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Aren’t notifications supposed to be encrypted for Signal?

iOS stores the previously displayed notifications in an internal database, which was used to access the data. It’s outside of Signal’s control, they recommend disabling showing notification content in their settings to prevent this attack vector

They do control the content on the notification. It's a bit odd to put the sensitive text in the notification only to recommend disabling it at the system level.

No. They recommended disabling it at the app level. Only the Signal app can control whether the message contents are included in the notifications.

They do not. They send encrypted notifications. It’s the OS that stores them unencrypted. It’s the OS at fault here IMHO.

i think they're replying to the "recommendation" part -- if it was recommended, why isn't it the safe default?

i haven't actually seen signal or anyone adjacent recommend that previously though, idk where that claim came from


Sorry, the “recommended” was a bad wording on my part. The recommendation comes from the 404 Media article who did the expose on this incident, not Signal itself.

I’ve checked the Signal documentation page, and there’s no mention of the privacy implications of the setting: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360043273491-In...


You can choose what to show in the notification and there is an option to include the message, so I'm guessing that allowed some unencrypted incoming messages to be read.

Sibling comment explains. The notification does arrive encrypted and is decrypted by an app extension (by Signal), however, if the message preview is shown, it is stored unencrypted by iOS. It is that storage that is accessed.

it seems iOS will drop previews into an unencrypted section. which, Is how I expected iOS notification previews to work without unlocking the phone

This kind of vulnerability is not tied to Signal but all apps which send notification.

They are;

“Messages were recovered from Sharp’s phone through Apple’s internal notification storage—Signal had been removed, but incoming notifications were preserved in internal memory. Only incoming messages were captured (no outgoing).”

ie the messages recovered were 1. incoming 2. stored by the OS after decryption

i also was spooked by the headline :p


That seems to be the expected and normal behavior. The title is a bit misleading.

yeah. Security and privacy are guaranteened by regulations, human management, and small part of the tech.

Little by little, Xcode is making progress. Probably a lot of the improvements come from the open-source and actual work on its build system… It’s still far from perfect, but at least it’s getting better.

Is “$0” (`argv[0]`) correct when the pre-compiled binary is launched instead of the script?

Ahh good question. I had to think a while before I understood what you meant. Let me check when I can.

Nice catch.

edit: you are right. The binary version will result in a different argv[0]. Not sure what'd the best solution would be. Hardcoding doesn't make sense, as symlinks also change argv[0], so overriding is not the way to go.


bash, zsh, and ksh93 support `exec -a` especially for this case.

yup, it got much better recently

I don’t even understand how SourceForge still exists!

There are other solutions which are as easy to read/write (if not more) and which are defined much better… Asciidoc comes to mind.

"Better specified" doesn't mean better. A bunch of features doesn't mean better.

Markdown is popular because it is simple. I have never had to teach anyone Markdown. They look at the file and immediately see what's going on and can copy the style.

Occasionally someone may have to look up something like table syntax, but no one in my career or personal life has ever asked me to explain Markdown to them, which is rare for a technology that is so widely used.

This has not been my experience with other markup languages.


Have you tried Asciidoc though? It is, IMHO, much clearer than markdown (YMMV, obviously), and exactly the same pros you gave of markdown can be said of Asciidoc.

Bonus: It starts simple but can be used to do whole books if needed.


My experience is that Asciidoc very quickly gets into advanced syntax.

If you introduce something with advanced functionality onto a team, soon enough someone's going to use pieces that others don't fully understand later.

Now everyone touching the document has to understand includes and document metadata and whatever else someone added. Suddenly you have includes and cross-references and what used to be a document where you could read the raw non-rendered form linearly top to bottom is a confusing mess unless you render it. Markdown is almost always just as legible raw as rendered.


It's great apart from the nested list syntax. It's quite noisy. I'd prefer if it supported indentation.

Interestingly I think things that should not be deterministic should actually forced not to be.

Swift for instance will explicitly make iterating on a dictionary not deterministic (by randomizing the iteration), in order to catch weird bugs early if a client relies (knowingly or not) on the specific order the elements of the dictionary are ordered.


This claim sounds vaguely familiar to me (though the documentation on Dictionary does not state any reason for why the iteration order is unpredictable), though the more common reason for languages to have unstable hash table iteration orders is as a consequence of protection against hash flooding, malicious input causing all keys to hash to the same bucket (because iteration order is dependent on bucket order).

Oh yeah you’re right, apparently the main reason was to avoid hash-flooding attacks[1].

I do seem to remember there was a claim regarding the fact that it also prevented a certain class of errors (that I mentioned earlier), but I cannot find the source again, so it might just be my memory playing tricks on me.

[1] https://forums.swift.org/t/psa-the-stdlib-now-uses-randomly-...


One more reason for randomizing hash table iteration was to prevent Denial of service attacks:

https://lukasmartinelli.ch/web/2014/11/17/php-dos-attack-rev...


Unless I’m mistaken Space Force is a netflix series.

Oh, apparently you are right! Thanks for the correction.

I refuse to give google any cent (and I also do not use youtube at all, so at least I’m consistent).

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