I’m excited but I still detest phone number requirements. Android RCS is a huge improvement over SMS/MMS but what I’m still hoping for is federated end to end encrypted chat to become mainstream. We figured out email, we can figure out text, audio, and video chat
“To register on Signal Desktop, a phone number will still be required.”
Then this is just a whole lot of not much.
Users have been asking Signal to allow accounts to be created without a phone number ever since it was released. I just want to use Signal with my kids who don’t have phone numbers, dude. Signal already have usernames and encrypted client-side contacts… What’s the holdup? Why insist a phone number is still required?
The new app design will still be necessary if that were to become a feature, so this is a halfway step either way.
One thing this lets people do is utilize burner numbers without a physical phone tied to it. They can use their provider’s web-based UI to receive text messages for the signal confirmation, but can then use the app solely from a desktop.
This also paves the way for an official command-line client, library or SDK that could be used for automation.
Thanks for those pointers. I like the idea of an official CLI for instance to perform automatic regular encrypted backups, or the possibility of interfacing messages to other systems. But I presume they’d have to be careful to avoid opening the door to automated messaging spam bots.
I just use SimpleX for kid stuff. No phone/numbers necessary, just uses random QR codes as the identifier, makes sharing and setup very easy.
Oh cool, I’ll give this a try, I see it’s on IOS also. Cheers
They want to be able to link accounts to your identity, obviously
You know, I’ve been thinking…
Signal’s end to end encrypted, yes… But we do the key exchange process through Signal’s servers, don’t we? How do we know they don’t store copies of the keys? Does the client have a mechanism in place to make sure the man in the middle doesn’t do anything funny? I haven’t actually delved very deep into the code, but it sounds like I should.
And… Sure, their server code may be open source too, but nobody guarantees that that’s the code actually running on their servers.
My thinking also. Corps/gov can also link identity to emails of course, but it’s much harder due to email aliasing and the ease of new account creation.
Mobile phone numbers are far more personal - people generally only have one or two max and generally keep them for very long periods.
If its the true reason, it would make Signal not much better than Meta’s WhatsApp, which gleans value from its users by noting metadata tying users to one-another by who they contact, when, and how often to extrapolate social circles and relationships. But Meta goes further in I think also tracking location, etc, and obviously has much more personal data in the linked phone numbers of many FB/Insta accounts… Signal could potentially be doing some of that to a degree with IP geolocation… Not great.
TLDR: its the one thing stopping me from trusting Signal entirely as a benevolent actor - they want and ‘need’ your personal phone number. I use it still, as its the best available mainstream option, but I mention this concern when recommending it to those seeking privacy.
They will also likely require a captcha done using webview, exposing many hardware identifiers to Google.
They will once again claim this is to protect against spammers and not to track people.
Signal is obviously a honeypot, as it never would have taken this long to release a desktop App not linked to a phone if it weren’t a honeypot, and they still are requiring a phone number. Any “privacy” company that adopts real privacy features only after huge pushback from the privacy community years later is likely a honeypot. Look at “tuta,” which a former government worker testified under oath is a honeypot: no accepting of Monero ever. Finally, when called a honeypot, they make a deal with a third party to accept Monero.
Signal is probably releasing this because whoever owns the honeypot wants to link desktops to phone numbers, allowing the desktops to be hacked with something like Pegasus as well.
Does anyone remember that accidental LinkedIn post showing all the Apps that one company was able to hack? And it showed WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc… And it was always based on a phone? And this photo was accidentally posted online before being scrubbed? I forget the details on it and if anyone remembers, please post about it to jog my memory. Well, now perhaps that group wants to hack laptops too.
I don’t believe this is anything other than more bullshit. It wouldn’t surprise me if they also blocked VOIP for registration. Fuck Signal.
Signal is obviously a honeypot
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Cause spamming will get a lot worse once you can just register accounts.
This is real false dilemma that people often raise. There’s so many tools that Signal can use to stop spam. Do you get spam email? Almost never - even on E2E email, because reputation blacklisting solved it. Signal already only lets accounts message other users in their local contacts list or added by username.
Examples off the top of my head: If a new account is registered it can have a ‘gradual release of abilities’ whereby it can only send 3 messages first day, 10 first week, etc. Same for adding users by username. Signal already has spam-account reporting capabilities that block accounts after too many reports. Simple. Solved. And the payoff is that everyone gets complete privacy of who they are during signup.
