The need to wait for an SMS to register a new account and the potential for recaptcha loop (which I have experienced) is a serious downside to Signal. Something I never need worry about with xmpp, matrix or threema.
I’ve had good fortune converting some family and friends to use XMPP.
People always mention fragmentation, and while there is some truth to it, it can be massively minimised by choosing blessed clients and servers for them to use.
In my case, I run my own server, and thoroughly test the clients (especially the onboarding flow) that I expect them to use, so that any question they have, I can help them out with quickly. Since we’re all on identically configured servers, it minimises one whole class of incompatibilities.
There is still unfortunately a bit of a usability gap compared to Signal - particularly on the iOS clients. But they have come a long way and are consistently improving.
I’m using Matrix/element. I rather not give my phone number, you see, which is must-have for Signal. I have installed the app in my family’s phones, and they were accepting, so all is well. I don’t need to communicate through private messaging with anybody else, so who cares if others don’t use matrix?
I’m not interested in running servers, in fact, my ISP doesn’t allow it anyway. I need something private that doesn’t ask for too much info off of me, and that’s why my solution was matrix, and not signal.
Why is Session always mentioned ? It’s an Australian company, in a land with zero constitutional oversight I’d be more inclined to think its a honeypot then a privavy focused chat app. Anom springs to mind as an example.
What’s your use case? Likeminded techie friends? Family members?
Signal works well as an alternative to the likes of Telegram and WhatsApp, even if it still requires a phone number and is centralised. Far easier to explain to the family instead of “oh well you can sign up on this website or this website or that website”.
Granted, if you want to host a small Matrix server just for the family, then go for it.
As far as I know Signal still requires a phone number to register an account. Since a while you can use usernames to connect with others instead of exchanging phone numbers.
The major one that concerns me is who is behind them. Even if we trust that their encryption is not backdoored, there is a lot of information that can be gathered just from the frequency of messages and who they are between.
If it came out that a three letter agency was running one of these networks, it would not suprise me at all.
Yeah but you cant really obfuscate your message destination and timing without using onion routing, and really thats just making it more expensive to compromise and run. That said other things here do make it seem like a honeypot…
Its fully open source though, even the server. Might not be that hard to fork it and let people host their own servers.
There’s a lot of really bad stuff on Tor. Like, really bad; probably worse than you’re imagining. Things that make the old rotten.com stuff look like a child’s birthday party. If Tor was actually compromised, the people creating and uploading that stuff would be grabbed quickly. Instead, LEAs have to cooperate globally and run long-con sting operations in order to identify people in order to bust them. Most of the time, they’re busting people that use Tor due to social engineering or one kind or another, and the remaining times it’s because someone fucked up configuration on a site.
If everyone gets busted all at once (2022-2024 market takedowns is as close to that as it could come IMO) then everyone immediately stops using tor and starts using i2p or freenet or whatever system they may not have broken yet. That’s baaahd for business, said the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Although they did run a cp site for months before shutting it down, so they’re clearly not opposed to the long-game, especially if it involves national security (it does.)
Freenet was never really anonymous; there have definitely been busts from Freenet. IIRC it’s distributed, but not anonymized; I haven’t really done anything with it in ten years or so. i2p is probably pretty solid, but it’s often very difficult to use. I’ve tried it, and most of the time couldn’t make configurations work. Or else the eep sites I was trying to reach were offline. IDK.
I dunno; given that Tor was originally designed to be extremely difficult to track, and was designed by spooks, it’s plausible that they aren’t able to crack their own security. If they controlled enough of the network, they could, in theory, track individual users. But it would be extremely resource intensive, and they would already have to be targeting you.
IIRC, the case you’re talking about involved social engineering to gain admin privileges, then illegally hacking computers through malicious javascript to leak their real IP. IIRC a huge number of the cases ended up getting thrown out because there was no way they could legally do what they did, and the convictions they did get were ones that they would have been able to get without the illegal hacking. That was, what, something like ten years ago? Around the time that The Silk Road got taken down? (That was taken down because the site owner used the same username both on the Silk Road and on a clearnet site; he essentially doxxed himself.)
