As far as I understand, the point of Signal's current move is to take advantage of the huge number of people who (for once) got interested in moving away from WhatsApp.
Then, I suspect there could be an implicit specific criticism underlying your comment but I don't get it.
From the infosec point-of-view, I believe simpler is better. Adding extra complexity always opens the door for issues which were not presented before, in the core product and core functionality.
From the business perspective, I understand it is a step to get the new demand opportunity.
Yes, it's a pain. And I have to install a thing, rather than just open a WebApp because I have to write some long messages. I've been using Signal for 4 hours though so we'll see how it goes.
If you have the current iPhone and the new iPhone close by, you can transfer all conversations from the old one to the new one through a direct transfer mechanism built into Signal.
But if you don’t have both devices close by or if you’re setting up your iPhone as new due to some issues and the restore from an iCloud or iTunes backup, then you’re out of luck because Signal prevents its data from being backed up to iCloud and iTunes.
This gives us the guarantee of forward secrecy. When you pair a Signal app, it gets to know the current keys used to advance the ratchet. But, it cannot deduce keys used to encrypt prior messages. It can only decrypt future messages.
It's really interesting to see the things people want:
1. Stickers
2. Status
3. Stories
4. Chat wallpapers
5. etc.
I guess it shows the different ways people use chat apps but I don't see any use case for status or understand why people want stories in yet another app. I'm sure they have their reasons though. Quite an interesting thread of requests.
Stories are implemented to keep the user engaged. I think the fact that people are even asking for them in other apps could be interpreted as clearly working or even as being addictive.
The status is definitely something people using WhatsApp are missing on Signal. This is a very easy, low engagement, no pressure way to publish news to friends and family.
What I really like about it is that you are not forced to look at the status of people, you as a consumer of the published status retrieve/pull them only when you want.
Interesting. I wonder if it's a regional thing. Not one of my contacts or any age group uses statuses. They're left on default. The last time I remember setting a chat status was using MSN as a teenager to share my favourite song.
Mind sharing an example of something you've used it for?
Not OP, but I use WhatsApp statuses frequently. You can set privacy settings down to individual people.
Most of my statuses are photos I take from my phone, when I'm out cycling, making some food, or even a link to an article in find interesting. I like that they are removed after 24 hours, and no pressure to edit the photos beyond simple filters. No pressure like when you post a photo on Instagram.
For anyone who might be confused: WhatsApp's statuses are similar to SnapChat/Instagram stories and Twitter fleets. This is different than the online/away/etc status feature in older chat apps that was text only and usually persisted until it was changed to something else
Sorry for the confusion, I was thinking about the pictures one can share as "status", not the status string which effectively is not used at all around me (I am in Germany).
I agree on the pressure part. I promoted Signal within my extended family extended a couple of days ago, no response, but one or two did move. I wanted to try again, but was worried about not getting any responses once again. Statuses can be a great fit here. It's more like my blog where I can publish content without the pressure of others not reading it, modify as necessary and take down as necessary.
Stories are a visual version of Tweets as they were at the very beginning of Twitter. You want to share something interesting that happened in your life with your friends but it's not important enough to warrant a notification. So you post it as a story which are semi-ephemeral and only seen by people who are specifically looking for them.
1. Stickers are cute. They're more enjoyable ways to send canned responses and reactions.
2. Having had them for so long chats without status feel weird now. They turn chat from sending letters into conversations. It's the difference between leaving a note on someone's desk and talking to someone face-to-face.
3. Stories are nice for when you want to be like "hey this happened" or "look at this cool thing" but don't want to spam your friends with notifications.
4. I hate staring at the same background all the time. I change them for the season, things I'm into at the moment, holidays. Same with my laptop wallpaper.
The success of iMessage and the entire Apple ecosystem in the US proves that a walled garden is exactly what people trust and want and are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of being part of one.
Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what the brand of their computer is or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
Even my young friends who are mechanical/civil engineers and make good money don't see any issue in having personal information in the hands of Facebook and Google controlled services or any other free on-line services who make a living by monetizing your personal data. They either think people are over-reacting about this, as like, if they were truly evil, the gov. would shut them down or for them it's just too much friction to bother readjusting their lifestyle to something else and prefer the comfort provided by these companies.
This a false dichotomy. There is nothing about interoperable/federated systems that make it harder for people to fulfill their needs. Or have we already forgot how to make a phone call (interoperable) or send an email (federated) in less than a generation?
>The success of iMessage and the entire Apple ecosystem in the US proves that a walled garden is exactly what people trust and want and are willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of being part of one.
People don't care about open, closed or whatever. They care about being able to send a message to others. If only 10 % of your friends are on signal, but 100% are on iMessage, most will just use iMessage.
So the success of iMessage (and the apple stonewall) is arguably just the success of the iPhone.
> Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what computer brand they have or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
You're basically making exactly my point. They don't care, they want to be able to browse, message, play, watch stuff, etc. They also wouldn't care if their messaging app would support different protocols, as long as they're just able to easily message their friends.
> Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
This is why it would be incredibly helpful for a big app to start supporting different protocols. If signal becomes THE app for connecting with friends (no matter if they use icq, irc, email, jabber, etc), it might come to a point where people rather use Signal, because that's the app that can reach ALL your friends.
At this point, iMessage would either die, or also start to support open protocols. (Or more likely: Apple will ban messaging apps from the app-store)
I think this is quite true. Even with federated/distributed architecture like web and email, many of the emails are on Google Apps (or whatever they call it these days), Office 365, or a few other services. Many web sites are on WordPress.com, GitHub pages, or platforms like AWS or GCP.
I just read both (Moxie and Matrix.org) and I will stay with Matrix response.
I understand Moxie points and the main one is about speed, as I understood. But, as Matthew Hodgson pointed out: the governance of decentralisation is hard, but not impossible.
So, in the end, Signal moves are driven by the market. And, IMO, sometimes it can be dangerous.
Signal moves are driven by Moxie. He is the driving force behind it. For those of us who have been using Signal before it got famous, there have been trying times in the past regarding the direction.
I'm not as knowledgeable about federation and decentralized systems, but I understand one of the biggest drawbacks is keeping everyone running on the same version. Quoting from the article you linked
> to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”
I think competitive is the key word here. Signal has moved fast in the last year, especially in the last few months. I can't imagine that happening on a federated system.
The other point is it isn't as trivial to join a federated system or create your own node. Signal? Download app and you're good to go. Matrix? Well who has a node? Where are we going? How do I set one up?
Personally I'll be happy with a bridge (like Matrix wants) when Signal is fully featured (I'd argue it is almost there. Just a few things like usernames, video scaling, channels, etc). But I couldn't imagine the mass adoption and moving at the speed they did (are) with a federated system. Even email didn't take off until Yahoo and Hotmail. Pretty much every federated system people are mentioning here didn't gain mass adoption until there was a large provider. Which has gone to such a point that rolling your own email now is difficult and you'll have a harder time avoiding all the spam. So even these examples have moved more towards centralization, if not at least a hybrid.
