Why I won't recommend Signal anymore
Like a lot of crypto-puritanism it is rather mixed up. He says he recommended Signal because it was easy to use (more consumer friendly I guess) and secure, then says he wouldn&#x27;t have gone in the direction of making it easier to use and criticises the things that make it user friendly, like using phone numbers instead of usernames.<p>He says he thinks the protocol is secure, then says he doesn&#x27;t want it to use GCM because it routes messages via Google who he doesn&#x27;t trust (fixing that is the point of the encryption) and then talks about an attack that&#x27;d apply to any app regardless of whether it used GCM or not.<p>He finishes with a call to action: <i>&quot;We as a community need to come up with a viable solution and alternative to Signal that is easy to use and that does in fact respect people’s choices ... this tool should not have dependencies on corporate infrastructure&quot;</i><p>But like a lot of armchair moralising, he isn&#x27;t willing to debate the hard choices that go into building successful software. He says it should &quot;respect people&#x27;s choices&quot; as if Signal is built by people who are disrespectful, he says it should not have dependencies on &quot;corporate infrastructure&quot; as if volunteer run datacenters actually exist, and then says his motivation is avoided paywalls, ignoring that both Signal and WhatsApp are free.<p>It reads like a collection of talking points rather than a coherent argument.<p>Signal is unusual because it combines cutting edge cryptography with consumer friendliness and is actually successful. It&#x27;s pragmatic, not ideological. Crypto-warriors have a long history of producing secure software that nobody uses and then blaming the general public for not getting it; this sort of blog post is just a continuation of this decades long trend.