Registration without a phone number on Signal will use zero-knowledge proofs
Mirrored from Hacker News — AI on Front Page for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
you have legitimate concerns, but you’re very wrong about this. zero-knowledge proofs are not only the technology behind donation badges and backup payments, but also behind groups. they can’t tie you to a specific donation just like they can’t tie you to a specific group.
the great thing about Signal is the client is designed to already not trust the server. in fact you can show that Signal is perfectly safe without even looking at server code.
ZKP is also used for verifying things like username character set and length without actually revealing contents which is super cool and comprises of math waaaayyyyy above my head.
I was wondering what ZKP was 
Also adjacent. The “save as pdf” is quite interesting. :)
For those who are already registered with their phone number and would like to “unlink” it without re-registering for the service… is that possible?
if this feature happens, signal org should clarify some technical details regarding privacy.
is phone number totally unlinked from username?
what remnants remains, locally in a device? in a server?
my guess is that unlinking is not 100% unlinked. which is leads to a second point. should new account without phone number be better idea. unlinking phone number may not be best option.
although unlinking phone number could be free of charge.
I don’t think anything points to this yet.
That seems unlikely, because spammers could just get one number, register with that, unlink, repeat, to get infinitely many accounts for free. Unless they add a cooldown or something…
cooldown is reasonably in this case. but even with one month cooldown, it may not be enough to prevent spammers and scammers. it cannot be long either.
cooldown alone may not be enough.
That seems unlikely, because spammers could just get one number, register with that, unlink, repeat, to get infinitely many accounts for free. Unless they add a cooldown or something…
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