Hacker News: finnn

New comment by finnn in "Bird.makeup: a Twitter to ActivityPub bridge"

finnn — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 05:14:41 +0000

ah yes, another fork of BirdSiteLive. Every one seems to make their own fork of that thing. And none of them (that I've found) set a user agent when delivering messages to other AP servers.

You can see where bird.makeup sets the headers here[0] (with a distinct lack of user agent) and an issue I filed against the upstream[1] asking them to please set a user agent.

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~cloutier/bird.makeup/tree/master/item/src...

[1] https://github.com/NicolasConstant/BirdsiteLive/issues/188

New comment by finnn in "Notkia: Linux phone in the shape of Nokia, with LoRa + WiFI + BT connectivity"

finnn — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 20:38:29 +0000

oh wow HN is parroting this bullshit again.

Moxie and Signal didn't do anything other than asking LibreSignal politely to stop using their servers. They didn't "shut down" anything, and they have shown no interest in shutting down signal-cli/signald.

MobileCoin, the cryptocurrency that Signal incorporates and essentially sanctions, uses signald for their bot[0].

the Signal Matrix bridge has hundreds if not thousands of open source users, plus Element One and Beeper users, all using signald and not having any repercussions for years. The only 3rd party Signal client that's caught any flak from Signal that I'm aware of is LibreSignal.

also see: last time this came up[1]

[0] https://github.com/mobilecoinofficial/mobot/blob/dev/RUN.md

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27682490#27683374

New comment by finnn in "Element One – All of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place"

finnn — Tue, 26 Oct 2021 17:50:37 +0000

https://www.freshports.org/net-im/signald/

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 02:18:56 +0000

Could you point me to some of those instances?

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 02:09:10 +0000

Okay, that's fair. I interpreted them as a response to the original question about if the policy is enforced.

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 01:58:04 +0000

We know the policy, no one is confused about the policy, all 3rd party clients violate the policy.

Is the policy enforced? I've seen no evidence of it.

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 01:20:29 +0000

I'm looking for people's experience interacting with the Signal server, not moxie. We're talking about if the server enforces any kind of client restrictions.

I haven't looked super deep, but to the best of my knowledge that's not something that happens really. I looked through that reddit thread (thanks for that BTW, whisperfish seems interesting) and skimmed over that enormous GitHub thread, but I couldn't find much in the way of people actually experiencing issues interacting with the Signal server. Again, would appreciate it if you could link me to such a thing. As I mentioned elsewhere, I maintain an unofficial signal client and I try to be aware of these sort of things.

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:44:21 +0000

Sorry what am I looking for in this 200 comment reddit thread? I don't see any comments from moxie himself, just a lot of other people claiming to know what moxie wants. Are there reports of specific issues with 3rd party clients or comments from a Signal employee or something?

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:29:03 +0000

signal-cli uses a clearly identifiable user agent [0] that could easily be blocked if Signal wanted to. signal-cli could escalate by trying to evade that kind of a block, but as it stands signal-cli has been operating without trouble for several years.

I meant they may ask some clients not to use their servers, but they don't have any enforcement mechanism in place beyond asking them to stop on github.

[0] https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/blob/05abb3f9f6294677d2d...

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:17:33 +0000

I said it's not enforced.

I cannot speak for moxie or Signal. I can speak for my own experiences, as the maintainer of a fork of signal-cli, and I have never seen any evidence that Signal's servers block signal-cli or my fork. I don't know about signal-cli but my fork clearly identifies itself in the user agent (and another field called the "signal agent") to the server. If they wanted to block me they could.

edit: signal-cli also sets a user agent clearly identifies itself: https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/blob/05abb3f9f6294677d2d...

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:02:15 +0000

It's not a licensing restriction, it's a terms of use for their network service. It's also not enforced. Their clients are open source, signal-cli uses a fork of the Android app's client library.

New comment by finnn in "Command Line Interface for Signal"

finnn — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:40 +0000

signald is a fork of signal-cli

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 05:57:55 +0000

yes, send it to your own phone number, just like all the real Signal clients.

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:47:07 +0000

there are matrix bridges for all three of those

https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-whatsapp

https://github.com/Half-Shot/matrix-appservice-discord

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-slack

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:37:21 +0000

signald also comes with a cli called signaldctl: https://signald.org/signaldctl/

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:35:34 +0000

the signal matrix bridge currently listed on matrix.org (https://github.com/tulir/mautrix-signal) uses signald

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 03:32:51 +0000

a pidgin (libpurple) plugin actually exists already: https://github.com/hoehermann/libpurple-signald

I'd like to improve the website to better showcase the clients

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 02:37:26 +0000

This daemon handles as much of the weird signal-specific stuff and exposes an easier to use API. It handles things like encrypting and decrypting messages, generating and storing keys, syncing with linked devices and a bunch of others.

signald doesn't really "trigger actions" or anything, but it would be pretty easy to write something that does using it.

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:00:06 +0000

New comment by finnn in "Signald: Unofficial daemon for interacting with Signal"

finnn — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:56:16 +0000

well "signal-cli" is already in use by https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli (which signald is a fork of)