this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
236 points (80.6% liked)
Privacy
31975 readers
652 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay first things first Jack Dorsey is a tool
The US government / CIA did in fact develop the protocol back in the day, with the goal of helping people in China and other countries message securely, probably with ulterior motives.
But the protocol itself is open source, and you can use it without any affiliation with the US government.
The claim " It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺" is therefore so stupid it almost invalidates everything else being said because the person writing is either an idiot or purposely misrepresenting the facts.
Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
They boast this as a feature, but on the instructions for how to do this for iOS, even Telegram admits "As things stand now, you'll need a jailbroken device, at least 1,5 hours and approximately 90GB of free space to properly set up a virtual machine for the verification process". Browsing the steps, it's extremely complex, and doesn't seem like something that is very user friendly and that you'd do weekly or monthly when a new version is released.
On the GitHub issue linked to in the body, it's disingenuous to claim they refused to implement this, and that the technical hurdles Apple has in place make this extremely difficult which halted progress. In the community forums where the conversation was moved to, someone pointed out that even if you were to reproduce it on a jailbroken iPhone, that there's no way to confirm that non-jailbroken iPhones aren't receiving a version with a backdoor.
And even if you are using a jailbroken device exclusively and can confirm the reproducibility of the iOS app, then the risk becomes the latest available jailbroken iOS could be outdated from the real versions, and you'd have other issues with not receiving timely security updates. This same issue applies to Telegram also.
Flipper0: iOS 17 Lockup Crash has entered the chat juuuust to be annoying.
EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.
My theory is that apple wont let the developer share there code for IOS because of "security"
I remember an emulator (retro arch i think?) Got on ios at one point and was later removed because it showed apples file system layout. Which apples reason was "because it could be used to make malware for IOS"
I feel like there is some similar thing with signal IOS