This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Session is pretty neat considering that it doesn’t require a cell phone number, unlike Signal messenger, which beats the purpose of anonymity.
I just purchased $20 in tokens. Perhaps one day in the future more people will start using it and nodes will start springing up all over, making the service much faster.
Has anyone else used or still uses Session? What are your thoughts? I think it has potential if more people have it a go.
Session was a good idea, but not implemented well
All file attachments go to a central server I think in Canada
They copied the signal protocol, and monero, to build their application but they removed perfect forward secrecy. Because it was hard to implement. This means of any session device ever gets compromised, somebody can look at the entire conversation from packets they captured on the wire
I'm much more excited about simplex and briar
I like briar, but I cannot use it on iOS. I did pay for Threema though.
Threema is actually less anonymous than signal, although Swiss privacy laws are [currently] very good.
I think it was a great idea, but poorly executed. I prefer using simpleX, personally.
Signal was never supposed to provide anonymity.
I like the federated network design and that the client is really polished. If only the cryptography in session protocol wasn't broken I'd consider actually using it.
How signal beats the purpose of anonymity. They never share or sell you phone number. Also you can use a temporary phone number if you want.
From my perspective how a anonymous person can have phone numbers ? Isn't that funny ? If you wanna anonymous you should avoid sim cards. So most probably they will buy numbers online which not related to their identity. So signing up signal with phone number is ok !
I just read a bit about it on their website, and I don’t understand why it needs to have anything to do with cryptocurrency…?
I dove into their FAQ which explains it. I don't agree with their logic, but the core idea seems to be that in order to run their equivalent of a TOR relay you have to stake a certain amount of their crypto, and you periodically receive some of the crypto as a reward for running the node. The theory is that the more nodes there are, the less crypto is available on the market and the more expensive it will become to acquire enough crypto to create new nodes. It's all supposed to make it prohibitively expensive to control a significant amount of the network.
The fatal flaw in the reasoning is the assumption that anyone will actually care enough about their crypto to drive the price up. With no central authority setting a price for the crypto the price becomes whatever anyone is willing to buy or sell it for. Their fatal assumption is that scarcity automatically generates value. It does not. A thing needs some kind of value in addition to scarcity to become valuable.
My fraudy-sense is tingling… that said, I tossed $6 at some German company a few weeks ago and patted myself on the back.
Remember kids, you can donate to the Signal foundation… Moxie Marlinspike is an international treasure #changemymind 😉
From their blog:
As you probably know, Session is decentralised. There are currently over 2,000 servers around the world working together to deliver your messages. Each one of these servers is an Oxen Service Node, and together they make up the Oxen Service Node Network. These are specialised servers that stake OXEN cryptocurrency to register on the network; and nodes receive OXEN rewards for performing particular services like routing Session messages.
(They are now switching from OXEN/the Oxen network to their own to be able to better control the features of their hosting network)
