Emojipedia

Privacy comparisson beween apps by XS4all

Are the messaging apps as privacy friendly as they are: VPNtester vision¹⁾ (German). Spoiler: They are not, access to the data is possible

Wikipedia
Maybe one of these 4 open source self hostable chat programs is a solution if you do not want to be spied upon by the government like it is on its way in the UK²⁾

A large overview of 38 messaging applications
Secure messaging apps
Messengers matrix

D: In Debian repository
A: In the Android Play Store
F: In the F-droid Store
O: Open Source
S: Self hostable. P: Peer to peer, no hosting needed
T: Needs a telephone number

Comparison Matrix and XMPP

More apps (and some already mentioned)

Wikipedia. Although Signal does not save meta data, the servers can because they see where traffic is coming form and what the destination is.

Some remarks

• With aptitude install apksigner
• Download the apk from https://signal.org/android/apk to a computer
• Verify the signature: apksigner verify -v --print-certs --min-sdk-version 24
  • The value of --min-sdk-version can change over time
• Upload the apk file to the phone via USB
• Go to Settings > Apps > Special app access > Install unknown apps > Files
• Slide 'Allow from this source' to On
• To be continued

The process of getting Signal running on an other telephone

Android transfer

• Keep the desktop version of Signal running. Reregister immediately when asked.
• Messages can get lost
• Transfer the account via Signal app > Settings > Account > Transfer account
• Be aware that only on one telephone with Signal signal can be registered. Multiple desktop Signal programs can be linked to one telephone
• With transfer or a backup made via Settings > Chats > Backups, the chat history can also be transferred with FTP or by other means

• A message can be deleted for everyone up to 3 hours after it has been send
• An emoji can be removed by placing the same emoji again

can nor be done on the desktop program, only on the smartphone app. Do:

• Start Signal
• Tap the three dots ⁞ in the upper right corner
• On the first line the profile photo and name can be changed

• Overview of all icons
• The meaning of the checkmarks
  • Sending
  • Sent
  • Delivered
  • Read. If both you and your contact have read receipts enabled, this indicates your contact has read the message.
• Example: . In the middle is the disappearing messages timer icon

can have up to 8 participants. How to set it up in the desktop client:

• Tap the pencil (New conversation) icon
• Click on “New group”
• Select members
• Click on “Next”
• Name the group
• Click on “Create”
• Open the group (click on it in the left column)
• Click on the video icon (upper right corner)
  • If asked allow access to the camera
  • To turn the camera off by clicking on the camera icon
• Click on the “Ring” icon (needed?)
• Click on the “Start Call” button to start the conversation

• Retainment: If the admin removes a group, which only can be done if all other members have left the group, the contents of the group remains for the members until a member removes the group by himself. So the admin removing the group has no influence on the existence of the contents for the ex members
• Remove all members
  • Click on the group name in the main (left pane)
  • Scroll down
  • Click on a member
  • Click on “Remove from group”
  • When finished deleting all members including yourself scroll up
• Click on the back arrow in the upper left corner of the main pane
• Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner
• Click on “Delete”

Signal-Desktop-Keyboard-Shortcuts

• Ctrl+J Jump to the latest unread message
• Ctrl+T
• Ctrl+F6

Do

Menu > Settings > Session and Startup > Tab Application Autostart
> Knob "+ Add" > Name "Signal"; Command "/opt/Signal/signal-desktop --no-sandbox %U"
> OK > Close

Turn read receipt on so others can see if you have read the message

• Go to “Privacy.”
• Under the “Messaging” section
• Look for “Read receipts.”
• Enable it by clicking on the toggle button.

How to show who read a message:

• Telephone (Android only?):
  • Tick and hold on the message until the pop up appears
  • Tick on “Info”
• Desktop (Linux only?):
  • Point on the message with the mousepointer
  • Press the right mouse button
  • Click on “more info”

The Signal server only saves 1000 messages between sessions for a given client. If the count for a device ever gets to 1000, it's highly likely that you've dropped some messages. When a new message comes in, the previously oldest element of those 1000 saved messages is dropped. That could very easily explain a big chunk of missing messages.