So what am I missing here? What's the big killer feature of federation that makes things better and proven?
i'm an advocate and adopter of federation in general, but i agree with signal's choice to decline federation.
signal is dedicated to one purpose, and that's accessible e2e crypted chat.
federation and interoperability severely complicates onboarding. if you have ever tried to get a "normal person" to use something like mastodon, you understand this risk. federation would also exacerbate spam. moderation is not possible in an e2e private messaging app, and spam is extremely user-hostile, so it's not an acceptable risk. allowing third-party and forked clients introduces a host of problems including automated client behavior that's undesirable in personal communication, malicious client behavior that users may be unaware of, and abandoned clients that lag behind upstream.
federated crypto chat exists. if you want that, go use it. if federation is really necessary for your use-case, you will be able to convince the people you are working with to come along. yes, it is the future. but socially, we're just not there yet, and a one-size-fits-most solution is important right now.
I had this exact conversation with some friends yesterday, and here was my response to them edited for clarity:
And the difference between Parler and Signal is that Parler is a social media platform, Signal is a messaging platform. It's the difference of having a group of terrorists[0] in your restaurant everyday audibly planning a terrorist attack versus being the site of a message drop that occurs discreetly. Accessory charges are likely in the former unlikely in the latter.[1]
[0]Replace terrorists with criminals or whatever is palatable to you, it was the example we were using at the time.
[1]Standard disclosure I am not a lawyer/prosecutor/etc.
I don't know about Signal, but Telegram blurs the lines between a messaging app and a more general purpose social network. Telegram has public groups (supporting 100s of thousands of users) and channels that feature comment sections. It wouldn't surprise me if Telegram ends up getting banned by app stores because of their resilience and respect of privacy.
Admittedly, I don't know about Telegram. But I would probably guess the distinction is still there because if I had to guess Telegram doesn't advertise those groups, you have to look for them, which decreases the condition of "audibly hearing the discussion." Where as Parler being a social media platform first wants to encourage the network effect and engagement among it's users, thus encouraging this open discussion and connection among potentially dangerous elements.
Again in my non legal estimation of the law (not that I think anything I'm currently suggesting has been tried in court).
The reason Parler was banned was not being willing or able to moderate the content. Telegram would only be banned, based on this info, if they weren't going to do the same thing.
I'd say telegram isn't likely to get banned from app stores as there is intentionally no support for e2ee in group chats, and dm's aren't also e2ee by default.
This. No one I know uses the E2EE chats in Telegram. They go with the default and they heard Telegram is "secure". To add to the inconvenience the secure chats do not sync between devices.
Didn't Apple get pushed to tell Telegram to get rid of posts in Belarus? If they hadn't made a deal out of it while also refusing to delete the posts, a ban could have been in their future.
> It's the difference of having a group of terrorists[0] in your restaurant everyday audibly planning a terrorist attack versus being the site of a message drop that occurs discreetly.
If we are making a restaurant analogy, I think a more accurate one is that the restaurant provides a sound proof room where a group can enter and discuss anything they want without anybody overhearing. The restaurant does not know what anybody uses that room for. It could be people planning a birthday surprise, it could be a group of terrorists.
Except for in Parler it isn't a soundproof room? It's literally a social media site where the admins (owner of the restaurant) can see what is going on. So it is the audible example I mentioned above.
The sound proof room would be more apt for the later comparison to signal.
Let's say that the restaurant goes to KKK and Neo-Nazi rallies handing out fliers saying that the restaurant is where "anyone can feel welcome." But they never advertise to the general public or to groups of opposing views. Is that restaurant for the general public or is it for a specific type of people? They said it was for anyone, but I'm not sure people are going to believe that.
More importantly there is a difference if you advertise that sound proof room to the public (maybe for business meetings) vs the mafia. Let's say that anyone was technically allowed to reserve the room but you only told mafia members about it then it is reasonable to believe that the room is intended to be used for nefarious activities and not as a general private room. Calling it a general private room and saying it is for businessmen or government officials to talk in private would be a coverup for its real intent.
I'll bite, but then I have a serious question for you.
I'm definitely not cheering on deplatforming – I think it's fraught with problems – but I do think there's a grave danger being posed by extremists plotting violent attacks using these platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Parler) right now. It's complicated! Here are some of my thoughts on the issue (which may conflict or have logical inconsistencies – I'm just a person trying to think through this stuff, and I don't have the answers).
- Private conversations should be private, always, and there should be no back doors, ever. The only regulations regarding private conversations should be to strengthen them. I think it's okay for law enforcement to try to crack those private conversations, but I am vehemently against requiring a "secure back door" that (supposedly) only the government has access to, or laws preventing tech companies attempting to make uncrackable encryption.
- Any rules created about this stuff should be applied equally across the board to all people, regardless of political persuasion or position in government.
- I'm in favor of internet access being considered a public utility or even government funded; nobody should be "deplatformed" from basic internet access. Assuming that's the case, I don't see what's stopping Parler from setting up a server. AWS isn't the only way to serve web applications, and Twitter isn't the only way to broadcast messages publicly. However, if Parler's primary content is plots to violently overthrow a democratically elected government, I'm not sure that should be legal.
- I'm troubled by the stranglehold that payment processors have on our systems of commerce, and I'd be in favor of more decentralized payment methods.
- Broadcast mediums are fundamentally different from private conversations, and I don't think free speech should be confused with right to Tweet. Trump, in particular, is the most powerful person in the world and has the biggest platform in the world; he need only step out to the press room and every news outlet in the world will report what he says. I don't feel this is the best example of someone being suppressed. He chose (and arguably drastically increased the importance of) Twitter, and he avoids reporters, because he can spread disinformation and propaganda there without focused criticism.
- The idea that Trump and his supporters haven't been heard is laughable; I feel like we've been living in a Trump theme park for the past five years. It's all we've heard about every single day. I try to remember what it was like not thinking about Obama for two weeks at a time, and I look forward to not thinking about Biden for two weeks at a time.
- It feels like everyone on all sides of this issue agrees that the big tech companies are too powerful in many ways: as you point out, they have the ability to tamp-down public conversation, but on the flip side they have the ability to propagate disinformation on a massive scale. (There's also obviously their anti-competitiveness, but that feels like a different topic.) I have no idea what, if anything, should be done about this. Just as consolidation of power in tech companies is worrisome, so is consolidation of power in government.
- Speaking as someone on the left, I'm also troubled by (and I hate this term) "cancel culture". In recent weeks I watched someone I care about get destroyed for no reason other than the tone of a jokey story they told missed the mark. In my mind, "Internet Mob Justice" is as worrisome and problematic as government or corporate overreach, and I'm extremely skeptical of it regardless of which end of the political spectrum it's coming from.
