I wish Signal was developed more openly, more like the linux kernel for a “critical infrastructure” example. I wish it had more features, so it could take the place of something like Slack. I wish it supported interoperability like fedi.
But it’s good for what it is and I sure am glad it’s around. People who disrespect it don’t know what they’re talking about.
Time for Molly
Also a nickname for Molybdenum which makes Iron stronger like torrifying Signal makes encrypted communication stronger by protecting metadata from interception.
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Signal fork
Terrible name lmao
??
“Molly” is a common nickname of the drug Ecstasy (MDMA)
“time for molly” kind of implies you’re off to get high
Isn’t matrix more like slack that you are looking for?
When it comes to security, I don’t think it’s close at all.
Why not? I thought it had very good security. It’s E2E encrypted and the government of France uses it.
Maybe I misunderstood. I thought I heard about terrible security implementations relating to matrix servers.
Edit: I think I was remembering this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/matrix-patches-vulnerabilities-that-completely-subvert-e2ee-guarantees/
Looks like I’m mostly wrong.
This is a very rude question, but on this subject of being lean, I looked up your 990 and you pay yourself less than some of your engineers.
Yes, and our goal is to pay people as close to Silicon Valley’s salaries as possible, so we can recruit very senior people, knowing that we don’t have equity to offer them. We pay engineers very well. [Leans in performatively toward the phone recording the interview.] If anyone’s looking for a job, we pay very, very well.
So, I googled their tax filing out of curiosity. It’s true that Meredith pays herself much less than her engineers, which is great. What I was rather shocked to see is that they pay their software developers enormous salaries. They’re listing developers making over $400,000 per year, with their VP making over $660,000 per year. Now, I’m all for the value-creators making more money than the CEO. I just had no idea that software developers make that kind of coin. I was thinking of donating to Signal, but I’m kind of weirded out by those astronomical salaries.
Not all SW devs make that kind of money. I don’t live in Silicon Valley, and I make significantly less than that amount. I could probably get a job there making somewhere north of $300k, but my expenses would go through the roof and I’d be stuck in SV traffic all the time, no thank you. I get paid well, but less than half what Signal is paying.
I mean, how does a free app with no advertising in it make that kind of money?
A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.
His biography on the Signal Foundation website:
Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.
Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.
The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.
But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.
Again back to the interview:
I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.
Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.
This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.
So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.
I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.
Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.
So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:
Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.
I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:
I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.
Bless the era of technology where Signal and ProtonMail exist.
Signal yes, Proton I have my doubts
Like?
I think yours is the first comment I’ve read that has Proton hesitancy. I’m curious what your reservations are.
Not OP, I’ve heard criticism of their recent Duo subscription and their bitcoin wallet.
I use Proton services and my biggest gripe is their mediocre Linux VPN app. No binaries to download/Flatpak, advertised port-forwarding isn’t fully implemented and requires playing around in a terminal, and UI feels less polished than it’s Windows counterpart.
There’s a community made Flatpak of ProtonVPN though, in case it helps anyone
Honestly, I just use wg-quick to connect to VPNs, and I tested out ProtonVPN and it worked fine with it. I even set up my router to connect to ProtonVPN, so I could have a wifi network that’s always connected to their VPN.
But I’d really rather not have the same company host my VPN, email, and other stuff, I’d prefer to separate them a bit so no one company has a lot of my data. And something like a VPN really doesn’t benefit from bundling anyway, unless it’s bundled with a browser or something a la Mozilla VPN.
Nobody is going to use Signal when it lacks so many features. Feels like MSN messenger compared to it’s peers.
what do you mean? i use it a lot and it works great, photos, videos, phone calls, optional temporary location sharing with friends, and encryption.
what features do you want it to have that it’s lacking?
My guess is it heavily private and does not have channels
That’s not a bad thing. Maybe some of us don’t want to be cluttered with a lot of things we don’t really care for on using. God forbid we go back to simpler days of communication whereas now we’ve got things like Discord trying to charge people to pay actual money to have fancy little animations for your profile picture.
Is that what you think is missing? Stupid pointless things that make you feel special because you paid money for it when the true attraction should be focused on how much communicating can be efficient and caring about your privacy and security?
Is that what you think is missing?
No.
The rest of your incoherent essay is now useless.
Oh please, stop trying to cover your own ass. You’re embarrassing yourself. Look at the chain of comments. You’re trash through and through. Nobody will miss you. All that you seem to live for is just bitch at others and when it happens to you, you cry like a little bitch yourself.
BTW, Moxie has a home made documentary kinda movie out called Hold Fast. It’s about sailing and uh stuff … It’s pretty keen, you should watch it.
“hashtag anarchist yacht club”
Lmfao
My only gripe with signal, is the use of phone numbers as usernames. Not everyone with whom I want to communicate via signal has a phone number. I understand why they went this route, but wish there was an alternative way.
You can use a username only for finding and adding friends, you only need the phone number to create an account. That’s probably because Signal started as an alternative to Messages (or whatever it was called back then), so you could send SMS if you wanted, or secure messages to friends w/ Signal. The whole point was to be a gentle transition from SMS to private messaging. However, they eventually dropped the SMS feature, but it seems they kept the phone number as username thing.
It kind of sucks, but I think that’s a reasonable limitation since the vast majority of people using this service will have a phone number. You could probably even sign up for a free trial of something (e.g. Google Fi) to sign up for Signal, set up the username, and then drop the phone number service. I don’t know if there are any problems with this, but I don’t think they do anything with your phone number after everything is set up.
Yeah. And I don’t fault them for this route. I just with I could sign up without a phone number. Maybe the username thing is a predecessor to allowing usernam-only registration in the future.
Yeah, hopefully. It would also be awesome to have a web login so I could access messages and whatnot when using someone else’s computer w/o having to install something.
I don’t know what direction they’re going, but I’m honestly okay with the caveats that currently exist.
Having web logon would mean they would need to hold the decryption key in some form (or have a weak decryption key, your credentials), so, while convenient, I think it would degrade security and possibly privacy. Unless you mean to receive new messages, the way the desktop app works?
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I can’t tell if you’re joking haha
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I’ve been using it for a while and by far the biggest issue is how giant the backup file is and now about 3Gb of data were lost because of a signal version mismatch between an old phone I was using and the new one I switched to.
It creeps me the fuck out. I do not get why a service that bills itself as secure needs to know something that can be traced back to my credit card and name. I won’t use Telegram or Signal because of this.
The Signal pitch is that you don’t need identity security so long as the encryption is strong enough.
That is, incidentally, the same pitch Botcoiner make.
I love the idea of signal, and want to use it and invite friends to it. But then I remember I don’t really want to message anyone, and don’t really have friends because I have no interest in messaging people.
