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Wire – modern, private messaging from Skype co-founder
- gtf21 11y agoDoes anyone know of an independent audit/confirmation of the robustness of their privacy / security? I don't really know enough about crypto or security to be able to tell.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI'm wondering the same, it is a shame there's not a whole lot of end to end encrypted applications, it's a conspiracy all of it's own or something? Maybe cryptologists are sparse or this is just not in their available time for the type of problems to tackle, not sure. The need is clearly there for more open source secure applications, hopefully we see more.
- thepangolino 11y agoMy theory, as way out there as it might seem, is that there is hardly any interest for actual encryption. GPG's unique maintain was struggling to make ends meet until last year when he made it in the news. I have yet to find someone, even among the "privacy aware" people to chat on Facebook using Pidgin's OTR plugin.
- reidflix 11y ago>I have yet to find someone, even among the "privacy aware" people to chat on Facebook using Pidgin's OTR plugin. That's because the "privacy aware" folks don't use Facebook. And if they did (likely a damn good reason) they would. Makes it all the less likely for you to have met them
- giancarlostoro 11y agoPrevious discussion from over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692563 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8692563
- ConAntonakos 11y agoYeah, Wire has been out for a while.
- tmikaeld 11y agoThey just added encrypted voice and video calls (1to1) in the latest version (Guess that's why this is posted now).
- Siimteller 11y agoSo far only calls were E2EE. Video was added this Thursday and full E2EE switched on for all comms.
- danpalmer 11y agoWire launched at least a year ago, if not earlier, and I have the same question now that I had then: Why should I use it? For good security, I have email/PGP which has few of my friends, but lots of usage for secure communication. For secure chat I have Signal which some of my friends use, but not many. For most of my chat I have WhatsApp which is relatively secure, and has a relatively good UI. Almost all my friends and family have this. For the rest of my chat I have Facebook Messenger which isn't secure in the slightest, but it also has almost all of my friends and family on it. It has a very good UI, and lots of features that I make good use of. Wire on the other hand has almost none of my friends, isn't open, so can't be any more secure than WhatsApp, and has a pretty but ultimately annoying UI, and very few features.
- ukblewis 11y agoHi Dan, I'm not using Wire yet - so I'm just quoting their marketing material - but they directly address your comments: "Wire uses open-source cryptography to encrypt all content. We made the source code for data handling available to the public under the GPL License. This means that anybody can review the source code." "Only Wire offers fully encrypted calls, video and group chats available on all your devices, on any modern platform. Unlike niche security apps we do not sacrifice usability for security — Wire is simple and straightforward to use."
- JohnKacz 11y ago> isn't open Their privacy page (in the comparison table) claims they are open source. I didn't see any links to their code however. edit: Sorry, reading on mobile (after just waking up) and didn't see the link. Thanks @ukblewis
- pmontra 11y agoThe app is free. What do they make money from, do they have ads?
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoThey say "No advertising" on the front page.
- Siimteller 11y agoCurrently VC backed (Iconical, Skype co-founder Janus Friis), premium services in the future.
- r3bl 11y agoI really don't get this. What's their advantage over using this over... well, anything else? They seem like a complete copy of Signal to me: they're a centralized service with open source clients that promises end-to-end encrypted communication. I see no difference between them. It's like re-inventing the wheel. Honestly, I don't see a single reason why I should use this.
- nailer 11y agoDoes Signal do video now?
- reidflix 11y agoNo, I think it's in the roadmap though.
- detaro 11y agoThe list of secure messengers that run on mobile and desktop is already pretty short. Add voice and video chat to the requirements... I'm kind of skeptical if this is the solution, but it checks a lot of boxes I want.
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoThey have comparison table on "Privacy" page: https://wire.com/privacy/#table-competition https://wire.com/privacy/#table-competition
- andreyf 11y agoHow does e2ee group video work?
- Siimteller 11y agoVideo calls are only 1:1
- dontscale 11y agoWhy... can't there be alternatives?
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y agoWell, some source code is on https://github.com/wireapp https://github.com/wireapp But it seems that only some crypto libraries are opensourced, no frontend and things like that.
- hofmannsthal 11y agoA new messaging app each week.
- andreyf 11y ago> all your data is protected by European privacy laws. Interesting to note that "American" is implicitly synonymous with "insecure".
- ekianjo 11y agoWell it's not really a major difference since the US has major intelligence agreements with other countries.
