If you use Signal messenger, you have to trust the Signal foundation, which uses Amazon’s AWS for the cloud. So you’re trusting CIA military contractors.

Signal supposedly hides metadata or who talks to whom, with a system called “sealed sender”, where it puts who sent it inside the encrypted packet. However, in a paper published by NDSS, headed by Ian Martiny, these university researchers found that Signal’s “read receipts”, which lets the sender know that the receiver got the message can be used as an attack vector to analyze traffic because it sends data packets right back to the sender. In as few as 5 messages, their team identified both participants in a conversation with a replicated version of Signal’s client.

The US Military funded Signal and Briar’s development, but yet they use XMPP. XMPP is often neglected even though it’s the most secure, private, fast, and reliable framework for end-to-end encrypted messengers.

In this brand new animated video, it discusses how XMPP works, and why it’s the best: video.simplifiedprivacy.com/xmpp/

Some will curse me out for posting this as they prefer the commercially backed project Matrix, but the Element Matrix client is objectively slower, and it’s harder and more expensive to setup your own server. And Element doesn’t let you have multiple identities at once. We should discuss concepts and ideas without attacking me as a person. If you disagree, state what facts you’re disputing.