- The disinformation thing is a huge and serious problem, and I haven't seen many "total free speech at all costs" advocates address it aside from saying something along the li...
> I'm in favor of internet access being considered a public utility or even government funded; nobody should be "deplatformed" from basic internet access. Assuming that's the case, I don't see what's stopping Parler from setting up a server.
This raises a really interesting question about where the line between regulated utility and free commerce should be drawn. I generally agree with what you've written in your post, and struggle to come up with an answer.
For some of the reasons you mention, I think that I think Facebook and Twitter and the various App Stores generally belong on the "free commerce" side of that line.
But what about DNS providers and ISPs? What about browser vendors and certificate authorities? And in particular, what about AWS?
I could imagine a world in which DNS providers and ISPs are regulated and cannot deny service without a court order, and in which AWS ends up straddling this: EC2 + Route53 get regulated, but S3 and on up are treated as unregulated free-commerce businesses.
As an aside, I'm really surprised that the Parler team didn't defend against this by hosting with multiple providers. Given their positioning, it seems like a pretty obvious risk. I wonder if that's an oversight / miscalculation, or if they made a decision that getting de-platformed at some point would be a good thing for their long-term brand / agenda.
How can you possibly include App Stores as required utility services when the App Store's founding concept is that they can and do reject app's they don't like from appearing.
Apple in particular will reject App's for all sorts of reasons (i.e. opinions about your UI was a common early one). That's fundamentally incompatible with the idea that they can be regarded as a public good.
Mmmmm.... I think that could be pretty easily solved by simply allowing other app stores or something like that. That way maybe people can have the best of both worlds. (Also, preferably, the setting to allow other app stores would not be hidden behind a ton of menus).
> The idea that Trump and his supporters haven't been heard is laughable
A bit of a tangent but - I know what you mean by this and I generally agree but I think their concern is not about the amount of media attention they have gotten but about how their views are represented (or misrepresented) in the media. The media tends to take the most extreme in a group and paint with a broad brush. Is being in the same camp as racists a good look? Not at all, but when someone calls all trump supporters or those who espouse beliefs in common with trump racists it ignites and incites and misrepresents.
I’ll admit to feeling this at times. I’m a moderate left and I once voiced support for tarriffs on Chinese goods and was called racist by multiple people because I have a belief in common with trump on that. It didn’t make me more likely to evaluate my belief on that it made me angry and sad and a bit silenced. How am I to respond to an accusation like that? I’m really not sure. If I had more beliefs in common with Trump I can imagine being a lot worse off in that respect.
> It didn’t make me more likely to evaluate my belief on that it made me angry and sad and a bit silenced.
People are very quick to work out whether they're being listened to or whether they're just soundboards for another's ideology. When they're treated like soundboards they tend to get entrenched, when they're listened to they tend to listen in return. People listening to each other is the only hope of finding a common way forward, everything else just ends in sectarian violence. It is amazing that simply tolerating a diversity of opinions and listening to them has become such a radical notion!
It will probably get worse before it gets better but I share your hope and supporting our hope are historical counter-cultural corrections to their over-the-top antecedents (e.g. the 60s vs McCarthyism).
> Do you think there's a problem with the way technology has enabled the scale and precision of disinformation campaigns? If so, do you have any ideas what we can do about it?
Better education. Especially with regard to critical thinking skills.
Even if we removed the Internet, there would still be disinformation and propaganda that the population would have to contend with. Be it from the media, politicians, governments, books, friends, family, etc. Just as there always has been.
So I think the more comprehensive and sustainable approach would be to upgrade brains. Teach critical thinking and philosophy from a young age.
> Do you think there should be any moderation whatsoever? In other words, should people be allowed to incite, advocate, and organize violence in public forums? If not, where is the line? If so, what's remedies do we have as a society to the subsequent violence?
I'm absolutely for moderation on public forums. They are better for it. And by default they have to remove illegal content at least. Beyond that, it's up to them what the moderation policies are. HN is an example where I think moderation is really well done.
This gets a lot harder for platforms that are the de-facto town square like FB and Twitter. I don't know how we should handle that yet. But I think they should mostly stick with removing illegal content and act like a common carrier. If that's a problem due to the nature of social media, then maybe we should revisit the laws of the land. The fundamental issue here is having a few tech giants with a high level of control over the nation's discourse and who optimize for engagement (e.g., outrage, anger, bias confirmation). Which is fueling a lot of hate in the first place. They're not optimizing for thoughtful conversation and interaction. Not even remotely.
I'd also explore some other kinds of governance. Maybe an external non-partisan committee or a crypto governance approach. Not sure, but something external from these platform holders is key I think.
There's this weird train of thought going around that I don't understand. If terrorists or criminals are talking in large groups, as they did on Parler, they might as well be in plain text. The point is that an average person can get into that conversation (be radicalized) and then become part of that mob. If the CIA/FBI/NSA can't get into those groups then they should be all removed because of gross incompetence and we've been overestimating their influence by several orders of magnitude for the last 50 years. We hear stories about agents infiltrating groups all the time. So what's the issue here? That they have to infiltrate and can't passively monitor? The only thing this stops is dragnet operations where small group terrorists are plotting together. Which historically we've seen that this isn't effective because it's just adding more hay to the haystack.
I'd contrast this from a platform like Parler where they actively encouraged extremists to adopt their platform. It is one thing to say "free speech" as a dog whistle and another thing to say "free speech" in the true meaning. Parler sought out extremists from the get go, Signal has been focusing on mass adoption. There's a big difference.
The messaging for this and Gab may thinly suggest otherwise, but it’s clear what these communities target, and it absolutely is the dog whistle version of free speech.
I'm having a hard time finding an ad since everything is being pulled, but they advertised to sites like Breitbart and Info Wars and even included the enforcements in several ads I saw. That's specifically catering to extremist groups.
But I'll point to videos I can find which aren't as bad. If anyone can find the original ads that I mentioned I'd appreciate a link. Here[0] Ingram mentions radicals like Alex Jones and Candice Owens mentioning that it is a social network specifically for conservatives. It is easy to find plenty of videos like this where they consistently talk about it being a social media platform for conservatives. Here's one where the CEO complains about fact checking the president[1]. He does end struggling to suggest that Parler is gaining diversity, but also says that Twitter is a Biden community in the same sentence. But I've never been one to think that Twitter was specifically targeting conservatives. But you'll find that a lot of these interviews do still focus around the politics of the issue. Compare that to Signal's much more neutral stance on the matter.
Edit: Downvoters, would you mind explaining? Is it that I no longer have a direct link to Parler using Info Wars/Alex Jones and Breitbart as endorsements? Or do you not think those are extremist websites?
Alex Jones and brietbart are sensationalists, not extremists.
If you cannot understand your own tone, maybe you need to take a step back and consider you may be part of the problem (being unable to regulate your emotions and have a neutral conversation)
> Alex Jones and brietbart are sensationalists, not extremists.
