Element celebrates The Great Facebook Outage with a Signal bridge for Matrix

Matrix-based communications and collaboration app Element has continued its mission to make bridges into the decentralised network a little more commercially acceptable with connectivity for Signal. The update follows bridges for the likes of Teams, Slack and – recently – WhatsApp. The timing is interesting considering the …

[Anonymous Coward]

stories of engineers being locked out of data centres doing the rounds

Well, sir, I'm really sorry, yes sir, yes, I do realize who you are sir, we spoke 20 min ago when you're leaving the server room, sir, yes, I do know half the world's on fire and running in circles like headless chickens, yes, I heard the news somebody's apparently just lost 6 bilion bucks too, sir, but like I said, you do not have the 2646th-level clearence to enter this door sir now, so STAND DOWN OR I'LL SHOOT!

You call it schadenfreunde? Wel, don't blame me that half the humanity (and then some) got themselves, willingly, into clustefacebook...

[Anonymous Coward]

How does the bridge work?

How does the bridge work?

If messages on Matrix are encrypted, and messages on Signal are encrypted, how do messages get from one network to the other? Surely there has to be some password sharing (and decryption) going on?

And then how does each network know how to route messages from one to the other? I can see something like user+signal@matrix (or however Matrix addresses users) getting routed to the bridge and then the bridge converting it to that Signal user's phone number (sigh, I really wish Signal had userids not tied to phones) and decrypting/encrypting and forwarding it, but in the other direction Signal only knows about phone numbers, and presumably the bridge only has one phone number as its address?

All this reminds me that I really should get around to giving Delta Chat a go, which seems to take the sensible stance of using email addresses as ids, and building on top of standard email as well...

[Anonymous Coward]

The next generation SDK is written in Rust and apparently not vulnerable.

Uh-huh. Because Rust comes with baked-in safeguards for verifying a device's identity, which is what the Matrix bug was all about.

Gotta love the bullshit hype.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The next generation SDK is written in Rust and apparently not vulnerable.

Christ, were you just out there looking for a hill to die on? The article said nothing about the Rust SDK being vulnerable because it was written in Rust. It just said that the Rust SDK didn’t include the bug.

[Anonymous Coward]

How does Signal fund itself?

I like it, its 'free', its a blue (as in colour theme) version of whatsapp - but how does it fund itself - honest enquiry as any 'free' user service is usually monetised by exploiting its dear users..

[Dan 55]

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

Donations and payment for work integrating the Signal protocol in other products.

[goldcd]

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

From facebook (indirectly) - setup by one of the creators of Whatsapp, who got an awful lot of money when Facebook bought Whatsapp - and he walked away from his Facebook job and even more money as he didn't like what they were doing to his baby.

[Dave559]

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

Not quite. Signal was originally and is developed by Moxie Marlinspike and others, and then at a later point in time WhatsApp liked what Signal were doing regarding encryption and so they also adopted Signal's encryption technology in WhatsApp.

Even later, after WhatsApp sold itself to Facebook, and after he didn't like the direction that Facebook was going in, Brian Acton, one of the WhatsApp founders, decided to more strongly support Signal and helped to set up and finance the Signal Technology Foundation (using some of the money he earned from the sale of WhatsApp to Facebook), which supports the ongoing development of Signal.

[Interestingly, the support for the Signal Technology Foundation is apparently in the form of an interest-free loan (see page 31 of non-textual PDF), rather than a donation (thanks to Signal Technology Foundation article on Wikipedia for the link).]

[Down not across]

Re: How does Signal fund itself?

[Interestingly, the support for the Signal Technology Foundation is apparently in the form of an interest-free loan (see page 31 of non-textual PDF), rather than a donation (thanks to Signal Technology Foundation article on Wikipedia for the link).]

I wonder if being a creditor, help shield the foundation from potentially hostile actions.