Privacy

31918 readers

959 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Signal's servers are no longer open source for anti-spam reasons. (signal.org)

submitted 3 years ago by ramberry@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

We build Signal in the open, with publicly available source code for our applications and servers. To keep Signal a free global communication service without spam, we must depart from our totally-open posture and develop one piece of the server in private: a system for detecting and disrupting spam campaigns. Unlike encryption protocols, which are designed to be provably secure even if everyone knows how they work, spam detection is an ongoing chore for which there is no concrete resolution and for which transparency is a major disadvantage.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Yujiri@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Honestly I think this is not concerning and this post title is misleading. It's open source software that calls a closed source library. jimio's argument makes sense.

[–] tmpod 5 points 3 years ago (1 children)

I agree. The vast majority of the server is still open, which, even though it isn't ideal, is still good compared to the mainstream services. It's also worth noting (as other people have), that Signal is centralized, so you're already putting all your trust onto Signal, even if the server and client code is 100% open.

[–] lemmy_check_that@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 years ago (1 children)

Well you are only trusting that they will deliver your messages right, all their clients are completely open-source and everything is end-to-end encrypted on the client. Even if they wanted, they could not read your messages, and this would also be true even if their servers were 100% closed-source.

[–] tmpod 2 points 3 years ago

Good point too.

[–] gmate8@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 years ago

exactly. and understandable.