- LamaOfRuin 11y agoAlso interesting to note that, despite this claim on their front page, the Terms of Use specifies that for American users it is interpreted by / subject to California law and SF courts.
- Veratyr 11y agoThere are two things I'll note: - As a non-American, I see America as one of the least safe places to store my information. The Snowden leaks showed that the US government has zero respect for the privacy of non-Citizens. - As someone who's lived both inside and outside America, I've noticed that privacy laws in the US are weak relative to other countries (much of Europe, Australia) that I've been in. Europeans have things like Right to be Forgotten. Americans have companies that have refused to remove my personal information after I terminated my account with them.
- awqrre 11y agoAmerica doesn't appear to respect it's Citizen's data privacy either, they just have to collect the data indirectly from other countries (I'm not sure how they can avoid respecting the laws by doing it this way though...)
- technion 11y agoAs an Australian, I would argue the metadata retention laws leave us just as weak as the US - if not, worse. I'd be surprised if the US equivalent of Greyhound Racing Australia had legally mandated, warrantless access to every ISP's metadata.
- andreyf 11y agoSafari unsupported for web version: > Download the latest version of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or MS Edge to use Wire for Web.
- Siimteller 11y agoSafari lacks WebRTC support in a manner that would play nice with Wire features. Thus no support for now.
- dingdingdang 11y agoI think this looks good - whether long term use is sustainable is dependent on whether they open up their protocol to interoperability via some sort of consortium. Email rules, not because of its brilliance, but because of its level of standardisation and ubiquity. The trick will be to provide a transparent P2P solution that can somehow be boosted by leaving nodes online.. now provide pay for service that can run the nodes for people - business plan (tm). On second thought this kind of thing is already done around the torrent sub-culture with regards to seed boxes..
- shmerl 11y agoAll modern platforms? I don't see the Linux version. Plus, for any such application to have trust these days, it should be open source both for clients and servers. Enough of this walled garden closed instant messaging.
- mchahn 11y ago> I don't see the Linux version. It runs in the browser so technically it runs on Linux.
- tyfon 11y agoI just tested the video call with my parents that still have an old adsl link to their home, it was crystal clear. Both skype and hangouts struggle when doing the same. Hangouts actually makes the audio choppy. I'm a bit worried about using something that is free and has no ads while maintaining central servers though..
- degenerate 11y agoI just gave it a shot too, and it works well. I deleted my account though, because I only need voice chat with my team and Discord has this app beat hands down for collaboration and team rooms.
- tmikaeld 11y agoDiscord isn't encrypted (Only client-to-server) and it's not open source at all. It's too bad though - as you say - it is very nice for collaboration and teams (It's geared exclusively towards gamers).
- andrey_utkin 11y agoEnough of fenced services owning the users. I'm fed up with carouselle of new services for same features. I'm going to stick with XMPP, which is openly federated and free as in freedom. It is now technically capable of chat sync, sent messages editing, end to end encryption (there are alternative modes to fit different usecases), videocalls, and many more things. There are working gateways to many other networks, including Skype (not fully, but mostly enough to start transition away from skype).
- Veratyr 11y agoXMPP could be a fantastic option but it's missing push notifications, which are an absolute killer these days. You either don't use XMPP on mobile or take a massive hit to your battery. ChatSecure has a nice writeup about this: https://chatsecure.org/blog/fixing-the-xmpp-push-problem/ https://chatsecure.org/blog/fixing-the-xmpp-push-problem/
- edhelas 11y agoConversations have Push Notification support https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/issues/1171 https://github.com/siacs/Conversations/issues/1171. There is a standard and it's implemented in some XMPP servers as well.
- mickael 11y agoXMPP strong selling point is federation. You can run your own private server and it does encryption. There is plenty of implementations from servers to clients, most being open source. It seems to me just one of the Zillion messaging alternative available.
- reustle 11y agoWhy hasn't there been a beautiful XMPP apps created? A company could come in and provide effortless XMPP server setup for a monthly price, and provide great apps for all to use, no?
- edhelas 11y agoThere is. You can have a look at Conversations for Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conversations https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.siacs.conve... and I'm also working on Movim https://movim.eu/ https://movim.eu/ ;)
- zaro 11y agoYet another WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber, Line, WeChat, Skype ,<Insert your own closed protocol, walled garden, messaging app here>. So innovation, much technology ...