this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2021
154 points (97.5% liked)

Privacy

33560 readers
521 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
154
Signal Server is effectively closed source software right now (lemmy.ml)
submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
133 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The Signal Server repository hasn't been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.

To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as "open source", and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 -- which raises questions about the legality of this situation).

Signal's whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. "we can never engage the community directly", "we will never merge/accept PRs", etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a "Signal apologist" thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I'm over Signal now.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (2 children)

You mean like the centralized Signal servers that recently went down half a day? Not a blip on XMPP despite also higher number of users the same time due to the federated nature of the network.

I get that people are annoyed by the latency of the main matrix.org server, but even that improved lately.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 years ago (1 children)

yes like that, but my private xmpp groups all have issues with people turning OMEMO off because they can't get some messages of each other.

Like I wish it was better and I'd totally advertise it to non-technical people over signal, but that's not the case today. I hope that projects like https://snikket.org/ take off and solve these issues.

tldr: Signal sucks, but it's the best we have for some scenarios for now.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (2 children)

I doubt it. OMEMO issues basically only come up when some people use some obscure clients on obscure and developer hostile OS (like iOS), and there is really no way around that. People even still insist to use Pidgin which really drives me mad.

But that is a problem between XMPP nerds and not "normal" users that simply all user Conversations and 100% compatible clients and it works great (and is quite comparable to all users using the official Signal client).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I have Conversations, blabber.im, Xabber and Dino (desktop). I use them daily. Turning on encryption is a problem. Conversations is the only decent XMPP client at all, and it has a UI on par with 90s IRC web clients. Not even its own fork blabber.im works with E2EE.

The protocol may be supreme, but polishing UX goes a big longer way than things like privacy, security or anonymity. Normal people treat these secure programs as mission critical, and this (features) is also why Telegram became so popular.

People value UX and features more and rely on obscurity for privacy, security or anonymity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Hmm, It is true that e2ee works best in Conversations and that turning it on in group-chats is not super intuitive in most other clients (as it has some special requirements).

But I really don't get the complaints about the Conversations UI. Except for that annoying background image in Telegram/WhatsApp, Conversations is pretty much looking exactly the same, no? In fact I find it quite a bit more usable than WhatsApp for example, which has really horrible work-flow in some details.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

Conversations has this super dingy UI that even an old school folk like me has trouble accepting. Atleast make the chat bubble colour and background colour customisable. Let us use any solid colours.

Also even for one to one chats, if both use Conversations for E2EE, then only it works properly. It is ridiculous and the whole point of federation is protocol compatibility across clients.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Conversation UI seems to fall a bit into the uncanny valley of being too modern for old school users and the same time too sober and down to basics for the snap-chat crowd ;)

As for e2ee chats, somehow I don't have nearly as many problems with it. It mostly just works... no idea why it is different for you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago

The UI honestly is just in a weird spot. Make it old school, or make colours customisable for chat bubbles and background. blabber.im, its fork, is beautiful to use, and is definitely not too Snapchatty.

E2EE chats are a pain in the rear across XMPP clients, be it one to one or group. And it has not changed in 20 years of XMPP. This has to be understood that basics like this need to be done right, maybe as a reference client or handful clients taking it upon themselves. Conversations is in the best spot to do it, and TailsOS is picking up Dino or Gajim as its default XMPP Torified client, so one of them, likely Dino, will become great as well.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 years ago (2 children)

obscure and developer hostile OS (that 1/3 of people use). I don't like iOS but I wanna chat with my friends who use it?!

Like what even are you saying? That we didn't have this problem (we did)? That it doesn't matter (it does)?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago)

Yes iOS and Apple are incredibly user-hostile and developer-hostile:

  • you can't install applications that are not approved by Apple, so obviously you can't install a user-friendly app store like F-Droid (i say like because of course F-Droid is specifically for Android, but the fact is something like that cannot exist for iOS without jailbreaking your phone)
  • you can't change your operating system (remove iOS)
  • Apple makes it pretty hard for users to interoperate with anything else, by requiring non-standard protocols everywhere (airplay, etc..) to the point where for years iTunes was (maybe still is?) the only way to interact with an iDevice
  • you can't develop for iOS without an iOS device
  • you can't develop for iOS without official, non-free Apple software
  • you can't publish an application on iOS without an official Apple developer certificate
  • even if you got all this, you can't push information to your users without going through Apple's centralized push notification gateway (they actively suspend background network connections, so you can't build anything useful on iOS)
  • you can't tear apart your phone without specific tooling
  • you can't even remove the battery without specific tooling (<-- seriously this is fucked up)
  • you can't use a standard micro-USB/USB-C cable because Apple is the only brand going strongly against any form of standard
  • you can't use a standard micro-jack cable for audio because Apple is the only brand going strongly against any form of standard

Should i go on? Seriously if prisons were in fact designed to protect people not businesses, all Apple execs would be rotting in jail by now, along with the collaborating engineers who let that happen. To be clear, i don't think prison is a solution for anything/anyone, just pointing out that the worst crime-doers in society are also those kept further away from prison.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

1/3? Maybe in the US and Japan, more or less everywhere else it is close to non-existent and the few that do use it are complete fools (that only bought it because they think it is an expensive status symbol like a Rolex watch).

I am saying that your problem is very rare and based on special circumstances and that can happen pretty much with any solution. For example Signal is banned in Iran, so if you have some members that live in Iran you can't really have a group-chat over Signal with them. Not a common issue, but real never the less.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 years ago (1 children)

You are arguing in bad faith, I won't answer any further.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago (1 children)

Yes, friends don't let friends use iOS :p

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 years ago

recently went down half a day

It was more like ~3 days