Like the title states looking for E2EE apps (Android and iOS) without going into much details or needs to be robust enough and easy to use for anyone and stable for operations that are susceptible to constant electronic warfare. I did some research and thought about replacing Signal with Molly and wondering if it will still work if Signal leaves the EU, but am also worried about its updates to patch vulnerabilities in a timely manner. I appreciate the help I am a “Jack of all trades and master of none” when it comes to these types of programs, but am also the go to currently in my unit since I am somewhat knowledgeable about exploits and attacks that can compromise systems would be great if there was an desktop as well (like Signal) and would also be nice if it was FOSS and auditable ( I know that’s kind of redundant ) I know it’s a tall order to ask but figured I would try. I really appreciate the help so much and hope I did things by the rules here and don’t get flamed if this has already been covered ( I searched but my skills with searching the fediverse is low
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XMPP, the internet standard for federated instant messaging.
Pardon my ignorance but is EU really truly considering this colossaly stupid move to ban E2EE?
Just a whole lot of ignorant hype, I believe.
It depends on what you want. I encourage people to use Jami (distributed, so might be a thing, if not self-hosting your own service, since what is said decentralized in reality is a set of centralized services). If too hard, then XMPP + OMemo. And only then, Matrix (by design it gives up more meta data than XMPP).
The only alternative that’s FOSS and not centrally controlled is Matrix. By being decentralized, anyone can run their own server and good luck stopping that.
There may be 200 other “alternatives”, but they’re irrelevant to the point where I consider then non-existent. Nobody has heard of them. Nobody is using them. Trying to push them on normal people will most likely result in them no longer talking to you as often or at all, and none of the other ones has any chance of reaching a critical mass. Matrix at least has some recognition among nerds and some, tiny amount of adoption outside.
Stop pushing random niche shit, it does privacy a disservice.
The only alternative that’s FOSS and not centrally controlled is Matrix
That’s not true, there is also XMPP which is lighter and far more decentralized than Matrix
I don’t understand why people think downloading s fucking app is so arduous. I truly don’t. Their stalwart refusal. To do it puzzles tf out of me.
If I installed a different app for every friend I had, I’d have a homescreen full just of chat apps. What’s worse, those niche privacy friendly apps go under or out of favor often.
You might be able to convince some of your friends to install an app just for you once, but by the time you’re telling them “this one now sucks, I’m on other app now” for the second time, they’ll just stop chatting with you, and if you ask them repeatedly, likely shun you even IRL because most people want to live their lives, not chase chat apps for their friends’ weird interests.
And even if they do that, they’ll have one app that they use every day, and one that sits in the bottom of their app drawer. Guess who gets invited to do something on the weekend, the person who shows up on their main contact list, or the person that would show up if they dug out that dusty app? And guess what the phone is gonna do with that app once it hasn’t been opened for a week… it’s going to deprioritize it so it won’t even work properly, while their main daily-opened app always gets push notifications immediately.
You don’t have to like it. You can pretend it’s not happening. But it will happen.
Is there a reason no one has mentioned Telegram yet in this thread?
possibly because Telegram is as “private” as Facebook.
It has end to end encryption though, so could you clarify why you think that it’s not private?
I’m not saying it can’t be private, but defaults matter and by default every message sent on Telegram (unless you opt into a “secure chat”) is viewable by anyone with access to Telegrams infrastructure and you have no way to know your message history has been compromised.
In contrast, everything within Signal is completely private and end-to-end encrypted with no compromises. Your groups, group names, profile pictures, stickers, reaction, voice/video message etc are all private without anyone having to make do anything. Privacy is enforced, not an option.
Telegram does have secure chats, but - either intentionally or not - they have made them incredibly inconvenient to use as they are not enabled by default, don’t work in group chats, and don’t sync across your own devices.
So yes, Telegram is private, just as private as a PGP encrypted email.
There are over 200 alternatives to Signal, Open Source and encrypted, out there. The attempt by governments to ban them all seems a little far from reality to me. https://alternativeto.net/category/social/encrypted-chat/?feature=end-to-end-encryption&license=opensource
Briar, xmpp with omemo, matrix, jami…
Much has been said about the idea of ‘signal leaving UK or EU’. Little has been said about how exactly that would happen.