Can you expand on this? I understand Breitbart more since people like Milo were more clearly trolls. But Alex Jones frequently talks about conspiracy theories and is promoting the current insurrection (see below). But if many extremists frequent your sites then maybe the line is pretty blurry and you should expect others to confuse them. And to quote from an article that is on Info Wars' front page (in its entirety)[0]
> They continue twisting the occupation of our nation’s Capitol by frustrated citizens and using it to destroy anyone that stands in their way.
> As DC Mayor Bouser lords over her potential future state with a 15 day emergency order following the Capitol Building siege, the National Guard, including 1,000 soldiers from New York, are stationed in the nation’s Capitol to protect the illegitimate inauguration of the Manchurian Candidate Joe Biden while the old establishment propaganda ratchets into full protection mode and the defenders of the New World Order crawl out of their holes to justify the plague that is exterminating liberty.
How do you differentiate this from extremism? Reading words like "occupation", "illegitimate inauguration", "New World Order", and "exterminating liberty" seem to me like extremist views. I'm not sure how you differentiate the two, but saying that a deep state rigged the election and calling those who attacked the capital "frustrated citizens" is in my view an extremist stance. These words encourage those actions. Extremists always use inflammatory language, so where is the line drawn? When does sensationalism because extremism? When you have followers that act on your words? I feel like we're there.
You would not respond with a book of text about a comment about the taliban (extremists). But Alex Jones gets you to write a thesis.. that’s sensationalism. Something that bothers you but not everyone.
from the CEO: "People will not be banned on Parler because of things they say off platform. They will also be safe here..."
So, even though the CEO danced around the concept of banning people for things their users would inevitably do on the platform, Parler was actively recruiting and reassuring people concerned about the deplorable things they did off the platform, and whether or not they would be safe on Parler.
"the lack of moderation on Parler is not the issue. they actually have very robust moderation tools and all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"
Basically, the idea was to get attention and make sure that it was a safe space for people who believed certain things, making sure that different viewpoints wouldn't be heard.
That might not be their messaging but that's what they were doing. Assuming this is true, of course.
> It is one thing to say "free speech" as a dog whistle and another thing to say "free speech" in the true meaning.
Saying that free speech doesn't count if you're not using it the right away, is literally the exact opposite of the concept. It's the same reason the ACLU has spent so much money defending literal Nazis.
Sorry, that's not what I was trying to convey here. "Free speech as a dog whistle" is people using the term free speech but not actually meaning it. More of a "free speech for me, but not for thee," but the second part isn't explicitly said. I do mean dog whistle, which is covert speech. But speech can only be covert (undertone) if there is a non-covert overtone (otherwise it wouldn't be hidden). So why I'm criticizing here is because the CEO said that Twitter is a place of cancel culture, which comes a lot from users, but said that that can't happen on Parler and then just targeted extremist right wing groups to adopt the platform. He flies under the flag of free speech but the intent was to create a network where right wing extremists could talk within a bubble. There's nothing wrong with that (except for the extremist part) but that isn't exactly free speech focused, that's a niche focus. There's a big difference if you develop a product and it is adopted by a certain group verses if you specifically target that group, use their language, go on their platforms, and actively encourage that group to adopt your platform without even making any attempt to get other groups to join. Essentially Parler said Twitter is a left wing echo chamber and wanted to create a right wing echo chamber. The intent was never to create a free speech platform, the intent was to create a right wing platform. Intent matters.
To clarify on the dog whistling part more, let's think about a recent example. Conservatives have frequently said that free speech is one of the most important things (Fox News, Trump, etc, not your neighbor). But then these groups also advocated for kicking athletes out of the country for kneeling in protest[0]. The president used his position of power to lead a boycott against a private organization[1]. The hypocrisy here is about that there is no right form of protest if you don't agree with me but even extreme forms of protest are okay if you do agree with me. Someone who says that is not actually advocating for free speech no matter how often they use the term. You saw organizations and the president saying that this wasn't a protest and that if it was they should do it another way. Then you see BLM and say that they should have protested peacefully and we would have solved the problems. From a different perspective you can see this as protesting escalating from peaceful to more disruptive and including violence. We see the "two sides" arguments (Charlottesville), encouraging supporters to run Biden's vehicle off the road[2], encouraging kidnapping of a governor[3], and I can go on (do we need to talk about the several cases at the Oregon capital?). Free speech isn't unlimited. Nor is "free speech for me and not for thee" free speech either.
If free speech is unlimited for one group but not for another, that is not free speech it is a dog whistle.
You can call a cat a dog but that doesn't make a cat a dog. And it doesn't matter if you take your cats on walks or you teach it to play fetch or other tricks or convince a bunch of people it is a dog, it is still a cat at the end of the day and won't ever be a dog.
From a user perspective, I am not sure "App Stores" or the leverage used to create them was ever a good thing. As a user, if a hardware vendor can choose to "ban" users from running certain software (after they have paid for the hardware), I do not see that as progressive. Maybe it is a clever "business model" but as a user I like to choose software based on personal preferences rather than delegate the process to someone else, e.g., a trillion dollar company.
Figure out how people will continue to donate and not deviate from their original mission, given the push from new users for feature parity with Telegram and WhatsApp.
I cant imagine that $100mn lasting if people are doing group calls, file transfers etc. because those are expensive activities with the needs for servers, bandwidth.
Previously they had the luxury to coast because of that donation, now not so much.
Agreed. The core services are working very well and business decisions because of this new market opportunity can drive them to pivot to something totally different.
the speed at which such a small team is working at is commendable but just take a look at the beta forum and see the how much faster they are moving in the new beta release for Android. Its a far more buggier release compared to the careful approach. Keep this up and signal will be a remnant of its former self.
Colocation, equipment, and admin time should be no more than $1-2 million/year. Reference OpenStreetMap, Wikipedia, similar non profit infra expenses in their IRS non profit return [1]. You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges.
The Internet Archive runs ~50Gbit/sec, peaking at ~62Gbit/sec [2].
They are using AWS for their infrastructure. Based on their last Form 980, which is from 2018 their expenses were about $5 million. That expense was with < 10 mn users and a much smaller dev team. Since 2018 theyve added more android and ios developers.
Hope they get on to their own gear sooner rather than later. Any exorbitant cloud costs they can avoid are funds that can go into development, and I'd rather what I'm donating goes to said devs and not AWS (not that there's anything wrong with AWS per se, but donations are harder to come by then business revenue and VC funding).
Would really appreciate if Signal would give rough estimates of their infra needs (average and peak bandwidth, storage, compute, etc).
> You most definitely don't want to be at a cloud provider with their bandwidth charges.
Amen to that, I don’t understand how anybody decides to go in that direction for this type of project. For my relatively small hobby-project (3Gbit/s image gallery) we’re renting bare-metal servers for $800/mo — cloud providers would be charging $50,000 just for bandwidth, let alone compute and storage…
(Incidentally if anybody knows good CDNs with prices in the same ballpark as bare-metal I’d love to hear it - looks like we’re too big for any of cloudflare’s entry-level plans, but their enterprise support doesn’t want to bother with any customer spending less than $3,000/mo...)
