[Replicant] Using signal/textsecure

[Tyler]

On 11/05/15, Nick wrote:
> Alternatively, there is an unofficial experimental fork that doesn't
> depend on the proprietary Google libraries [1], but I can't tell if 
> works fine day-to-day. Anybody have experience with it?

Hi,

So I help contribute to @JavaJens's fork and keep it up to date with
upstream. I'm currently using Signal 3.3.1 on a Replicant running phone
with no Google Play crapware installed, and I have been using JavaJens's
fork since around May of this year (around 2.23.0). 

It works 100% fine for messaging. As of right now, phone calls don't
work. AFAIK, the RedPhone encrypted phone call functionality requires 
Google  Cloud Messaging (requires Google Play, is closed source). I have
commented out the registration for encrypted phone services in Signal 
in the WebSocket Reborn fork. In a perfect world I would like phone 
calls to  work, but I don't have time to hack a solution together and 
I also don't care enough about phone calls to dedicate tons of hours to 
that specific effort.

If you are a programmer and familiar with using git and android-studio, 
I highly recommend just building the fork from source yourself. There
are instructions here:
https://github.com/JavaJens/TextSecure/wiki/Building-the-Websockets-reborn-fork

If that's beyond your abilities, @xmikos created a repo for F-Droid that
you can install Signal from. I believe that he's lagging behind my
latest pulls from upstream so I think the latest version up there is
2.28 or 2.27 (which was the last update before vanilla TextSecure 
switched from TS to Signal) and I think he renamed it to LibreSignal or
something similar. You could find more info here:
https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

I personally recommend just building from source. Moxie and xmikos had a
fight over naming shit, I don't want to piss off Moxie any more than we
already have because I want to keep using his software. Piss off moxie
enough and he may decide to make our lives harder and blacklist us from
the main TextSecure Server which then means you'd have to start running
your own server infrastructure and distribute custom apks to your
friends so they could talk to you. (He already asked JavaJens to change
the user agent string that websocket-reborn clients talk to the server
with, although I suspect that's just so OWS folks can get an idea of how
many people are using websocket-reborn)

If anybody has any questions about running Signal/Textsecure on
Replicant feel free to reach out to me. I am invested in this venture.



side note -
For those who are interested in such things, you may want to check out
https://github.com/janimo/textsecure-qml

This is a independent implementation of the TextSecure messaging
protocol with a go library for messaging and a QML (QT markup language) 
user interface written by a Canonical employee for the ubuntu phone.
If/when I finally get my hands on a neo900 (https://my.neo900.org/) I
will be wanting to port this to Debian, and in theory it will work for
both desktop and phone usage. (Although AFAIK ATM the TS protocol does
not support multi-device so you'd have to have a separate phone number
for each device... Although you can get around buying a new phone with
things like google voice and voip providers... last I checked you could
pay for callwithus using Bitcoin and there's no reason you couldn't pipe 
the web requests through TOR, its just HTTP last I checked...)


tl;dr - yes you can run signal on your Replicant phone. It's the only
method of communication I allow close friends to talk to me with.

-- 
If you have PGP and want to communicate privately,
my key is in the header of this email.

If you're interested and want to learn more: 

https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-pgp-windows
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-pgp-mac-os-x
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-pgp-linux
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