this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Privacy

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Those are outside Signal's scope and depend entirely on your OS and your (or your sysadmin's) security practices (eg. I'm almost sure in linux you need extra privileges for those things on top of just read access to the user's home directory).

The point is, why didn't the Signal devs code it the proper way and obtain the credentials every time (interactively from the user or automatically via the OS password manager) instead of just storing them in plain text?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They're arguing a red herring. They don't understand security risk modeling, argument about signals scope let's their broken premise dig deeper. It's fundamentally flawed.

It's a risk and should be mitigated using common tools already provided by every major operating system (ie. Keychain).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

"Highways shouldn't have guard rails because if you hit one you've already gone off the road anyway."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

You'd need write access to the user's home directory, but doing something with desktop notifications on modern Linux is as simple as

dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" | grep --line-buffered "member=Notify\|string" | [insert command here]

Replacing the Signal app for that user also doesn't require elevated privileges unless the home directory is mounted noexec.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Feel free to submit a pull request. We could use your help.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't see the reasoning in your answer (I do see its passive-aggressiveness, but chose to ignore it).

I asked "why?"; does your reply mean "because lack of manpower", "because lack of skill" or something else entirely?

In case you are new to the FOSS world, that being "open source" doesn't mean that something cannot be criticized or that people without the skill (or time!) to submit PRs must shut the fu*k up.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago