To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol

Mysteriarch ☀️@slrpnk.net to Technology@beehaw.org – 263 points –
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol | TechCrunch
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I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn't, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there's stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn't leak even metadata because it doesn't have it.

Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.

A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don't think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.

The standard is about the protocol, not every bit of the implementation. 3DH / X3DH and double ratchet, etc, are among the best for E2EE.

Thanks for the tip about SimpleX, that looks interesting! I could never use Signal due to the way they operate and force you to rely on their and Google's servers, actively blocking forks from their network. So much for FOSS...

They do provide an apk outside of the Play Store, that uses a Web Socket for push notifications. Not he best way of going about it, but hey, it exists.

SimpleX is very neat. But it cannot do multiple devices unless you count shutting down, exporting database to new device replacing existing database as a sensible workflow. Using the database on two devices at once will break encryption and cause all sorts of weird problems.

It appears SimpleX is not even available for me (Android 8).

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