GitHub commit d7447b1 states that “accounts without phone numbers can never get phone numbers, and accounts with them can never lose them”.
So you’ll have to register a new account if you want to decouple your number.
Bullllllllshit.
They’ve said that for years. It’s easy to do. But they won’t do it
How’s it easy?
Not the technical part (which definitely looks as easy as just dropping a requirement), but the spam/abuse prevention part.
It’s pretty easy to detect spam. I guess user reports and noticing when someone suddenly messages many new users and those users do not respond.
Anyway, it’s not an issue on Wire or SimpleX or the dozens of other platforms that don’t require phone numbers. It’s obviously a solved problem. Signal is just making up fake excuses.
It’s pretty easy to detect spam.
Tell that to… any social media. Lol. If was easy to detect bot you think they not big problem anymore.
Social media is different from a platform that’s literally just DMs.
It’s pretty easy to detect spam. I guess user reports and noticing when someone suddenly messages many new users and those users do not respond.
It’s not so easy, because you could even register a new account for each new spam message, or register 100k accounts & only send out 3 messages a day / account…
Obviously not. Because this isn’t an issue elsewhere
just go the matrix route; username, password, 2fa, then any other connection requires you to verify with a current logged in session (or recovery code).
Cannot decrypt message
As someone who uses matrix and runs a matrix server, matrix fucking suuuucks jfc why are so many privacy tools soooooo bad at what they do on so many levels like wtf the proto the servers the clients the ux the metadata issues like so much wrong
Edit: and if anyone tells me to use XMPP I’ll slap them
What are your main issues with Matrix?
Unencrypted by default (among other bad defaults), leaks metadata like it was built to do so, makes it surprisingly difficult to tell what’s encrypted and what’s not, filled to the brim with bugs and exploits, bad feature interop between most clients (most of which have known vulnerabilities or abandoned dependencies), defacto-standard “just use synapse/element if you want things to work properly” (and still doesn’t), bad user communication about well everything but mainly teaching new users what all the things mean (session, verification, 1:1 vs jitsi, when you’re using what,…), ton of federation issues and bugs, …
And despite all that it somehow has a massive csam seeding problem, which really just makes me think the whole thing is a telegram-like fed psyop but one level higher on the tech competency ladder.
… Multi-device session chaining is a neat feature and surprisingly user-friendly (tho no one maintains their session list or verification; half pebkac admittedly), so that’s something nice I can say about it… But almost nothing else.
Seriously, Signal is basically a joint three-letter-agency sigint project and I still think it’s safer and easier to use than matrix for the vast vast vast majority of people
Boy… We are going to get spammed.
I never understood the “phone numbers are evil” people, whining about signal requiring them. As soon as this arrives, they will find another thing to whine about.
Hopefully Signal will make it possible to block any and all communications from people wohtout a phone number, unless I reach out to them. And that that feature also be introduced to groups. Because otherwise maintaining public groups is going to be turboshit.
mobile numbers require government identification in many countries. But yeah, not seeing an easy solution to the spam problem
mobile numbers require government identification in many countries
Yes and all they will know is “person A has installed signal”. Nothing more. If you haven’t degoogled tour phone or use one with a fruity logo, the government knows that you have the app already. It won’t need phone number.
huh? you can’t see the difference between a grapheneos burner linked to a gov ID backed phone number and one that isn’t?
like what happens when you go to a protest and they pull out a Stingray and get your IMEI+ICCID down that’s directly linked to you? you’re telling me you don’t see any issues with cops/ICE being able to know exactly who goes where?
this has strong “I don’t need freedom of speech because I have nothing to say” vibes - it’s fine if you don’t see the value but I can assure there very much is
You’re fighting a scarecrow in your head that you built. “This has a vibe so I’ll vibe comment”
Once you come back down to earth and want to talk seriously, ping me. I don’t debate paranoid snow bunnies.
ah yes the paranoia of documented evidence…
i wish I could live in your fantasy land where fascists weren’t in power and being an antifascist wasn’t a terrorism offence
Buddy, how are you going to communicate with people via Signal even without a username? Are protests full of free WiFi?
If you think getting rid of phone numbers on an internet connected application will help you at a local protest where you should be using a local network for communication (Bluetooth for example), you are just lost.
Having your phone number will only reveal that you’re using signal, not who you’re talking with nor the groups you belong to.
look you obviously don’t do grassroots political organising if you’re asking such silly questions - this whole thread was about you thinking numberless signal accounts aren’t useful - and being more worried about your made up spam boogieman - than the actual threat of fascistic state violence
prepaid sims exist, yes briar exists but it’s not viable when people need to communicate over whole city distances (eg for spotting), if the cops can connect your burner to your actual ID at an anti-ICE protest - they can very easily raid your house after the fact - and no they don’t even need a warrant due to the extraordinarily powers given to “anti-terror” police forces.
please touch grass and stop being an armchair security expert and let the adults think about applied security in the real world
Remember metadata , they also know person A send message to person B at specific time. Of course knowing phone number also gives them your location from cellular towers.
If you’re using text messages, yes, but not with signal. They just know that you have it, nothing more.
this is bullshit designed to respond to increasing use of simplexchat and other platforms
and they still want to tie it to payment (so a credit card) so they can track people
and they are implementing it only after many years
a complex captcha that takes 10 minutes to solve would work just as well as payment, but they aren’t doing it, and it certainly leaves me wondering if they are a honeypot. i can’t prove it, but it’s really suspicious it’s taken so long to possibly roll out something that may require a credit card
I have watched the futo video and i think don’t think its very likely it will become a paid feature. The CTO said they would want to have the registration require some kind of cost but it was almost certainly meant as a computing cost not money. Link to the same video in case you can’t play it https://i.imgur.com/QMDjn7T.mp4
it was almost certainly meant as a computing cost not money
Agreed.
I think he makes a lot of sense. I mean, just look at Telegram (which is ironically going the opposite route now).
SimpleX, Cwtch, Briar?
I think only SimpleX has asynchronous messaging
When you send a message, and it gets delivered when the recipient is online?
Delta has that, but you have to be online for the message to be sent later, since there’s no central server to cache it.Yes, that means it’s synchronous.
My point is that we need servers for asynchronous messaging (or some clever network where everyone is a server relaying messages for others). Lacking asynchronous messaging is not going to be a practical solution for 99% of people.
Encryption works. We don’t need to trust servers. They’re not inherently an issue for security nor anonymity.
Thank you for the clarification. I just wasn’t sure on the terminology, but this makes perfect sense.
We don’t need to trust servers. They’re not inherently an issue for security nor anonymity.
For me, my issue with a central server infrastructure is less that it can be snooped on (because, to your point, properly implemented encryption does work) and more that it’s easy to be taken down or censored, since it is a central server infrastructure.
The benefit with the every-client-is-a-server infrastructure, such as the one that Delta uses, is that if one of the many servers gets taken down, the network, as a whole, keeps working.
Something similar can be said about the Lemmy infrastructure, really any of the Fediverse. If one of the servers gets taken down, there are still hundreds, thousands, or millions more that are serving content, even if not the exact same content, allowing the social network, as a whole, to not be subject to mass censorship.For the everyday, central infrastructure, such as the one that Signal uses, works perfectly fine. For those “special locations”, a decentralized every-client-is-a-server infrastructure might be a requirement. So it really is situational.
That’s a good point.
I guess the best is a hybrid where the server is just optional for asynchronous messaging, and if the server is temporarily down, the service just becomes temporarily degraded into synchronous mode.
SimpleX is awesome SimpleX is awesome.
Trump hates this plan
and still no app for Android tablets ffs
