ContactDiscoveryService VS sydent

[1] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Signal uses SGX for remote attestation, which presumably lets the client verify that the code running on the server is a build of the OSS code and not a modified version. But I don't know the details or if this is reliable.

SGX and remote attestation described here:

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Signal does private contact discovery and the effort they've gone to to do this is quite impressive.

TEEs have numerous privacy-enhancing applications that may benefit users. One of them is, as discussed earlier, private contact discovery; the Signal application uses a contact discovery service enhanced using Intel SGX, a TEE technology, to protect its users' privacy. A similar application of TEEs is performing malware analysis in a remote cloud service, so that the service may not identify users by the contents of their devices, such as the applications they have installed, especially important as 98.93% of users may be uniquely identified by the list of applications they have installed.

Signal (or, more accurately, one of its predecessors) used to use client-side private set intersection for contact discovery, but this scales poorly [1].

Now they use a solution based on Intel SGX and server-side trusted computing [2].

[1] https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/

[2] https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

GitHub Discussions can also be a great place for support as long as these are regularly monitored. Another option along the same lines is Discourse and the Open Source Matrix which is used by quite a few Open Source and community-based projects.

Tangential: the article notes that Telegram is an “encrypted messaging app”. While this is technically true, it's worth keeping in mind that it's not end-to-end encrypted, so it's less secure in that regard than, say, Signal or even WhatsApp. Telegram does have opt-in end-to-end encrypted one-on-one chats, but those are very inconvenient to use.

For a properly encrypted chat app, including group chats (opt-in), try Matrix instead: https://matrix.org/

I'd love something like the Matrix [0] data model (JSON messages aggregated in an eventually-consistent chatroom CRDT) transmitted over something like simplex for metadata resistance.

[0] https://matrix.org

Trillian mod here. There's this new thing called Beeper, works on matrix.org. It's not as the good old times, but I'm currently using whatsapp, FB messenger, discord, telegram, signal, imessage and a few more. It's not Cerulean experience, but it's... slowly improving.

I'm trying to change my account provider from "matrix.org" to whatever Element One needs, and for the life of me I just don't understand what values I have to put where to be able to log in. I tried `element.io`, which takes me to sso.element.io but this doesn't seem like the right thing (no credentials work as I expect.