hedgehog

If you’re a C developer who doesn’t know Rust, yes.

And it's I who should take a course in encryption and cybersecurity.

Yes. I was trying to be nice, but you’re clearly completely ignorant and misinformed when it comes to information security. Given that you self described as a “cryptography nerd,” it’s honestly embarrassing.

But since you’ve doubled down on being rude, just because I pointed out that you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s unlikely you’ll ever learn enough about the topic to have a productive conversation, anyway.

Have fun protecting your ignorance.

If a communication norm is just about other people’s preferences, why should they change? Who’s to say that other people’s preferences are more important than their own, particularly given that this particular preference is shared by millions of other people.

If inconsistent use of capitalization actually hinders understanding for some subset of their audience, then that’s a different story. My experience is that people are more likely to be annoyed than to actually have issues understanding all lowercase text. All caps text, on the other hand, is a different matter - and plenty of government and corporate entities are fine putting important text in all caps. But all caps text is a known accessibility issue. When I search for “all lowercase accessibility,” though, all I get is a bunch of results saying to not use all caps text for accessibility reasons.

If you have sources showing that all lowercase text is an accessibility concern, then you should share them. Heck, you should have led with that. But as it is, your argument ultimately boils down to “someone else should change what they do, that works for them, because it annoys me.”

Fight Club 5th Edition.

• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lionsden.fc5
• iPhone / iPad / Mac: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/fight-club-5th-edition/id1484084460

Nice try FBI.

Wouldn’t “NSA” or “CIA” be more appropriate here?

Well, if my pin is four numbers, that'll make it so hard to crack. /s

If you’re using a 4 number PIN then that’s on you. The blog post I shared covers that explicitly: “However, there’s a limit to how slow things can get without affecting legitimate client performance, and some user-chosen passwords may be so weak that no feasible amount of “key-stretching” will prevent brute force attacks” and later, “However, it would allow an attacker with access to the service to run an “offline” brute force attack. Users with a BIP39 passphrase (as above) would be safe against such a brute force, but even with an expensive KDF like Argon2, users who prefer a more memorable passphrase might not be, depending on the amount of money the attacker wants to spend on the attack.”

If you can't show hard evidence that everything is offline locally, no keys stored in the cloud, then it's just not secure.

If you can’t share a reputable source backing up that claim, along with a definition of what “secure” means, then your claim that “it’s just not secure” isn’t worth the bits taken to store the text in your comment.

You haven’t even specified your threat model.

BTW, "keys" when talking about encryption is the keys used to encrypt and decrypt,

Are you being earnest here? First, even if we were just talking about encryption, the question of what’s being encrypted is relevant. Secondly, we weren’t just talking about encryption. Here’s your complete comment, for reference:

I have read that it is self hostable (but I haven’t digged into it) but as it’s not a federating service so not better than other alternative out there.

Also read that the keys are stored locally but also somehow stored in the cloud (??), which makes it all completely worthless if it is true.

That said, the three letter agencies can probably get in any android/apple phones if they want to, like I’m not forgetting the oh so convenient “bug” heartbleed…

Just so you know, “keys” are used for a number of purposes in Signal (and for software applications in general) and not all of those purposes involve encryption. Many keys are used for verification/authentication.

Assuming you were being earnest: I recommend that you take some courses on encryption and cybersecurity, because you have some clear misconceptions. Specifically, I recommend that you start with Cryptography I (by Stanford, hosted on Coursera. See also Stanford’s page for the course, which contains a link to the free textbook). Its follow-up, Crypto II, isn’t available on Coursera, but I believe that this 8 hour long Youtube video contains several of the lectures from it. Alternatively, Berkeley’s Zero Knowledge Proofs course would be a good follow-up, and basically everything (excepting the quizzes) appears to be freely available online.

it wouldn't be very interesting to encrypt them, because now you have another set of keys you have to deal with.

The link I shared with you has 6 keys (stretched_key, auth_key, c1, c2, master_key, and application_key) in a single code block. By encrypting the master key (used to derive application keys such as the one that encrypts social graph information) with a user-derived, stretched key, Signal can offer an optional feature: the ability to recover that encrypted information if their device is lost, stolen, wiped, etc., though of course message history is out of scope.

