4d ago

there are many great reasons to use Signal

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I’ve never used Signal, so can’t speak to it’s quality, but the founder’s attitude is pretty funny
- Its pretty great, my default messaging app when someone's on it.
- It's top notch if you want to keep conversations private (NSA spying) with friends and family who already have your phone number (unique identifier used to create Signal profile)
  
  Usernames are a thing now, so it's no longer necessary to share your phone number with other users.
  
  Still good to make your contacts find you easily
  
  It still requires a phone number to make an account though iirc
  
  You can use usernames, so I think it's great for communicating with people who you don't want to share your phone number with too
  https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
  
  My friends already know my political opinions and my family would probably turn me in if they knew.
- Been a solid messaging app for the past couple years I've been using it. Unlike Whatsapp, it's much easier to control its notifications and media shared
  
  As an old user of textsecure they've been solid for a surprising amount of time. Back in the day (ca like 2013?) me and all my friends would use CyanogenMod which at the time had textsecure built in to the ROM. It used an early version of the Signal encryption protocol layered onto plain SMS messages, and the ROM support meant I didn't even need to install a special app - it would intercept all incoming and outgoing SMSes at the OS level and transparently encrypt and decrypt each one based on who it was coming from or going to. Since messages were direct, the textsecure servers afaik were only used to host public keys.
  Also since it was layered onto SMS, we had a handful of fun occurrences of re-flashing ROMs and forgetting to re-register and then we'd get gibberish texts from our friends whose phones still had our old key.
- Moxie is awesome! He's one of those people that would be on the short list for 'most interesting person'
- It's feature equivalent to WhatsApp except maybe with backups. But wow getting people of WhatsApp is hard
- Very good these days! They've also been tested, all the gov gets are unix account creation date timestamps.
  Was pretty buggy back in 2016 especially with embeds and video codec support between android and apple devices.
  edit: There's also Molly-FOSS a signal fork on https://molly.im/ with more optional security features but the FOSS branch doesn't use google proprietary blobs/services. Great for GrapheneOS users especially.
- I recommend this blog post he published a few years ago. The way this is written is so funny and amazing at the same time.
  https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/
  
  Lmao that last paragraph ahahahaha
  
  I really enjoy this paragraph as well: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/#the-rite-place-at-the-cellebrite-time
  The rite place at the Celleb…rite time
  By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters.

50 comments

The rite place at the Celleb…rite time