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this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Privacy
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Okay first things first Jack Dorsey is a tool
The US government / CIA did in fact develop the protocol back in the day, with the goal of helping people in China and other countries message securely, probably with ulterior motives.
But the protocol itself is open source, and you can use it without any affiliation with the US government.
The claim " It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺" is therefore so stupid it almost invalidates everything else being said because the person writing is either an idiot or purposely misrepresenting the facts.
Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
They boast this as a feature, but on the instructions for how to do this for iOS, even Telegram admits "As things stand now, you'll need a jailbroken device, at least 1,5 hours and approximately 90GB of free space to properly set up a virtual machine for the verification process". Browsing the steps, it's extremely complex, and doesn't seem like something that is very user friendly and that you'd do weekly or monthly when a new version is released.
On the GitHub issue linked to in the body, it's disingenuous to claim they refused to implement this, and that the technical hurdles Apple has in place make this extremely difficult which halted progress. In the community forums where the conversation was moved to, someone pointed out that even if you were to reproduce it on a jailbroken iPhone, that there's no way to confirm that non-jailbroken iPhones aren't receiving a version with a backdoor.
And even if you are using a jailbroken device exclusively and can confirm the reproducibility of the iOS app, then the risk becomes the latest available jailbroken iOS could be outdated from the real versions, and you'd have other issues with not receiving timely security updates. This same issue applies to Telegram also.
Flipper0: iOS 17 Lockup Crash has entered the chat juuuust to be annoying.
EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.
My theory is that apple wont let the developer share there code for IOS because of "security"
I remember an emulator (retro arch i think?) Got on ios at one point and was later removed because it showed apples file system layout. Which apples reason was "because it could be used to make malware for IOS"
I feel like there is some similar thing with signal IOS