What I’m talking about wrt tor is traffic shaping or node DoS leading to a Sybil attack. When the (state)actor has the ability to drop all packets from you to NON attacker-controlled guard nodes, and then once you’re connected to a dirty guard, drop all connections to non-controlled relay and exit nodes, it’s done. There’s also an ongoing DoS attack that is able to make any guard/entry/relay/exit use 100% CPU making them unusable and it’s been going on for months now. You can see it on the tor forums (relay-operators) and someone posted about it in more detail on the monero subreddit the other day.
Oh, yeah, I’ve been seeing that a lot of it has been really dragging for, like, the last year or so.
Yes, if a state-level actor is able to get control of all the nodes, then everyone is pretty much fucked. I suppose that, with enough nodes, you could make that kind of attack really, really hard. I’m also guessing that Monero transactions are taking a really long time right now to go through? I saw that the Finnish (?) gov’t claimed to have ‘broken’ Monero, but they’re not giving any technical information about their claims, and most current speculation is that they busted the guy doing other shit that they were able to trace link to Monero transactions. (I don’t really keep up with Monero; last I knew, there wasn’t a good wallet that didn’t require downloading the whole blockchain, and my home internet is slooooooooooooow.)
It’s not even a matter of gaining control of nodes, they can simply blackhole your access to good nodes so you end up with nodes controlled by them. Easy but loud, although it seems to be what’s going on in a number of cases, and not many people are talking about it. Tor used to alert you to this, but now it’s quietly tucked away into a log file. There are other vulnerabilities present in tor and the tor project devs don’t seem particularly interested in them, with the DoS attacks requiring the community itself to step in with hacky solutions. I’m of the mind (never would have found myself saying this) that the tor project at large is compromised.
Monero is currently being hit by a (likely) black marble attack which is why it’s so slow. They’re basically flooding transactions (1/3 to 2/3 of all transactions able to be processed at any given time) so that the anonymity that makes monero work is severely degraded. Whether it breaks past transactions remains to be seen, but it absolutely weakens the anonymity of transactions done during (possibly shortly before and after) the attacks.
The difficulty of any non-mainstream chat app is getting other people to use it. On that list, Signal is the most probable to be recognized by people who don’t have a particular interest in privacy, so it’s more likely to get more people to use it.
besides that, and besides the lack of forward secrecy on matrix and session already mentioned by privacy guides, do some of these alternatives have worse security, privacy, or ux than signal in some way?
Signal has read receipts, reactions and typing indicators. That’s 90% of what any messenger needs. It also let’s you schedule texts. I do wish it would do reminders and pinch to resize text though.
Signal’s UX is NOT good unless you want to expose your encrypted conversations to a smartphone (of which far from all can run a private OS). All because of no desktop registration. You either have to use inconvenient signal-cli, or an Android emulator which creates its own troubles.
Dunno, it’s fine for me. As a messenging app it moslty gets out of my way and lets me communicate. It has all of the important functionality and creature comforts. Also, it already has some bloat (stories, whatever that crypto payment thing was/is). And the UI / UX is perfectly fine as is.
Although, as a dev myself, I hate UX work, it’s just boring and unfulfilling. I get why UX is often an afterthought. First it has to be functional, anything beyond that is secondary.
Matrix also does have a pretty big problem with meta data. By default it stores a ton of meta data (at least the reference server implementation does) and I am not sure if this is even a solvable problem without redesigning the protocol. When opting for an alternative to Signal, XMPP is probably the better choice.
That’s a good question. I wonder if there are available user numbers for them.
I imagine it’s regional and depends on what communities you are in. SimpleX chat seems pretty popular these days in privacy circles but I could see something like Briar being useful if traditional networks weren’t reliably available for example.
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