• smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      It is a great app, but you cannot fit everyone into a single app.

      Examples why I personally sometimes don’t want to use Signal:

      • no native desktop app, just a half-baked Electron based thing
      • no versions for systems other than Android and iOS
      • requires phone number (common argument)
      • hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use
      • when Signal foundation do something stupid, it would mean me having to migrate all friends yet another time

      Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        no versions for systems other than Android and iOS

        requires phone number (common argument)

        Ok, those are legitimate complaints, and I suspect they’re related too. It would be nice to have a web client.

        hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use

        Personally, I’d say that’s a feature.

        Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.

        To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement. Signal protocol

        • smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
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          1 year ago

          To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement.

          “The Signal Protocol (formerly known as the TextSecure Protocol) is a non-federated cryptographic protocol that provides end-to-end encryption for voice and instant messaging conversations[…]”

          Signal is an encryption protocol, not messaging protocol. My comment was about a messaging one like XMPP or Matrix.

      • nixcamic@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Honestly for most people this is a crazy level of paranoia. The US government can know the metadata of my friends birthday party organization group.

            • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Ah, fair enough.

              I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.

          • nixcamic@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Honestly I don’t care if the government knows who’s all going to the party. Someone’s gonna post pictures of it anyhow. My garbage data is just more stuff for them to sort through.

            And I’m not gonna bother missing out on everything out of fear that the government will do what exactly with my data? The risk is so low for your average person.

            • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.

            • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              You say that, but what if one of them had a friend who is a communist? Could make for some awkward conversation with the authorities at some undisclosed location in the future.

          • Chobbes@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Signal push notifications don’t contain any useful plain text data (no content, no information about who sent you a message). AFAIK the only thing you would be leaking is that you received a message on signal, and frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.

            • notenoughbutter@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.

              How?

                • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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                  1 year ago

                  They can tell you connect to AWS when the Signal app fetches messages after a notification, they need to be able to peek into Amazon’s servers to see you’re connecting specifically to Signal

                  • Chobbes@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    AWS is not a black box from the outside. The signal servers will have their own external IP addresses that you will connect with, your ISP could keep track of those connections. Furthermore, if you are worried that the government is using your ISP to spy, what makes you think that AWS wouldn’t be subject to that as well? Signal is absolutely a target in this respect too.

                    Of course you can do various things to potentially hide your connection to signal, for instance by using tor, but in some sense there’s no guarantee if you don’t trust anything external to you. I’m personally not too worried about the “this person uses signal” metadata, though.

            • Still@programming.dev
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              1 year ago

              it’s not the content in the noti, it’s where your phone was connected when it received it