Comment by OhMeadhbh

Comment by OhMeadhbh 5 days ago

30 replies

I talked to Moxie about this 20 years ago at DefCon and he shrugged his shoulders and said "well... it's better than the alternative." He has a point. Signal is probably better than Facebook Messenger or SMS. Maybe there's a market for something better.

venusenvy47 5 days ago

Is there any reason they didn't use email? It seems like something that would have been easier to keep some anonymity., while still allowing the person to authenticate.

  • OhMeadhbh 5 days ago

    email is notoriously insecure and goes through servers that allow it to be archived. also, email UIs tend not to be optimized for instantaneous delivery of messages.

    • venusenvy47 3 days ago

      I wasn't assuming the actual messages would go through email. I assumed they just needed that for a onetime setup. Isn't that the only reason for using a phone number currently?

ddtaylor 5 days ago

Briar and Session are the better encrypted messengers.

Bender 5 days ago

I remember listening to his talks and had some respect for him. He could defeat any argument about any perceived security regarding any facet of tech. Not so much any more. He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure. I get why he did it. That little boat needed an upgrade and I would do it too. Of course this topic evokes some serious psychological responses in most people. Wait for it.

  • ddtaylor 5 days ago

    > He knows as well as I do anything on a phone can never be secure

    I assume because of the baseband stuff to be FCC compliant? Last I checked that meant DMA channels, etc. to access the real phone processor. All easily activated over the air.

    • Bender 5 days ago

      All easily activated over the air.

      Indeed. The only reason this is not used by customer support for more casual access, firmware upgrades and debugging is a matter of policy and the risk of mass bricking phones and as such this is not exposed to them. There are other access avenues as well including JTAG debugging over USB and Bluetooth.

    • direwolf20 5 days ago

      I don't think the FCC requires DMA channels. That's done out of convenience because it's how PCIe works.

      • ddtaylor 5 days ago

        The FCC doesn't require DMA channels, but the baseband processor may have access to it among anything else.

        • direwolf20 5 days ago

          That's done for convenience because that's how PCIe works.

    • hsbauauvhabzb 5 days ago

      Any citation on this? I’ve never heard that.

      • ddtaylor 5 days ago

        47 CFR Part 2 and Part 15

        FCC devices are certified / allowed to use a spectrum, but you must maintain compliance. If you're a mobile phone manufacturer you have to be certain that if a bug occurs, the devices don't start becoming wifi jammers or anything like that.

        This means you need to be able to push firmware updates over the air (OTA). These must be signed to avoid just anyone to push out such an OTA.

        The government has a history of compelling companies to push out signed updates.

      • Bender 5 days ago

        There are hobbyist groups that tinker with these things. They are just as lazy as me and do not publish much. One has to find and participate in their semi-private .onion forums. Not my cup of tea. Most of it goes over my head and requires special hardware I am not interested in tinkering with.

causalscience 5 days ago

I have no idea if that was true 20 years ago, but it's not true now. XMPP doesn't have this problem; your host instance knows your IP but you can connect via Tor.

  • OhMeadhbh 5 days ago

    Tor has the problem that you frequently don't know who's running all the nodes in the network. For a while the FBI was running Tor exit nodes in an attempt to see who messages were being sent to. maybe they still are.

  • ddtaylor 5 days ago

    OTR has been on XMPP for so long now

  • zxcvasd 5 days ago

    my mom can use signal no problem. she doesnt know what half the words in your comment mean, though.