On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
Signal always responds to authorities when they ask for data, and they give them all they have: the day they registered, their phone number and the timestamp they last used the app.
Telegram has unencrypted channels of drug dealing, and what I heard is a lot of illegal porn too. The authorities want information on certain users there and Telegram doesn’t comply. This is directly against the law Signal is not breaking, because they always send all the data they have to the law enforcement.
But they give their data when the officials ask. That is all that matters. And I seriously hope none of us uses Telegram or WhatsApp to any discussions. Use Signal because that is so far pretty unbreakable.
Telegram is already in the hands of that tiny Russian old man and WhatsApp is owned by a lizard.
All of the illegal stuff like that that I’ve seen around on social media always linked to telegram channels. Most of the time what you see on regular social media are bots advertising the telegram channels, where the real people are at
I’m no authority on it but from what I’ve read it seems to have more to do with the social features of telegram where lots of content is being shared, both legal and illegal. Signal doesn’t have channels that support hundreds of thousands of people at once, nor media hosting to match.
Right, the French authorities are going to present evidence that this dude was aware of specific illegal activity and refuse to comply with a legal warrant involving said actively, making him guilty of obstruction at best, and possibly conspiracy. Signal complies with warrants, they just don’t have anyone’s keys. Telegram has everyone’s keys, and theoretically could turn them over but they refuse. That’s a huge difference from a legal perspective.
Thank you. I’m going to restate your explanation to be sure I’ve got it:
authorities want platforms to comply with legal requests
when Signal gets a subpoena, they open the key locker and show that it’s empty. They provide the metadata they can (sign up date and last seen date, full stop) and tell authorities they can’t do better.
when Telegram gets a subpoena, they open the key locker and show all the keys, then slam it shut in the face of the investigator, telling them to get bent.
conclusion: it’s easier to never have the keys in the first place than to tease the government with them
Are you developing your opinions based on vibes or have you actually audited their software yourself (you are free to do so both client and federation server code)?
If you audited it, have you produced an actual report with metrics and points of reference for your data points?
The folks at F-Droid have said that Signal would certainly qualify, but Signal doesn’t want multiple channels out there. F-Droid is just honoring their wishes.
Assuming you’ve audited Signal, can you tell us what your findings were and why you think Signal must be up to something pretty bad? I’m very curious and would love to be enlightened by someone as knowledgeable as you.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that is bad or not, but one of the reasons the Signal app can’t be put unaltered on F-droid is because it loads in external dependencies from Google at run-time, which can also be altered by Google at will with any Android update.
How significant is it that the server code is open-source or not? It’s possible for Signal to publish their server code while running completely different software on their servers. The point of the client is being open source and audited on a regular basis by the community, which is why it doesn’t make sense to trust the server-side software.
The entire point is that we don’t have to trust the sever at all. The client is open source and regularly audited by the community. As long as the client stays fully open source, everything’s fine. Also, the closed source dependencies are part of a spam reduction effort which IMO is well worth it. Prior to this, Signal had a spam problem and the client itself remains fully open source.
Signal could have very well not even told people that they added a closed source dependency on Google to its servers and just lied by publishing fake server code that omits the closed source dependency., but instead they were very transparent about the spam problem. In terms of they “why?” regarding the closed source dependencies, their argument is that making it open source would almost immediately result in all anti-spam measures being thwarted. Frankly I’m inclined to agree and again, as long as the client is fully open source and regularly audited, the server code is irrelevant to user privacy/security.
Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone’s ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.
For what it’s work, the APK on Signal’s website (obviously) doesn’t have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don’t see this as an issue at all.
There is also Google maps integration. Sure, it’s not mandatory anymore, but if you install the official Signal app on a phone with Google play services installed, you are effectively not running an open-source app anymore and this potential backdoor is also not noticeable with reproducible builds.
F-droid has strict rules in place to prevent these sort of things for good reasons, thus the original comment is not entirely wrong in saying that an app that claims to be open-source, but can’t be made available on F-droid is a red-flag.
Jokes aside, I’m a firm believer that upvotes/downvotes should be private and I think it’s very unfortunate that they aren’t. I’m fine with people downvoting me and me not knowing who they are.
I hope they don’t arrest them too.
Not that the action against Telegram is right, but there’s a big difference between what Signal and Telegram is doing.
Would you have more info on the differences? I was wondering the same thing, but I don’t know enough about Telegram to compare
Signal always responds to authorities when they ask for data, and they give them all they have: the day they registered, their phone number and the timestamp they last used the app.
Telegram has unencrypted channels of drug dealing, and what I heard is a lot of illegal porn too. The authorities want information on certain users there and Telegram doesn’t comply. This is directly against the law Signal is not breaking, because they always send all the data they have to the law enforcement.
while not wrong context matters, US social media companies also enable human, weapons, and drug trafficking. they play a role in a few genocides too.
but the western regime does not care.