Full disk encryption also uses multiple keys in a similar way. Take LUKS, for example. Your drive is encrypted with a master key. You derive the master key by decrypting one of the access keys using its corresponding pass phrase. (Source: section 4.3 in the LUKS1 On-Disk Format Specification (I don't believe this basic behavior was changed in LUKS2).)

Its impossible to verify what code their server is running.

Signal has posted multiple times about their use of SGX Secure Enclaves and how you can use Remote Attestation techniques to verify a subset of the code that’s running on their server, which directly contradicts your claim. (It doesn’t contradict the claim that you cannot verify all the code their server is running, though.) Have you looked into that? What issues did you find with it?

I posted a comment here going into more detail about it, but I haven’t personally confirmed myself that it’s feasible.

Both of the reasons you’ve provided are nonsensical:

• It isn’t performed automatically if you disable it, and they did (and explained why)
• They said they don’t believe capitalization aids with clarity. They didn’t express the same opinion about punctuation and paragraph breaks.

Message history won’t be fully fixed. It can’t be without storing message backups in some cloud somewhere (whether it’s to iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Signal’s servers) and Signal omits its message history from system backups on iOS and Android.

iOS users are completely incapable of backing up their message history in the event of their phone being lost, stolen, or broken. This omission isn’t justified in any way, as far as I’m aware; I don’t know of any technical reason why following the exact same process as on Android wouldn’t work.

Android users are able to back up locally via Signal, but that isn’t on by default, can’t be automated, needs to be backed up separately, requires you to record a 30 digit code to decrypt it, and has limitations on when it can be used for a restore (can’t restore on iOS, for example). See https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Backup-and-Restore-Messages for more details.

Message history on linked devices - meaning iPads and desktop computers - is being improved, but it still won’t mean that a user who loses or trades in their phone as they get a new phone will be able to simply restore their phone from a system backup and restore their Signal message history. And even that isn’t anywhere near as easy as on Telegram, where a user can just log in with their password and restore their message history, no backup needed.

It’s great that they’re improving the experience for linked devices, but right now that doesn’t actually help if you lose, break, or trade in your phone. Maybe they’ll later allow users to restore to a phone from a linked device or support backups on iPhones, but right now the situation with message history isn’t just an unfriendly UX, but one that is explicitly and intentionally unreliable for a huge portion of Signal’s user-base.

Also read that the keys are stored locally but also somehow stored in the cloud (??),

Which keys? Are they always stored or are they only stored under certain conditions? Are they encrypted as well? End to end encrypted?

which makes it all completely worthless if it is true.

It doesn’t, because what you described above could be fine or could have huge security ramifications. As it is, my guess is that you’re talking about how Signal supports secure value recovery. In that case:

1. The key is used to encrypt your contacts, profile name, group avatars, social graph, etc., but not your messages.
2. Your key is only uploaded to the cloud if you have a recovery PIN or passphrase
3. Your key is encrypted using your PIN or passphrase using techniques (key-stretching, storing in server secure enclaves) that make it more difficult to brute force

The main criticism of this is that you can’t opt out of it without opting out of the Registration Lock, that it necessarily uses the same PIN or passphrase, and that, particularly because it isn’t clear that your PIN/passphrase is used for encryption, users are less likely to use more secure pass phrases here.

But even without the extra steps that we can’t 100% confirm, like the use of the Secure Enclave on servers and so on, this is e2ee, able to be opted out by the user, not able to be used to recover past messages, and not able to be used to decrypt future messages.

If my gender doesn’t exist, doesn’t that mean that I don’t exist? And if I don’t exist, then I can’t get a passport or hold office? That sucks, but that also means I also don’t have to pay taxes and can’t be charged with a crime. Heck, you can’t even chase me! What’re you gonna do, tell the police to go after the “~~man~~ wait no, ~~woman~~, wait no 🤯”?

These motherfuckers just Polyphemus'd themselves, and I’m “Nobody.”

Seriously, though, denying passports to intersex people is some science-denying bullshit.

I believe this is legally supposed to take 60 days before it’s effective but read that some transphobes are already enforcing it.

My immediate reaction: It still looks like this, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t, but I feel like I saw this like a couple weeks ago. Does it still look like this on the website on mobile or something?