Imagine you do not want to have a smartphone for some reasons, but still need to have a little bit of privacy. Well, there is a way to use a desktop version of Signal on a computer (MacOs, Windows or Linux). You just need to be able to receive a One Time Password by SMS. This can be done on a regular “brick” phone, a burner or a Virtual Phone.

I followed the recipe described here.

You first need to install three things on your computer:

1. The desktop version of Signal corresponding to your OS:
2. java
3. The signal-cli command line program

For this last one you should download the signal-cli-*.tar.gz archive.

you can verify the download in the following way:

1. download the signature signal-cli-*.tar.gz.asc
2. Download the public PGP key:

gpg –recv-key FA10826A74907F9EC6BBB7FC2BA2CD21B5B09570