Signal-iOS
Peergos
Signal-iOS | Peergos | |
---|---|---|
130 | 33 | |
10,451 | 1,858 | |
0.4% | 0.7% | |
10.0 | 9.4 | |
6 days ago | 1 day ago | |
Swift | Java | |
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 | GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
Signal-iOS
- Signal 7.0 released for iOS – Private Phone s
- Police Can Spy on Your iOS and Android Push Notifications
- Police used Cellebrite to break into my phone, how do I prevent this in the future?
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Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications -US senator
Fortunately, they did foresee this! The push notification only contains enough information to tell the phone that it should fetch the actual notification content from Signal's servers.
Here's a Signal dev talking about it on the Signal-Android GitHub: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/12961#iss...
And similarly for Signal-iOS: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/962#issuecomm...
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Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive
This was a nice, detailed read. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects):
> When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year.
> We are proud to pay people well. Our goal is to compensate our staff at as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit organization.
That said, I really dislike Signal for a few reasons. The first is what many people have already talked about very often — forcing to use a phone number to register. Since the SMS or call costs are quite high, Signal could adopt the iMessage approach to verification, which is having the user send an SMS to the service (this will cost the user some money depending on which country the SMS is sent to). This could be decided based on the country code so that the current SMS OTP model can coexist.
Signal is obstinate on a few aspects on user experience, more so on iOS/iPadOS. Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages. Even setting up a new device requires the old device to be in physical proximity to transfer the data. Signal does integrate with CallKit (to act like a phone app) and with Apple’s notification services, but refuses to allow the user to backup the data with a password to encrypt it.
Secondly, I found this paragraph in this post to be disingenuous:
> Such practices are often accompanied by “growth hacking” and engagement maximization techniques that leverage dark patterns to keep people glued to feeds and notifications. While Signal is also free to use, we reject this kind of manipulation, focusing instead on creating a straightforward interpersonal communications app. We also reject business models that incentivize such practices.
Signal on iOS/iPadOS wants the user to enable notifications and to share contacts. If notifications are disallowed and if contacts upload is disallowed, it will pester every few days about it. One might think this is a silly mistake that Signal isn’t aware of. But it was reported some years ago and Signal responded that it will not fix it because it believes this is the only way. [1] Not even an option where this is a toggle for those who want no notifications or don’t want to share contacts (Signal does have a toggle for contact joining notifications).
Signal is also not that reliable in delivering messages in a timely manner compared to other apps (the GitHub repo has many repetitive issues on this topic over all these years).
Finally, since Signal has poorer UX in general, which isn’t an easy or cheap thing to handle, I use it only with less than a handful of people who I know and who use it.
I’d donate occasionally so that Signal can continue to exist, but I don’t feel like supporting it every month with all these issues, some of which look like Signal showing me the middle finger.
[1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-72...
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Telegram raises $210M through bond sales
I also use both extensively and I agree, Telegram has the best UX of any messaging app. The desktop app is QT I think so it feels very snappy compared to Signal's electron app.
Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS
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App crashes on open | iOS 16.5 | will stop donation
Yeah I was able to find a few tasks that might be similar to your issue, though I don't know the exact details how the app behaves in your case, as in if you get error message or something like in this issue, or if it just closes on open like in this issue comment. Regardless, the generated crash report from the phone itself is probably good to add in your email to support (which is different from the debug log, just to specify in case you have been sending only that, here's a link for more details).
- I have absolutely had it with Signal (lack of basic backup options)
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Rewriting the Messenger codebase for a faster, smaller, simpler messaging app
My bet is on "object-oriented obfuscation" and bloat caused by "modern" coding styles. Looking through the Signal source you linked to, I see tons of the former. There is an absolutely insane amount of boilerplate-looking code in here, for example: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/tree/main/Signal/src...
I don't know Swift or the iOS UI API, but a lot of that code seems to be manually creating and positioning UI elements and otherwise implementing UI functionality that I'd expect the OS to handle. It's a lot of code that should really be data (arrays, structures).
To offer a huge contrast, a long time ago I wrote an MSNP chat client in pure Win32, and it was around 2kloc. The binary was 24KB. Of course it only supported contacts, presence, and text messaging, but I still can't see features like audio/video or the crypto that Signal has needing 100x more, especially if they use OS functionality for much of them.
- Camera quality during video call
Peergos
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Tim Bray's De-Google Project
A good Dropbox alternative is Peergos (founder here). Peergos is an E2EE P2P storage, sharing and application protocol. Fully open source, including the server, self-hostable, no VCs.
https://peergos.org
- Skiff Is Joining Notion
- I Moved My Blog from IPFS to a Server
- Filecoin Foundation Successfully Deploys IPFS in Space
- Peergos: A P2P, secure file storage, social network and application protocol
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Amino – The Public IPFS DHT Is Getting a Facelift
You can do that with peergos [1]- mount a peergos folder locally using FUSE. Or login to the web interface and share easily and privately.
[1] https://github.com/peergos/peergos
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The problem with federated web apps
You might be interested in the p2p design of Peergos. You sign up to Peergos[0]. Your initial server is just responsible for storing your data (although you can run as many live mirrors as you like), and clients verify all updates. You can automatically move server (by running a command) and all your data is moved, and old links continue to work, and you keep your social graph and identity.
You can also log in through any instance, including localhost. Links also work on any server because they include a capability to the content in the link.
This is the beauty of content addressing plus public key based addressing.
[0] https://peergos.org
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Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU
Totally agree! Shameless self promotion: have a look a Peergos - https://github.com/peergos/peergos
Our tech book might be a better starting point for this group: https://book.peergos.org
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Enigma: A simple cross-platform encrypted filesystem in Golang
https://peergos.org
https://book.peergos.org
https://github.com/peergos/peergos
Features:
* audited by Cure53
* protects metadata (directory structure, file name and properties, file sizes, social graph)
* fine grained capability-based access control
* built-in social media
* sandboxed 3rd-party apps: e.g. word doc viewer, calendar, text editor, games etc.
* FUSE bindings
* CLI
* cross platform
* browser client
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Ask HN: What do you do for online privacy?
I use Peergos[0] for E2EE storage, doc editing, sharing media, calendar, kanban boards and social media. (Disclaimer: I also work on Peergos).
[0] https://peergos.org
What are some alternatives?
mollyim-android - Enhanced and security-focused fork of Signal.
slate - WIP - We're building the place you go to discover, share, and sell files on the web.
simplex-chat - SimpleX - the first messaging network operating without user identifiers of any kind - 100% private by design! iOS, Android and desktop apps 📱!
CoreDB - Take back control of your data with a self-hosted network node for your digital identity. The IndiView app works with this node allowing you to share contact details, photos, and videos only with the people you specify.
LibreSignal - LibreSignal • The truly private and Google-Free messenger for Android.
ipfs-chat - Real-time P2P messenger using go-ipfs pubsub. TUI. End-to-end encrypted texting & file-sharing. NAT traversal.
Signal-Desktop - A private messenger for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
web3.storage - DEPRECATED ⁂ The simple file storage service for IPFS & Filecoin
wire-ios - 📱 Wire for iOS (iPhone and iPad)
solid - Solid - Re-decentralizing the web (project directory)
Unigram - Telegram for Windows
skynet-cli - a lightweight cli to interact with Skynet