As Signal team said on Twitter, in case of a federated network, censors would simply block all servers (which are in a limited amount anyway). To counteract censorships I only see two possible ways:
a P2P system (IMHO I believe the world is not ready for that yet)
something that changes so often (and unpredictably) that censors would find it hard to block (e.g. some sort of āIP address frontingā (you get the meaning), but the question to be able to resolve it from a hostname would remain)
The case for Kontalk is a very delicate one at the moment because of the single server involved (the second one has been inactive for some time now). Besides the distributed load factor for needing multiple servers, censorship can cause real damage to Kontalk at the moment.
p2p seems to be getting there slowly but steadily, with applications like Briar, Ring and Tox all being active.
Itās great to have these as alternative solutions, especially for people that have to worry about censorship, aggressive surveillance and even internet services being blocked.
Yes and no. It works only when you have pop or imap. With webservices only (like the Mailfence.com free accounts) it does not work.
Iāve been playing with it with my accounts from Gmail, Yandex and Mailbox.org and it works good. In your accounts you get an extra folder called Chat.
Hello,
I read this topic, which is a security app now ?
I used Signal, but now i use Lineage os without google as i read Signal cant work without GSF (i install from yalp store and work i dont know what the matter is)
Now i found this Kontalk, how much this app is secure, is it possible for someone to read my conversations? conversations images audio are they being stored on a server or anywhere?
Is everything encripted? Whether the government or my internet provider has insight into my messages?
Im not an expert, but im worried about my communication, i have nothing strictly confidential, its just not nice when know someone can read it or everything is stored somewhere. Thanks
Sorry for my poor english
But still I will try to answer.
All messages are End to End PGP encrypted.
And after receiving the message it will deleted on the server.
So nobody then you and your chat buddy can read the messages (including audio an pictures)
For more privacy stuff (like phone number using and so on) you can read this:
Iād like to know how Signal doesnāt need ātrackersā in the Google app store to work, but Kontalk needs it (not in f-droid). I was answered by email about this:
As for the trackers, those are in the Google Play version in order to use push notifications and crash reports (you can opt-out of both if youād like, but push notifications are a big battery saver and message content is not shared with Google, itās just a signal for the app like āhey, there are new messages, go connect and dowload them!ā).
Another difference is map providers: the F-Droid version has only
OpenStreetMap, the Google Play version has both OSM and Google Maps."
Yes, I use the F-droid version and also my wife, but if I want some friends out there (using the Google App store) to use it, they wonāt follow my steps to download it from F-droid (you knowā¦). Iād be more happy if Kontalk avoids all those ātrackersā because other apps (like Signal) donāt need it to work.
Opinions?
As for Crashlytics, we use it for statistics purposes and automatic crash reports. You can opt-out of both of them, and recently weāve been considering abandoning analytics in general and leave only the crash reports (they are much more detailed than the Google Play ones and they help fixing bugs a lot).
I was recently looking for an alternative since the Google acquisition, but itās going to take some time for it to be replaced completely.
As for Signal, I didnāt check the source code but they probably have their own crash reporting (or use just the Google Play one).