SimpleX Chat Ltd is a seed stage startup with a lot of user growth in 2022-2023, and a lot of exciting technical and product problems to solve to grow faster.
Run by a VC funded for-profit company. That really should tell you all you need to know. Sorry, but no thanks.
Upvoted bc VC eventually means enshittifiication. But with xz getting back-doored recently, what is the middle ground that keeps these things sustainable financially and operationally?
As opposed to whom? Are investors in VC startups less compromised or more? What are the incentives in either case? Who do you trust to be competent and/or incompetent enough to compromise it without you noticing it? Who is likely to change a project that was well intentioned first after the fact? In what ways?
I wonder what that looks like fleshed out a little, though. Is that a mandatory or voluntary payment? And by paying for what they use is that per message or per month like a subscription?
Either way, if one needs to communicate without the use of identifiers like a phone number (afaik signal requires one) I trust Session. SimpleX features cool new tech but let’s wait until it matures
this is a wrong take for a few reasons, if we're talking about trust.
Also, Signal literally was taking money from the CIA for a decade and also is based in the US anyway, and no one hardly said a word 🤣🤣 "Privacy" activists are a joke lmao. Also signal made a crypto coin and took away features like SMS, but of course they get a free pass for that too. Makes you wonder.
SimpleX is fully open source, verifiable, and audited. If there are changes that are bad, the community will talk about them, and at worst it can be forked
SimpleX has made it clear that they dont want you to trust them. It's decentralised and anyone can run their own relay, and the servers are designed prevent correlation. They also make it very easy to use TOR and multiple circuits. This is contrary to the inferior Signal model where you just have to trust that the centralized Signal org isnt leaking your phone and IP to the feds.
moving towards a decentralised, open, and trustless world is better for everyone. In this kind of system, I really dont give a damn where they are getting their money from, as long as they arent putting crap in the software, and if they do, we will all know about it. But so far they have shown that they are committed to extreme security and privacy, and they obviously arent trying to appeal to normies, so i doubt they would ever even try to put VC-pushed garbage in.
If you want a good app, you will need funding from somewhere. Look at apps like Session that arent funded well. They suck. So I'd rather SimpleX be funded by a VC instead of by the feds like Signal, as long as everything stays open, free, trustless, and decentralised
Exactly what I thought; if the technology is so decentralized does it make sense to care so much about who finances the project?
Like if one instance of lemmy was funded by Microsoft, we could easily use another one and block it, right?
yeah it's like TOR. it's public knowledge that it was both made and is funded by the US Gov, but we all see it as the standard of anonymity online because everything is open, trustless, and decentralized.
originally it was. but it was given to the larger community as an open project, because they realized that without public use, it would be useless.
There is endless discussion on whether tor software is backdoored or not, but I severely doubt this with all the eyes on the open source code
There is also debate on how many nodes are owned by the feds, but the largest estimates at the peak were about 20%ish iirc. i doubt it's a significant number enough to worry about, from what I've seen.
tldr I'd recommend to look up all the opinions online yourself.
Usernames exist for a reason, especially in chat apps. Not having usernames is only going to severely limit your target demographic. And if nobody uses your app does it's benefits even matter?
I don't need people to be hyper-privacy minded.
But just a little bit at least. I'm not expecting everybody to self host a matrix server and use element and run self hosted services on their own RPI.
If I want a simple chat protocol, I use IRC or XMPP. These are battle proven by time.
If I want a really secure protocol, I use Signal or Matrix. These are endored by many security experts who their shit when they assess protocols, crypto and solutions.
SimpleX may be a good alternative for anonymous communication, but there is plenty options out there. Considering how many startups are funded by cheap VC money, and the business model is always "provide something awesome, and once you have enough traction - enshittify it" makes me very weary of investing myself in new solutions no matter how open-source the are.
I may sound bitter and skeptic, but I've seen this pattern has been repeated many times over.
This is way more of a self-promo blog post than an article, but it's also along the lines of Signal or Apple announcing their own successes in cryptography.
I also appreciate their clarification that post-quantum encryption is a guess, not a sure thing. Actually, they're much more blunt than that:
post-quantum cryptography can be compared with a remedy against the illness that nobody has, without any guarantee that it will work. The closest analogy in the history of medicine is snake oil.