I think Signal should bundle a simple on-screen keyboard, similar to the way banks etc... do it.
It always felt weird to me that while I trust Signal developers, all of the text input into the app goes through an on-screen keyboard that might or might not be secure.
So basically, on android, while your data doesn't go to Facebook anymore, as far as I can tell it still goes to Google via the keyboard app. Doesn't it?
EDIT: It feels to me like a missing piece, but maybe I'm wrong. Please educate me if I am, it's a genuine question :)
While this does still mean you have to trust your keyboard app, you can tell Signal to trigger your keyboards incognito mode.
I don't think it should include its own keyboard. But this could be an extra app in general.
Signal already has problems with pissing people off by having annoying user interfaces for security reasons. This seems like a pointless measure.
If you can’t trust the keyboard software installed on your phone then surely you don’t trust the os either. But if you don’t trust the os then what’s the point?
It's about explaining this threat model to users. The pitch "Use Signal and your chats will be 100% secure" is not actually true in practice due to the keyboard loophole. Users who are not technical enough to understand this will get themselves in trouble.
China is especially at risk due to both having oppressive censorship and a language that needs sophisticated keyboards for entering characters.
If you are concerned about your privacy, you can use an OSS keyboard app. Hacker's keyboard is one for android. There are some on F-Droid. You may even prefer them to Google's offering.
The problem is that even if you install one of those privacy-protecting keyboard apps, chances are that the person you are talking to on the other end is using the stock Google keyboard that sends what they type to Google. Even if only half of the conversation leaks that way, that is still a major blow to the privacy of both parties.
There is plenty of keyboards on android, including ones that are super-simple like "simple keyboard" from F-Droid, or the one provided by Keepass for Android.
Just switch keyboard. There is a lot of choice here, interface to do that and so on.
Naomi Wu has been talking about this for a while [0]. She lives in China, and has flagged this multiple times on Twitter, apparently without much response from the Signal team to her frustration. The issue seems to be that Signal simply sets the incognito flag when users are typing in the app, which kindly requests keyboard apps to not track the input. Unfortunately, since most American made keyboards for chinese writing are slow and difficult to use, most Chinese citizens use keyboards made by companies made in China, which does not provide much reassurance w.r.t adherence to the incognito request. Your concern seems to be spot on, and it'd be worth Signal at least making this clear to users when they first begin using the app.
While the answer from most technical users will be "just switch keyboards", it's also widely accepted that defaults matter and unless Signal makes an active effort to discourage people's default choice, the larger purpose of privacy will be somewhat defeated.
> You want to write Chinese, you need an IME. Apple/Microsoft/Linux/Google all have their own IME, but they aren't very good- typing on them is SLOW. Most Chinese use [...]
So, the ask is that Signal (a western company) develop a Chinese keyboard that is better than the vast majority of Chinese keyboards on the market (something Wu says is hard for western companies), and then force all Chinese users to use it, even if they prefer something else? What happens if they develop a bad one?
Keyboards aren't that special here. Signal opens up links in web browsers and some users install insecure web browser (also more commonly in China than in the US). Signal runs on an operating system and some users install insecure operating systems (also more commonly in China than in the US). There's no logical stopping point here until the whole device is Signal.
I think it's good for Signal to try to do one thing (encrypted communication) well, rather than trying to do everything.
> So basically, on android, while your data doesn't go to Facebook anymore, as far as I can tell it still goes to Google via the keyboard app. Doesn't it?
The answer is to use a keyboard that doesn't have internet permission. It's not the chat app's worry to force their keyboard on users, in my opinion.
Usernames are coming in 2021. As of now, it's not necessary to use your actual mobile number to signup though. It's well possible to use a virtual number like Google Voice, and even landline numbers work! By "other non-phone devices", were you referring to Signal on front-end-less platforms like Raspberry Pi CLI?
I actually really need a web interface to Signal. Family has got me stuck into Facebook Messenger for a good while, but the desire to use it on corporate supplied hardware is why it has stuck around for me. For other things I have some self-hosted services on my own domain so I can, for example, grab a common set of scripts and the like - but AFAIK I can't use Signal from the web.
Have you considered using a Matrix [0] bridge [1] to relay Signal messages between any Matrix client and Signal? Most bridges work very well for messaging in my experience, and some web clients (such as Hydrogen [2]) use less than 15MB of RAM according to the the most recent status report on it [3].
You already have the domain knowledge to host another service on your own domain, and so running a Synapse server is well within reach. At least this way you have the choice between two imperfect choices: running another service vs. not having a Signal web-client.
Flagging this for an editorialized title, which is against the HN Guidelines for posts like this where a change in title is not required.
The tweet says that Signal group calling limit has been raised from 5 to 8 and it continues to say (pun intended) that now you can call it even. I think it’s good to have a limit of 8 as opposed to 5, but it’d be better to bump this to double it further to cover almost everyone’s needs, though that’d require a lot more effort.
But Signal, as observed over the years, could do better by focusing on many other features that users and potential switchers consider critical.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadThen, I suspect there could be an implicit specific criticism underlying your comment but I don't get it.
From the infosec point-of-view, I believe simpler is better. Adding extra complexity always opens the door for issues which were not presented before, in the core product and core functionality.
From the business perspective, I understand it is a step to get the new demand opportunity.
But if you don’t have both devices close by or if you’re setting up your iPhone as new due to some issues and the restore from an iCloud or iTunes backup, then you’re out of luck because Signal prevents its data from being backed up to iCloud and iTunes.
This gives us the guarantee of forward secrecy. When you pair a Signal app, it gets to know the current keys used to advance the ratchet. But, it cannot deduce keys used to encrypt prior messages. It can only decrypt future messages.
I don't believe syncing in multiple devices can be a problem for the app purpose, mainly because the new whatsapp features they announced.
1. Stickers
2. Status
3. Stories
4. Chat wallpapers
5. etc.
I guess it shows the different ways people use chat apps but I don't see any use case for status or understand why people want stories in yet another app. I'm sure they have their reasons though. Quite an interesting thread of requests.
What I really like about it is that you are not forced to look at the status of people, you as a consumer of the published status retrieve/pull them only when you want.
Mind sharing an example of something you've used it for?
Most of my statuses are photos I take from my phone, when I'm out cycling, making some food, or even a link to an article in find interesting. I like that they are removed after 24 hours, and no pressure to edit the photos beyond simple filters. No pressure like when you post a photo on Instagram.
2. Having had them for so long chats without status feel weird now. They turn chat from sending letters into conversations. It's the difference between leaving a note on someone's desk and talking to someone face-to-face.
3. Stories are nice for when you want to be like "hey this happened" or "look at this cool thing" but don't want to spam your friends with notifications.
