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European Commission to Use Open Source Messaging Service Signal

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

canopic jug writes:

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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Original Submission

• Re:re Great (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday March 19 2020, @09:55AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Thursday March 19 2020, @09:55AM (#973109) Journal

  I consider Signal an adequate compromise. It does have a centralised component, which is not ideal as a single point of failure, but has very little privacy impact. When they had requests for data from the FBI, the only thing that they were able to present was the last time the person in question had logged into the service. Messages are encrypted and padded. They can tell (but promise not to record) the first time you send a message to someone, but after that you have their public key and so you don't need to identify yourself to the service to be able to send the second message (you leave it anonymously, signed with your key then encrypted with the recipient's and the recipient grabs it and decrypts it, discarding the message if it doesn't have a valid signature).

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  sudo mod me up

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+3
  Interesting=1, Informative=2, Total=3
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5