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Signal Private Messenger vs. WhatsApp, Etc. Login/Join 
Savor the limelight
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quote:
Originally posted by ensigmatic:

<broken record>There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.</broken record> Smile



Hold my beer.

Why does one need a messaing app? I've been sending and receiving text messages for 15 years and email for 10 years longer than that. In fact, my email address is from when Microsoft was my ISP in the 90s. Have I been doing it wrong all this time?
 
Posts: 10821 | Location: SWFL | Registered: October 10, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
The Ice Cream Man
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Yes. ProtonMail is simple, and encrypted, email.
 
Posts: 5706 | Location: Republic of Ice Cream, Miami Beach, FL | Registered: May 24, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
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quote:
Originally posted by trapper189:
quote:
Originally posted by ensigmatic:
<broken record>There are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.</broken record> Smile

Hold my beer.

Why does one need a messaing app? I've been sending and receiving text messages for 15 years ...

Two reasons:

1. If you've been texting that long, surely you remember when text messages cost money, right? They were even more expensive in other parts of the world. Sometimes they're still chargeable--particularly between countries.

2. SMS and MMS messages are not encrypted. So anybody who can insert themselves into the message stream can read or alter them.

A third reason, in the current context: Signal Private Messenger does more than messaging. It also does voice and video calls.

quote:
Originally posted by trapper189:
... and email for 10 years longer than that. In fact, my email address is from when Microsoft was my ISP in the 90s.

Got you beat. I've been doing email since before the Internet was even a thing Smile

quote:
Originally posted by trapper189:
Have I been doing it wrong all this time?

Not "wrong," per se. But, at least as regards messaging, there are now Better Ways Smile



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Savor the limelight
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Thank you. I knew sms wasn't encrypted, but assumed that it couldn't be easily intercepted. Wish me luck, I'll be switching from an android phone to an iPhone this week. Good to know the messages between my wife and I will be encrypted. Wouldn't want anyone to know when I'm picking up an extra gallon of milk.
 
Posts: 10821 | Location: SWFL | Registered: October 10, 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
What would soncorn do?
Picture of soncorn
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What about?

https://www.getlockdown.com/individuals/

Seems to offer most control of your information.


Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
 
Posts: 1387 | Location: Fort Worth, TX, USA | Registered: October 20, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
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quote:
Originally posted by soncorn:
What about?

https://www.getlockdown.com/individuals/

Seems to offer most control of your information.

Appears to be a closed-source, proprietary solution? Also appears to be much more than a messaging and video calling solution, so not really what we're talking about.



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Serenity now!
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bump -

I installed it and found several folks already using it which is a plus. Downside, not enough of my contacts are on it.


------------------------------------------------

9/11/01 Never Forget

"In valor there is hope" - Tacitus
 
Posts: 2659 | Location: VA | Registered: April 15, 2003Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Political Cynic
Picture of nhtagmember
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Still think we should develop a group contact list.
 
Posts: 53085 | Location: Tucson Arizona | Registered: January 16, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Lawyers, Guns
and Money
Picture of chellim1
posted Hide Post
I don't know much about these... as I've only used regular text messaging with friends/family.
My bro-in-law is now encouraging Signal or Telegram?
It looks like the consensus here is Signal?



"Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."
-- Justice Janice Rogers Brown

"The United States government is the largest criminal enterprise on earth."
-rduckwor
 
Posts: 23943 | Location: St. Louis, MO | Registered: April 03, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
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The other half and I just got Signal set up. Impressed with the privacy controls so far.


-------------
$
 
Posts: 7655 | Location: Mid-Michigan, USA | Registered: February 17, 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Member
Picture of Keystoner
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I really want to like Signal. I hate the paint job. Why isn't it customizable? I want to be in control of the colors it picks for each contact.



Year V
 
Posts: 2613 | Registered: November 05, 2012Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
posted Hide Post
quote:
Originally posted by Keystoner:
I really want to like Signal. I hate the paint job. Why isn't it customizable? I want to be in control of the colors it picks for each contact.

DDG is your friend. Found it in one go: How do I change colors? - Signal Support

You can also have photos, emojis, etc.

TBH: The only time I dislike app colors is when the color combo makes it hard to distinguish details in the app. E.g.: Under- or over-contrasted colors, too bright or too dark. Otherwise I could hardly care less.



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
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Just a heads up: Signal's servers are apparently swamped. People are encountering trouble registering new devices.

This is not as much a problem after registration/signup/what-have-you is completed, because Signal's servers are only used to initiate a device<->device connection, but some people have even experienced trouble establishing new conversations.

ETA: And I'm one of them. Trying to message a friend with Signal and messages are not getting delivered. Considering the minimal traffic connection setup takes, their servers must be really slammed!

https://downdetector.com/status/signal/



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Political Cynic
Picture of nhtagmember
posted Hide Post
my username on Signal is Greg Roberts
 
Posts: 53085 | Location: Tucson Arizona | Registered: January 16, 2002Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Truth Wins
Picture of Micropterus
posted Hide Post
Interesting article on Gab about Signal.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/s...-a-government-op-85e

quote:

Signal is a government op

Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. It is not your friend.
Yasha Levine
8 hr ago


Signal — the privacy chat app favored by the world’s leading crypto experts — is trending again. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s MAGA Maidan Internet purge (which was followed by Facebook’s announcement that it was gonna start siphoning data off its WhatsApp property), Signal shot up to being the top downloaded messenger app on the planet.

