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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 18 2020, @05:47PM   Printer-friendly
from the sending-a-signal-to-use-signal dept.

The Signal messaging progam is now the favored messaging program for the European Commission instead of proprietary messaging programs. The decision was made last month, in February, to prefer it for both internal and external communication.

The Signal open source software is written in JavaScript, TypeScript and CSS and published on GitHub under a General Public Licence v3.0[*] (GPLv3). In particular, the clients are published under the GPLv3 license, while the server code is published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. The software contains the following features:

  • Voice and video calls to other Signal users;
  • Text messages, files, voice notes, pictures, GIFs, and video messages to other Signal users;
  • Group messaging;
  • Set deletion timers for messages on both the sender and the received devices.

All communications to other Signal users are free of charge and automatically end-to-end encrypted.

[*] Link in source was malformed (lacked URL). Updated to point to official GNU document. --martyb


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  • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:19PM (2 children)

    by bart9h (767) on Wednesday March 18 2020, @07:19PM (#972880)

    Same here.

    I have a dozen people on my Signal contact list, but I actually talk to just two of them over Signal (my wife, and a nerdy friend that moved to Seattle).

    It's very difficult to get rid of Watsapp, as there are not only lots of friends, but even numerous services that use it. For instance, I book appointments with my dentist via Whatsapp.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18 2020, @09:25PM (#972919)

    I have started using two phones (actually, I already had two phones, but the second one is for app deployments testing only. I just added a prepaird SIM card to that one, to get a phone number).

    I've now "caved" and installed WhatsApp on my secondary phone. If my friends want a direct response, they know to use signal or SMS. When they message me on WhatsApp, they know I won't read it quickly. They seem to accept it.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheRaven on Thursday March 19 2020, @09:25AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Thursday March 19 2020, @09:25AM (#973105) Journal

    For instance, I book appointments with my dentist via Whatsapp.

    Don't they have a phone or web site as an alternative? I've never seen a business where WhatsApp was the only contact mechanism, just the most convenient one (and I'm happy to put up with a small inconvenience to avoid Facebook products). If you are in the EU or California, then you can ask to see a copy of their compliance document indicating why data sharing with Facebook is required to offer the service, that they are informing their customers that they share data with Facebook. For extra fun, ask them how much they are willing to indemnify customers for, in monetary terms, for data sharing with Facebook.

    --
    sudo mod me up