You can now contact Purism via Signal Messenger!

General Announcements
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Great news for folks eager for easier ways to communicate with Purism over end-to-end-encrypted (E2EE) communication channels! This is especially notable for customers where email communication with the Support department has not been entirely reliable, or for Anti-Interdiction customers as an alternative to GPG-encrypted email.

Please note that this account may be monitored by more than one department within Purism based on the nature of the conversation (e.g. support, assembly team for expedited shipment, etc). Take this into consideration if providing PII.

I just created a Signal Messenger account for Purism and updated Purism’s contact information table to include the Signal Messenger username. (This username is not included within this announcement so that this information does not become obsolete.) Make sure you verify this username before accepting a contact who claims to be Purism.

This new contact method is currently experimental as Purism adjusts workflows. It is currently being treated as an “alternative” contact method and may not be frequently monitored until such a time when it is fully adopted.

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This is a strange choice having that matrix exists

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We must meet customers where they are since they are the ones offering money.

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I bought Liberty phone and top subscription. I am not in signal :wink:

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Do you generally feel like you know how to reach Purism, or know where to look to find that information? (Honest question - not sarcastic or snarky)

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Upon the purchase? I used web-site which suggested to send an email that was only answered half a year after. Accidentally I found this forum and it remains my main source of news, advises and general talk. I expect that a regular client would use the website too

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Signal does seem a bit of an odd choice, given their hostility to software freedom (undermining forking their client, admitting adding code to the server that is not published, not supporting fully-free OS’s as first-class clients), among other issues, like requiring a phone number.

It could be worse. WhatsApp/Facebook Messenger are worse.

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To add to your point, I was disappointed when I heard what felt like a heavy-handed decision to remove SMS support in Signal, thereby forcing users to use several messaging applications rather than a single one. One of the cited reasons was, paraphrased, that “SMS is not secure, and we don’t want to confuse secure- and non-secure messaging methods within the app.” I reached out to the Signal Foundation at that time to describe how the necessity of multiple applications reduces a user’s security posture given compounded security vulnerability risks of an additional application. There was much documented outcry from this, but Meredith Whittaker (President of the Signal Foundation) stood behind her decision.

Anyway, to my actual point:

The simple solution is for you to not use Signal Messenger, right?

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Was XMPP considered?

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Yes; the goal was to offer an option simple to install and configure with E2EE enabled by default, whereas XMPP offers E2EE through extensions like OMEMO.

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I have this problem. As a Liberty phone user, the Signal Messenger basically doesn’t work on my phone. People say there are workarounds, maybe I can do command line install of a sign up tool that will sign me up and then embed the command line generated data into the ported electron desktop app, and maybe it will work until after a month when they kick me off and need me to reconnect to primary device that they think is the iPhone but in reality it’s command line. Or I can use Waydroid, but I don’t use Waydroid on my primary device because the point of using a Liberty Phone in my life was in part to not use Android. (For me, the first time I tried to switch to one of those command line tools and was banned from Signal for 7+ days for “improper connection” to their servers, I realized how hostile they really are to using a Librem 5)

As we unlock a whole new class of moral and ethical problems by building AI, might you consider the AI? I have one person in my life who I wanted to have end-to-end encrypted messaging with where I followed some simple steps to communicate:

  • Rented a VPS
  • Logged into the VPS and did sudo -i or whatever
  • Installed creepy “frontier model” coding tool from AI
  • Typed into the box “I want to do end to end encrypted chat with my friend. I will use a GNU linux handset and they will use android. Build an app that chats back and forth in an end to end encrypted way which has an identical client available as a python gtk app for the linux handset or as an Android app for the Android user”
  • The creepy “frontier model” instantly built that, and we’ve been using it ever since. It communicates through the VPS where the AI was present infiltrating things to build the server layer, but whatever that’s someone else’s hardware anyway.