AFAIK, Signal has no business presence in the UK or EU. IE, no offices, no registered corporate entities. Thus, they (arguably) have no more requirement to comply with UK’s or EU’s regulations than, say, Iran’s or China’s or any other jurisdiction where they do not do business and have no presence.
Signal’s leadership has a record of giving any regional restrictions the middle finger, so I doubt Signal would voluntarily block EU countries. So that means the EU would either pressure Google and Apple to delist Signal (easily worked around, at least on Android, and soon on Apple too as EU is trying to force sideloading) or they’d pressure ISPs to block connections to Signal (more or less impossible).
If EU tried to do that, it’d just create a giant game of whack-a-mole. And people doing real CSAM shit would just move to even more private distributed systems.
expired
https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.amnesica.kryptey/ This looks like a good backup plan that can’t be banned very well.
Take a look at the matrix network. Its decentralized like lemmy and the cryptography is on point. And it cant really be cencored due to this reason.
Unfortunately its possible to send messages on Matrix that are not encrypted
Yes, because for large public rooms it makes no sense as anyone can leak the message contents anyway and e2ee is expensive for large rooms.
Also DMs
Yes its possible, but you are free not to send unencrypted matrix messanges.
Human error is possible. Happens to our users PGP emails all the time.
As an org we dont allow any software where its possible to send unencrypted messages. It too much risk.
this seems easily fixable by choice of end user app, Element surely defaults to sending encrypted messages, if a user goes out of their way to figure out how to send clear text good on 'em
I completely agree. Though pgp emails usually have to be set up. At least when using element nothing has to be set up and it is enabled by default. But this doesnt change the point.
As an org self hosting a matrix server would be an option. But the issue would still remain. So its a tradof
Signal. Any restriction can be bypassed
Signal’s devs have been pretty good about offering proxies to people in oppressive nations like Iran and Egypt in the past.
And now we can add Britain to that list.
AFAIK in Iran, the issue is that the real local phone numbers could not be accepted for registration due to sanctions, so it only ever worked for existing accounts. Another problem of such a system.
I don’t think Signal will ever give up phone numbers as identifiers, for better or for worse… The “for better” helps prevent spam and makes contact discovery easier, but the “for worse” can easily place a pretty heavy burden on users to own a phone number.
I hope we don’t get to Iranian conditions in the UK, but if we do, I imagine there would be a lot more press about how they handled the “first world” country… At that point, switching to a different platform would probably be better…
They could. If they wanted to. But they don’t want to. They could charge a little bit of money to initiate contact with somebody if you don’t have your phone number registered. To keep the spam down. They already have their own mobile coin, they could just ask initial contacts to send a penny for that contact. Something not too intrusive. They could do that, if they want to, but they don’t want to.
Not just a phone number, but a non-sanctioned phone number.
It’s a feature that keeps being said to be “almost ready”, but phone number for registration will continue to be required from what I understand. What they were working on was the ability to have usernames to connect to strangers and other people without the need to share the phone number.
Yeah, which has taken a frustratingly long time to implement. They’ve been working on it unofficially since 2018 and officially since 2019, and fingers crossed will be getting it sometime in 2024. They struggled for a while with message editing as well, finally rolling it out just recently… Presumably, waiting for the old clients to expire. (That’s why they stop functioning after a while.)
Yeah, Signal should work on its reliance over phone
Soo… this whole thing is about the eu not the uk. Which are (now) different things. The uk dropped their dumb idea with a “when this is technically possible” restriction, which it won’t be because maths isn’t changing anytime soon.
The eu thing is different and technically possible.
At least the UK is willing to acknowledge they want something impossible, haha. In the US they’d just say “do it, math be damned”.
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.” ~ Malcolm Turnbul, former Australian PM.
Turnbul has done less study on the matter than king Cnut.
Thanks, apparently I was struggling to read a two letter acronym…
I’ve been using DeltaChat (available on F-Droid) for a few months now.
What I like about it is that because it’s email based, it uses OpenPGP for encryption, making it easy to have compatibility with other email-based solutions.
If you want to go the extra-secure route, you and your contacts can even self-host your emails - as long as you’re not going to send messages to people on Gmail or other big providers, you can avoid your messages being treated as spam.
