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Comment by joshgachnang | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of comments here about Signal being better than Wickr, but little information on why yet. A quick Google search didn't give me any decent answers, so can anyone fill in why Signal is better?

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Signal is open source https://github.com/signalapp

Even their server code?

Yes! https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

But how can you be sure there's no additional code being run on their server?

It doesn't matter as the messages are end to end encrypted and the way it is done is continously verified by multiple leading/up-and-coming cryptographers as far as I understand.

This is the huge advantage that Signal has over mail, the default mode in Telegram and pretty much anything there is: it does matter if NSA, FSB, MI5, Mossad, Google and Facebook all have root on a server that all the traffic passes through. To the best our knowledge - long as they don't compromise one of the endpoints - the only thing they'll get is metadata and the only thing they can do is disrupting the service.

But Signal requires your phone number to work.

Also, Wickr is open source: https://github.com/WickrInc

Wickr is not open source. There is a review-only-licensed copy of a C-language implementation of their encryption protocol on Github, and little else.

"Open-source"... but don't you dare actually try modifying the code. Moxie Marlinspike (speaking for the Signal project) has stated that forks of the client aren't authorized to use the official servers -- and since there's no federation, that makes modified clients effectively unusable.

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

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