Each device's queue is limited to the 1000 most recent messages. Once this limit is reached, each new addition will cause the oldest message to be deleted from the queue. The server will also delete any undelivered messages if they are older than 60 days

You don't actually need to send/receive 1000 messages in order to reach the queue limit. Other items like delivery receipts, read receipts, profile updates, group chat updates and setting changes are also sent as end-to-end encrypted messages between devices and count equally toward the queue's limit
Source

• Privacy issues:
  • From their website: “Telegram is a cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed.”. So Privacy does not seem to be a consideration.
    • By default Telegram only uses TLS to protect the connection between the users device and the Telegram servers
    • Telegram does not provide end-to-end protection because other messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp allow you to make unencrypted backups. Telegram claims to be more secure because of how they store backups
    • Secret Chats uses end-to-end encryption which is limited for the conversation to a specific device
  • The F-Droid version, Telegram FOSS, needs a lot of connections to several Google services
    • The Google Play store version only needs contact to IP addresses in the 149.154.64.0 - 149.154.255.255 range which is owned by Telegram
  • Needs access to contacts, files, images, be able to make and receive telephone calls.
  • Its encryption is not officially audited
  • Only secret chats are E2EE¹⁸⁾
  • Voice calls are not E2EE¹⁹⁾
  • The official app has Google trackers
  • The server is not open source.
• The Linux version needs Flatpack or Snap.
• There is also a web browser version.
• Meaning of the check marks.

Reporting of spam can be done by:
Smartphone:Tap on the article > Tap on Report > Tap on Spam
Desktop: Right click on the article. A context menu opens > click on “Report”

• Deleting messages (only in the app, not possible in the web interface).
• Deleting messages²⁰⁾

After entering the phonenumber and clicking on the “Next” button we got: “Internal server error”. No solution found yet. Maybe a manual install from the download page might work. Additional installation of Flatpack or Snap is needed

The “Fact Check” feature will allow additional clarifying information to be attached to messages.

The government in your country will be able to appoint an agency to conduct fact-checking on public Telegram channel posts. This agency will have full control over the content of these fact check blocks, while regular users will not be able to influence or have a say in the notes. By clicking on the “What is this?” tool-tip, details about the agency providing the fact-check will be shown
Source

- Unlike Telegram's “Fact Check” feature, Twitter's Community Notes are created and evaluated by regular users, and the most useful notes are selected by an algorithm based on votes from readers with diverse political views.

After starting Telegram via the command line:

qt.qpa.xcb: could not connect to display 
qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin "xcb" in "" even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized.
Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

Available platform plugins are: xcb, wayland, wayland-egl.

Probable cause: Telegram is started as root. This can happen if you forget to go to a user terminal to start Telegram after installing Telegram on the command line as root

Admin/Team Admin privileges: Moderation requires administrator privileges so channels and settings can be managed by the moderator

Set Channel to Private: Change a public channel to private if you want to limit access. Only invited members can view and participate.

• Go to the channel.
• Click on the channel name to access settings.
• Choose Edit Channel and select Make Private

• Mute Notifications: for channels that might be too active or heated. Access the channel settings and select Mute Channel
• Block members: individuals can be blocked from the channel. This prevents them from seeing or participating in the channel

Bots or integrations specifically designed for moderation can be used. They may help to filter messages, manage spam, or provide automated responses

The discussion has to be regularly monitored. Inappropriate behavior has to be responded to. Users who violate channel guidelines can be directly messaged

Clear guidelines for channel behavior have to be established and communicated. Users are encouraged to report any violations

Download from Downloads or run wget https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/releases/latest/download/simplex-chat-ubuntu-22_04-x86-64
Then:

chmod 740 simplex-chat-ubuntu-22_04-x86-64
# Run SimpleX CLI
./simplex-chat-ubuntu-22_04-x86-64

• /welcome Display the welcome message again
• /help
• /address Create your address
• /da If abbreviated commands are encountered try to guess to which command they belong an run /help thatcommand to show the full meaning

Matrix clients page
Size in MB. X: Not in the Debian repository

With matrix there is a two phase system. First login into the matrix server.Then the matrix server wil login for the user on IRC. In the process a [m] is added to the nickname of the user. More information

Matrix IRC Bridge Usage Guide on how to control the IRC bridge using this room.
The following commands are available:

Awesome-nostr, a collection of projects and resources built on Nostr

Nostr has many privacy concerns especially with relays.

Messages can be set to exprire. The relay must support it.

All conversations are stored on the relays. If the connection is lost to the last relay containing a conversation that conversation is not accessible until the connection to a relay containing the conversation is resorted

Nostr is driving the adoption of Lightning²⁷⁾. Example: @ZEUS is building a Lightning wallet.

Nostr uses NIP's to document what may be implemented by a Nostr-compatible relay and client software.
NIP stand for Nostr Implementation Possibilities

Private keys start with npir1
Public keys start with npub1 and are 32 characters long, after the npub1. They can be made by running openssl rand -hex 32 in a terminal and appending the result to npub1.
Example: npub1 and the result of the command 822297bef811cb28de262d323eb8317c66dc161a548175e74b8329e079277f54 results in npub1822297bef811cb28de262d323eb8317c66dc161a548175e74b8329e079277f54
Guide to generate and manage Nostr keys and sign events

Android from the Google Play Store:

• Amethyst (see privacy issues)
• Plebstr (has no privacy statement. Plebstr is currently, september 2023, in the making)
• Iris. Not stable. Hangs in the “Post” pane, even after killing the app via Settings and restarting it
• Nostrmo (terms of user do not show up, website seems to be disfunctional)
• Snort. Unclear how to get a private key. Via the webbrowser it is easy. See below at webbrowser. Needs a pin, Want access to Google, Cloudfront, Cloudflare, Akamai, your-server.de and others wich do not seem to be Nostr relays.
• Spring is a Nostr browser. Explore the Nostr apps! Can load a lot of other apps.

