11 ms·

Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

225 points by wolverine876 3y ago

wolverine876 3y ago
> The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryptography, around 2007, was to challenge existing power structures, particularly the injustice of how (as he put it) “Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.” But sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat. What a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"? I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew? EDIT: > Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist. Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? EDIT2: I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible. It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm. Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.
- throwayay583739 3y ago
  > Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states? It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
- mc32 3y ago
  Not to be Debbie downer but there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship. It’s clear that principles can shift over time and Wired is toeing the line.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    It's a problem across the spectrum. "Don't say gay" and the whole book banning business across the US come to mind. Is there legislation anywhere implementing "left wing censorship"?
    - mc32 3y ago
      That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
      - katbyte 3y ago
        That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed) Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
        SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        I would government employees to not talk about sex, their partners, their bedrooms, and all manner of topics to 5-9 year old kids.
- gcanyon 3y ago
  There's a case to be made that encryption/private communication has gone through the same sort of progress as personal weaponry has, only on a much shorter time frame and to a much greater extent. In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second. In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said." To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
  - komali2 3y ago
    > I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated. This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that. Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
    - catiopatio 3y ago
      I absolutely believe I should be able to own a bazooka, and that the second and first amendments are equally critical for a free state. People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions. It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
- tptacek 3y ago
  The authors of the Declaration of Independence are also the authors of the Constitution, premised in part on English Common Law, in which the public is entitled to every man's evidence.
  - schoen 3y ago
    I think "entitled to every man's evidence" means that there is a compulsory subpoena power to make people testify. One can call a hostile witness, and in the absence of a corresponding privilege against testifying, the witness can be punished for refusing to testify, as a contemnor (or for testifying falsely, as a perjuror). This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Yeah, I don't think the public claim to every person's evidence vindicates dragnet surveillance! I think these are complicated issues, we can make our own policy decisions and we can find a right to privacy even if one didn't exist at the time of the founders. I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    I'm not sure how you mean to apply that idea. If you mean that it balances the right of privacy, that seems like a stretch to apply to encryption. My evidence might be in my head, for example. Nothing stops me from burning records unless they already are potential evidence in an active case. I could delete this comment.
- skybrian 3y ago
  Yes, Wired was originally pretty libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I don’t know what it’s like now. As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    We've seen example after example of the Fourth Amendment being trampled all over with zero consequences. Why bother arguing over possible edge cases (and I personally don't see any reason online communications wouldn't be covered) when there are no meaningful consequences for even the most cut and dry violations. Like, why argue the finer points of a right that we effectively don't have?
    - skybrian 3y ago
      In a large country, I think it could be true that there are many violations of a rule, and at the same time, the rule is often enforced and is doing some good. I haven’t researched it, though.
      - kelnos 3y ago
        And on top of that, for the most part we only hear about the violations. The rule being followed won't make the news. That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.
- cempaka 3y ago
  Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could normalize total mass surveillance.
- r00fus 3y ago
  Follow the money - Wired is a Condé Nast property (for some time) which is in turn, owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
- safety1st 3y ago
  What sets the modern era apart from the rest of human history is that Marlinspike's ideas are radical yet commonplace at the same time. He's in the company of people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated the idea of permanent revolution, or that the rebellion against unjust government would never end. It would keep on happening through the ballot box. That is what democracy is. It is continuous small, non-violent revolutions against the government. This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored). There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?) But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again. Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present. This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
  - bombolo 3y ago
    I remember, as a young italian studying about risorgimento, asking my mother why did the people in venice and milan not want to be under the austrian empire. My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest." In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
- gorgoiler 3y ago
