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FabHK

Can everyone just please install Wire [1]:

* free,

* end-to-end encrypted

* text and voice chat

* with pictures and group chat and what have you,

* using the Signal/OpenWhisper protocol,

* with desktop and web clients,

* open source (GPLv3, and on github [2]),

* signup with phone number or email,

* based in Switzerland,

* what else can you ask for?

Signal itself of course is pretty good, secure (recommended by Ed Snowden, famously), but not quite as fully featured it seems to me.

[1] https://wire.com

[2] https://github.com/wireapp

EDIT: added license, web client

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> * using the Signal/OpenWhisper protocol,

Developer of Signal says:

> Wire does not use Signal Protocol. They used some of our code, but created a protocol of their own devising that we do not recommend.

— moxie, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12149642

Very interesting, wasn't aware of that.

I have free choice on which messenger to use, but no choice at all on which messenger to reach my friends. And sadly I know I'd loose all the less close long distance friends if I refused to talk about private things on facebook all-together.

It was hard enough to make some people switch to telegram, but at least some of my frequent contacts arrived there. On signal I've been lonely ever since, no Idea how to make people switch again. For PGP I lost my passphrase because no one ever supported it and OTR doesn't work with my phone and nobody uses it...

Yeah, I use PGP routinely, but really mostly as a way to get servers to encrypt SQL backups and things. So my own system admin purposes without a lot of PGP-encrypted communication with anyone.

> I have free choice on which messenger to use, but no choice at all on which messenger to reach my friends

A problem indeed, that's why I'm begging everyone to install it...

Tried to use Wire recently. On both the "native" app and the web one, it takes from 2-5 seconds for my message to appear in the window.

I wanted to use it instead of Hangouts, but I can't if it's 3x slower. They need to do something about it, and they need to do it soon. This has happened since they launched the desktop client, but at first I thought I'd just give them sometime to fix the initial bugs. But it's still as slow as ever.

My guess is their HTML5 app code sucks, so if I were them I'd scrap it and start over with a higher-performance alternative.

Give it another try in a day or two (we're close to a small performance release). Browser based encryption has performance issues but at least now we're showing the sent message immediately (in grey while it's sending, in black when sent).

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