Android from the F-droid Store:

• Amethyst (see privacy issues)

On the Linux desktop:

• Gossip²⁸⁾. Needs the Rust programming language framwork (867 MB)
• more-speech has custom filtering based on web-of-trust and relay selection. Needs the Clojure framework (20 MB), leiningen (98 MB, the amount includes the openjdk-17-jdk dependency and other dependencies). Total: 118 MB
• Lume Downloadable .deb file. Needs the Tauri²⁹⁾³⁰⁾ framework. Needs Rust (867 MB), libwebkit2gtk-4.0-dev & build-essential & libssl-dev & libgtk-3-dev & libayatana-appindicator3-dev & librsvg2-dev (Total: 336 MB) and curl, wget and file (About 4 MB?) Total: 1,207 GB

In the webbrowser:

• Alby is a Bitcoin Lightning Wallet & Nostr extension for Firefox. Webpage.
• Astral Ninja. Good explanation when setting up an account
• Flamingo is an extension for Google Chrome
• Coracle. Maybe also an app
• Iris
• Snort Login can be slow. Be patient for a minute. Logout via Settings > Log Out. Needs an Iris.to account to generate a public key

Only use small images.

Questions and remarks about the Plebstr Andriod app

• “Relays”
  • Disconnect very fast, take a long time to reconnect
  • How to disconnect from relays, how to turn them off in the list?
    • Slide a relay left in the “Relays” pane (Overview pane > Settings > Relays)
• “Global” pane
  • Which messages are shown in the “Global” pane?
  • Search in the “Global” pane does not work, does not yield the expected results
    • Or is it the case that if no results are found all posts are shown. This is not convenient. Zero results shown should be the result then
  • Posts can go to
    • A specific cllient
    • The clients you follow
    • All, “Global”, clients
    • How to post in the “Global” pane?
      • Via tapping on the “Timeline” pane + sign?
• Posts in “Timeline” can not be deleted
• Disconnects to relays when the phone is in sleep mode. It takes a lot of time to reconnect again when the phone is waked up. This is not workable

Servers are called Relays. An overview

Relays can require an admission fee to be payed before being used by clients

See the disk usage for programming languages table and the table for other software for the disk space needs for some dependencies

Bold: seems interesting

• LNbits Relay, a relay you can launch in your own LNBits server with a click, wrapper over nostr_relay.
• Minds Nostr Relay, a relay for Minds, an open-source social network.
• NNostr, a relay written in C# (Microsoft based).
• nostr_relay, a Nostr relay written in python, backed by SQLite.
• saltivka, a friendly relay with a cozy administrator interface.
• søstr, a Nostr relay designed for a single writer pubkey.
• strfry, a very performant relay written in C++, uses LMDB for data storage and comes ith a built-in set-reconciliation mechanism for syncing. Most used in the wild

Needs aditional software which needs a lot of disk space

• knostr, A Nostr relay implemented in Kotlin with support for Postgres (and metrics).
• me.untethr.nostr-relay, a very strict and performant relay written in Clojure, uses SQLite.
• nostream, A Nostr relay written in Typescript backed by PostgreSQL and Redis, optimized for load-balancing and fault-tolerance. Most used in the wild
• Nostr filter. Needs Docker and Docker Compose
• NostrPostr Relay, a relay written in Kotlin, supports both SQLite and PostgreSQL.
• nostr-rs-relay, a minimalistic, optimized relay written in Rust that uses SQLite. Most used in the wild.
• Relayer Basic, a simple reference relay backed by Postgres, written as a demo on top of the Relayer Go framework for building custom relays.

