alanfriedman

Out of curiosity, what were some of the differences in work culture you experienced? I've never worked outside the U.S., so would be interested to hear a different perspective.

My point was that if the server providing client code is compromised, it can serve malicious code to said client. This isn’t a cryptographic claim, just a point about how all web-based applications work.

Also while I appreciate the feedback, this comment struck me as more hostile than helpful, so I’d suggest having a look at HN comment guidelines for future reference.

Thanks for the feedback. If we assume the server is compromised then it's true that a MITM attack is trivial. However it seems to me this would be the case for any web-based e2e chat application, all of which must use a server by definition.

Regardless, it's easy enough to spin up your own instance of Darkwire (`docker compose`) and operate the server yourself if so inclined.

Thanks for pointing this out. We'll work on getting fixes in ASAP.

Firstly, thanks for inspecting the source and offering a suggestion for improvement. The latter point should be a relatively easy fix.

As for your first point, there’s little we can do to prevent TLS or AWS tampering. But we can make it easier to choose e2e encryption in the first place. So we focused on reducing barriers to entry (no signup required, simple URL-based rooms) as well as providing these benefits over alternatives:

- Open source code

- Ephermeral message history (not persisted in a DB)

- Opt-out anonymity

We think these features make Darkwire a good solution for many users seeking secure, private online communication. Having said that, no solution is perfect and we hope to see contributions from the open source community to make it even better.

Thanks! We actually need the server intermediary to handle storing and locking rooms, and adding and removing members. Also IIRC WebRTC data channel doesn't have great cross browser support.

Darkwire is more for ephemeral chat rooms, where the name doesn't change as long as the room is occupied. We also don't require sign up, so you can use it instantly and anonymously.

The testimonials section is hilarious and the app looks great too.

This is neat. What radius is used for viewing messages in a given area?

Yes I think so too. Long-term I'd like to have a extensions (Chrome, desktop, etc) that give access to running blocks from anywhere. I think this makes code much more usable to non-developers.