Good on them for saying that.
But then on expounding with minimal jargon... At least, as far as explaining cryptography can be done that way.
The guy literally printed the algorithm in a book to show that the first amendment protects encryption math. Luckily the justices at the time were definitely pro first amendment. Unlucky that they used first amendment to justify citizens United
post-quantum cryptography can be compared with a remedy against the illness that nobody has, without any guarantee that it will work. The closest analogy in the history of medicine is snake oil.
Good on them for saying that.
A "remedy against the illness that nobody has" is a good analogy, but it is important to note that it's an illness which there is a consensus we are likely to eventually have and a remedy that there is good reason to believe will be effective.
It isn't a certainty that there will ever be a cryptographically relevant post-quantum computer, and it also isn't a certainty that any of the post-quantum algorithms (as with most classical cryptography) which exist today won't turn out to be breakable even by yesterday's computers. The latter point is why it's best to deploy post-quantum cryptography in a hybrid construction such that the system remains secure even if one of the primitives turns out to be breakable.
That said, I think it is totally wrong to call PQC snake oil because that term in the context of cryptography specifically means that a system is making dishonest claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_oil_(cryptography)
I didn't post the part after the "snake oil" quote because my post was getting a bit long but yeah, they basically agree with you. I also get mild ESL vibes (the phrasing on the title is a little off, and I believe a couple of the developers are Russian-born) so I don't think they were trying to be too inaccurate.
I should've made clear in my comment that, aside from a bit of imperfect English and incorrect use of the term snake oil, I think this is an excellent blog post.
I saw a user’s hash just this week — it was in a ransom note. They required their victims to sign up for the service and text a code to their userhash to kick off sending the attacker cryptocurrency so they’d send a decryption key and not make stolen data public.
Other than that use case, it hasn’t picked up many users that I’m aware of.
I don't trust for profit venture capital funding, if you want to see where it ends up just Look at how telegram or wickr transitions from being "open" and free to getting stripped of features only to have them become paid only and the wickr sold off to Amazon and ended all non business support...the business model for making a profit off chat applications is bad for users.
Also now that signal supports usernames I have no reason to use anything else even for people I wouldn't want having my real number.
Agreed, this is why I am slowly moving away from Signal. The moment they announced putting in a wallet along their own crypto, was the sign for me to leave.
I've been a fan of SimpleX for a while now. Privacy comes at the cost of convenience, and SimpleX is the most private messaging platform according to this spreadsheet.
In F-Droid, after disabling all anti-features, SimpleX still is listed. Signal never will be due to connecting to GCM or Firebase. Molly is an improvement for Signal but not for untrackable privacy like SimpleX from using a different ID with each individual SimpleX contact.
Not to mention, SMS was removed because it’s inherently insecure at every level. Keeping it would mean there’d be an insecure side channel into the protocol. While it’s a useful onboarding mechanism, it can also be abused — and was. So eventually it got removed to prefer privacy and security over convenience.
@SolarPunker I've not heard of anyone who does "not like" it? Many don't know about it maybe. I can't think of anything I've seen against it as it ticks most of the boxes for excellent privacy and has been very usable for me.
agreed, i liked that session had out of the box alternative routing, but a basic vpn + simplex's new private routing knocks down one of my final gripes with the app.
although, i guess my only other gripe now is that using your simplex profile on both desktop and phone is either hard as shite or totally impossible.
¹ Repudiation in SimpleX Chat will include client-server protocol from v5.7 or v5.8. Currently it is implemented but not enabled yet, as its support requires releasing the relay protocol that breaks backward compatibility.
² Post-quantum cryptography is available in beta version, as opt-in only for direct conversations. See below how it will be rolled-out further.
Some columns are marked with a yellow checkmark:
when messages are padded, but not to a fixed size.
when repudiation does not include client-server connection. In case of Cwtch it appears that the presence of cryptographic signatures compromises repudiation (deniability), but it needs to be clarified.
when 2-factor key exchange is optional (via security code verification).
when post-quantum cryptography is only added to the initial key agreement and does not protect break-in recovery.
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