it is a bit troubling to me how this and stories covering the same group of people are so often quickly flagged.
i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this only to see it flagged dead. it does seem like this seems to be happening quite a lot when a certain group of people and their competence levels are being covered.
thanks for not burying this particular instance.
be_erik · 4h ago
Installing Signal using this method provides none of the guarantees Signal can normally provide by being an open verifiable application. It not only opens you up to state actors, but also IT folks like us. This is very much tech news. It helps explain why MDM is both critically important for businesses and terrible for security.
afavour · 8h ago
Surely the most significant tech news story of the day and it’s immediately flagged off HN.
robocat · 8h ago
Hacker news is not about political hacks.
Use /active as your start page on HN if you're interested politics. Political discussions occur, just not on front page.
My guess is that HN will shut down within a few years because it doesn't much serve a purpose for PG or YC.
afavour · 8h ago
Hacker news is about tech news. Political hacks are absolutely included within that. Personally I’d love to read HN users knowledgable thoughts on the topic, the community here is very well qualified to make points others won’t.
But alas. We won’t get any of that.
be_erik · 4h ago
There’s chatter on bsky.
But tl;dr anything said on those phones is assumed to be compromised until proven otherwise by time or a whole lot of very interesting security verifications. So far the evidence that this is a very large leak looks probable based on the evidence presented.
cadamsdotcom · 8h ago
Thanks everyone who has chosen NOT to flag this. It is emphatically in the public interest for this to be known.
be_erik · 4h ago
Yeah, I was shocked to see this buried. If the allegations are verified this could be a huge leak on what a number of people were led to believe is a secure by default platform. It turns out when you can’t trust the CI/CD pipe those guarantees go out the window.
Seems to be a censorship campaign targeting 404 Media. Been going on for at least weeks.
dashundchen · 8h ago
Anything with a potentially negative impact on Musk, Trump or DOGE seems to get flagged immediately. Coordinated or not it extremely frustrating people flag rather than honestly engage.
be_erik · 4h ago
This news story has been strange for me for awhile because on one hand NO our public officials should not be using Signal, but it isn’t because Signal is a bad technology choice. Signal is great. It’s probably the most useable service that’s verifiably secure.
jimmydoe · 8h ago
We should all feel relieved that trump admin are following law to archive their chats after all.
Unfortunately this Israeli company is just incompetent, should try something from Russia next time, given that’s all the data end up to be anyway.
namdnay · 32m ago
I wonder if they were using it from the start, or if after the first SignalGate, someone scrmabled to find a supplier who could "make their Signal compliant" (which is exactly what TeleMessage/Smarsh are selling)
watwut · 1h ago
I am pretty sure China has some backups too.
1oooqooq · 7h ago
cutting the middle man is very neo lib of you. you may have a bright future in this administration.
also keeping government honest and open is also very libertarian. covering all fronts.
senectus1 · 6h ago
what is going on in the US gov IT?
They took an Israeli app, that is a modified version of signal. the modification BREAKS the one thing signal is excellent at (keeping your messages encrypted so that only the desired endpoints can read them), then distributed it within the US Gov.
This is insanity!
US's enemy's couldn't manufacture a better result themselves!
namdnay · 33m ago
It's not just the US gov - TeleMessage/Smarsh sell to everyone: banks, corporations etc. Their USP is that your employees get to "keep using their apps" but still comply with all the boring data retention stuff - instead of using a dedicated corporate chat app
What's interesting is that they also sell a hacked version of WhatsApp, and the Meta legal team haven't steamrolled them yet
bathtub365 · 6h ago
The messages do need to be recorded in a way that can be read by people other than the intended recipients due to federal record keeping laws. I’m curious if this particular app has been in use for a long time within the government and only recently became a target after it was accidentally revealed in that cabinet meeting photo.
i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this only to see it flagged dead. it does seem like this seems to be happening quite a lot when a certain group of people and their competence levels are being covered.
thanks for not burying this particular instance.
Use /active as your start page on HN if you're interested politics. Political discussions occur, just not on front page.
My guess is that HN will shut down within a few years because it doesn't much serve a purpose for PG or YC.
But alas. We won’t get any of that.
But tl;dr anything said on those phones is assumed to be compromised until proven otherwise by time or a whole lot of very interesting security verifications. So far the evidence that this is a very large leak looks probable based on the evidence presented.
Why are these being instantly marked as dead?
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891088 in which a user reports that moderator dang said why that happens for this domain.
Unfortunately this Israeli company is just incompetent, should try something from Russia next time, given that’s all the data end up to be anyway.
also keeping government honest and open is also very libertarian. covering all fronts.
They took an Israeli app, that is a modified version of signal. the modification BREAKS the one thing signal is excellent at (keeping your messages encrypted so that only the desired endpoints can read them), then distributed it within the US Gov.
This is insanity!
US's enemy's couldn't manufacture a better result themselves!
What's interesting is that they also sell a hacked version of WhatsApp, and the Meta legal team haven't steamrolled them yet