this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
483 points (94.5% liked)
Privacy
32142 readers
1281 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Those are outside Signal's scope and depend entirely on your OS and your (or your sysadmin's) security practices (eg. I'm almost sure in linux you need extra privileges for those things on top of just read access to the user's home directory).
The point is, why didn't the Signal devs code it the proper way and obtain the credentials every time (interactively from the user or automatically via the OS password manager) instead of just storing them in plain text?
They're arguing a red herring. They don't understand security risk modeling, argument about signals scope let's their broken premise dig deeper. It's fundamentally flawed.
It's a risk and should be mitigated using common tools already provided by every major operating system (ie. Keychain).
"Highways shouldn't have guard rails because if you hit one you've already gone off the road anyway."
You'd need write access to the user's home directory, but doing something with desktop notifications on modern Linux is as simple as
dbus-monitor "interface='org.freedesktop.Notifications'" | grep --line-buffered "member=Notify\|string" | [insert command here]Replacing the Signal app for that user also doesn't require elevated privileges unless the home directory is mounted
noexec.Feel free to submit a pull request. We could use your help.
I don't see the reasoning in your answer (I do see its passive-aggressiveness, but chose to ignore it).
I asked "why?"; does your reply mean "because lack of manpower", "because lack of skill" or something else entirely?
In case you are new to the FOSS world, that being "open source" doesn't mean that something cannot be criticized or that people without the skill (or time!) to submit PRs must shut the fu*k up.
It's in the draft phase from what I can see.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6849