- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
- cross-posted to:
- privacyguides@lemmy.one
Signal has announced new functionality in its upcoming beta releases, allowing users to transfer messages and media when linking their primary Signal device to a new desktop or iPad. This feature offers the choice to carry over chats and the last 45 days of media, or to start fresh with only new messages.
The transfer process is end-to-end encrypted, ensuring privacy. It involves creating a compressed, encrypted archive of your Signal data, which is then sent to the new device via Signal’s servers. Despite handling the transfer, the servers cannot access the message content due to the encryption.
With the introduction of a cross-platform archive format, Signal is also exploring additional tools for message transfer to new devices or restoration in case of device loss or damage. Users can begin testing this feature soon, with a wider rollout expected in the coming weeks.
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I’m still waiting for the day that I can make a full backup of my chats and save it on an external hard drive so that I won’t lose all of my message history when I lose my phone.
You can on Android. If you have an iPhone you can link using the molly signal fork on an android device and then backup using that.
Oooh interesting! Could you please elaborate / share any resources about this?
Here’s a link to their website https://molly.im/ It also links to their GitHub. If you’d want to backup what you’d do is link molly to your iphone signal instance and then the Android client or molly android client of signal allows you to make local backups on device.
Restoring it back to the iPhone won’t be possible but there’s a backup at least. Or rather maybe with that recent change the article talks about it might be possible in the future but not currently afaik.
This is wonderful, thank you so much!
I’ve been holding off from switching to Android (and getting a GrapheneOS x Pixel phone) because I have 5 years’ worth of messages on Signal on my iPhone… I’ll look into this method for sure
I just set up molly today, along with mollysocket and an ntfy server. Liking it so far, just need to get my friends to migrate…
That’s always the hard part.
You can already do it. I have Signal create daily backups, sync it to my NAS using Syncthing with versioning enabled.
Oh fucking shit, setting this up today
Yeah I’ve been doing this
I still wait for an option to officially use signal without having to have a proprietary operating system running 😆🥲
And I am waiting for a way to use Signal without it ever touching a smartphone) Right now I have a Graphene phone so I can trust it (so Molly works), but before that my phone (like most phones) did not support any degoogled OS. While the laptop (like most laptops can) was running Linux easily. Yet, you have to either use an Android VM or a frustrating command-line client to register!
Yea, that was what I meant to say with my comment 😄 linux phone gang rise up!
Finally I can transfer my one and only chat to my PC
I know right. I wish more people used it. It’s nice and simple. No fuss in the way. And especially now with chat transfers. Should be Gucci.
Original announcement: https://signal.org/blog/a-synchronized-start-for-linked-devices/
Blogs like these drive me fucking crazy: there’s a primary source out there, why not just link to that at the end of your (evidently pointless) opinion piece?
It’s almost like they know their commentary isn’t adding anything and they’re worried we’ll click away immediately.
Maybe OP is following said blog and got their info from there, then thought that it might be worth sharing?
I’m not harping on OP. If they thought it was worth sharing, great.
The people whom I take umbrage with are those who make a blog post that is reporting on a public announcement (E.g. Signal’s news post on their website) without linking to said announcement.
You’re not talking about world events with your reporter on the scene - your entire post is literally “someone else posted something to the internet!”; linking to it is the bare minimum required, if you ask me.
Thanks, I love Signal, but can we get Android tablet linking?
Molly has it.
What’s Molly in this context?
A hardened Signal fork that works with Signal’s servers and adds features I like that Signal doesn’t support.
I heard signal dislikes forks using its server, did molly get approval to do so, or is this based on generosity until signal can ban them?
I heard that too…1ish years ago and Molly still seems to work okay. I would assume by now that Signal knows they exist, so hopefully they’ll keep playing nice.
TIL. Thank you!
in this context? haha
See the other response to justify that part, heh.
A good time 🌚
That’s why “in this context”!
Still a good time in that context 🤭
Fair enough.
Yay Signal!
So is there a signal alternative that is fully open source and not under control of one single company?
Bett as I understand it, it’s still from a company and still locked to the whims of a CEO and I’m done with that.
What’s the best alternative?
deleted by creator
Matrix as a protocol, and the official client is Element.
I’m baffled Signal didn’t support transferring chats… I thought it was supposed to be easier than Matrix
Unfortunately it seems like some people think that that is neutral.
This may be out of date, since it’s been a while since I last tested this, but: will Signal on desktop still store media in an easily accessible folder where the only security is the use of random strings to identify each individual media file with the file type extension deleted? So, for example, if you’ve had the desktop Signal client synced with your account for a period of time and have running conversations that include sensitive media, that media can be accessed and viewed without even opening the desktop app (which also, last I tested it, lacks most of the locking/security mechanisms found in the phone versions of Signal).
Most media viewers can open the files without the need for adding the file extension to the end of the filename, albeit you would be browsing the files in a pseudorandom fashion if you didn’t try to sort by date or size.