Set up a nostr relay server in under 5 minutes
Install a Nostr relay
How to Setup a Paid Nostr Relay using the ZBD API to earn Bitcoin for running Nostr relay infrastructure

Signal can be installed from the Debian repository
Linux (Debian-based) Install Instructions
NOTE: These instructions only work for 64-bit Debian-based Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Mint etc

As root run signal.install.sh

• Set up via a mobile data connection since a verification number is send
• Check the firewall app for to be allowed connections
• The hChaptcha test needs to be passed
• These can be blocked in the firewall without loss of function
  • Wants to connect to ….googleusercontent.com and the Google addresses 2600:1900:…
  • Wants to connect to local telecom providers
• For calling a lot of extra connections to Signal servers are needed

Telegram can be installed via aptitude. Search for: ^telegram
Install log:

Performing actions...
Selecting previously unselected package qt5-image-formats-plugins:amd64.
(Reading database ... 114180 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../qt5-image-formats-plugins_5.11.3-2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking qt5-image-formats-plugins:amd64 (5.11.3-2) ...
Selecting previously unselected package fonts-open-sans.
Preparing to unpack .../fonts-open-sans_1.11-1_all.deb ...
Unpacking fonts-open-sans (1.11-1) ...
Selecting previously unselected package libxxhash0:amd64.
Preparing to unpack .../libxxhash0_0.6.5-2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking libxxhash0:amd64 (0.6.5-2) ...
Selecting previously unselected package telegram-desktop.
Preparing to unpack .../telegram-desktop_1.5.11-1_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking telegram-desktop (1.5.11-1) ...
Setting up fonts-open-sans (1.11-1) ...
Setting up qt5-image-formats-plugins:amd64 (5.11.3-2) ...
Setting up libxxhash0:amd64 (0.6.5-2) ...
Setting up telegram-desktop (1.5.11-1) ...
Processing triggers for fontconfig (2.13.1-2) ...
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.23-4) ...
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.62) ...
Processing triggers for hicolor-icon-theme (0.17-2) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.28-10) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.5-2) ..

After updating you might have to set the permissions right again. Do, as root,

chmod 4755 /usr/bin/signal-desktop

/usr/bin/signal-desktop might be a symbolic link to /opt/Signal/signal-desktop which will be updated

/usr/bin/signal-desktop: error while loading shared libraries: libffmpeg.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Solution:

• With aptitude reinstall ( L ) Signal
• See Github issue #3692

Error: After running

$ ls -l /opt/Signal/signal-desktop
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 156M feb 10 21:16 /opt/Signal/signal-desktop
$ /opt/Signal/signal-desktop

you get:

[13096:0214/113339.688047:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(157)]
The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly.
Rather than run without sandboxing I'm aborting now.
You need to make sure that /opt/Signal/chrome-sandbox
is owned by root and has mode 4755.
Trace/breakpoint trap

Solution: Run, as root:

$ chmod 4755 /usr/bin/signal-desktop**
$ ls -l /usr/bin/signal-desktop
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 156M feb 10 21:16 /opt/Signal/signal-desktop

E: Malformed entry 1 in list file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list (Suite)
E: The list of sources could not be read.

Solutions:

• Check /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list for double entry's
• Remove the \ (line break) token and put everything belonging to this command on the same line

After an update you can get:

$ /opt/Signal/signal-desktop
[4944:0201/200935.225895:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(157)] The SUID sandbox helper binary
was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I'm 
aborting now. You need to make sure that /opt/Signal/chrome-sandbox is owned by
root and has mode 4755.
Trace/breakpoint trap

Solution, as root do (beware, do not change the permissions of /opt/Signal/signal-desktop):

chmod 4755 /opt/Signal/chrome-sandbox

• When the app on the smartphone is running
  • new messages do not show up on in the desktop program
  • it is not possible to reply nor react to message in the desktop program. After turning off the smartphone and restarting the desktop program one can create new messages and reply and react to messages in the desktop program.
• Messages are not synced to the desktop program(s)
• It can take a very long time for the desktop app to load all messages. Loading about 400 messages can toke up to 20 minutes.
• Has privacy issues, is not privacy friendly:
  • Needs a telephone number
  • Needs access to
    • contacts
    • files, images, be able to make and receive telephone calls and SMS. This can be a privacy issue since these data can be upload to Google
  • Uses the services of Adobe, Amazon Google which are not privacy friendly company's, are data collectors
  • When Force Stopped via Settings > Apps Signal auto starts after some time
• When using an emoji like 😐 (neutral face) the reader has to guess the meaning. However the writer gets a tool tip when selecting from the full overview of emoji's. This is an improvement point. For information about emoji see emoji's
• Time can not be set to 24 hours format, is only in U.S. format: AM & PM
• Signal contains multiple proprietary libraries and therefore is not available on the Fdroid appstore.
  • The Signal developers are against Signal being distributed through the F-Droid app store
  • Alternatives
    • Signal-FOSS
  • Times are in system time set in the computer BIOS / UEFI. So if the system time is set to UTC Signal shows times in UTC
• When you block a contact, messages the contact sends are delivered to you but not shown to you. After unblocking the messages are also not shown to you.
  • When you block a contact you get “Let username message you and share your name and photo with them? You won't receive any messages until you unblock them.” with a Delete and Unblock button.
  • As an admin of a group you can not block, nor leave that group
• Seems to connect to awsglobalaccelerator.com among others which can be a privacy concern

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