You can't say anything on this platform anymore that isn't super left or they downvote you into obscurity! I took a shot at Bluesky a week or so back and they hit me with a nice shiny pile of downvotes. Yet the user base on that app is dismal compared to X. O well!
I don't think you understand. The downvotes you get are not because of your political leanings. You get down voted for all sorts of reasons. I personally downvote anyone who whines about being down voted. Well, you look like a good snowflake to downvote.
Here's a thought: if you don't want to get down voted then don't have shitty opinions. You support a POTUS who has literally raped at least one child and multiple women, who also filled his cabinet with pedophiles though he missed out on the child sex trafficker. Your right wing economic ideas have been proven time and time and time and time again to not only not work but they actively harm the economy and anyone who isn't in the top 10% of earners. Your right wing ideas on religion are always unconstitutional. The fact that your ideas are routinely unconstitutional proves you don't care about this country otherwise you wouldn't be cool with trying to subvert such an important document.
Also, fun fact for anyone who isn't you: when Republicans cry about "the left" they're mostly crying about moderates and conservatives. The average Republican has no idea that, on the political spectrum, their party is now hanging out with ISIS and the Taliban. The "left" hasn't changed much, the right has pushed way right. I know this upsets Republicans but you all choose to be a part of the Party of Pedophiles and Domestic Terrorism.
Republicans are top of the FBI list for domestic terrorism. Easily looked up fact but I'll let you look it up since the average Republican likes to "do their own research."
...you mean the preexisting platform that's had over a decade to grow its user base? I'd hope that they'd have a pretty fair lead in that aspect at least
FYP is based on what you use the app for, or what you use other apps for (that cross app share). So if your feed is a mess, maybe you should look deeper at what you are viewing across your devices. Pick a social media platform, any of them. You will find they ALL create echo chambers that just feed right back into whatever interest the reader has. Reddit used to be less of an echo chamber, but over the last 5 years it seems to have declined. But that is my opinion, and I do not expect everyone to share it. I would like to point out that most of the advertisers that recently left X to make political points are all back there advertising now, even Disney (and that was back in Q4 2024).
Great job only reading one point, locking onto it, and ignoring the rest of my post. Wait to prove my point about echo chambers, you are actively curating yours!
I mean I was on Twitter for +12 yrs. I know how it works. It got awful. And there's plenty of discussion on Reddit that Twitter's FYP pushes stuff that you haven't engaged with previously. Incessant pro trump conspiracy theory garbage.
OR, maybe that stuff you label as garbage is being read and agreed upon by the majority of the United States, and as a result, is being forced into your feed due to shear numbers. Versus the tiny corners of the internet you filter to show up in your FYP and other social media threads all curated by your personally developed algorithm. Kinda how they all told us that Kam Kam was winning by a landslide, then they all acted shocked when she lost the popular vote. Let's try this again, if X is so bad, why are advertisers flocking back to it and leaving Bluesky (and TikTok for that matter)? I can tell you why, the ROI is garbage (to use your wording). Because they are platforms where people go to complain and voice their opinions loudly, not listen to others or consume products.
That's not what I said... I mean I didn't think it was hard to figure out both parties were hacked at the same time but only one was used as a weapon but then again this is reddit and thinking is hard for some of you.
Because the person wasn't trying to make an honest point, they were trying to go on the attack for something that happened to both parties and I called it out.
You think the only end to end encryption communication platform that has a not for-profit foundation at its head, has its own protocol, doesn’t collect metadata, is open source, and has been around since 2014… is a honeypot operation?
I mean we can nitpick about word choice if you want but that’s just how the feature works. People are following shady links and getting their shit hijacked. That’s what’s commonly referred to as “social engineering” not a “vulnerability”.
It just doesn’t catch as much attention to put “Signal Social Engineering Hack” on a poster when you’re trying to keep people from being dumb and maintain OPSEC.
Not everything can be hacked at scale. It's also the platform of choice of people that have states as enemies (journalists, activists, opposition in 'democratic' countries, etc).
We can't currently break asymmetric encryptions, and the next thing that is being worked on (matrices) will be quantum proof too.
This requires the use user to authenticate another device or the device being compromised. That's not signal. You can't hide such an attack either.
This again cannot be done on a wide scale, and the POI needs little security awareness (waves at Trump cabinet) and/or be dumb (waves a second time).
This does not mean signal encryption is broken. I'm not sure what you're trying to say by posting that link, but it heavily hints that you don't have a grasp on these technologies.
Ps: signal is already quantum resistent. I missed that they switched algos.
Really? its about the only quality messaging tool if you actually care about privacy. Other apps that claim to be e2e encrypted tend to leave themselves little loopholes in that claim. You think WhatsApp doesnt have the keys to your messages and wont hand them over to the government when asked? Think again. On Signal the only people with the encryption keys to your messages are you and the recipient.
And the people in charge of it actually seem to not be huge assholes or shady weirdos. I listened to a 2 hour interview with Meredith Whittaker and she's like super smart and seems like a really decent person who has the right priorities. I hope it stays this way, but right now the whole thing really seems to be an awesome project with people in charge who actually know what they're doing and who are not interested in selling or otherwise misusing your data.