It is quite a bit out of date luckily. Signal-Desktop already stores data encrypted for quite a while. However it used to store the decryption key right alongside it. Recently (a few month ago) Signal switched to storing the key within the systems keystore, greatly improving security. Also causing a flood of users complaining that the can’t just copy their .config to a new desktop and retain their chat history. This may have prompted the release of this new feature :)
😂and 98% do upvote this old news, it is crazy
Good to know!
When they gonna allow sign up without a phone number. Or allow federation with 3rd party signal severs. Or allow sign up without a phone number that’s linked to ur real identity by law in most countries.
The more I learn about signal the less I trust them.
The day security researchers say Signal is bad is the day I’ll stop using it. Until then, it’s the best option we have that both provides both great privacy and UX. The only thing that comes close - and it still has a ways to go - is SimpleX, but it’s basically a signal fork and it’s devs still support Signal.
Security researchers always look at a specific thing, usually the encryption only. The message encryption of Signal is great, the problem is all the rest of it that never gets scrutinized that closely.
Yeah. For me, Signal’s security benefits are counteracted by various other usability issues. Such as not being feature-complete on desktop and not even allowing registration there without workarounds - given that phones are very privacy-invasive by default and far from all can have a privacy-respecting OS installed (while Linux works on pretty much any random computer). Or even on mobile - pushing the user towards Google download with dark patterns, not being on F-Droid, or (at least in my experience) the official app not working at all on my Graphene device (Molly worked perfectly though). Also, from what I’ve seen, even if you don’t mind losing connectivity with other users and would only converse with people on your server anyway (like how I do with my family on XMPP), selfhosting Signal is really hard compared to XMPP, Simplex or even Matrix, even requiring modifying the client app.
the official app not working at all on my Graphene device
FWIW, I just installed Graphene on a Pixel 8a yesterday, downloaded the Signal apk from their website, and haven’t had any issues with it so far. I also learned that you can get it through Fdroid if you add the Guardian Project repository.
IDK if this has been fixed, but this summer I was unable to register - it was stuck in a loop warning about lacking Google services (even though it is supposed to work without them, so maybe a coincidence).
Also didn’t know about Guardian’s repo having it, that’s awesome!
Why not use SimpleX then? You mention it but provide no real reason to use Signal over SimpleX
Privacy and security is all about threat modeling. Signal meets 100% of the security needs of everyone I communicate with in my region of the world. There’s no need (especially now that you can hide phone numbers) for the added security benefits of SimpleX.
Additionally, my experience in using SimpleX over the last year+ is that message delivery is not reliable yet. This has forced me and the few people I’ve been testing it with to fall back to Signal multiple times. Because of these reliability issues and lacking UX, I don’t feel comfortable pushing it on others, knowing the tolerance level is low for message delivery failures and UX that isn’t yet up to par with other messaging apps.
I use Simplex and overall happy with it, but since it is so new, would rather not go all-in. It is VC-backed so might eventually enshittify to make a profit.
I thought it was open source? Presumably a FOSS project can’t go too bad.
Yeah, it absolutely is. But just being FOSS does not guarantee that its development would be forked in a sufficient way should something bad happen. Especially since they use Haskell, and I heard that it is not very common thus decreasing the survival chances. Sure hope it is cool enough to still warrant a fork, though.
Hey u still use signal I’m not saying to stop using it I’m simply saying just cos its better than the alternatives doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand better.
The signal encryption is provably secure that’s what the researchers analyse. The metadata is a separate story.
I’m not bagging on signal, here, since I use it too. But what about xmpp? It does e2ee, right?
XMPP basically uses the same end to end encyption method as Signal, but due to it not being mandatory some things are easier but come with the footgun that you can accidentially disable it (but it is enabled by default in most modern xmpp clients).
Otherwise: since XMPP federates more servers can theoretically see some metadata, but since most servers are small and community run there isn’t a single big target like with Signal where you can siphon off all the metadata. So you can make arguments for both. XMPP: more meta data but decentralized, Signal: less metadata but all in one place.
XMPP has been an option for decades, if your contacts aren’t using it by now, they arent going to. And with communications tools, both parties have to agree on a tool. Even if one party doesn’t care about privacy or security.
Raw brute force security isn’t the point most of the time, and ease of use and simplicity of setup are going to be major factors in adoption. Signal is much easier to get started with for most people than XMPP.
Yeah. If the contact would be installing a whole new client to communicate with you anyway, why not make it an XMPP one? I got my mom to use it like this.
I did hear that the implementation of the encryption isn’t as good as in Signal (and most clients also use an older version of it), but from my understanding - not in any way critically so.
XMPP only does message encryption. Signal has spent tons of engineering time and effort to minimize the collection of metadata, not just encryption of message content.
Yeah, true! However, you also have to trust their server not to log what is available to them (including your whole social graph), while with XMPP you can SSH into your server and see that its retention is exactly as you expected. But yeah, the issue remains when interacting with other servers - tho even then there the data is more evenly distributed between different servers with different owners.
What about threema?
