- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
Signal has announced new functionality in its upcoming beta releases, allowing users to transfer messages and media when linking their primary Signal device to a new desktop or iPad. This feature offers the choice to carry over chats and the last 45 days of media, or to start fresh with only new messages.
The transfer process is end-to-end encrypted, ensuring privacy. It involves creating a compressed, encrypted archive of your Signal data, which is then sent to the new device via Signal’s servers. Despite handling the transfer, the servers cannot access the message content due to the encryption.
With the introduction of a cross-platform archive format, Signal is also exploring additional tools for message transfer to new devices or restoration in case of device loss or damage. Users can begin testing this feature soon, with a wider rollout expected in the coming weeks.
When they gonna allow sign up without a phone number. Or allow federation with 3rd party signal severs. Or allow sign up without a phone number that’s linked to ur real identity by law in most countries.
The more I learn about signal the less I trust them.
The day security researchers say Signal is bad is the day I’ll stop using it. Until then, it’s the best option we have that both provides both great privacy and UX. The only thing that comes close - and it still has a ways to go - is SimpleX, but it’s basically a signal fork and it’s devs still support Signal.
Security researchers always look at a specific thing, usually the encryption only. The message encryption of Signal is great, the problem is all the rest of it that never gets scrutinized that closely.
SimpleX is not a Signal fork. It is it’s own protocol, service and app. It just utilizes Signal protocol for encryption like every good e2e encrypted messenger out there.
SimpleX allows anonymous identity, federation between servers and still a good UX.
You’re right! not sure why I thought SimpleX was a fork, it’s definitely just using the Signal protocol. Thanks for the clarification. That said, I would objectively state the UX needs some work to get to where Signal is at. SimpleX is oddly both easy to use but confusing and unreliable. I’ve been using it for a little over a year now and very often messages just stop getting delivered or received, forcing a fall back to Signal.
SimpleX is still very promising and more secure than Signal if your threat model necessitates it, but I continue to champion Signal for its ease of use, reliability, and security compared to more mainstream messengers.
Why not use SimpleX then? You mention it but provide no real reason to use Signal over SimpleX
Privacy and security is all about threat modeling. Signal meets 100% of the security needs of everyone I communicate with in my region of the world. There’s no need (especially now that you can hide phone numbers) for the added security benefits of SimpleX.
Additionally, my experience in using SimpleX over the last year+ is that message delivery is not reliable yet. This has forced me and the few people I’ve been testing it with to fall back to Signal multiple times. Because of these reliability issues and lacking UX, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it on others, knowing the tolerance level is low for message delivery failures and UX that isn’t yet up to par with other messaging apps.
Hey u still use signal I’m not saying to stop using it I’m simply saying just cos its better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better.
The signal encryption is provably secure that’s what the researchers analyse. The metadata is a separate story.
See: https://lemm.ee/comment/17831982
I’m not bagging on signal, here, since I use it too. But what about xmpp? It does e2ee, right?
XMPP basically uses the same end to end encyption method as Signal, but due to it not being mandatory some things are easier but come with the footgun that you can accidentially disable it (but it is enabled by default in most modern xmpp clients).
Otherwise: since XMPP federates more servers can theoretically see some metadata, but since most servers are small and community run there isn’t a single big target like with Signal where you can siphon off all the metadata. So you can make arguments for both. XMPP: more meta data but decentralized, Signal: less metadata but all in one place.
XMPP has been an option for decades, if your contacts aren’t using it by now, they arent going to. And with communications tools, both parties have to agree on a tool. Even if one party doesn’t care about privacy or security.
Raw brute force security isn’t the point most of the time, and ease of use and simplicity of setup are going to be major factors in adoption. Signal is much easier to get started with for most people than XMPP.
What about threema?