Olvid, a secure messenger, is finally open-source! They said before the end of 2021, well it’s really just before the end but it’s there. They released the source for their Android and their IOS app.
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Some red flags about this messenger:
They are dishonest about the merits of existing secure messengers.
From the homepage:
There is no “most secure messenger in the world”; that judgement is much too nuanced and situation-dependent for such a claim.
This is false of at least several alternatives, including Signal and Matrix.
From the “technology” link on top bar:
Objectively false. Even if you consider end-to-end encrypted and federated platforms like Matrix to “rely on a trusted third party”, there are P2P messengers which truly have no servers and which solve the problem of mapping username to public key, such as Tox.
Actually, all existing secure messengers have cryptographic authentication, and I’m pretty sure some of them also encrypt as much metadata as possible, such as Signal.
It seems like they’re dishonest about the merits of their own messenger.
This is huge. I’m developing a federated messenger and had given up on hiding the recipient ID when sending a message because I couldn’t find a way to do it. If there’s a practical way to do it, I want to hear about it. So I opened their protocol specification.
In the section “Upload message and get UID”, I see that the request actually contains a list of both the device UIDs and the identity of all recipients. They call it “encoded”, but it sounds like that just means JSON.
In summary, I would stay away from this messenger in favor of another option like Matrix or SIgnal.
I think Molly may be trying to do something similar https://ccs.getmonero.org/proposals/vd-molly-payments-stage1.html and molly.im
Similar to what? According to their client’s github readme, it’s just an alternate client for the signal server (which IIRC is illegal and previous alt-clients such as LibreSignal have been shut down because Moxie threatened legal action, so I’m not sure how Molly’s getting away with that).
Your right, they could be shut down at any time so that’s a risk for now. That’s why they are working on their own messenger that improves on signal using their own decentralized servers. Signal hasn’t taken down others in operation currently either
Marketing speak bends the truth? Say it ain’t so!
They are trying to sell audio calls, video calls and desktop clients as premium feautures. Important consideration for my anti-capitalist ass. Also those features shouldn’t be catered to businesses only.
They also list “unlimited contacts” as a free feature. I think this should not even be considered negotiable.
The only thing that really bugs me it’s the desktop clients as a premium feature. Even if I would prefer to get everything freely, I understand their choice to make call premium.
Just browsing around the Swift files in the iOS app, I found these:
And they say Java has verbose names.
Sometimes, for my own internal solo projects, I give my variations and functions wacky names because I was bored, I wonder if that’s the same for whoever named those.
NonFree server.
To me, self-hosted and federated (so you can self-host and others can self-host and it seamlessly works across instances) is the way of the future. There might be criticisms of xmpp or matrix, but to me the moment you’re no longer looking at a single point of failure like with big tech services (or aspiring big tech services like this) you’re much more secure because your data isn’t in one centralized spot with everyone else’s data to get picked up in one big hack.
Hope someone forks it and makes all premium features free, lol.
That could be cool, I hope it’s feasible!
Unfortunately it might not be since it seems their server is still closed source.
Ah. yes, forgot about that part. And I bet they will not open the source code of their server anytime soon…
such a dick move.
There is little incentive to publish open source code in a commercial setting comments like that validates it.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯Well, I’m poor and I’m already expecting that stuff for free, my poor friends are also not going to pay for that and therefore they will not switch to a private messenger therefore, so give me free real state or gtfo. I know people want to live from that and it must be great, but I live under capitalism and I don’t have many choices.
What about their server?
Apperantly, they run E2EE which means no servers are being used for storage of what people send to each other. They tell their visitors this on olvid.io (below “Olvid cares for you”).
E2EE doesn’t mean servers are not used for storage, it only means servers can’t see message contents.
(From the GitHub repo of the Android app.)
repost of that xkcd article which goes: “there are 14 standards”; “that’s too many! we need one that meets all use cases!”; “there are 15 standards”
Here you go!
I don’t think matrix protocol will be surpassed by this.
But competition is good for business, and innovation. Maybe Matrix is ‘forced’ to implement some features because of this.
what features does olvid have that matrix doesnt have yet?
Most notably voice calls probably.
Matrix/element should have that too, afaik
Awesome! Hope its on f droid soon
“Olvid’s not Covid” 🤪
...gnu
Gnu’s not Unix