The New York Times is writing about it. Edward Snowden is tweeting about it, telling his fans that Signal is the only reason he’s able to stay alive (and not the fact that he’s being protected round-the-clock by Russia’s security apparatus.) Hell, Even Elon Musk is out there telling people to go Signal. So many people are flooding the app that it’s been crashing.

Given that the app is blowing up, I figure it’s a good time to roll out my periodic public service announcement: Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. Yes, a CIA spinoff. Signal is not your friend.

Here are the cold hard facts.

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by “Moxie Marlinspike,” a tall, lanky cryptographer who has a head full of dreadlocks and likes to surf and sail his boat. Moxie was an old friend of Tor’s now-banished chief radical promotor Jacob Appelbaum, and he’s played a similar fake-radical game — although he’s never been able to match Jake’s raw talent and dedication to the art of the con. Still, Moxie wraps himself in air of danger and mystery and hassles reporters about not divulging any personal information, not even his age. He constantly talks up his fear of Big Brother and tells stories about his FBI file.

So how big a threat is Moxie to the federal government?

This big: After selling his encryption start-up to Twitter in 2011, Moxie began partnering with America’s soft-power regime change apparatus — including the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now called the U.S. Agency for Global Media) — on developing tech to fight Internet censorship abroad. That relationship led to his next venture: a suite of government-funded encrypted chat and voice mobile apps. Say hello to Signal.


If you look at Signal’s website today, you’ll find all sorts of celebrity endorsements — Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and even Jack Dorsey. You’ll also find a “donate” button — which, by the way, you shouldn’t press because Signal has plenty of tech oligarch cash on hand these days. What you won’t find is an “about” section that explains Signal’s origin story — a story that involves several million dollars in seed and development capital from Radio Free Asia, a CIA spinoff whose history goes back to 1951 and involves all sorts of weird shit, including its association in the 1970s with the Moonies, the hardcore anti-communist Korean cult.

Exactly how much cash Signal got from the U.S. government is hard to gauge, as Moxie and Open Whisper System have been opaque about the sources of Signal’s funding. But if you tally up the information that’s been publicly released by the Open Technology Fund, the Radio Free Asia conduit that funded Signal, we know that Moxie’s outfit received at least $3 million over the span of four years — from 2013 through 2016. That’s the minimum Signal got from the feds.

Three mil might not seem like much these days, especially because Signal recently got a huge infusion of WhatsApp oligarch cash to keep its operation going. But it’s important to know that without this early U.S. government seed money, there would be no Signal today. And that makes you think: If Signal’s super crypto tech truly posed a threat to the feds and to our oligarchy’s power, why would the feds bankroll its creation? And why would Facebook and Google rush to adopt its super-secure protocols? H’mmmmm…

As you can see from the way Parler was shutdown last week — when our imperial oligarchy wants to cancel an app, it can do so instantly and with a vengeance. But Signal lives on and thrives, despite it being a supposed threat to the almighty surveillance powers of the United States of America.


Signal was seeded by this Radio Free Asia?
What is Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund? And why would the U.S government fund crypto tech like Signal? On top of that, why would Silicon Valley — built as it is on for-profit surveillance — embrace Signal’s supposedly unbreakable privacy tech?

I’ve written at length about the deeper history of Signal’s government backers and the way in which crypto fits into America’s imperial machine. In fact, I dedicated two whole chapters of my book Surveillance Valley to the subject. I won’t reprint it here. But if you want to…


—Yasha Levine


True? I have no idea. I'm weary of anything Jack Dorsey endorses. But the creator of Gab has been somewhat vocal about Signal's origins as well.


_____________
"I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength—the marrow of Nature." - Henry David Thoreau
 
Posts: 4285 | Location: In The Swamp | Registered: January 03, 2010Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Chasing Bugholes
Picture of jelrod1
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I've been using Threema and been very happy with it.
 
Posts: 1771 | Location: North Carolina | Registered: March 06, 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Nullus Anxietas
Picture of ensigmatic
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quote:
Originally posted by Micropterus:
Interesting article on Gab about Signal.

https://yasha.substack.com/p/s...-a-government-op-85e

[QUOTE]
Signal is a government op

Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. It is not your friend.
Yasha Levine
8 hr ago


Signal — the privacy chat app favored by the world’s leading crypto experts — is trending again. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s MAGA Maidan Internet purge (which was followed by Facebook’s announcement that it was gonna start siphoning data off its WhatsApp property), ...

He'd be a mite more credible if he'd not suggested the surge in SPM had anything to do with Twitter's and Facebook's censorship. It's solely a result of Facebook's announcement re: meta-data harvesting.

But only a mite.

As for the rest of it: One more time: The application is open source. That means anybody and everybody is 1. Able to review every last line of the software and 2. Able to compile it, themselves, and make the compiled binaries available to one and all.

So, other than the possibility of The Man having an "in" on Signal's servers and being able to tell whom is connecting to whom, there's nothing they could reliably glean from it. (And they'd be able to tell that just by watching Signal's servers' traffic.)

Yes: Twitter had acquired Whisper Systems. Subsequently, the founder of Whisper Systems spun off Open Whisper Systems as a non-profit, independent of Whisper Systems.

As for OWS getting a cash infusion from WhatsApp: WhatsApp uses OWS' code base for the heart of its application. Ya think WhatsApp might have a vested interest in seeing that code base development remain viable?

Jesus fracking Christ on a pogo stick, but the conspiracy theory bullshit is getting old.



"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system,,,, but too early to shoot the bastards." -- Claire Wolfe
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living." -- Seneca the Younger, Roman Stoic philosopher
 
Posts: 26009 | Location: S.E. Michigan | Registered: January 06, 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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