On its 10th anniversary, Signal’s president wants to remind you that the world’s most secure communications platform is a nonprofit. It’s free. It doesn’t track you or serve you ads. It pays its engineers very well. And it’s a go-to app for hundreds of millions of people.
You can use a username only for finding and adding friends, you only need the phone number to create an account. That’s probably because Signal started as an alternative to Messages (or whatever it was called back then), so you could send SMS if you wanted, or secure messages to friends w/ Signal. The whole point was to be a gentle transition from SMS to private messaging. However, they eventually dropped the SMS feature, but it seems they kept the phone number as username thing.
It kind of sucks, but I think that’s a reasonable limitation since the vast majority of people using this service will have a phone number. You could probably even sign up for a free trial of something (e.g. Google Fi) to sign up for Signal, set up the username, and then drop the phone number service. I don’t know if there are any problems with this, but I don’t think they do anything with your phone number after everything is set up.
I think another reason they use a phone number is that it can mitigate issues with people or bots creating hundred of accounts maybe
But there are plenty of other services that don’t require a phone number that also seem to mitigate that issue, so while it may be a convenient option, it’s hardly the only option.
Yeah. And I don’t fault them for this route. I just with I could sign up without a phone number. Maybe the username thing is a predecessor to allowing usernam-only registration in the future.
Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else’s computer w/o having to install something.
I don’t know what direction they’re going, but I’m honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.
Having web logon would mean they would need to hold the decryption key in some form (or have a weak decryption key, your credentials), so, while convenient, I think it would degrade security and possibly privacy. Unless you mean to receive new messages, the way the desktop app works?
Not if they used WebAssembly to do all the decryption locally.
I can’t tell if you’re joking haha
Why would they be joking? There’s really not a big difference between how their mobile and desktop apps work and what’s possible in the web. It can fetch the keys from my computer or my phone just like their other apps work, and store the keys and whatnot encrypted in temporary local storage, just like on the phone. WebAssembly could allow them to share the code and retain similar performance.
I honestly don’t see an issue here. If they need help, I’d be happy to lend a hand.
Why? C++ does wasm and I’m pretty sure the signal client is already written in C++. It definitely wouldn’t be something that could be pulled off quickly, but the ability to securely run code like this is kind of the whole point of wasm as I understand it, no?
I’d be more interested in allowing more than one Android device at a time like MySudo. They let you link Windows with a phone so I wouldn’t think it would be too hard to implement.
Big concern with your number being recycled and a new user receiving the signal activation key on that number.
You need to enter your Signal Pin, otherwise you will get removed from all groups etc
Sure, and I think that would send a message to all of your contacts that a new account is using that number, but I’m honestly not sure. If you have an active account (i.e. on a desktop or something), I think you can just change your number if that happens (i.e. get another temp number).
It’s certainly more convenient if you use a longer-term number, but I think it’s feasible with a throwaway number. Once your account is set up, Signal doesn’t need your number for anything if you disable publishing that.
It does send a “your safety number has been updated with user” message. But not as an automated message. Only when a new signal thread is started.
Haven’t tried when only logged in to desktop and changing devices / numbers so I can’t speak to that.