A native python gtk app that I can add to my homescreen of my Librem 5 as a desktop entry seems to run better, smoother, and faster than all that absolute gobbletygook nonsense of Signal. At some point maybe I’m not actually deciding based on how secure these things are, but on the fact that when presented with two reasonably secure options like that but where one of them lags and does constant buggy automatic updates and weird requests for re-validation and the other one works seamlessly forever, you can imagine why I 100% go with the AI and never with Signal in that case. It’s just really a matter of wanting something that works on my phone, and the ten years of software development and millions of dollars at Signal Foundation wasn’t able to deliver that, and twenty bucks of Fraude Fable tokens and a VPS fee did deliver that.

So why doesn’t Purism just make a free source software, publicly available tiny GTK app with minimal and easily human reviewable code, which shows chat messages between the user and Purism, and then offer it anywhere (these forums, Purism website, etc) as a free download?

It literally is less human effort to make it than what it took me to type this post. You just enter the subset of this post where I described how the app should work into a text box on Fraude Fable.

My advice is to not install the app by default on Librem 5. It would feel too much like you created a device that can’t do anything other than talk to your own company. But if you make this app freely available for download, and even encourage people to download it as source code only and just do python purism_support.py on their Librem 5’s, and leave a guide how to make a desktop entry to launch that if people want to associate the “icon” like an “app” with the script, I think this would be extremely, extremely easy to do.

Obviously making it use an open protocol like XMPP instead of a “protocol invented on the spot” would be a nice nod to humans of the past, but if that prevents you from finishing building it then maybe just have a “DIY” script like the one I use described above.

Edit:

I literally was invited to drinks by some AI users at the office and asked the ChatGPT to make an app on my phone to “talk to the space aliens” and even this app to talk with the UFO beings runs better than Signal on the Librem 5.

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:pirate_flag: :gem_stone: :rocket: :folded_hands: :heart_eyes:

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There is literally no marketing scheme. This is not an attempt to garner sales or convince anyone to use XYZ. There is simply an alternative contact method available, and forums and Librem Social are first to know. That’s all. Your perspective is clearly clouded by your disdain for Purism and you appear to be projecting strawman arguments to fit the narrative you’ve constructed.

You are entitled to your own opinion despite it being disastrously misguided. You have no data to back your claims. You have not seen the support issue burndown metrics. You choose piecemeal datapoints and stitch together a false motive. Yes, there are outstanding support issues; yes, there was an incredibly long backlog for a while and the number of open issues is being steadily reduced everyday by absolutely stellar support staff. Do you have something helpful to contribute?

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Yes, I have adopted this solution for myself :joy:

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Since Signal is not a commonly available method of communication with L5 (needs work, workarounds, luck), I see this as an avenue for people who are coming from those other phones and thinking of trying L5 - they have this messaging app available easily, so this probably serves them (insofar as much as Purism has bandwith to communicate in any channel). This shouldn’t be judged so fast at this point (beforehand) - the more important thing is how information flows and what are the response times in any channel.

Trying something new is a good thing. It should be encouraged (even if this wasn’t what you may have expected or dreamed of) - there might then come other new things. And who knows, maybe Signal eventually some day becomes a real alternative [which is a different discussion]

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helpful to contribute

I would not mind to contribute.Some easy tasks to start with, like packaging, integration etc which are my areas of expertise

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I see the logic of what you are saying. But for me, Signal is one of those traps that makes it harder to use a Librem 5 because it fights you for trying to leave an Android or iOS, so it’s a bit weird to encourage someone to start their journey towards Librem 5 by potentially being further trapped.

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A believable counterargument, but I doubt it’s purely just one or the other. At individual level it can be either. At scale, and after a long time, there might be some statistical view of which of them has more affect - or if there is some other phenomena at play. I also think these are not diametrically opposed evenly - my argument may be more closer to the beginning of the process while that trap may hinder later in changing platforms. There’s probably some insights from research already done on Android vs. iOS change. But be that as it may, the point was more that it’s not serving L5 users atm.

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These are people who already use Signal that request Purism to communicate on that platform rather than over GPG-encrypted email. Many (most?) of these customers are new. Keep in mind that businesses need to make it as seamless as possible to close sales and fulfill product; for Anti-Interdiction customers, they have not yet received the product and they are still forming early impressions.

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