10mo ago

Signal and Threema want nothing to do with WhatsApp

www.androidpolice.com /signal-threema-nothing-to-do-with-whatsapp-eu/

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Signal refusing to federate with WhatsApp, even though meta says they will still use the signal protocol is the most bone headed decision I have ever seen from them.
There no better chance to break the network effect than this.
- Meta could easily have the WhatsApp client upload decryption keys to their servers without any notification to the user.
  
  Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it's own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.
  
  What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the line protocol. Each client has encryption key pairs. The public key of the first party shares it with the other parties, and vice versa. If it's encrypted with the public key then the private key can decrypt it.
  If Meta gets the private keys, they can decrypt any message they want independent of whatever protocol is being used.
  
  But aren't these key pairs generated per session and/or per contact? So once you switch to a more secure / auditable client this only matters when communicating with people on whatsapp. But they presumably have a backdoor in their app for the NSA anyway.
  
  No body said it's going to have the same level of security, but that still doesn't mean that should just give up on it, just put a small icon indicating this is a WhatsApp user.
- Yeah that sucks, Signal is my preferred app and I wish I could get rid of WhatsApp without having to convert everyone.
- Yeah this is very stupid. But I never liked Signal anyway.
  Is there a matrix protocol based app that is planning to "federate"?
  
  Realistically there is going to be a bridge which you can either self host or use to federate matrix.
  
  Every Matrix protocol server, excluding some experimental or internal for a company ones, are federating? And it's not an app as you can choose an app, the protocol defines client<>server spec too.
  
  I mean "federate" with whatsapp. Apparently there is a bridge https://github.com/tulir/whatsmeow
  
  Okey

234 comments