ponymontana💜⚡'s avatar
ponymontana💜⚡ ponymontana@nostriches.club 1 year ago
yeah, but whatsapp was the first to become really popular. When facebook bought it, it was already the most used app, at least here in italy (was like the most expensive acquistition ever made at the time). After the acquisition, the original founder of whatsapp joined with 50 million $ to the development of a little niche app noone uses called "chatsecure" by the cryptographer Moxie Marlinspike, then they renamed it to signal and started "recreating whatsapp but open source". Signal started late and always been many steps behind whatsapp in every features (except implementing signal protocol for cryptography).
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mleku's avatar
mleku mleku@smesh.lol 1 year ago
yeah, that definitely was not the sequence of events signal started in about 2014-15 and their protocol was used by the rest of them, so-called "double ratchet" protocol, and you may also have heard of "OTR" messaging, that also came around the same time, it was out of the same school of cryptography development signal was born out of the merger of the FIRST SMS based auth service, and everything else uses that now, whatsapp, telegram, viber, they all use that, but it was invented by Redphone here's some history
Open Whisper Systems - Wikipedia
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JD's avatar
JD jd@satellite.earth 1 year ago
I think I was playing around it as well around that time. Even did couple of calls over their encrypted connection. Felt pretty 7331 haxx0r at the time. But it was lagging as hell. Probably would've gotten use to it if someone else would've used it also. But they were pretty unknown. I heard about them because we had some innovation hackathon at the place I worked then. One proposed project for the hackathon was encrypted chat app, and after searching, found the redphone. Another project was planning poker for software development teams.
ponymontana💜⚡'s avatar
ponymontana💜⚡ ponymontana@nostriches.club 1 year ago
I mispelled "chatsecure", was " textsecure" instead... whatsapp launched in 2009, and reached great popularity in the first years of smartphones here in italy. The facebook acquisition happened in 2014. Then has been "upgraded" with the signal protocol by the collaboration with the signal guys in later years.
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