On Signal vs Telegram:

Telegrams Encryption is off most of the time. They have serverside access to messages. The optional E2E is annoying to use and isnt even available on every platform. For example Tdesktop afaik still has no E2E support. (And has a very brittle software architecture.) You can't register Telegram accounts with the open source client anymore. This should be a non-Discussion.

MG implying that just because other messengers like Whatsapp use Signals encryption scheme does not make them more more trustworthy.

Yes you can verify in a binary if the stuff is implemented well. But if a vendor has control over the update channel or beta rollout features its kinda easy to hide targeted features. Wasn't Whatsapp caught exfiltrating chats in ways that don't involve the normal channel bypassing E2E?

Btw there is no Signal in Fdroid but nowadays there is an accepted by upstream third party implementation. You could separate software and infra vendor. Look at Molly.im

Better to bring non tech folk to Signal than to other messengers that do the same but less protected.

Matrix? Lol!

You can buy "anonymous number" on fragment without using any client and without providing any personal information and use it as much as you can

When signal becomes at least remotely as popular as telegram it will implement same protection to fight against spammers because you can't have free unrestricted registrations and don't drown in spam

Telegram currently makes it as accessible as possible: either use it freely but register using phone number and official app or pay and use anonymously as you want

I just looked at the fragment.com site to see how much such a number costs. The lowest possible bid you can currently make, and that is for an auction that has six days to go, so probably not even the final price, is over 100$. That is an unacceptable price for basic privacy.

Signal is already extremely popular, their anti-spam by default is that you need to get matched to the user's local contact list or the spam becomes an allow/deny prompt. They also require a confirmed phone number and handle registration throttling.

Both services are relatively insecure because they require phone authentication. In the EU at least the number can always be traced back to you if you don't buy specific burner phones.

The level of encryption isn't as important anymore at that point. It is less probable you get into problems by using a service that doesn't know your identity.

> Both services are relatively insecure because they require phone authentication.

That hasn't been the case for Signal for some months: https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/

You still require a phone number for sign up for Signal, but your phone number isn't visible to anyone you chat with.

> but your phone number isn't visible to anyone you chat with.

That's irrelevant - the phone number is known to Signal and can be request by law enforcement. And, since it's been made pretty much impossible to buy a SIM in the EU without showing identification [0], this will allow law enforcement to link the account to you.

[0] IIRC the Netherlands is the only country left where you can buy SIMs without ID.

> That's irrelevant - the phone number is known to Signal and can be request by law enforcement.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if usernames are treated as ephemeral, what's the threat model here?

> That's irrelevant - the phone number is known to Signal and can be request by law enforcement.

So how does this work? Law enforcement asks signal if they have an account for a phone number, signal saying "yes, here's when they created it".

Then what?

> Law enforcement asks signal if they have an account for a phone number, signal saying "yes, here's when they created it".

Law enforcement says that the suspect chatted with some username/told people to contact him by his Signal username, then they go to Signal and request the linked phone number, which is then linked to the ID shown when the card was bought.

This only works as long as the username is active/unchanged. It would probably be better if usernames were never linkable to phone numbers, but if your threat model requires a persistent, non-ephemeral username to remain anonymous when targeted by law enforcement that has access to your telecom records and warrants... that's going to require a pretty high level of opsec.

The UX on usernames in Signal might be non-ideal. It might be helpful to have a toggle that regularly cycles your username if that's important for your threat model.

"Get me all the numbers which talked to X, including all the numbers".

You won't get the actual plaintext messages, but the contact graph + metadata (timestamps) are pretty sensitive.

Signal doesn't store the graph, nor does it log message timestamps.

How can you know without access to their servers?

> [0] IIRC the Netherlands is the only country left where you can buy SIMs without ID.

As far as I know, in Romania you can still buy and activate a prepaid SIM card without having to show your ID. There was an attempt a few years ago to make it mandatory to tie the phone number to an ID, but it was overruled by the Constitutional Court.

> That hasn't been the case for Signal for some months

Wrong. Because:

> You still require a phone number for sign up for Signal

So, they have your phone number. What is displayed is irrelevant.

If they have your phone number (which they do), they will have to disclose it for any subpoena/NSL, so they do.

Please see the sibling comments, I feel this has already been addressed.

Anonymity and Encryption aren't flip sides of the same coin, they can be used together or separately, and are orthogonal in lots of use cases.

A nitter instance that still works? What is this sorcery?

Nitter still works if you configure the instance to use valid accounts.

* enough valid accounts. If the instance gets popular, you're going to need hundreds of them to get past rate limits according to the announcements some time ago (maybe the rate limits have changed though)

Lack of widespread use most likely. Maybe some people put Nitter on their personal user account and it works until it has too many users.

