FYI for #Signal users:

Today my wife could not send messages because Signal has implemented captchas, and the captcha failed. Nothing would send without passing the captcha. The message was being sent to another Signal user who she's messaged before and is in her contacts. It was urgent, and she had to send via SMS to get the message through.

The "feature" and "safety" creep has turned Signal into something that doesn't do its only job. They would sacrifice function for the sake of treating us like spammers. You'd also think the years of metadata they have would be enough to get us on the "not spam" list.

We were already using other apps as our primary messengers, but this is really the final nail in the coffin.

#privacy #security

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Damn. Was the captcha proprietary? Or did they use something like hCaptcha or God forbid google reCaptcha?

The wife here, I don't remember what flavor it was. I was too busy raging at it to pay attention too closely, apparently I'm a robot though...

I dumped #Signal after they pushed scam coin "mobilecoin".

Wow this is good info to know.

I will never use it now. Their Jewish CEO with a past of political censorship made me not want to try it

I think that's when we started with Session and Threema. Now we host SimpleX and use that a lot. Threema gets a little hate, but it's been the most reliable.

what condition causes the captcha to appear and be required? ..i’ve never had that appear before in Signal (for ref, i’ve only used it on iOS and Linux)

I don't know exactly. I've seen it a couple of times, but it was just a check box. I wasn't doing anything unusual other than being on a VPN. To me, there's only one reason anyone would want my real IP, so Signal can go right ahead and blow me.

i’ve been using Signal for 6 or 7 years and not seen that, but i’ll keep an eye out for it — thanks for the heads up

Same here. It's something recent for sure. Maybe in the past couple of weeks.

Those captchas come up when you use a #VPN and contact new people, or contact people already in your contact list whom you have not contacted for some time.

I am sure it is more complex than that, but this has been my experience.

At least they went with hcaptcha, not google's :)

That's what I suspected. I'm just super not okay with that, though. It's E2EE messaging. Why the hell would there NOT be overlap with VPN users? And why now?

They aren't even hiding the agenda of the new management.

It's been like this for at least a couple of years.

It's really rather occasional (unless you're messaging new contacts all the time) and honestly it has not been a drag to me. It's only slightly annoying, compared to google captcha endless loops on Tor and the usual multiple attempts until it passes using VPNs.

Weird. That's the complete opposite of what we've seen. I've only seen it recently, it popped on regular contacts, and I don't have a group over 4 people. It also didn't do anything complex for me, just a check box. My wife got the full deal about choosing certain objects, though. This morning she got a notification that her message yesterday wasn't sent, so that was helpful.

I've noticed it occasionally. Only seems to happen when I send messages frequently and to larger groups (more than 100 people). Never had a problem with it failing and preventing me from sending new messages though.