I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.

Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        17 hours ago

        Downvoted as you let them bait you. Escaping WhatsApp and Discord, anti-libre software, is more important.

        I don’t know what you mean by “bait” here, but…

        Escaping to a phone-number-requiring, centralized-on-Amazon, closed-source-server-having, marketed-to-activists, built-with-funding-from-Radio-Free-Asia (for the specific purpose of being used by people opposing governments which the US considers adversaries) service which makes downright dishonest claims of having a cryptographically-ensured inability to collect metadata? No thanks.

        (fuck whatsapp and discord too, of course.)

          • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            15 hours ago

            When it’s libre software, we’re not banned from fixing it.

            Signal is a company and a network service and a protocol and some libre software.

            Anyone can modify the client software (though you can’t actually distribute modified versions via Apple’s iOS App Store, due to Apple’s binary distribution system being incompatible with GPLv3… which is why unlike the Android version there are no forks of Signal for iOS) but if a 3rd party actually “fixed” the problems I’ve been talking about here then it really wouldn’t make any sense to call that Signal anymore because it would be a different (and incompatible) protocol.

            Signal (the company) must approve of and participate in any change to Signal (the protocol and service).

    • pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      18 hours ago

      it’s being answered in the github thread you linked. Sorry that this is not enough for you but it’s enough for most people: “For people who are concerned about this sort of thing, you can enable sealed sender indicators in the settings”

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        17 hours ago

        it’s being answered in the github thread you linked

        The answers there are only about the fact that it can be turned off and that by default clients will silently fall back to “unsealed sender”.

        That does not say anything about the question of what attacks it is actually meant to prevent (assuming a user does “enable sealed sender indicators”).

        This can be separated into two different questions:

        1. For an adversary who does not control the server, does sealed sender prevent any attacks? (which?)
        2. For an adversary who does control the server, how does sealed sender prevent that adversary from identifying the sender (via the fact that they must identify themselves to receive messages, and do so from the same IP address)?

        The strongest possibly-true statement i can imagine about sealed sender’s utility is something like this:

        For users who enable sealed sender indicators AND who are connecting to the internet from the same IP address as some other Signal users, from the perspective of an an adversary who controls the server, sealed sender increases the size of the set of possible senders for a given message from one to the number of other Signal users who were online from behind the same NAT gateway at the time the message was sent.

        This is a vastly weaker claim than saying that “by design” Signal has no possibility of collecting any information at all besides the famous “date of registration and last time user was seen online” which Signal proponents often tout.