I appreciate your critique and well written essay, as well as your motivation. Thank you again for writing this, and I will heed your advice and be more skeptical of signal foundation. However, but I have followed Marlinspike for years, and was an early signal adopter, so I do have some trust that the project is not compromised.
comment from lobster also makes some good points here, and I tend to agree with this guy
This take comes up every so often, e.g. in some of the linked articles. I’m sympathetic to many of the concerns raised, but I’ve yet to see serious engagement with some of the deeper issues raised. For example:
A significant number of security and privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) have received US military funding or other support. See: Tor from the Naval Research Lab, OpenBSD from DARPA. SELinux comes from the NSA. The Open Technology Fund has also support Ricochet, WireGuard, ?
Delta.chat, and Briar (that the author recommends), etc. (link). Are all these tools suspect?
As an aside, the EU also funds a significant number of PETs. While not as egregious as the US, the EU is no enemy of mass surveillance, either.
One reason for Signal’s centralization is, in short, that it’s hard to update federated protocols, including their security features. E2E encryption in XMPP or email is still a pain, and far from usable for most people. I hope that e.g. Matrix can pull it off, but they face challenges that centralized services don’t. With a centralized service, you know that you can handle unforeseen security developments quickly. Shouldn’t this be a key priority for a security tool?
Using phone numbers as identifiers has its benefits: you don’t need to store users’ contacts on your servers. A service like Wire, that does allow you to sign up without a phone number, has to store your full social graph on their end. Avoiding this sort of metadata is a hard problem — Signal has opted for minimizing the amount they store.
It’s hard to overstate how much ease of use matters when it comes to gaining mass adoption for these tools. For a long time, privacy & security tools were super user-unfriendly, reserved only for a small technical elite (see PGP). If we want to combat mass surveillance, we need tools that the masses want to install (in my experience, it’s hard enough to convince activist groups to migrate off Discord or Slack — the alternatives need to be similarly easy to use).
How do you feel about the guy who donated 50 million to Signal? He probably has the most influence on the project second only to Marlinspike.
Thanks for linking Libresignal, read over its readme.
But really 3rd party clients are beside the point: the main thrust of the article is about signal being a single, us domiciled, centralized service. They don’t let you self host a server, and you also have no way of verifying their server code. You just have to “trust them”.
How do you feel about marlinspikes ruthlessly banning all third party clients and server implementations? Or his choice of phone # identifiers?
Yes I do not see why we should trust any system which forbids self-hosting, especially when alternatives exist.
I appreciate your critique and well written essay, as well as your motivation. Thank you again for writing this, and I will heed your advice and be more skeptical of signal foundation. However, but I have followed Marlinspike for years, and was an early signal adopter, so I do have some trust that the project is not compromised.
comment from lobster also makes some good points here, and I tend to agree with this guy
How do you feel about the guy who donated 50 million to Signal? He probably has the most influence on the project second only to Marlinspike.
False.
There are a few 3rd party clients. They all identify themselves to the server that they’re 3rd party clients and they haven’t been banned.
Thanks for linking Libresignal, read over its readme.
But really 3rd party clients are beside the point: the main thrust of the article is about signal being a single, us domiciled, centralized service. They don’t let you self host a server, and you also have no way of verifying their server code. You just have to “trust them”.
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