Nonprofit doesn’t mean can’t make a profit, it limits use of said profit into going back to the cause. That’s why plenty of non profits jealously guard their IP donations, that massive funding source runs a lot of their programs.
So, merely being a non profit doesn’t mean they won’t be willing to sell. This isn’t a negative to them, more a “that branding is not fully trustworthy on its own, verify” warning.
Huh? Signal was made by an American company, by Americans, in America. Not sure why you're bringing up Europe or its regulations. Regulations which are frequently anti-privacy, btw. https://x.com/mer__edith/status/1796508893822238881
Maybe you're thinking about Session, a similar privacy focused messenger which is run by a Swiss group?
Yes. Hence my comment about having access to more metadata.
But they cannot read the content of the messages or provide the keys to anybody because they never have them.
We can be critical of WhatsApp and Meta without resorting to lies about their access to the encryption keys.
Using any E2E platform, even WhatsApp, is still way, way better than plaintext SMS, or tweets, or facebook messages, or discord, or telegram, or whatever else.
You can now secure your end-to-end encrypted backup with either a password of your choice or a 64-digit encryption key that only you know. Neither WhatsApp nor your backup service provider will be able to read your backups or access the key required to unlock it.
I'm not claiming that this is what happens, but as a developer, if you write a wrapper around another piece of software, you have every chance of siphoning off data in the wrapper.
Put another way: it doesn't matter if a message can go from A to B without being read if you have someone looking over your shoulder at points A and B.
Yeah, WhatsApp (meta) controls both sides of the communication unless you know exactly what that app is doing. If they are decrypted on one end to show you the message Meta can get access to it.
At least they claim that but how can it be verified? Also nothing is really stopping them from pushing updates compromising encryption or targeting certain users.
So, that "metadata" they collect undermines a key point of Signal's privacy protections: Who is talking to who and when. If you don't think those details by themselves are important, understand that the NSA certainly does because it allows them to undermine free association and organization. Since it's being collected as the innocuous sounding "metadata" and not called something more appropriate, such as "personal communication data", people aren't paying much attention to it being collected, packaged, and sold. But it's important to realize that some of the buyers are companies like Wal-Mart and Amazon, and they are using that data to undermine attempts of workers to form unions.
So, just because WhatsApp is still protecting the content of the communications themselves, don't think for one second that the service is "private" or "secure".
So does Facebook Messenger, but you can recover your data with a six digit PIN. If I can recover my data with a six digit pin, so can a very simple python script in fractions of a second.
I suspect they use the same implementation for WhatsApp, which is incredibly insecure, unless I'm missing something. You shouldn't be able to recover E2E encryption with a password that has a character space of 1,000,000.
Don't trust any encryption implementation you can't build from source yourself, like Signal, because your security is entirely in the hands of a corporation with vested interest in reading your communications. It's like hiring a dingo to babysit your baby.
You think WhatsApp doesnt have the keys to your messages and wont hand them over to the government when asked?
This was the impetus for us to move over to Signal for my friends' group chat. Say I was critical of a certain country and their policies regarding a migrant workers in that country. Say I got a job offer to work in that country - not unlikely in my line of work. Say that as part of the background check to go to that country, the messenger app I used was told to hand over all of my shit so they could see if I had said anything critical of that country.
After Google's Gulf of retardation capitulation, I'm convinced they'd hand over your emails or anything else. I already assume everything I type on Facebook and it's messenger is compromised.
Those keys are still on my phone though. If I can read my messages, then so can anyone with access to my phone.
I'm not saying it's not better than other messaging apps at privacy. But I don't for a second believe law enforcement couldn't get into the average smartphone if they really wanted to.
Of course if you have selected the make and model of your phone with security and privacy in mind, then that's another story. But most people won't have done that (myself included).
edit Why is everyone responding to me by making the exact same point I just made. Again, I'm not saying signal is bad. I use it myself. I'm just pointing out that you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking your communication is 100% private and safe just because you use signal. Know the limits of the tools you use.
That is also true of a literal note written by hand, if anyone comes into possession of it, they can read it. And if it's coded, they can try to break the code and then read it. So that seems just about as good as it could get in terms of digital security.
Given enough effort, anyone can break into any device if they have physical possession of it, but that doesn't mean the end to end encryption is any less important or useful
Again, I'm not saying signal isn't great. I've been using it myself for years. I'm just saying, don't be under the illusion that your communication is 100% safe and private just because you use signal.
That's a very fair point, yeah. I think the issue is just that currently most people assume ALL digital communications are safe and private, so even getting them to start using signal would be a huge jump up from that.
If you want flawless security, the only solution is to keep the information locked in your mind. If you're typing a message to another person, there really is no safer way to do it. If a person is handling information that is sensitive, its up to them to do so responsibly.
My problem with Signal is that they do what every other niche strongly principled FOSS project does and take things to extremes, sacrificing UX to an insane degree. The Signal mobile app used to fallback to texting if there wasn't a connection or the other person didn't have Signal. I managed to convince several people to move over because it could also function as a replacement for an SMS app.
