[Cryptography] Signal planning no support for plaintext SMS

[Peter Gutmann]

John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> writes:

>Unlike competently maintained free and open source software, they have a
>longstanding logic bomb in Signal that makes each version refuse to operate
>after 90 days.

Yup, and that's really annoying because it means the software self-destructs
every three months if you don't keep up with the neverending churn of do-
nothing updates.  Like most people here I'm on a friends&neighbours IT support
system, one of whom has an older laptop running Signal that doesn't have the
space to deal with Signal's neverending updates that consume 0.5-1GB (!!!)
during the install.  Whenever they try and update it, it exits with an error
message that Signal isn't supported on their version of Windows (during the
hundreds of do-nothing updates they've pushed out, none of them have thought
of checking for disk space before running).

Is there any secure IM software that doesn't suck?  Or, alternately, is severe
suckage a prerequisite for secure IM software to filter out anyone who isn't
really serious about having encrypted comms?

Peter.