Over the past days, two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov,...
Last I checked, their provided server code lags behind their production server, so you rarely get to see the current version. However, that's kinda the point of E2EE, is you don't have to trust the server.
It really depends on your use case. Most of my simple chat messages are the same as I would have in any public space. I have no need for encryption, I have need for convenience in that regard. With Telegram I have my chat history on all devices and don't need to use my phone to connect which are two must-haves for me. For my use case, Signal is the worse option. That doesn't make Signal bad, just not suitable for me.
As a privacy-concious person I am very much aware of the non-secure nature of my chats, but since that is not a factor of consideration to me when it comes to casual chats with a few friends and family members. The worst thing Telegram could do is analyse my chats and ... then what?
Signal is not applicable when you need a public space for people to just have a discussion, like in discord. Signal clients are clunky and rely on cross sync from what I see, while telegram clients are well made and convenient to use. Even Whatsapp went away from electron so I'd choose it over signal any day.
I'm wondering if something interesting will fall off the truck this time :D
Context: before that blogpost, cellebrite claimed they can "hack" signal (or they were kinda closer to the truth, and that was media talking abt hacks without reading stuff)
It has had some suspicious funding sources
(UPD: It was funded by CIA)
(UPD2: Here I will quote www.securemessagingapps.com:
This matters because “money talks”, as the saying goes. If the company or person behind the money is likely to have reason not to protect customers’ privacy, it’s important to know. This could be indicative of the company not doing as they say (Google, Whatsapp, for example) or changing their mind once they’ve onboarded enough customers from whom they can make money.
(I'm gonna find sources for the last two statements a bit later to not be unsubstantiated)
Done.
Although, we all can agree, that Signal is still better than Telegram, or WhatsApp, or Threema, or whatever.
Still, we probably want to look at the better alternatives, like Simplex or Session.
Session is also sus because you effectively cannot host a node, last I have seen. They claim it is "against a Sybil attack" but all it does is making sure only people wih large disposable funds can have nodes, and the effect might be the exact opposite.
Simplex is more interesting in this regard because while I am concerned with initial centralization (the default servers), they made hosting your own easy. But I personally stick with imperfect yet trusty XMPP.
SimpleX is great. BUT it's not user friendly. Thus general adoption for the average user will be hard. Don't get me wrong using the app itself is easy but as soon as someone switches their phone that doesn't have technical knowledge they will loose their chats because they won't understand the concept of moving their DB. Since you don't have an identifier like a phone number with SimpleX those people could even lose contacts as a whole since they generate a new DB, hurting their social connections.
That's the reason I personally never recommend SimpleX to anyone who doesn't have the technical knowledge to understand stuff like that.
Telegram requires a phone number too? I mean yeah there's the option to use that blockchain phone number service, but you can do the same for Signal. 🤷
Signal no longer requires a phone number. You can now create an account. Not sure if that helps your outlook on it, but yeah. It was a fairly recent update that this was rolled out.
Edit: being told we still do need numbers to register. I haven't gotten a new phone since well before the change was made, so I haven't actually created an account and gone through the process. It looks like I misinterpreted what was going on when I read the changelog.
Last I have seen, it still requires a number to register - it just doesn't have to be public.
What gets me the most is the requirement of a smartphone to register. No way I am trusting my non-public chats to a phone, so that means either Waydroid/VM (which creates issues with copypasting) or signal-cli (which is fairly inconvenient).
I don't get it at all. There are plenty of platforms like matrix, xmpp, simplex that don't require phone numbers tied to your identity. Signal has somehow managed to convince people that it's a private platform, despite it being a US hosted service that requires phone numbers.
Who have they convinced that it is private? I think it has more to do with the overall purpose of the platform. Signal is not made for large group chatting with strangers like Matrix.
Say the US government, in a worst-case scenario in which it constantly monitors all traffic that goes through Signal’s data centers, can ‘only' see phone numbers, IP addresses and timestamps, right? Or am I forgetting something here?
I use it sometimes. It has its fair share of issues, and the back end is not open-source, but it is OK for the most part. Main benefit is that you don't need a mobile number to sign up.
But if you are looking for an alternative IM to use with friends and family, I would rather suggest XMPP, specifically Snikket.