Is Semaphor focused on group chat (Slack) or are there plans to support private communications (text, audio, video) like Wire? Unlike Signal, Wire allows registration with only an email address (via http://app.wire.com) and does not force you to upload your contacts to their server.
I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things:
1. Secure. A few of them exist
2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1
3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of course, Telegram fails #1.. making temporary communication all the more troublesome.
[1]: This may be limited to certain systems, such as Android. But yea, don't save an image of an important document in a "secret" chat on Android.. it saves it to your filesystem.
No UX complaints here. I don't think it has ephemeral messages, but you can delete per-contact history of end-to-end encrypted msgs. There's a neat doodle/whiteboard feature. The surprising killer feature of Wire has been the quality of audio, which may be due to their hiring of former Skype engineers, http://www.wired.com/2015/08/wire-declares-war-on-terrible-c...:
"You know that vague hissing noise that’s omnipresent during your phone calls? It’s called “comfort noise,” and it’s totally artificial. It’s placed there so that when you hear those brief moments of silence between each speaker’s vocalizations, you don’t think the call has disconnected. In Wire, there’s none of that; it’s actually a little jarring, not hearing anything at all when no one’s speaking ... a Wire group call is also set up in a sort of virtual space. Sound comes through the app in stereo—you really need a headset to experience it—and the app’s post-processing is able to delay it by a few milliseconds in one ear or the other. The effect is that even though you’re all on a call, it will always sound like Mary’s sitting on your left, Mike is right in front of you, and Stephanie is a few seats over to the right. Your brain doesn’t have to re-identify a voice every time it starts speaking."
1. End-to-end using Proteus which is inspired by Axolotl (now Signal). Whitepaper available (wire.com/privacy), independent security review underway). Right now only crypto/comms part open source but there will be more news in this.
2. It's similar. Visually distinct the UX is close enough to what people are used to from other IM apps, I would say.
3. Not. We've experimented with this internally but so far have not decided to release ephemeral aspect to public. Not enough demand. As someone else commented - you can delete content from your devices (syned across if you're logged in from more than one), but content will remain on other people's devices.
> 3. Not. We've experimented with this internally but so far have not decided to release ephemeral aspect to public. Not enough demand. As someone else commented - you can delete content from your devices (syned across if you're logged in from more than one), but content will remain on other people's devices.
You may not see demand, but the userbase for an app like Wire or Signal is itself very small and with almost no demand (compared to just having a messaging app with emojis, GIFs and stickers, for which there is a huge demand - encrypted or not). :)
I use this feature in Telegram called secret chat with the self-destruct timer set to a specific duration to exchange sensitive information like banking information or other things that I don't want to remain for long.
(By trusting Telegram's encryption for secret chats) This makes it quite simple to exchange information which otherwise would involve asking people to delete specific messages or wondering if someone really deleted it or just forgot to do it because of laziness, forgetfulness or just being busy (not attributing malice to the other party here, since the information can be captured for posterity through many other means).
I hope you would consider this feature even if you see "not enough demand", because for those who need it, it's a real blessing to have it!
Are decrypted messages/assets stored in plaintext in the local device cache, or subject to local device backups? Can the local device cache be manually flushed, made subject to OS-level data protection policy, or eliminated entirely?
Your "temporary" criteria is not yet available in the 1.0.x version of Semaphor, but the very near term roadmap includes retention policy per channel/conversation, with settings like "N days" and/or "N messages". Then Semaphor uses ephemeral key rotation to match the retention policy (i.e. both the messages and ephemeral keys are destroyed as the retention expires.)
I'm dying for an app that eventually does three things:
1. Secure. A few of them exist
2. UX. I love Telegram, shame it doesn't fit item #1
3. Temporary. I actually really love Snapchat's ephemeral images and/or messaging. Telegram does a good job at this with auto destructing messages.. but it saves images on the system[1], and i don't trust it removing from the cloud in a timely manner. And of course, Telegram fails #1.. making temporary communication all the more troublesome.
[1]: This may be limited to certain systems, such as Android. But yea, don't save an image of an important document in a "secret" chat on Android.. it saves it to your filesystem.