BTW I already get spam on Signal. Here’s the latest from just 2 days ago, know nobody by this name and don’t recognize her, standard pretty god-botherer bait profile, user photo looks like AI (light reflection left eye very different to right eye):
Require a $15 payment
Then you have the same privacy problem but with payment provider…
For non-phone-numbered accounts
Yep. So… You sign up with a username, no phone number… Then you use a payment provider to pay for that account… And… Your payment info is therefore linked to that account at creation time.
Potential remedy could be using Bitcoin or something as an option, but then… 99% of people dont have or use crypto, and would just use the default CC/paypal. Same issue.
Can’t wait to daily-drive a Linux phone with this.
Same here. I desperately want to exit the Android ecosystem and I have a cellphone all setup with UBPorts to do so, but the lack of native Signal client is a showstopper for me.
You can use something like signal-cli and the desktop app for basically the same thing.
The usability is nowhere near acceptable with a cellphone for daily usage with either or those options, or with the native client in Waydroid because it’s not persistent if Waydroid is closed.
Signal with anything other than the official client sucks ass. I know, I tried.
And that’s without mentioning that you still need to have the “master” Signal client running on an Android cellphone, which defeats the purpose if you want to ditch Android.
Yes, Signal is completely unusable unless you’re using a phone with a closed source operating system with Signal linked to the phone number.
Even if they are creating a Linux version, I don’t trust them at this point and think they are likely creating this as a hacking vector. It took them too damn long to do this, and they have never let people with higher threat models register without a number. The whole thing is sus.
Yeah I don’t trust the Signal people much either. But I don’t really care: I use it mainly to share grocery lists, photos of work sites with builders, talk to friends or share non-important photos and videos easily and instantly without paying. And I can tell those who want to contact me to install it, it takes them 10 seconds and it’s done. It’s not about privacy for me, it’s about convenience and not paying the phone company.
That’s why I’m not desperate to make it work with silly workarounds like Mautrix/Signal or put up with Waydroid on UBPorts: if it’s not convenient, it’s not worth it for me.
Just run Signal in Waydroid?
Signal won’t run in the background in Waydroid in UBPorts: as soon as you close Waydroid, whatever runs inside dies.
Also, if you want to run something else in Waydroid, it can’t run in parallel for some reason. So I’d have to kill Signal to run my banking app for example, then restart Signal - and be careful never to close the window as I use the cellphone throughout the day.
Not super usable…
thats kinda cursed
Yep. Signal on mobile Linux - or the lack thereof - is entirely what’s still keeping me on Android. Other than that, UBPorts is perfectly usable for me. It’s just that one thing…
Of the desktop app? The .deb?
The desktop app on a cellphone is unusable, like all desktop apps.
Use a local Matrix bridge.
This new update will not change how the desktop app looks. They’re just copying over the code for the signup flow.
Edit: oh my brain put your and the top level comment together. Sorry.
Use a local Matrix bridge.
Not an option. You lose the ability to share photos and videos, which I do constantly with friends and family.
And it’s hellishly Rube Goldberg.
Finally, Signal will catch up to XMPP.
Nah, it still requires a phone number.
XMPP has always won
Just install signal-cli :P
Or use SimpleX Chat in a terminal instead desperately using some third party github repo to try to access something that tries to identify you based on numbers and hardware identifiers.
Have they brought back SMS?
finally, been waiting for a signal desktop-gui for a long time…hope its available on linux
Signal desktop has been a thing for years at this point. On Linux too. However, you could not register it to desktop only. You had to have the mobile app and then register the desktop app, so there was a dependency. This is about to change now.
ooo didnt know about that ill try it, i came to hear that WhatsApp is also gonna have a username based system…i dont think thats gonna make it any better
It really isn’t, and recently there have been claims that WA has 3ssentially backdoored its encryption and can read everything.
whats with big corps messing everything up… why haven’t people switched to FOSS yet
Plenty of reasons: inertia, vendor lock-in network effect, lack of knowledge or awareness, or plain ol’ stupidity.
But on a less pessimistic note: I’m pleased to say that I can reach pretty much all of my contacts via Signal these days. It’s reached critical mass where I am.
Why is it a different version
Wdym?
It seems the headline has bad wording. It’s not a new version of Signal.
Why can’t it just be a website? Is it because the desktop version plans to mine my computer?
Hegseth will leave his laptop open at the bar when he goes to take a piss.
Why is that mitigated by using a desktop app? If anything you’re more likely to leave apps running in the background than you are browser tabs.