4. I hate staring at the same background all the time. I change them for the season, things I'm into at the moment, holidays. Same with my laptop wallpaper.
A walled garden has no long term future
/s
Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what the brand of their computer is or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
Even my young friends who are mechanical/civil engineers and make good money don't see any issue in having personal information in the hands of Facebook and Google controlled services or any other free on-line services who make a living by monetizing your personal data. They either think people are over-reacting about this, as like, if they were truly evil, the gov. would shut them down or for them it's just too much friction to bother readjusting their lifestyle to something else and prefer the comfort provided by these companies.
- email to the same email provider
- phone only to the same telco provider
- access a website through a dedicated browser
- ...
Still don't understand and bother?
People don't care about open, closed or whatever. They care about being able to send a message to others. If only 10 % of your friends are on signal, but 100% are on iMessage, most will just use iMessage.
So the success of iMessage (and the apple stonewall) is arguably just the success of the iPhone.
> Seriously, get out of the tech bubble for a while and see that most people have no idea what computer brand they have or what their OS is called and they don't even care. They just want to click the internet icon and start browsing memes, play candy crush or watch youtube.
You're basically making exactly my point. They don't care, they want to be able to browse, message, play, watch stuff, etc. They also wouldn't care if their messaging app would support different protocols, as long as they're just able to easily message their friends.
> Interoperability/Federation is something the average user doesn't understand and won't even bother too as long as their basic needs are already comfortably fulfilled.
This is why it would be incredibly helpful for a big app to start supporting different protocols. If signal becomes THE app for connecting with friends (no matter if they use icq, irc, email, jabber, etc), it might come to a point where people rather use Signal, because that's the app that can reach ALL your friends.
At this point, iMessage would either die, or also start to support open protocols. (Or more likely: Apple will ban messaging apps from the app-store)
Moxie has made it known on several occasions he doesnt believe decentralization is the right approach
I just read both (Moxie and Matrix.org) and I will stay with Matrix response.
I understand Moxie points and the main one is about speed, as I understood. But, as Matthew Hodgson pointed out: the governance of decentralisation is hard, but not impossible.
So, in the end, Signal moves are driven by the market. And, IMO, sometimes it can be dangerous.
> to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”
I think competitive is the key word here. Signal has moved fast in the last year, especially in the last few months. I can't imagine that happening on a federated system.
The other point is it isn't as trivial to join a federated system or create your own node. Signal? Download app and you're good to go. Matrix? Well who has a node? Where are we going? How do I set one up?
Personally I'll be happy with a bridge (like Matrix wants) when Signal is fully featured (I'd argue it is almost there. Just a few things like usernames, video scaling, channels, etc). But I couldn't imagine the mass adoption and moving at the speed they did (are) with a federated system. Even email didn't take off until Yahoo and Hotmail. Pretty much every federated system people are mentioning here didn't gain mass adoption until there was a large provider. Which has gone to such a point that rolling your own email now is difficult and you'll have a harder time avoiding all the spam. So even these examples have moved more towards centralization, if not at least a hybrid.
So what am I missing here? What's the big killer feature of federation that makes things better and proven?
signal is dedicated to one purpose, and that's accessible e2e crypted chat.
federation and interoperability severely complicates onboarding. if you have ever tried to get a "normal person" to use something like mastodon, you understand this risk. federation would also exacerbate spam. moderation is not possible in an e2e private messaging app, and spam is extremely user-hostile, so it's not an acceptable risk. allowing third-party and forked clients introduces a host of problems including automated client behavior that's undesirable in personal communication, malicious client behavior that users may be unaware of, and abandoned clients that lag behind upstream.
federated crypto chat exists. if you want that, go use it. if federation is really necessary for your use-case, you will be able to convince the people you are working with to come along. yes, it is the future. but socially, we're just not there yet, and a one-size-fits-most solution is important right now.
Are you still going to be onboard when Signal is banned from the App stores? How about when backdoors are required?
Bear in mind, Signal has no moderation - that's baked into the product.
And the difference between Parler and Signal is that Parler is a social media platform, Signal is a messaging platform. It's the difference of having a group of terrorists[0] in your restaurant everyday audibly planning a terrorist attack versus being the site of a message drop that occurs discreetly. Accessory charges are likely in the former unlikely in the latter.[1]
[0]Replace terrorists with criminals or whatever is palatable to you, it was the example we were using at the time.
[1]Standard disclosure I am not a lawyer/prosecutor/etc.
Again in my non legal estimation of the law (not that I think anything I'm currently suggesting has been tried in court).
https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/issues/118#issue...
If we are making a restaurant analogy, I think a more accurate one is that the restaurant provides a sound proof room where a group can enter and discuss anything they want without anybody overhearing. The restaurant does not know what anybody uses that room for. It could be people planning a birthday surprise, it could be a group of terrorists.
The sound proof room would be more apt for the later comparison to signal.
https://www.vox.com/2018/7/19/17594156/whatsapp-limit-forwar...
I'm definitely not cheering on deplatforming – I think it's fraught with problems – but I do think there's a grave danger being posed by extremists plotting violent attacks using these platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Parler) right now. It's complicated! Here are some of my thoughts on the issue (which may conflict or have logical inconsistencies – I'm just a person trying to think through this stuff, and I don't have the answers).
- Private conversations should be private, always, and there should be no back doors, ever. The only regulations regarding private conversations should be to strengthen them. I think it's okay for law enforcement to try to crack those private conversations, but I am vehemently against requiring a "secure back door" that (supposedly) only the government has access to, or laws preventing tech companies attempting to make uncrackable encryption.
- Any rules created about this stuff should be applied equally across the board to all people, regardless of political persuasion or position in government.
- I'm in favor of internet access being considered a public utility or even government funded; nobody should be "deplatformed" from basic internet access. Assuming that's the case, I don't see what's stopping Parler from setting up a server. AWS isn't the only way to serve web applications, and Twitter isn't the only way to broadcast messages publicly. However, if Parler's primary content is plots to violently overthrow a democratically elected government, I'm not sure that should be legal.
- I'm troubled by the stranglehold that payment processors have on our systems of commerce, and I'd be in favor of more decentralized payment methods.
- Broadcast mediums are fundamentally different from private conversations, and I don't think free speech should be confused with right to Tweet. Trump, in particular, is the most powerful person in the world and has the biggest platform in the world; he need only step out to the press room and every news outlet in the world will report what he says. I don't feel this is the best example of someone being suppressed. He chose (and arguably drastically increased the importance of) Twitter, and he avoids reporters, because he can spread disinformation and propaganda there without focused criticism.
- The idea that Trump and his supporters haven't been heard is laughable; I feel like we've been living in a Trump theme park for the past five years. It's all we've heard about every single day. I try to remember what it was like not thinking about Obama for two weeks at a time, and I look forward to not thinking about Biden for two weeks at a time.
