- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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For the people who want to use Signal but are stuck in WhatsApp land because all their contacts are on WhatsApp, you should download WhatsApp business and create an automated away message that says that you are only available via Signal and with a link to your Signal account (if you use a Signal username. ) People in my contacts are slowly switching to Signal.
I did something similar with Twilio. When you call or text my number you get a message about how to reach me.
Ironically having a giant security breach happen in a security focused messaging app was good advertising.
Of course in this instance the beach was not because of the app, which is a good thing I guess.
“When something is made idiot-proof, they will just make better idiots.”
Gestures broadly at the federal government
Gestures narrowly at oval office and cabinet.
On Signal you can verify user identify, and you should absolutely do it if were to discuss national security maters.
This is not a hidden feature, I think it’s designed to prevent man in the middle attack. It also work against the “oops I accidentally added a journalist to my conversation no one should know of”, which is so dumb that no one saw this coming 😅
Dont use consumer apps for national security matters.
There was a vulnerability identified in Signal last year that caused the British to discontinue its use. I dont trust the british government but I am wary of what they are wary of.
vulnerability
My understanding is this has less to do with Signal than phones themselves. Signal messages are decrypted and stored on the phone itself, so a successful attack on the phone would allow access to the messages.
This is completely fine for personal use since the average person isn’t going to be a target, but for classified information, that’s unacceptable. This isn’t unique to any messenger, any app that stores data on the phone is open to it.
Yeah I was wondering what it could be myself, the notification text access was a thought. I didnt realise they were unencrypted on the phone. If I go to save a picture from a chat I am prompted with the this is going outside the sandbox dialogue.
They do seem to have experimental support for local encryption, but I don’t think it’s quite the win people will assume it is, since an attacker could conceivably pull the key from memory when you access Signal. A regular user isn’t likely to be targeted by an attack that would retrieve the encrypted messages, and a state-level attacker can work around the encryption.
It’s a hard problem to solve, and the best answer is to make sure you use hardened devices and ideally not discuss sensitive information on a handheld device in the first place.
It’s not a security breach per se. Someone accidentally added a journalist to the group. Signal is still as safe as it’s ever been.
PEBKAC
Everyone hoping to get accidentally added to a government group chat.
People hoping to get randomly added to war chats lol
I would ruin it by posting my balls immediately
i’m more curious about getting on their venmo friend list.
“hey, it’s uh, vlad. i need 200k for the um, rigging of the midterms in uh, wisconsin. thank you.”
Just send like a request for a few thousand dollars and put the description entirely I’m Russian lol
Good. It’s the only encrypted channel I trust right now.
I’d consider using them if I didn’t need to use a phone number to register. My friends and family stick with Briar as a result.
Hey man, if you can convince anyone to use Briar, do that. I have better luck getting people to use Signal because it’s way more popular and easier to sign up. And if I want to know if someone uses it, I can find out instantly.
After years of trying, I finally got my wife to use signal!
I text with her the most so it’s a big win for me (and her even if she doesn’t realize it.)
Convenience vs security
Security vs having someone to message.
I’ve tried to get everyone I know on Signal, so far my mom is the only one who uses it and that’s only when she accidentally taps the wrong icon when she intended to send me an SMS.
And then there’s my stepsister who complains about not being able to have a unified chat because she and family are apple while most of the rest of us are android. Signal Diane, it’s a cross app platform that solves your problem…but no it’s not apple so it won’t work…🤬
How about this:
- Tell everyone signal is the best way to contact you because it works on all your devices (phone, laptop, desktop)
- When someone messages you on signal, be really responsive
- When someone messages you on SMS, be really slow, and occasionally mention how sorry you are about missing it
Yes and no, Signal is more convenient but convenience doesn’t play into a scenario where I have no way to message someone on a given platform. And most people aren’t interested in a conversation about which messengers they’re using.
Matrix is also an option and heavily audited+ federated. And unlike Signal not based in the US.
And the best? You can easily selfhost a bridge to signal and WhatsApp.
How well do the signal and whatsapp bridges work? Have you used them yourself? I tried setting up a discord bridge years ago and it was terrible. Is it better now?
Next up:
- Signal getting banned in US govt
- Signal getting banned in the US
- Signal servers seized, devs detained
- Signal protocol repos removed from M$hub
Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms.
Bad actors are sowing distrust by implying that Signal is not secure. Always remember that the powers that be don’t want the public to have encrypted comms and would love to ban private messaging apps altogether.
Wrong logic, trying to guess what they are doing. I mean, if you were a god-level poker player, then maybe, but most people are not and god-level players lose too.
and Signal is in fact a fed honeypot
Being competitive and protected from network effects (decentralized, p2p, federation, one standard and many implementations, all that) can hurt being secure. The complexity of being both may not be practical.
The point of Signal is academic level security. It has a clear model and is not doing anything to make it more complex.
Which is why it is centralized, leading to suspicions and accusations of being a honeypot.
The code is open-source though, and I’m hoping that individuals more learned than I would surely alert us if there were any backdoors/exploits…
That’s a wrong hope in any case.
There are many things you can complain about when it comes to signal, but overall it’s a huge improvement from unencrypted messengers like discord and definitely a
stepleap in the right directionYou have to be very tinfoil hat to believe that this current administration is capable of anything so sophisticated as a misdirection.
So who exactly is downloading the app as a result of this latest government scandal? I’m going to guess it’s the maga crowd because they are this as an endorsement from their new king. But hopefully I’m wrong and it’s a broad sweep of different users from across the political spectrum.
Why should it matter if the new users are all magas or not?
You wouldn’t want the Signal brand to become linked to it.
“I’m on Signal, would you like to chat there?”
