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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday April 05 2016, @11:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-about-beginning-to-beginning dept.

The title pretty much says it all. According to the report:

the service will encrypt all messages, phone calls, photos, and videos moving among [the devices].

Moxie Marlinspike is involved, so they have a chance of getting it right, and no one, even WhatsApp, will be able to know what you”re saying, texting, viewing, &c. (Unless, of course, your widget is running malware, or the opposition can get their mitts on it.)-: They claim this is available on nearly a billion devices—this is a really big deal.

takyon: Alternate links with no Wired paywall: TechCrunch, Washington Post, CNET, Reuters.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @01:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @01:40AM (#327886)

    (1) Signal depends on the google play store's closed source api, so while it isn't as untrustworthy it is still untrustworthy pick your poison

    (2) Patience Give it a few days for it to roll out

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 06 2016, @05:26AM

    by frojack (1554) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday April 06 2016, @05:26AM (#327935) Journal

    Did the Patience bit, with Signal.
    Invited several people, couple tried it, and then ended up deleting it because all their friends were on another service.
    Deleted it.

    Same with Proton Mail. It wouldn't inter-operate with normal GPG/PGP encrypted email. How hard would that have been to add? Deleted it.

    Same thing with Telegram. Nobody home.
    Deleted it.

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @10:34AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @10:34AM (#327996)

      None of that applies to WhatsApp which has a billion users.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @11:36PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @11:36PM (#328279)

        That second point was about working with PGP or GPG.

  • (Score: 2) by kadal on Wednesday April 06 2016, @03:19PM

    by kadal (4731) on Wednesday April 06 2016, @03:19PM (#328092)

    SIgnal only uses GCM to tell the device there is a message waiting for it on the server.

    • (Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday April 06 2016, @08:11PM

      by Pino P (4721) on Wednesday April 06 2016, @08:11PM (#328222) Journal

      If the intent is to cover Fire OS devices, which don't ship with the GCM library, one could try using ADM, Amazon's counterpart to GCM [amazon.com]. But that appears to be proprietary as well, as it works only on Fire OS devices, not all devices that can run Amazon Appstore. So what push mechanism should free software for Android be using instead? F-Droid lists alternatives to several proprietary libraries [f-droid.org] but not to GCM.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @09:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 06 2016, @09:38PM (#328251)

      That's true, but it misses the point.
      Signal makes a call into the GCM binary blob.
      Once it starts executing GCM code, there are no guarantees.

      It also means you have GCM's various services running on your phone, so even if Signal doesn't directly execute compromised code, your phone may still be compromised because GCM is sitting there in the background doing housekeeping.