What’s better than WhatsApp? Telegram. What’s better than Telegram? Signal. What’s better than Signal? Session!
Why do we need privacy and secure messaging? This need became mainstream in 2020 when tyranny imposed itself worldwide into everyone’s personal lives. Before that, in the USA, free speech was assumed. However, in other countries around the world, especially journalists were at risk if they attempted to report on subjects the authorities didn’t want them reporting on.
Protesting is one of the ways that people push back against government overreach. If protesters are to be safe from persecution they must be able to have secure communications.
Telephone lines have been tapped for many decades (yes, I even helped design the equipment that tapped telephone lines back in the 1970s). For the most part, people have blissfully assumed they weren’t being spied on. The modern era, high tech with massive computing power, has brought 24/7 surveillance of everyone to reality. It is now our norm, even if there is no reason for you to be suspected of anything. Spying isn’t just for governments anymore, businesses have discovered how profitable spying is.
For my fellow James Bond fans, you might like to adopt a few technologies that help preserve your free speech. Thus we have encrypted messaging! Far safer than making a phone call!
So what makes “Session” better than Signal?
Session takes Signal’s encryption technology (exact same code) and adds on the TOR (The Onion Router) concept. What this does is route your messages through several servers so they are very hard to trace. With encrypted messages, like Signal, your messages can’t be read, but you can still be tracked to keep an eye on who you talk to, when and how much. Session makes this sort of tracking virtually impossible (unlike how they show easy route following on TV).
Session doesn’t require any identifying information to create an account. No phone numbers, no email addresses, nothing.
Another advantage of Session is that you can have it on all of your devices and, for example, when you change phones you don’t have a nightmare trying to migrate your conversations and information. This is very, very handy for those of us that have more than one phone!
What drawbacks does Session have? Currently the Windows desktop app can’t apply styles to text (no italics, no bold text). Also Session doesn’t allow you to edit a message after you have sent it (so fix those typos before sending!).
Where can I get Session? For your phones, go to your “App Store”. For computers go to:
https://getsession.org/
Session came to my attention because the Australian government visited an employee's home one night, not long ago, trying to get them to cooperate to reveal information about a user.
This motivated Session to decide to move to Switzerland where they would be safe from such government pressure.
Never heard of it, but will be looking into it for sure!
Session came to my attention because the Australian government visited an employee's home one night not long ago trying to get them to cooperate to reveal information about a user.
This motivated Session to decide to move to Switzerland where they would be safe from such government pressure.