Submitted 1 week ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to technology@lemmy.zip
Privacy-focused messaging app Signal is adding new features for video calls, including links, reactions and a calls tab, in a bid to pose as an alternative to Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
Great. Now can we get text messaging back so that it’s possible to convince people to use it again?
Security risk, by their own admissal.
No, that was an excuse. They claimed people could mistakenly send unencrypted messages. Easily resolved by changing the color of conversations and send buttons to flag SMS as insecure.
It was really about moving development resources to features like this one. Unfortunately, it makes it much harder to convince people to use (or keep using) Signal, meaning more messages that go by insecure messaging instead.
Is that a US thing? I don‘t know anyone who still uses SMS. Or do you mean something else?
Nailed it. Yes, it’s a US thing.
The U.S. lagged adoption of SMS compared to Europe (relatively high prices for texting in the early days while relatively low prices for calling in the same era) but now SMS/RCS/iMessage are the dominant mobile messaging method in the U.S. There’s much lower adoption of third-party services like WhatsApp compared to the rest of the world because basically everyone has those services already on their phone, they don’t have to sign up for a service that not everyone might use, and it’s basically free on every phone in the U.S. now.
And an alternative to Discord?
A chatroom isn’t hard to replace, but the video/voice calling on Discord is what keeps people there.
Signal should evolve to have discord-like channels and servers. I think it’d be brilliant.
Please don’t.
I am aware what Discord is for and respect it but it’s ectic to be in a Discord room. Signal does not need it.
Yes they should. Having business and gaming communities using it also helps the journalists and activists that use it to stay safe by normalizing its use
Fuck discord.
Jitsi is a open-source video platform you can self-host.
I don’t trust anything going through another company’s servers. Zoom had to backpedal when it was found feeding content to AI… Imagine talking about your company business secrets and now some dickwad are Zoom reads the transcripts and steals it.
Is Signal video and call not end to end encrypted like their messaging?
That’s fine and all, but if I use a product (especially a privacy focused one) for my personal communication, I do not want to use it for work. A proper separation between work and personal is too important to me.
So they just added a few buttons?
Call links are a lot more work than “a few buttons”
That’s not really the best example to prove a lot of work. Call links are actually pretty easy from a conceptual standpoint:
Make a small website to accept https://join.my.website/?callid=…&password=…
Have the website redirect to: myapp:join/:callid/?password=…
Have your app register as a myapp protocol handler.
When a myapp:join/:callid/ URL is visited, open the same window that would be used normally for joining a call by ID.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 week ago
Until you can manage a “group of people” (your company), and give them permissions to “rooms” (chats/channels) by group, Signal can’t compete.
Administrators aren’t going to one-off everything, or rely on users to do it when there is no admin visibility.
Getting admin tools right with an encrypted service is key here.
rumba@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
TBF, the level of privacy afforded at work will never be usable in most companies.
At scale, it’s a security nightmare. PII, HIPAA, PCI, If OPSEC can’t at the very least go back and see what happened in private channels, it’s going to be a hard sell.
fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com 1 week ago
Yea I’ve done work in Privacy focused companies, and they love this stuff, but everyone else who isn’t a journalist… Probably not.
You mention HIPPA, and the interesting one with that (to me) is offices don’t track conversation already, so it probably wouldnt impact situations like that, but Signal chat most certainly would. Can’t report a violation if you can’t see it.