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I switched to Signal way before. And then Elon Musk recommended Signal to all and sundry on Twitter. And then that got retweeted by Jack Dorsey. Now..I am a li

I switched to Signal way before. And then Elon Musk recommended Signal to all and sundry on Twitter. And then that got retweeted by Jack Dorsey. Now..I am a little worried. Do I want anything that has Jack’s paw prints on it. Since he and Zuckerberg turned up like creepy ideological twins at the senate hearings, I can’t tell them apart. The first question on the Reddit AMA resonates. WhatsApp was great before FB bought that out. Who is to say it won’t repeat with Signal and someone else?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
metaxis78 6y ago
Signal is well documented and the client is open source. They've done an excellent job making e2e chat accessible to everyone. But, that's always an inherent risk. I believe signal to be one of the best options right now. However, I'm also running a matrix server and working to convert my friends to that. These challenges are never going to stop, but federated messaging is a big step forward.
r00fus 6y ago
Did WhatsApp release their protocol openly with an open source reference client/server? Or did I miss that part? Having an exit plan makes me less concerned about a centralized service - if FB/TWT/etc buy Signal many parties are strongly incentivized to fork the code and provide migration paths.
- skinkestek 6y ago
  WhatsApp had some real issues and then it seemed they cleaned it up. It seems every mainstream researcher now agree that the message delivery part of WhatsApps is now trustworthy. That said the metadata and incentives story is about as bad as it can get[1] and in the backup department your chats can be uploaded wholesale to iCloud and/or Google Cloud if one of your contacts from the same conversations enable cloud backup. [1]: Owned by Facebook and they shut off the revenue stream so the only way they can make money from it is by squeezing it of the metadata they get or introduce ads.
jbj 6y ago
One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest bidder.
- input_sh 6y ago
  Their answer on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_private_messenger_team_here_we_support_an/gikrk2p https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...
- jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
  - jbj 6y ago
    Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation". I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed? - https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/ https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/
    - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
      Also OpenAI. Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too) [..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..] [..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform). Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
kubanczyk 6y ago
> WhatsApp was great before FB bought that out. Who is to say it won’t repeat with Signal and someone else? We need a protocol with competing federated servers. It's old news: Matrix, XMPP, IRC, e-mail.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

metaxis78 6y ago

Signal is well documented and the client is open source. They've done an excellent job making e2e chat accessible to everyone. But, that's always an inherent risk. I believe signal to be one of the best options right now. However, I'm also running a matrix server and working to convert my friends to that. These challenges are never going to stop, but federated messaging is a big step forward.

r00fus 6y ago

Did WhatsApp release their protocol openly with an open source reference client/server? Or did I miss that part? Having an exit plan makes me less concerned about a centralized service - if FB/TWT/etc buy Signal many parties are strongly incentivized to fork the code and provide migration paths.

skinkestek 6y ago
WhatsApp had some real issues and then it seemed they cleaned it up. It seems every mainstream researcher now agree that the message delivery part of WhatsApps is now trustworthy. That said the metadata and incentives story is about as bad as it can get[1] and in the backup department your chats can be uploaded wholesale to iCloud and/or Google Cloud if one of your contacts from the same conversations enable cloud backup. [1]: Owned by Facebook and they shut off the revenue stream so the only way they can make money from it is by squeezing it of the metadata they get or introduce ads.

jbj 6y ago

One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest bidder.

input_sh 6y ago
Their answer on the subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_private_messenger_team_here_we_support_an/gikrk2p https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/kt91qk/signal_p...
jelliclesfarm 6y ago
A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
- jbj 6y ago
  Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation". I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed? - https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/ https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/
  - jelliclesfarm 6y ago
    Also OpenAI. Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too) [..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..] [..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform). Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..] https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...

kubanczyk 6y ago

> WhatsApp was great before FB bought that out. Who is to say it won’t repeat with Signal and someone else? We need a protocol with competing federated servers. It's old news: Matrix, XMPP, IRC, e-mail.