- It feels like everyone on all sides of this issue agrees that the big tech companies are too powerful in many ways: as you point out, they have the ability to tamp-down public conversation, but on the flip side they have the ability to propagate disinformation on a massive scale. (There's also obviously their anti-competitiveness, but that feels like a different topic.) I have no idea what, if anything, should be done about this. Just as consolidation of power in tech companies is worrisome, so is consolidation of power in government.
- Speaking as someone on the left, I'm also troubled by (and I hate this term) "cancel culture". In recent weeks I watched someone I care about get destroyed for no reason other than the tone of a jokey story they told missed the mark. In my mind, "Internet Mob Justice" is as worrisome and problematic as government or corporate overreach, and I'm extremely skeptical of it regardless of which end of the political spectrum it's coming from.
- The disinformation thing is a huge and serious problem, and I haven't seen many "total free speech at all costs" advocates address it aside from saying something along the li...
This raises a really interesting question about where the line between regulated utility and free commerce should be drawn. I generally agree with what you've written in your post, and struggle to come up with an answer.
For some of the reasons you mention, I think that I think Facebook and Twitter and the various App Stores generally belong on the "free commerce" side of that line.
But what about DNS providers and ISPs? What about browser vendors and certificate authorities? And in particular, what about AWS?
I could imagine a world in which DNS providers and ISPs are regulated and cannot deny service without a court order, and in which AWS ends up straddling this: EC2 + Route53 get regulated, but S3 and on up are treated as unregulated free-commerce businesses.
As an aside, I'm really surprised that the Parler team didn't defend against this by hosting with multiple providers. Given their positioning, it seems like a pretty obvious risk. I wonder if that's an oversight / miscalculation, or if they made a decision that getting de-platformed at some point would be a good thing for their long-term brand / agenda.
Apple in particular will reject App's for all sorts of reasons (i.e. opinions about your UI was a common early one). That's fundamentally incompatible with the idea that they can be regarded as a public good.
A bit of a tangent but - I know what you mean by this and I generally agree but I think their concern is not about the amount of media attention they have gotten but about how their views are represented (or misrepresented) in the media. The media tends to take the most extreme in a group and paint with a broad brush. Is being in the same camp as racists a good look? Not at all, but when someone calls all trump supporters or those who espouse beliefs in common with trump racists it ignites and incites and misrepresents.
I’ll admit to feeling this at times. I’m a moderate left and I once voiced support for tarriffs on Chinese goods and was called racist by multiple people because I have a belief in common with trump on that. It didn’t make me more likely to evaluate my belief on that it made me angry and sad and a bit silenced. How am I to respond to an accusation like that? I’m really not sure. If I had more beliefs in common with Trump I can imagine being a lot worse off in that respect.
People are very quick to work out whether they're being listened to or whether they're just soundboards for another's ideology. When they're treated like soundboards they tend to get entrenched, when they're listened to they tend to listen in return. People listening to each other is the only hope of finding a common way forward, everything else just ends in sectarian violence. It is amazing that simply tolerating a diversity of opinions and listening to them has become such a radical notion!
> It is amazing that simply tolerating a diversity of opinions and listening to them has become such a radical notion!
I hope and believe that in time it will become less so again.
> Do you think there's a problem with the way technology has enabled the scale and precision of disinformation campaigns? If so, do you have any ideas what we can do about it?
Better education. Especially with regard to critical thinking skills.
Even if we removed the Internet, there would still be disinformation and propaganda that the population would have to contend with. Be it from the media, politicians, governments, books, friends, family, etc. Just as there always has been.
So I think the more comprehensive and sustainable approach would be to upgrade brains. Teach critical thinking and philosophy from a young age.
> Do you think there should be any moderation whatsoever? In other words, should people be allowed to incite, advocate, and organize violence in public forums? If not, where is the line? If so, what's remedies do we have as a society to the subsequent violence?
I'm absolutely for moderation on public forums. They are better for it. And by default they have to remove illegal content at least. Beyond that, it's up to them what the moderation policies are. HN is an example where I think moderation is really well done.
This gets a lot harder for platforms that are the de-facto town square like FB and Twitter. I don't know how we should handle that yet. But I think they should mostly stick with removing illegal content and act like a common carrier. If that's a problem due to the nature of social media, then maybe we should revisit the laws of the land. The fundamental issue here is having a few tech giants with a high level of control over the nation's discourse and who optimize for engagement (e.g., outrage, anger, bias confirmation). Which is fueling a lot of hate in the first place. They're not optimizing for thoughtful conversation and interaction. Not even remotely.
I'd also explore some other kinds of governance. Maybe an external non-partisan committee or a crypto governance approach. Not sure, but something external from these platform holders is key I think.
I'd contrast this from a platform like Parler where they actively encouraged extremists to adopt their platform. It is one thing to say "free speech" as a dog whistle and another thing to say "free speech" in the true meaning. Parler sought out extremists from the get go, Signal has been focusing on mass adoption. There's a big difference.
Can you share evidence of this? Because it clashes with all the messaging I've seen from Parler.
The messaging for this and Gab may thinly suggest otherwise, but it’s clear what these communities target, and it absolutely is the dog whistle version of free speech.
But I'll point to videos I can find which aren't as bad. If anyone can find the original ads that I mentioned I'd appreciate a link. Here[0] Ingram mentions radicals like Alex Jones and Candice Owens mentioning that it is a social network specifically for conservatives. It is easy to find plenty of videos like this where they consistently talk about it being a social media platform for conservatives. Here's one where the CEO complains about fact checking the president[1]. He does end struggling to suggest that Parler is gaining diversity, but also says that Twitter is a Biden community in the same sentence. But I've never been one to think that Twitter was specifically targeting conservatives. But you'll find that a lot of these interviews do still focus around the politics of the issue. Compare that to Signal's much more neutral stance on the matter.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6iyAt1Ydpc
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8IcjsFHwc8
Edit: Downvoters, would you mind explaining? Is it that I no longer have a direct link to Parler using Info Wars/Alex Jones and Breitbart as endorsements? Or do you not think those are extremist websites?
If you cannot understand your own tone, maybe you need to take a step back and consider you may be part of the problem (being unable to regulate your emotions and have a neutral conversation)
Can you expand on this? I understand Breitbart more since people like Milo were more clearly trolls. But Alex Jones frequently talks about conspiracy theories and is promoting the current insurrection (see below). But if many extremists frequent your sites then maybe the line is pretty blurry and you should expect others to confuse them. And to quote from an article that is on Info Wars' front page (in its entirety)[0]
> They continue twisting the occupation of our nation’s Capitol by frustrated citizens and using it to destroy anyone that stands in their way.
> As DC Mayor Bouser lords over her potential future state with a 15 day emergency order following the Capitol Building siege, the National Guard, including 1,000 soldiers from New York, are stationed in the nation’s Capitol to protect the illegitimate inauguration of the Manchurian Candidate Joe Biden while the old establishment propaganda ratchets into full protection mode and the defenders of the New World Order crawl out of their holes to justify the plague that is exterminating liberty.
