer could generate millions.
yeah, that's an inherent limitation of PoW, so it has to be an option rather than a requirement. then people who don't care about privacy can do the SMS thing, and those who do can opt to do the 30 minute PoW.
but this is irrelevant to Signal. it's not the phone number verification itself that people have problem with. if the only purpose it served was to prevent attacks on the service by ratelimiting it to one account per one phone number, that would be largely fine. the problem is that your phone number is your Signal identity, which is utterly moronic for a "privacy-first" service, and the reasoning and excuses for this stink to high heaven.
I get the appeal, but seems like requiring out of band key exchange will add significant friction and make signal much less popular compared to the competition. I've got a few dozen signal contacts, only a few of them close enough to do a key exchange. If I only had a few, not sure I'd use signal.
Signal has been resisting making special cases for the few, and I get it. Why spend developer time on some feature that's not going to benefit the majority of users?
> the problem is that your phone number is your Signal identity, which is utterly moronic for a "privacy-first" service
I can't think of anything that would work as well and result in so many (40M monthly) people communicating securely. They do seem to be considering their options to help with this, in particular: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
Allowing social networks, surviving the death of your phone, frictionless on boarding, account recovery, etc all interact in complex ways.
Personally I like that there's not a contact database/social graph inside signal.
how do you exchange phone numbers and email addresses with people?
>and make signal much less popular compared to the competition
is popularity among the (COMPLETELY) tech-illiterate worth giving up privacy for?
>I can't think of anything that would work as well and result in so many (40M monthly) people communicating securely.
and virtually everyone who had ever used the internet has an email, despite its apparently cumbersome sign-up and contact discovery procedures.
>surviving the death of your phone, ... , account recovery
are less likely if your account is tied to the phone number or email. they can be lost, they can be stolen, they can be seized.
I don't want to find people on Signal, or be found by them. I want a way to securely communicate with people I've decided I trust enough to be contactable by them - that is, people I've met and sufficiently liked face to face.
But why then do you even need a phone number to use WhatsApp? If it is a texting and calling service that is used to circumvent carrier fees, and is almost exclusively used on WiFi (because data is even more expensive than texts), why not just let them make an account and not use the phone number? That way they don’t have to pay a secondary company to use WhatsApp…
I understand the whole concept behind it. I understand why they want a phone number. BUT. This is not secure (oh, really, my phone number is hashed, how long do i need to brute force a few numbers in range of 0-9, a few seconds on my laptop, maybe?)
On the other side, I can use a simple email/irc/counterstrike chat to be MORE secure. Why? As it doesnt require any PII from me.
So why bother? Yes, sure, I can use it as a nice chat interface, I can use it as another way beside ~20 chat applications I need to use to contact people I know ( https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/chat_systems.png ). But dont sell me security. With requiring PII they broke it.
If you are not interesting for the NSA, giving your phone number to Signal is fine. If you are... run. The counterstrike chat won't hide you.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Threema&sort=byPopularity&type...
How would this other method make it hard/expensive/infeasible for a malicious company to produce 100M accounts to cause problems with spamming, DoS, and related issues? Phone numbers are finite, cheap, but not zero cost. If sending a spam email cost $0.01 much of spam would disappear.
How would this other method protect a user's social network without having to upload that meta data in signal? Currently this is handled by a user's address book hosted outside of signal. How many users would you lose if you required some key exchange in person?
Sure it's easy to think about generating a key pair, uploading the public key to a DHT, and allow people to communicate directly without a central server. However that has a fair number of practical issues that would be worse for the average signal user, not the least of which would be much worse battery life and bandwidth charges.