You can use something like signal-cli and the desktop app for basically the same thing.

You know, I've been thinking...

Signal's end to end encrypted, yes... But we do the key exchange process through Signal's servers, don't we? How do we know they don't store copies of the keys? Does the client have a mechanism in place to make sure the man in the middle doesn't do anything funny? I haven't actually delved very deep into the code, but it sounds like I should.

And... Sure, their server code may be open source too, but nobody guarantees that that's the code actually running on their servers.

My thinking also. Corps/gov can also link identity to emails of course, but it's much harder due to email aliasing and the ease of new account creation.

Mobile phone numbers are far more personal - people generally only have one or two max and generally keep them for very long periods.

If its the true reason, it would make Signal not much better than Meta's WhatsApp, which gleans value from its users by noting metadata tying users to one-another by who they contact, when, and how often to extrapolate social circles and relationships. But Meta goes further in I think also tracking location, etc, and obviously has much more personal data in the linked phone numbers of many FB/Insta accounts.. Signal could potentially be doing some of that to a degree with IP geolocation... Not great.

TLDR: its the one thing stopping me from trusting Signal entirely as a benevolent actor - they want and 'need' your personal phone number. I use it still, as its the best available mainstream option, but I mention this concern when recommending it to those seeking privacy.

They will also likely require a captcha done using webview, exposing many hardware identifiers to Google.

They will once again claim this is to protect against spammers and not to track people.

Signal is obviously a honeypot, as it never would have taken this long to release a desktop App not linked to a phone if it weren't a honeypot, and they still are requiring a phone number. Any "privacy" company that adopts real privacy features only after huge pushback from the privacy community years later is likely a honeypot. Look at "tuta," which a former government worker testified under oath is a honeypot: no accepting of Monero ever. Finally, when called a honeypot, they make a deal with a third party to accept Monero.

Signal is probably releasing this because whoever owns the honeypot wants to link desktops to phone numbers, allowing the desktops to be hacked with something like Pegasus as well.

Does anyone remember that accidental LinkedIn post showing all the Apps that one company was able to hack? And it showed WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc... And it was always based on a phone? And this photo was accidentally posted online before being scrubbed? I forget the details on it and if anyone remembers, please post about it to jog my memory. Well, now perhaps that group wants to hack laptops too.

I don't believe this is anything other than more bullshit. It wouldn't surprise me if they also blocked VOIP for registration. Fuck Signal.

Thanks for those pointers. I like the idea of an official CLI for instance to perform automatic regular encrypted backups, or the possibility of interfacing messages to other systems. But I presume they'd have to be careful to avoid opening the door to automated messaging spam bots.

Oh cool, I'll give this a try, I see it's on IOS also. Cheers

Why do I need to register an account?

If mullvad can let me click one to generate an "account" that receives payment, signal can figure out how to do the same with a bit of text.

It seems the headline has bad wording. It's not a new version of Signal.

Last I checked the android app only works as a primary device, and the desktop app doesn't run on android, did that change?

Well, I mean it can take a 4K video down scale it to reasonable sizes to share with your chatgroup.

But everything else, yeah.