I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don’t understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn’t ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I’m luddite enough to still be using it) doesn’t ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven’t looked into and tbh I don’t understand why they exist.
It’s not suspicious. It’s been talked about for years. People know exactly what the phone number is used for. Easy discoverability, quick and seamless onboarding of new users by providing a way to bootstrap their social graph, and it being very similar to the process of the other biggest player that people just understand. And spam prevention. The phones are not leaked or used for anything else. The other alternatives exist and you are welcome to onboard the people you want onto them if you think it’s simpler.
The code is open, if you don’t trust other people and can’t read the code to understand then hire someone you trust to validate the claims and assure you. But spreading FUD and saying it’s suspicious is not productive to anyone.
I don’t understand what you mean about discoverability: is my presence on the network advertised to strangers and spammers? That doesn’t sound good. What does the onboarding process look like?
You still haven’t said what Signal’s advantages are supposed to be over alternatives, though I can guess some (e.g. better/more crypto than irc has). Jami seems conceptually ok, but buggy in implementation. Nextcloud Talk works but is kind of clunky. Matrix is popular though I’ve never used it: is it the main alternative to Signal these days? I thought it was what all the hipsters had migrated to while luddites like me were still on irc. Jitsi Meet looks nice though again I haven’t explored it much. I’ve been puzzled for a long time that there is so much work in this area yet everything has deficiencies. Are there difficult problems to solve?
If Signal’s code is open then of course I’d want to self-host the server. Can I do that? Does that get in the way of the onboarding process you mention? Where does the phone number come in, in that case? If I to use Signal’s server, that doesn’t sound so open, and normally there’s no way for me to verify that it’s running the same code that they claim.
I don’t see where I’m spreading FUD. Ignoring a question and calling it FUD doesn’t invalidate the question.
You can’t easily selfhost Signal. They engineered it purposefully to only run on Big Tech Clouds with specific Intel CPUs they put (too much) trust in.
Very interesting, thanks. Do you mean they use SGX (Intel’s buggy secure enclave feature)? Any idea what they use it for? If not SGX, do you know what the issue is? AMD Epyc processors have something similar but different, fwiw. If there is such highly secret info on the server though, that makes self-hosting even more important. It also makes the architecture suspect.
Yes SGX, they use it for sealed Sender, contact discovery and mobilecoin.