Here’s what he said in a post on his telegram channel:
🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷
🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺
🕵️♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡
🕵️♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤
🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪
Original post: https://t.me/durov/274
Looks like a push to discredit Signal right now. While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole). The 3rd “emoji-point” is quite an accusation, and I would love to see any evidence of this kind of thing, that didn’t result from the cops unlocking a defendants phone, or having infiltrated a chat.
Agreed. But it is worth mentioning that XMPP with OMEMO seems to be the current gold standard - runs almost everywhere, tons of available (free) servers, secure end to end messages, and fully auditable public source code.
I have used xmpp a lot, but I can’t really recommend it to friends and family as a secure messenger. There are too many compatibility issues between clients and servers. If your friend is on a client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols, then you can’t have a secure chat. Basically there is too much user knowledge and effort required at this time, for xmpp to be a good, secure, general use chat. I very much look forward to this changing. I also really like Matrix, but it is still a bit rough around the edges as of my last check.
I use xmpp all the time. Biggest hurdle for certain fam/friends using xmpp has been certain android builds (samsung) and ios interfering with timely notifications. User knowlege is not a problem as I can recommend the apps that are compatible encryption protocols with mine.
That’s great, and I’m happy it’s working out for you. It’s still kind of a bummer that this open protocol ends up fragmented across all those clients and severs. I’ve met other Linux enthusiasts online, connected with them via xmpp only to find we can’t encrypt our chats. Neither of us wants to give up our preferred client for various reasons, so we have a non-working situation.
Hmm, I see. But isn’t there an obvious solution to this? One of you just run two different clients side-by-side?
Sure there are workarounds, but every one of them erases a bit of convenience or is at odds with the benefits of federation. Again, I think XMPP is great, but I wish it was better. As it is now, it doesn’t fully meet my needs better than Signal does.
Yea, I hear you. I use both.