The multi-device support is still a bit rough around the edges, but has gotten better in the last few months since the app is under active development.
deltachat uses autocrypt which apparently doesn’t support key verification yet. how secure is it if you can’t even verify that your messages aren’t being intercepted? I also didn’t see anything about rotating keys after every message like Signal does, so anyone sucking up your encrypted messages just needs one key to see your entire message history. that doesn’t sound very good.
I’d just like to point out that if Signal leaves the EU, it will most likely just mean that it’s not available through the official app stores. With Signal updating itself, it’s just a little inconvenient to install it on a new device, though, they even said that they’ll try to make it as easy as possible.
MollyMoxie will need to go back to F-Droid 😂Molly has its own F-Droid repo, it’s one of the default available in Droid-ify.
Yes, I wanted to mean Moxie, sorry. The one that said “NO SIGNAL ON F-DROID REPOS”… hahaha blaming f-droid was insecure and that’s why we should use Google services.
He didn’t want Signal on FDroid because surprise surprise he just wanted to roll their own crypto coin with insiders knowledge. You can’t do that with open source so easily. There’s a reason they didn’t publish code for years. That people still support those crooks, who have lost all credibility, for a privacy app, baffles me.
Thank god we have Matrix now.
Yup. At most, Signal gets removed from the Play Store. There’s no meaningful way to block Signal, especially now that big CDN providers are starting to rollout Encrypted Client Hello.
“If it’s not allowed in the play store and we need to click away a Google warning or 2, maybe it’s dangerous and we shouldn’t use it” - average Joe. Next step: “… suspect was using signal, so we decided to …” yada yada yada same as it already is perceived in general for tor and even with VPN in some countries. Just the fact you’re not using the thing most other people use makes you stand out.
Can you please link an article or something explaining what you’re going on about? When was this announced?
Edit: guessing it’s related to this. https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2023/06/eu-member-states-still-cannot-agree-about-end-end-encryption
If so, banning E2EE because of CSAM is like cutting off your hand because you stubbed your toe. Banning E2EE won’t stop child porn nor will it prevent the use of E2EE.
Unfortunately, It’s not about ending CSAM. It’s about ending encryption.
If they cared about ending CSAM they’d ban…checks headlines…police officers
police officers
What? Why?
lots of headlines recently of cops getting busted. reading through the articles, it looks like some cloud backup provider for verizon phones started scanning, and filed reports, which led to investigations, which lead to tracking down the phone, which led them to a cop’s house. many such cases follow that same pattern.
police work attracts people who like to abuse power, so we shouldn’t be to suprised tbh
Yes, [https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-eu-governments-set-to-approve-the-end-of-private-messaging-and-secure-encryption/](https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/chat-control-2-0-eu-governments-set-to-approve-the-end-of-private-messaging-and-secure-encryption/ This is exactly how I feel I don’t understand the logic behind this at all.
Understanding is simple. Every few years, 5 or 8 or 10, there’s a big marketing push and brain wash around trying to destroy encryption by using the excuse of CSAM. Nothing new, a play as old as ever. It’s basically (and really the whole point) trying to pass mass surveillance into law hoping that people forget the arguments of the last time or that people are not paying attention or trying to put it wrapped into a different gift wrapping and see if it goes into effect before anyone notices. The time frames for these things are getting smaller and smaller and more and more people don’t care at all about privacy and basic rights and are ok with things like mass surveillance. It will eventually pass.
It’s a real shame the eu is doing this. I’ve agreed with most of their policies recently regarding IT and phones.
I don’t agree with that stupid cookie shit though.
I just felt that there was a lone voice of reason trying for a better future but I guess we are on our own.
As a fellow cookie warning hater, the Firefox extension “I don’t care about cookies” is great. It’ll dismiss the box.
And please keep the reminder that most cookie popups are not required and it’s mostly bad actors/companies that keep insisting on being annoying by saying they are just complying when in fact they are forcing all that on purpose on us users so we turn out heads to hate on the law instead.
EU is not doing it yet, however there is strong push from interested parties within and outside of the EC:
Including illegal use of targeted advertising / misinformation campaign:
