this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
253 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
59377 readers
5554 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The encryption algorithm may be open source, but they rolled it themselves. It is proprietary encryption.
Again, it's not, go to their github, check the code of the client, compile it yourself, and make a reproducible build to check that the client they ship to your phone is the same. You are talking nonsense.
Todd is a known bullshitter
You're not getting what I'm saying, because you don't understand what "proprietary" means in this context.
Proprietary encryption ≠ Proprietary code.
You can roll your own shitty novel encryption algorithm and license it under GPL if you want, it's still proprietary encryption in that Signal has its own unvetted encryption algorithm instead of using a trusted existing algorithm.
EDIT: How are people not understanding this?
Proprietary licensing is different from a proprietary way of doing things.
If you folks think that a GitHub repo and GPL license are all you need to vet an encryption algorithm, and you think that absolves an novel untested algo from being called "proprietary encryption" you're gonna get burned one day because your trust was built on not understanding encryption.
Signal built their own encryption algorithm. That's proprietary encryption. If you still think I'm wrong, pick up a dictionary, look up "proprietary" and "encryption", and you might just have a chance at understanding that "proprietary" is an adjective that can apply to a lot of different words.