How do you differentiate this from extremism? Reading words like "occupation", "illegitimate inauguration", "New World Order", and "exterminating liberty" seem to me like extremist views. I'm not sure how you differentiate the two, but saying that a deep state rigged the election and calling those who attacked the capital "frustrated citizens" is in my view an extremist stance. These words encourage those actions. Extremists always use inflammatory language, so where is the line drawn? When does sensationalism because extremism? When you have followers that act on your words? I feel like we're there.
[0] https://www.infowars.com/posts/selling-the-illusion-of-insur...
from the CEO: "People will not be banned on Parler because of things they say off platform. They will also be safe here..."
So, even though the CEO danced around the concept of banning people for things their users would inevitably do on the platform, Parler was actively recruiting and reassuring people concerned about the deplorable things they did off the platform, and whether or not they would be safe on Parler.
"the lack of moderation on Parler is not the issue. they actually have very robust moderation tools and all new users start out shadowbanned until enough of their post get approved for rightthink by their user moderators"
She also claims that influencers were being paid to post material without disclosing the payments. The FTC frowns on this. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/02/how-parler-app-plans-to-make... talks about this.
Basically, the idea was to get attention and make sure that it was a safe space for people who believed certain things, making sure that different viewpoints wouldn't be heard.
That might not be their messaging but that's what they were doing. Assuming this is true, of course.
What were these things? How right was too right, how left was too left?
Saying that free speech doesn't count if you're not using it the right away, is literally the exact opposite of the concept. It's the same reason the ACLU has spent so much money defending literal Nazis.
To clarify on the dog whistling part more, let's think about a recent example. Conservatives have frequently said that free speech is one of the most important things (Fox News, Trump, etc, not your neighbor). But then these groups also advocated for kicking athletes out of the country for kneeling in protest[0]. The president used his position of power to lead a boycott against a private organization[1]. The hypocrisy here is about that there is no right form of protest if you don't agree with me but even extreme forms of protest are okay if you do agree with me. Someone who says that is not actually advocating for free speech no matter how often they use the term. You saw organizations and the president saying that this wasn't a protest and that if it was they should do it another way. Then you see BLM and say that they should have protested peacefully and we would have solved the problems. From a different perspective you can see this as protesting escalating from peaceful to more disruptive and including violence. We see the "two sides" arguments (Charlottesville), encouraging supporters to run Biden's vehicle off the road[2], encouraging kidnapping of a governor[3], and I can go on (do we need to talk about the several cases at the Oregon capital?). Free speech isn't unlimited. Nor is "free speech for me and not for thee" free speech either.
If free speech is unlimited for one group but not for another, that is not free speech it is a dog whistle.
You can call a cat a dog but that doesn't make a cat a dog. And it doesn't matter if you take your cats on walks or you teach it to play fetch or other tricks or convince a bunch of people it is a dog, it is still a cat at the end of the day and won't ever be a dog.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44232979
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/22/donald-trump-n...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/31/biden-harris...
[3] [dead] lambda_obrien ↗ Jesus christ you killed that argument, that was the most rational explanation of the subject I've seen. Can I use this verbatim elsewhere?
I cant imagine that $100mn lasting if people are doing group calls, file transfers etc. because those are expensive activities with the needs for servers, bandwidth.
Previously they had the luxury to coast because of that donation, now not so much.
The Internet Archive runs ~50Gbit/sec, peaking at ~62Gbit/sec [2].
[1] https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/
[2] http://blog.archive.org/2020/05/11/thank-you-for-helping-us-...
Would really appreciate if Signal would give rough estimates of their infra needs (average and peak bandwidth, storage, compute, etc).
Amen to that, I don’t understand how anybody decides to go in that direction for this type of project. For my relatively small hobby-project (3Gbit/s image gallery) we’re renting bare-metal servers for $800/mo — cloud providers would be charging $50,000 just for bandwidth, let alone compute and storage…
(Incidentally if anybody knows good CDNs with prices in the same ballpark as bare-metal I’d love to hear it - looks like we’re too big for any of cloudflare’s entry-level plans, but their enterprise support doesn’t want to bother with any customer spending less than $3,000/mo...)
It always felt weird to me that while I trust Signal developers, all of the text input into the app goes through an on-screen keyboard that might or might not be secure.
So basically, on android, while your data doesn't go to Facebook anymore, as far as I can tell it still goes to Google via the keyboard app. Doesn't it?
EDIT: It feels to me like a missing piece, but maybe I'm wrong. Please educate me if I am, it's a genuine question :)
If you can’t trust the keyboard software installed on your phone then surely you don’t trust the os either. But if you don’t trust the os then what’s the point?
China is especially at risk due to both having oppressive censorship and a language that needs sophisticated keyboards for entering characters.
Just switch keyboard. There is a lot of choice here, interface to do that and so on.
While the answer from most technical users will be "just switch keyboards", it's also widely accepted that defaults matter and unless Signal makes an active effort to discourage people's default choice, the larger purpose of privacy will be somewhat defeated.
[0] https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/119769534457579929...
> You want to write Chinese, you need an IME. Apple/Microsoft/Linux/Google all have their own IME, but they aren't very good- typing on them is SLOW. Most Chinese use [...]
So, the ask is that Signal (a western company) develop a Chinese keyboard that is better than the vast majority of Chinese keyboards on the market (something Wu says is hard for western companies), and then force all Chinese users to use it, even if they prefer something else? What happens if they develop a bad one?
Keyboards aren't that special here. Signal opens up links in web browsers and some users install insecure web browser (also more commonly in China than in the US). Signal runs on an operating system and some users install insecure operating systems (also more commonly in China than in the US). There's no logical stopping point here until the whole device is Signal.
I think it's good for Signal to try to do one thing (encrypted communication) well, rather than trying to do everything.
The answer is to use a keyboard that doesn't have internet permission. It's not the chat app's worry to force their keyboard on users, in my opinion.
2. Feature parity for desktop app
3. Improved search and archival features
4. Full message threading?
- stop with their aggressive ANTI-everything marketing
You already have the domain knowledge to host another service on your own domain, and so running a Synapse server is well within reach. At least this way you have the choice between two imperfect choices: running another service vs. not having a Signal web-client.
[0] https://matrix.org
[1] https://matrix.org/bridges/#signal
[2] https://hydrogen.element.io
[3] https://matrix.org/blog/2020/12/25/the-matrix-holiday-specia...
The tweet says that Signal group calling limit has been raised from 5 to 8 and it continues to say (pun intended) that now you can call it even. I think it’s good to have a limit of 8 as opposed to 5, but it’d be better to bump this to double it further to cover almost everyone’s needs, though that’d require a lot more effort.
But Signal, as observed over the years, could do better by focusing on many other features that users and potential switchers consider critical.