this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Privacy

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[–] mojo@lemm.ee -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

of a popular XMPP client

10k downloads for a hideous outdated app is popular now?

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

FYI that's an app that's used by the German police and in several other "sensitive" contexts where users won't just pull it from the play store :) ISIS even had their own fork at a point.

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] mojo@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that website is broken beyond belief, I can't confirm anything

talking about the police site, not the mastodon link

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It really took me a second to figure out: https://www.bundespolizei.de/Web/DE/Service/Mediathek/Jahresberichte/jahresbericht_2020_file.pdf , click on the PDF link, hop to page 48. But even without that, do you really believe that the developer of the app, who's making a living of it, would commit financial suicide by lying so openly about such a trivial thing? Either way, with or without Conversations, XMPP is used by millions of users daily: https://www.rst.software/blog/22-companies-using-xmpp-and-ejabberd-to-build-instant-messaging-services
https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/

[–] mojo@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Huh interesting, I actually had no idea those big apps used XMPP. Would it be easy for them to add e2ee if they wanted to?

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

It depends, E2EE is mostly a client thing and most of them implement OMEMO as a standard: https://omemo.top/

OMEMO is XMPP's take on the double ratchet algorithm (very similar to Signal's), MLS is in the works as the hot new cross-protocols standard (but is inferior to OMEMO:2 when it comes to metadata encryption), PGP is often an option for the cases where perfect forward secrecy isn't desired, and OTR is still used in niche cases when you want E2EE across protocols.

In fact, E2EE was a thing in XMPP world since about 10 years… before Signal existed.