“What, on the MAGA Nazi app, are you joking? Of course I’m not talking to you there!”
Ideally you want a broad spectrum of people.
TBH this is why I’ve never used Telegram.
Telegram is a great piracy app tbh.
Perceptions matter.
And this frustrates me to no end.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t want to associate with bigoted people. But I wish people would take a step back for a minute and think. If everyone runs away the moment conservatives take interest in something, that means conservatives get an undue amount of power over you.
If we all largely ignore trolls, bigots, and bullies, they’ll lose their power. I’m not saying to be tolerant of intolerance, I’m saying we shouldn’t let them have power over us. Content moderation should take care of intolerance where it makes sense. On platforms like Signal, this means accepting that privacy means protection for both you and things you dislike. Yes, the platform will be used to arrange drug deals, facilitate pedophiles, and enable Nazis to communicate, but it also protects whistle blowers, people living under repressive regimes, and LGBT communities. Privacy means privacy, and that has value in itself.
Stop throwing babies out with the bathwater.
Sure, but that was before almost every app was a Nazi app.
It’s not just perception, it’s mindless tribalism and it’s a form of bigotry in itself. It’s no better than doing things to “own the libs” or whatever.
And the irony, some express this attitude on lemmy, which unlike signal is an actual platform, not a chat app, and with tankie roots to top it off.
The chat space is problematic.
- There are a lot of apps that don’t encrypt at all (e.g. Google chat, discord, etc)
- There are apps that encrypt but they are subject to jurisdictions that can or may in the future force backdoors (e.g., Chinese apps, possibly telegram, possibly US apps in the future)
- There are apps that encrypt, are in countries that are privacy focused but are not for free (e.g., threema)
This contributes to a fragmentation that makes WhatsApp the app that-you-must-have
Sure it is supposedly encrypted but I would not bet my money that is without back doors
WhatsApp
Not in the US, pretty much nobody uses it here. Which is really odd to me, since it’s so prevalent elsewhere.
IIRC it’s because US cell carriers don’t charge as much as others for sending and receiving SMS
That makes sense, SMS is essentially free here.
It is elsewhere now it’s just in the past it used to be stupidly expensive to send SMS.
It’s wjere text speak came from, I believe they used to actually charge by the character so if you wanted to tell somebody you’ll “be at the train station in 15 minutes” that’s quite a lot of characters, so that became “@ stn n 15” which is almost incomprehensible these days.
When WhatsApp became available everybody went over because suddenly you could communicate like humans, after the phone company’s realized that the jig was up they lowered text prices but by that point everyone had gotten used to just using WhatsApp. Then Apple came along with iMessage and no one could see the point because it only worked on iPhones whereas WhatsApp work for everyone.
I remember my parents flipping shit over a $0.50 fee for a handfull of messages before text was unlimited.
That is if you stay within one country. I still get some insane charges if I text someone 60 kilometers away because it’s international.
It still expensive to use your phone abroad that hasn’t improved
hmm havent heard of this one yet. Looks promising, gonna try it later. Thanks!
For people seeking an interface similar to signal, I suggest Session. It’s a fork of signal that onion-routes the messages (they have their own onion routing network, not TOR). There are no user IDs stored anywhere, you message people through their public keys. From the user experience side of the coin, it’s a little on the slow side tho.
But definitely find out beforehand whether there were any security gaps or anything else. I followed the whole thing at the beginning of the tox protocol and the clients were not yet fully developed. But since I couldn’t get people away from WA, I forgot about it over time. So I can’t say anything about the security.
I know session… well i have read about it… Didnt test it because i would fail at the same point like with tox.
It just about always comes down to user error. The White House trusting Signal is very indicative of the effectiveness of the app’s underlying protocols and the organization’s commitment to privacy. This is definitely huge publicity and I hope Signal endures the limelight.
LOL what kinda bullshit comment is this?
The people in the White House are idiots. They choose Signal because they’re either dumb/negligent -or- because they have been intentionally avoiding record preservation requirements.
Signal is a solid app for sure, but there dipshits didn’t choose it for being the right tool for the job here, as it certainly is not.
-or- because they have been intentionally avoiding record preservation requirements.
It’s this one
dipshits didn’t choose it for being the right tool for the job here, as it certainly is not.
It was, actually. If they weren’t dipshits it wouldn’t have been a problem.
Signal, on your personal device, is fine for personal use. It is absolutely not fine for classified communication as the VP or head of DoD, as there are billions of dollars dedicated to compromising your phone.
The encryption doesn’t mean shit if they breach an endpoint or account.
If it was strictly personal chat, yeah, no problem, but they just have to assume the messages are being read by other nations.
That’s absolutely correct. Everyone seems to fixate on the encryption, but hackers are lazy and they’ll attack whatever is weakest. In this case that means the storage on the phone after it’s decrypted.
Don’t store classified information on your phone, regardless of what you use to transmit it.
Or better yet, do whatever the heck security experts tell you to do. I can only imagine what’s standard procedure for the president’s cabinet.
It’s not the right tool for their job but still a good tool for the laws they were trying to break…
The white house trusting signal is nice, but using it to circumvent official communication tools which document messages for the archives is not the way it should be used - they used the “disappearing messages”-feature as well. This usage is more in line with criminal organizations like the mafia or yakuza.
I believe some people have been ordered to archive the chat so that it can be presented to Congress in the future. Trouble is, looking at the screenshots it’s already gone as they had the message lifetime set to a week.
I wonder if this will be seen as destroying evidence .
i’m pretty sure that there are laws regarding required archival, but laws seem optional for this administration.
There very much are law requiring archival, but now it’s been ordered in the hearings as well. This makes it much more obvious that it’s a problem.
