alt Hacker NewsI like the idea. But I’m pretty happy with Signal. Signal does require a phone number I think, but otherwise seems very similar.
Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage. It makes recovery simple. It does block the ultra paranoid use cases though. Oh well.
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>> Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage.
Yeah if you compare that with Facebook messenger and other such services but if you want secure communication it's not reasonable.
signal is really crappy. It fails at the most basic feature which is : deliver the message on time.
> otherwise seems very similar.
It's worth mentioning that Session had started out as a fork of signal.
>Grounding identity in a phone number is very reasonable for almost all normal usage
In many jurisdictions, telecoms form an abusive oligopoly, and you need to provide a state-issued identity document to get a phone number.
That is not at all reasonable for normal usage - unlike well-known non-abusive authentication methods, such as a keypair; or its even simpler cousin, the username/password.
Signal's code quality is not conducive to security. They had an extremely bad state management bug that resulted in photos being sent to random contacts in your list (potentially life ruining implications if you're sending private photos).
For this reason, it's hard to trust them. The encryption quality is irrelevant if the slop coded client is blasting random photos to random contacts.
Session is not similar to Signal.
Session aims to provide anonymity, Signal aims to provide privacy.