Do you seriously believe that ALL communication working through a single proprietary non-federated service would be a good thing? !
Let go of the idea of “good”, nothing is currently good. Everything is terrible. The only thing that’s “good” is a federated, open, and secure in practice protocol (I.e. not just for people who use it properly, but for people who is it full stop. Like HTTPS, for example.) Today, we don’t have that. Let’s work towards that. Let’s make it happen tomorrow.
But today: federated or secure, pick one. (See TFA)
Meanwhile , there are people , today, with a real need for encryption. (See TFA) A need that transcends our long term plans. These people look at what “techies” do and say, and they imitate it. That’s the way of the world.
It is currently PGP. That is not secure, in practice when used by those people (see TFA). Therefore, we need to stop using PGP, use Signal for now, until we have an actually good solution that is better than Signal and PGP.
That’s the summary of the article.
Nobody is talking about replacing all email. Nobody says the status quo is good. Heck, nobody is really arguing for Signal, as much as arguing against PGP, and signal winning by default. That’s all.
We’re all on the same side here, guys. It’s just a matter of temporary compromise.
I get that, and I actually agree with you on almost this whole comment. The problem of the temporary compromise on Signal is that I don't believe it is temporary. Signal is actually good enough to prevent the transition to the optimum. Being non-federated, Signal will always have a single point of failure, but this will get masked until it is eventually exploited.
There is not a federated messenger that provides the same security as Signal.
Your argument reduces to (for the user segment under question) “don’t use electronic because I value federation”.
I value it too but that seems incredibly selfish.
Actually, there are federated messengers that provide better security and privacy than Signal. Yes, XMPP ones. They might not have the same convenience yet, yes, because they are not tied to phone numbers, but don't even get me started by trying to say that tie to phone numbers is a plus.
Actually, this phone number thing is the main reason why I find it hard to suggest using Signal to anyone who's life is on the line.
As far as I can tell, sealed sender leaks less metadata than omemo currently does, which makes tor etc. Mostly irrelevant. Plus, I'm not going to fuck up signal, while I will misuse Tor.
This is an important question, because cryptographic repudiation and secured metadata prevent most of the dangers that I can think of, but I might be missing some.
One example (from the article) is other people accidentally replying to your encrypted messages in plain text, including the entire reply history.
This is what TFA is about. PGP is not safe for people who actually need encryption.
> Purchase a modern android or iOS device and install Signal. Your communications are now secure.
Given the security provided by signal, why do I need to understand the message authentication schemes, private key management, keyservers, versions, etc.
> The simplicity and strength of PGP is hard to beat. Riseup.net has an entire section mostly about OpenPGP:
Given that, in practice, basically no one's use of PGP provides security or privacy beyond what I get when using Gmail or Outlook, I beg to disagree.
How in god's name can you claim that a 6 page article describing the ~20-30 steps to correctly set up a keyring (oh and then keep up your opsec for the life of your communication because pgp doesn't provide forward secrecy and the protocol makes it possible to transfer plaintexts unencrypted) is simpler than "Install signal, and send messages"?
And yeah, Signal will detect that and inform the other side that "security number has changed". At which point they'll promptly confirm the new one, because they don't understand its purpose anymore so than private key management etc - because they simply installed the app from the store, and expect it to "just work".
Specifically, it will say "Your safety number has changed...This could either mean that someone is trying to intercept your communication, or that <other party> reinstalled signal."
Even for a layperson, if they have reason to be concerned about a powerful attacker that's reason enough to stop.
Something like Signal is OK for most people, particularly if they trust the Signal company. But when things get serious you have to:
1. Know what you are doing.
2. Keep the device that is doing the encrypting as separated from the rest of the world as possible.
If this is the kind of thing you're resorting to claiming, we're well beyond reasonable forms of argument, and so I think it's safe to say that you agree that signal is better.
No communication protocol works on an air gapped system, and a modern Android or iOS device is going to be secure enough that you really don't need to use a special device for your messaging.
The riseup article doesn't mention anything about using a special device for your secure messaging, so I'm not sure why you think it's so important all of a sudden.