But they give their data when the officials ask. That is all that matters. And I seriously hope none of us uses Telegram or WhatsApp to any discussions. Use Signal because that is so far pretty unbreakable.
Telegram is already in the hands of that tiny Russian old man and WhatsApp is owned by a lizard.
All of the illegal stuff like that that I’ve seen around on social media always linked to telegram channels. Most of the time what you see on regular social media are bots advertising the telegram channels, where the real people are at
Hilarious that it’s impossible. They don’t even horde your data.
Is it time stamp of last usage, or time stamp of all messages?
I’m no authority on it but from what I’ve read it seems to have more to do with the social features of telegram where lots of content is being shared, both legal and illegal. Signal doesn’t have channels that support hundreds of thousands of people at once, nor media hosting to match.
Right, the French authorities are going to present evidence that this dude was aware of specific illegal activity and refuse to comply with a legal warrant involving said actively, making him guilty of obstruction at best, and possibly conspiracy. Signal complies with warrants, they just don’t have anyone’s keys. Telegram has everyone’s keys, and theoretically could turn them over but they refuse. That’s a huge difference from a legal perspective.
Thank you. I’m going to restate your explanation to be sure I’ve got it:
She responds to this point in the interview.
Telegram is available on F-Droid. Signal is not. Whatever is Signal doing, it’s pretty bad.
Are you developing your opinions based on vibes or have you actually audited their software yourself (you are free to do so both client and federation server code)?
If you audited it, have you produced an actual report with metrics and points of reference for your data points?
This person has been running around spreading FUD in every post about this
It’s what Ive come to expect from the lemmy.ml instance and I finally blocked the entire instance.
But you still post in lemmy.ml/privacy?
Doesn’t take away the fact that not being on F-droid is a huge issue and says a lot about how much they care about privacy and security.
The folks at F-Droid have said that Signal would certainly qualify, but Signal doesn’t want multiple channels out there. F-Droid is just honoring their wishes.
Assuming you’ve audited Signal, can you tell us what your findings were and why you think Signal must be up to something pretty bad? I’m very curious and would love to be enlightened by someone as knowledgeable as you.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if that is bad or not, but one of the reasons the Signal app can’t be put unaltered on F-droid is because it loads in external dependencies from Google at run-time, which can also be altered by Google at will with any Android update.
How significant is it that the server code is open-source or not? It’s possible for Signal to publish their server code while running completely different software on their servers. The point of the client is being open source and audited on a regular basis by the community, which is why it doesn’t make sense to trust the server-side software.
The entire point is that we don’t have to trust the sever at all. The client is open source and regularly audited by the community. As long as the client stays fully open source, everything’s fine. Also, the closed source dependencies are part of a spam reduction effort which IMO is well worth it. Prior to this, Signal had a spam problem and the client itself remains fully open source.
Signal could have very well not even told people that they added a closed source dependency on Google to its servers and just lied by publishing fake server code that omits the closed source dependency., but instead they were very transparent about the spam problem. In terms of they “why?” regarding the closed source dependencies, their argument is that making it open source would almost immediately result in all anti-spam measures being thwarted. Frankly I’m inclined to agree and again, as long as the client is fully open source and regularly audited, the server code is irrelevant to user privacy/security.
https://community.signalusers.org/t/spam-scam-on-signal/26665
https://signal.org/blog/keeping-spam-off-signal/
The external Google dependencies I am talking about are loaded into the client not the server, so that’s an entirely different issue.
Every app from the Play store requires GCM though, and Signal functions even if a user disables GCM. It pertains to a phone’s ability to notify a user of a new message. But again, users can disable GCM and the app itself will continue to work just fine.
For what it’s work, the APK on Signal’s website (obviously) doesn’t have the external Google dependencies. Personally, I really don’t see this as an issue at all.
There is also Google maps integration. Sure, it’s not mandatory anymore, but if you install the official Signal app on a phone with Google play services installed, you are effectively not running an open-source app anymore and this potential backdoor is also not noticeable with reproducible builds.
F-droid has strict rules in place to prevent these sort of things for good reasons, thus the original comment is not entirely wrong in saying that an app that claims to be open-source, but can’t be made available on F-droid is a red-flag.
It would still be nice to have the server code. I want to run my own server on my own hardware
Lots of apps have slight modifications in F-Droid. Like Telegram for instance.
Someone should audit your downvote
Jokes aside, I’m a firm believer that upvotes/downvotes should be private and I think it’s very unfortunate that they aren’t. I’m fine with people downvoting me and me not knowing who they are.
Wonder how you get negative one down vote…
You see this?
Yeuup
Indeed there is, one is an op funded by US intelligence agencies and the other is a platform that the US has no control over.
She has her hand in too many strategic places, unlike Telegram.
The very fact that there have never been any attempts in the west to stop Signal from operating says volumes in my opinion.
She’s in the US
Say what you will about US but they are pouring money into the cyber security industry