Signal has announced new functionality in its upcoming beta releases, allowing users to transfer messages and media when linking their primary Signal device to a new desktop or iPad. This feature offers the choice to carry over chats and the last 45 days of media, or to start fresh with only new messages.
The transfer process is end-to-end encrypted, ensuring privacy. It involves creating a compressed, encrypted archive of your Signal data, which is then sent to the new device via Signal’s servers. Despite handling the transfer, the servers cannot access the message content due to the encryption.
With the introduction of a cross-platform archive format, Signal is also exploring additional tools for message transfer to new devices or restoration in case of device loss or damage. Users can begin testing this feature soon, with a wider rollout expected in the coming weeks.
The day security researchers say Signal is bad is the day I’ll stop using it. Until then, it’s the best option we have that both provides both great privacy and UX. The only thing that comes close - and it still has a ways to go - is SimpleX, but it’s basically a signal fork and it’s devs still support Signal.
SimpleX is not a Signal fork. It is it’s own protocol, service and app. It just utilizes Signal protocol for encryption like every good e2e encrypted messenger out there.
SimpleX allows anonymous identity, federation between servers and still a good UX.
You’re right! not sure why I thought SimpleX was a fork, it’s definitely just using the Signal protocol. Thanks for the clarification. That said, I would objectively state the UX needs some work to get to where Signal is at. SimpleX is oddly both easy to use but confusing and unreliable. I’ve been using it for a little over a year now and very often messages just stop getting delivered or received, forcing a fall back to Signal.
SimpleX is still very promising and more secure than Signal if your threat model necessitates it, but I continue to champion Signal for its ease of use, reliability, and security compared to more mainstream messengers.
Why not use SimpleX then? You mention it but provide no real reason to use Signal over SimpleX
Privacy and security is all about threat modeling. Signal meets 100% of the security needs of everyone I communicate with in my region of the world. There’s no need (especially now that you can hide phone numbers) for the added security benefits of SimpleX.
Additionally, my experience in using SimpleX over the last year+ is that message delivery is not reliable yet. This has forced me and the few people I’ve been testing it with to fall back to Signal multiple times. Because of these reliability issues and lacking UX, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it on others, knowing the tolerance level is low for message delivery failures and UX that isn’t yet up to par with other messaging apps.
I use Simplex and overall happy with it, but since it is so new, would rather not go all-in. It is VC-backed so might eventually enshittify to make a profit.
I thought it was open source? Presumably a FOSS project can’t go too bad.
Yeah, it absolutely is. But just being FOSS does not guarantee that its development would be forked in a sufficient way should something bad happen. Especially since they use Haskell, and I heard that it is not very common thus decreasing the survival chances. Sure hope it is cool enough to still warrant a fork, though.
Hey u still use signal I’m not saying to stop using it I’m simply saying just cos its better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better.
The signal encryption is provably secure that’s what the researchers analyse. The metadata is a separate story.
See: https://lemm.ee/comment/17831982
I’m not bagging on signal, here, since I use it too. But what about xmpp? It does e2ee, right?
XMPP has been an option for decades, if your contacts aren’t using it by now, they arent going to. And with communications tools, both parties have to agree on a tool. Even if one party doesn’t care about privacy or security.
Raw brute force security isn’t the point most of the time, and ease of use and simplicity of setup are going to be major factors in adoption. Signal is much easier to get started with for most people than XMPP.
Yeah. If the contact would be installing a whole new client to communicate with you anyway, why not make it an XMPP one? I got my mom to use it like this.
I did hear that the implementation of the encryption isn’t as good as in Signal (and most clients also use an older version of it), but from my understanding - not in any way critically so.
XMPP only does message encryption. Signal has spent tons of engineering time and effort to minimize the collection of metadata, not just encryption of message content.
Yeah, true! However, you also have to trust their server not to log what is available to them (including your whole social graph), while with XMPP you can SSH into your server and see that its retention is exactly as you expected. But yeah, the issue remains when interacting with other servers - tho even then there the data is more evenly distributed between different servers with different owners.
What about threema?