Replace https://twitter.com with https://twiiit.com (3 i's), it will automatically redirect a Twtr link to a working instance.

Signal has reproducible builds for android now? Why not f-droid then, too?

Signal's definition of "reproducible" meant for quite a while "download this binary docker image and build Signal inside of it". I don't know if that has changed since.

Signal rejects F-Droid for a different reason, though: They only want to distribute through channels where they get download statistics and control update rollouts.

Hm f-droid provides privacy friendly https://fdroid.gitlab.io/metrics/ for some time now.

I'm not sure what sort of "control" they have over the Play Store compared to f-droid, but I'd rather have a trusted 3rd party do the building transparently and verifyable.

Their problem is that F-Droid releases are signed by F-Droid, not by Signal. This way F-Droid could potentially insert a backdoor in an update.

That's not true tho. f-droid supports (true) https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds/ for quite some time now. Those are signed by both, f-droid and the author.

I should have checked before I posted something from memory. These are the reasons they list:

https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-android-app-on-f-...

F-Droid with reproducible builds signed by both parties seems the best of both worlds to me, now I don't understand why Signal is so stubborn about this.

> This way F-Droid could potentially insert a backdoor in an update.

Google requires app developers on play store to give goole the keys that enable google to insert backdoors in any release. I can't trust anything on the play store for this reason. There is no way to tell which apps have been backdoored by google for whatever reason (the usual reason is a NSL).

F-Droid uses a package maintainer-esque process where the maintainers of F-Droid can intervene and prevent an update to an app from reaching users if it's deemed to be malicious or to add anti-features.

It's of particularly high need on mobile since popular apps, even those who were originally FOSS, are sold to scummy publishers who fill it with ads and subscription schemes (oft called anti-features, since removing them could be seen as a feature in and of itself), ruining the original. You can't really trust mobile app devs because the track record is downright awful. Recently that happened with the "Simple" collection of apps, where the Play Store version got filled with junk but the F-Droid maintainer froze the version and marked the apps as outdated since nobody could conceivably want the new versions.

Of course, that strokes poorly with developers who a. don't want to deal with potential third parties in their distribution chain rejecting their updates or b. are planning to add anti-features to their apps later down the line. With signal, I'm gonna guess it's mainly a; the Play Stores checks and balances are much less invasive than the sort of thing an F-Droid maintainer might check for. (As I understand it, Google Plays checks mostly are anti-exploit and keyword scans.)

> where the maintainers of F-Droid can intervene and prevent an update to an app from reaching users if it's deemed to be malicious

That sounds like a feature you want when using FOSS.

Imagine distros wouldn't have been able to intervene quickly and malicious xz would be still deployed through their channels just because the authors want to.

Oh yeah, it's an absolutely wonderful feature. F-Droid is pretty much the main app store I'd recommend to get "the basics" from if you're ever in the unfortunate position of having to manage the mobile devices of family members. Having a maintainer "on the lookout" gives so much peace of mind. Not suddenly having the gallery app turn into a data collection machine and baiting less tech-savvy people into vaguely defined subscriptions is a value that's too good not to pass up on.

FOSS isn't really the important part for me there; it's nice, but the real value is that F-Droid is pretty much the only app store that has some reckoning on how the relationship between mobile devs and mobile customers should be far more adversarial than on any other platform due to the poor track record of mobile devs and empowers users to be able to deal with that in a way that restores some degrees of trust.

It's a fucking shame there's not an equivalent on iOS where you can just say "yeah, what you find here can be trusted" and then not have that gets polluted a year down the line. Apple used to somewhat police the App Store back in the early 2010s for similar peace of mind, but that's not the case anymore.

> With signal, I'm gonna guess it's mainly a; the Play Stores checks and balances are much less invasive than the sort of thing an F-Droid maintainer might check for. (As I understand it, Google Plays checks mostly are anti-exploit and keyword scans.)

It might have been b as well – Signal did keep their server code proprietary for many months to add their custom cryptocurrency to it, and added this cryptocurrency for microtransactions into the app as well. There may be many more features like this planned, some of which F-Droid might oppose.

Ah so that's how Telegram got reproducible iOS builds:

> you need a jailbroken (old) iPhone. And at the end you still can’t verify the whole app. Some files stay encrypted

So basically, it works you just have to bend over backwards to verify that it's truly reproducible.

Woah, people are still doing that thing where they break a post into 10+ tweets?

Of course, it's either that or a png of the text from a text editor or pay for blue check account, neither of which are optimal for most people