Then in their brilliance, Signal removed texting because it is insecure. That might be true, but it turns out most people don't have friends on Signal or end up in places where data won't work or is expensive, but SMS is still fine. Every single one of my friends uninstalled it.
"I'm mad because they wont compromise their mission statement for my wants. It doesnt matter if this tool protects dissidents from government persecution, security only matters in theory. NOTHING should compromise my convenience."
If you dont have any need for privacy, then Signal may not be the app for you.
They had so many options aside from outright removing it. They could've encrypted the text over SMS if the contact is marked as having Signal and a user could've just toggled an option to never fallback or use SMS.
I want privacy, but I can't have it if my contacts don't adopt it in the first place. Adoption of the technology is also an aspect of things like this that rely on your social network. A chat app that no one uses is useless and I say that while still having Signal installed for the few people in my circle who use it.
The most important reason you should want it is because one of the 2 co-founders/creators of WhatsApp, Brian Acton, is now the CEO of Signal.
He created WhatsApp back in 2009. After FB bought it, apparently it was promised to them by Mark Z that he will keep WhatsApp as it is and not turn it into an ad behemoth, but as is his nature, he reneged on his word and now WhatsApp is overrun with random brands pinging us about their offers.
Jan Koum left FB, and later Brian left it too in 2017, angry with the way WhatsApp turned out under FB. Brian then went ahead and co-founded Signal Technology Foundation in 2018, which gave result to the Signal messaging app.
The same Brian who created WhatsApp tweeted out in support of the #DeleteWhatsApp trend on Twitter some time in 2020-21.
All in all, Signal is a trustworthy messaging app, and has just about every feature WhatsApp has, with added encryption. I am trying hard to recruit my friends and family over to Signal, but breaking ingrained habits & convenience is just too difficult!
it was revealed that the feds had indeed hacked signal
Source? The only thing I've ever seen that's claimed anything along these lines was that Cellebrite once claimed to have cracked Signal's encryption, which turned out to only be true on an unlocked device that they had physical access to (i.e. a device where they could just open the app and read the messages already) and could pull the keys from with their tools. I've never seen any legitimate claims that the protocol has been cracked or that they can pull messages from phones in secure/encrypted states (like the before first unlock state after a reboot).
Here’s this article from Forbes. I can’t get past the paywall but the blurb is: “Court documents obtained by Forbes not only attest to that desire [the FBI’s], but indicate the FBI has a way of accessing Signal texts even if they're behind the lockscreen of an iPhone.”
Yes, them needing the device is what I remember and a saving grace, but I don’t trust this administration to not take our devices from us for arbitrary reasons
I don’t know about the cellebrite thing, will have to look into it after work. If the FBI used cellebrite, and cellebrite’s claim turned out to be untrue, please lmk so I can relax and change my CS habits
The full article speculated it was either GreyKey or Cellebrite, and more likely GreyKey. They also note the phone was in AFU (after first unlock) state but the screen itself was locked, which both of these tools have claimed over the years is enough for them to pull decryption keys out of memory and pull all data on the device (which is probably true on some devices). So based on the details given, they didn't break Signal itself but just generally got all data on the device which got them the Signal messages and the keys to decrypt them. The best defense against this is, if you can, to turn your phone off any time you suspect there's a chance it could get confiscated (going through TSA or customs at airports, if you think the cops may imminently detain you, etc), as they can't perform these attacks in BFU (before first unlock) states because the decryption key is not yet in memory.
it was revealed that the feds had indeed hacked signal
This is an incredibly misleading way of phrasing "it was revealed that the feds had gotten access to the texts in the signal app on the phone they were in possession of". "Hacked signal" implies some sort of weakness or vulnerability in Signal itself, the reality is they had the device and got access to its contents. The facts here don't imply any weakness in or compromise of Signal.
Me: State what I know, including that I'm open to changing my opinion, which almost none of reddit does. Most of reddit just is confidently wrong. Unlike what you're saying, here's what I knew
“Court documents obtained by Forbes not only attest to that desire [the FBI’s], but indicate the FBI has a way of accessing Signal texts even if they're behind the lockscreen of an iPhone.”
You: Come in and be mean for no reason, like a typical redditor. You see how the other guy was able to add new information in a kind and helpful way? Try that. I guarantee you if I was just confidently wrong no one would care, but since you sniffed what you thought was weakness here you are. Most people would consider the above quote hacking. But I'm not a subject matter expert so I left it open. Like someone who wants to learn, not fight
Come in and be mean for no reason, like a typical redditor.
I'm very sorry if your feelings are hurt but no part of my post is "mean" - you seem to be misinterpreting directness as evidence of malice. My response also has nothing to do with perceived "weakness". I think you should probably do some self-examination about why you feel this way, since you're imputing a lot of behavior which isn't present and for which there's no evidence.
It's a decent messenger app. I'm not really sure how different it is from Whatsapp. Aside from the owners. I thought Whatsapp also did E2E but now I'm going to have to search and see.
I think WhatsApp still takes a bunch of metadata like location etc when certain actions are taken. I don’t understand it 100%, however I think signal tracks the bare minimum of data for users
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u/Ghost_shell89 Feb 17 '25
lol first thought: download signal now