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Apple has seemingly found a way to block Android’s new iMessage app (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 47 points 2 years ago (4 children)

This doesn't matter because everyone should be using signal.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It is a great app, but you cannot fit everyone into a single app.

    Examples why I personally sometimes don't want to use Signal:

    • no native desktop app, just a half-baked Electron based thing
    • no versions for systems other than Android and iOS
    • requires phone number (common argument)
    • hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use
    • when Signal foundation do something stupid, it would mean me having to migrate all friends yet another time

    Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    no versions for systems other than Android and iOS

    requires phone number (common argument)

    Ok, those are legitimate complaints, and I suspect they're related too. It would be nice to have a web client.

    hard to integrate bots, notifications and automatic services for the future use

    Personally, I'd say that's a feature.

    Signal is super giga great, the cons list is short, but if we want everyone to use something it has to be an universal protocol, not one app.

    To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement. Signal protocol

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    To be fair, signal is an open source protocol that anyone is free to implement.

    "The Signal Protocol (formerly known as the TextSecure Protocol) is a non-federated cryptographic protocol that provides end-to-end encryption for voice and instant messaging conversations[...]"

    Signal is an encryption protocol, not messaging protocol. My comment was about a messaging one like XMPP or Matrix.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    With notifications turned off

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Honestly for most people this is a crazy level of paranoia. The US government can know the metadata of my friends birthday party organization group.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    But why?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Because it's a significant inconvenience to disable those notifications over the very unlikely possibility that some bad actor will hoover that data up, much less do something nefarious with it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Ah, fair enough.

    I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Honestly I don't care if the government knows who's all going to the party. Someone's gonna post pictures of it anyhow. My garbage data is just more stuff for them to sort through.

    And I'm not gonna bother missing out on everything out of fear that the government will do what exactly with my data? The risk is so low for your average person.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I realize now that I misunderstood the objection, I thought you were saying that using signal was an unreasonable level of paranoia, but I can totally see why turning off notifications seems that way.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Why?

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surveil-push-notifications/

    The US government is forcing Google and Apple to share push notification data with them. Even if the content is not sent, the metadata alone can let them know who you are talking to and when using metadata correlation.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Signal push notifications don’t contain any useful plain text data (no content, no information about who sent you a message). AFAIK the only thing you would be leaking is that you received a message on signal, and frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    frankly that metadata is probably going to be leaked to the US government regardless of your use of push notifications.

    How?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Because your ISP and cell phone provider can tell you’re connecting to signal.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They can tell you connect to AWS when the Signal app fetches messages after a notification, they need to be able to peek into Amazon's servers to see you're connecting specifically to Signal

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    AWS is not a black box from the outside. The signal servers will have their own external IP addresses that you will connect with, your ISP could keep track of those connections. Furthermore, if you are worried that the government is using your ISP to spy, what makes you think that AWS wouldn’t be subject to that as well? Signal is absolutely a target in this respect too.

    Of course you can do various things to potentially hide your connection to signal, for instance by using tor, but in some sense there’s no guarantee if you don’t trust anything external to you. I’m personally not too worried about the “this person uses signal” metadata, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    There's not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers, if you don't explicitly set up static IP addresses you're going to share an IP pool

    https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/aws-ip-ranges.html#aws-ip-download

    Sure they could tap into AWS (but it would be even easier to try to get data from Google Play Store on who has it installed).

    Signal has native support for proxying via Tor in that case.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The signal servers will absolutely have public and static IP addresses. You would not be able to connect to them reliably if they could change at any time and you had to rely upon DNS updates to find the server. AWS is not magic.

    And yes, AWS has IP ranges allocated to it that they pull their public IPs from, that's all that link is talking about

    this page even provides the context that the IP ranges are available in order to identify which traffic is coming from AWS in order to allow / disallow it. Of course the AWS IP allocations won't tell you which IP is associated with which service (and indeed many IPs, particularly in the IPv6 space, are probably not in use at all).

    There’s not enough unique IP addresses to distinguish Signal servers

    Why? Yes, IPv4 address exhaustion is a thing, and yes AWS only has a slice of IPv4 addresses to give, but you absolutely can get static public facing IPs from AWS that will be unique to your server. You can even pay for an elastic IP so you can hold a particular address and move it between instances. There is no way Signal does not do this.

    Signal has native support for proxying via Tor in that case.

    Yes, though the use case is mostly for getting around censorship. Realistically if you don't want the government to know you're using Signal... Do you want them to know you use Tor?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    FYI, SNI is a thing (included encrypted SNI these days) and you absolutely can share an IP among many many unrelated domains.

    Domain lookups have a TTL (time to live) and they stop advertising IPs which they'll stop using a little bit before those IP addresses are taken out of rotation. That's why it doesn't break even when addresses keep changing.

    Signal have an active incentive NOT to use static IP addresses!

    https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007320291-Firewall-and-Internet-settings

    The underlying IPs are constantly changing, so it'd be hard to define accurate firewall rules.

    Realistically if you don't want the government to know you're using Signal... Do you want them to know you use Tor?

    Probably not, but you don't need to run the Tor client on the phone, you can run an anonymous proxy and point your phone at it.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    it's not the content in the noti, it's where your phone was connected when it received it

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