  In a previous era of journalism an article such as this one would include comment, if there was one, from Whisper themselves. There are quotes in there but they are ones reported by other journalists for other articles. That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Yeah. It's been sad to see how far we've fallen back, in the 10 years since Snowden. I'd argue we've gone even further than regressing, with an outspoken support for civil liberties and healthy skepticism of authorities being seen as not merely "kooky", but increasingly "harmful to society" I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies
ftyers 3y ago
https://archive.ph/FbSrC https://archive.ph/FbSrC
greyface- 3y ago
No mention of criticism for requiring use of phone numbers as identifiers. Falsely claims phone numbers are not linked to usernames.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- j_crick 3y ago
  Yeah, any discussion of anonymity and Signal can start and end with phone numbers. They could maybe offer an option to use just a username and some kind of authentication? But somehow they don’t :(
  - asynchronous 3y ago
    So many are missing the point here- Signal is *private*, not anonymous. They are two different things.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      We'd hope it's that, but the data collection isn't a good sign that it's private either.
- nathanaldensr 3y ago
  That has always bugged me about Signal. It seems like such an obvious hole--one that other services like Telegram and Wickr don't suffer from. I think Signal implies that you always know and are comfortable with the person on the other side of the message, but that is not always the case.
  - zen_1 3y ago
    Telegram also requires phone number signups
    - pepa65 3y ago
komali2 3y ago
I don't think the article accurately represents anarchism / Marlinspike's philosophy. The article seems to be trying to say that anarchist values are the root of Signal, but this is a barrier to pragmatism or general adoption. It describes anarchism, or, the principles of it that Marlinspike adopted (which aren't inherently anarchist. Though Marlinspike is of course an anarchist), as "far out on the political fringe." It says explicitly "sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat." It implies Marlinspike agrees by dropping his quote on anarchist failure. However, in the quoted article from Marlinspike, he absolutely doesn't imply something being anarchist relegates it to failure. From his article https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/ https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/ > Anarchists are best known for their failures... And yet, far from trying to suppress these histories, these are the stories that anarchists recount. ... This is unusual. American Patriots do not speak, with a gleam in their eyes, of the incredible number of battles that George Washington lost (and he lost almost as much as anarchists do). ... The difference between the ways Nationalists and Anarchists talk about their histories seems critical. > Will there ever be a night — one glorious evening — when the world is won? Where suddenly civilization, the spectacle, class, racism, and patriarchy all simultaneously topple and remain in ruins? ... It seems unlikely to happen in one moment. ... The George Washingtons of the world offer success. This is based on "realism" and the logic of quantifiability, where it is necessary to make compromises, pass laws, and assert control. Because these are the things that can be won; this is where success is found. > Anarchy, by contrast, offers us defeat. ... Anarchists are such failures because, really, there can be no victory. Our desires are always changing with the the context of our conditions and our surroundings. What we gain is what we manage to tease out of the conflicts between what we want and where we are. ... Remember that success is a word used to measure. It describes dollars made, people counted, votes cast. In other words, it's a swindle. The rejection of quantification, the emphasis on the role of the individual, is what makes anarchism unique. By my interpretation, the article is pulling a George Washington, trying to quantify the success of anarchism-in-software, or perhaps private communication, to whether signal can "go mainstream." > For an idealistic engineer to succeed, he will have to build something that is useful to many.... Signal’s success depends on maintaining its principled anarchist commitments while finding a wide-ranging appeal to the masses No, Signal is already successful, it's probably already achieved Marlinspike's goal of actualizing a "normal" way to do end to end encrypted private communication (and made it easy for his friends to do so), and it's absolutely achieved the general philosophical goal, through the popularity of the protocol, of giving people the chance to be in control of their surroundings. If Signal "fails," I guess by not growing its userbase more, the anarchist solution is to build again for whatever the new context is. The Win is there, we'd have the memories of Signal, it existed and let us maintain control of our surroundings if even only briefly. Example: > Signal also doesn’t do a good job serving some of its core users. Activists and organizers deal with huge amounts of messages that involve many people and threads, but Signal’s interface lacks ways to organize all this information. The solution is build again. Or, squat. If people can find a way to make Slack work to organize an antifascist protest, even if it means trading end to end encryption, then, that's a win.
nathanaldensr 3y ago
I did get a good chuckle at Wired's implication that only right-wing fringe groups use or need E2EE.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Apparently that is now a right wing fascist idea. Call me names all you want, I’m not changing my ideals.
  - cevn 3y ago
    Yeah I am not clicking on wired posts again. What garbage.
XorNot 3y ago
Signal would be a lot more pragmatic if they would develop a funding model based on selling something for actual money, rather then subsisting off donations. Sell "Signal for Business" accounts or something so I can stop having my bank or local government depend on SMS to communicate with me. I know a number of doctors who'd really love to be able to use Signal to talk to their patients (and would tell them to install it) if it was possible to sanely integrate with it from their practice management software. As it is, Signal lives in the same space that every other "free" internet service does - if you're not the customer, you're the product. And we get to just wait till that bill comes due.
- greyface- 3y ago
  And that bill will be substantial. According to Signal Foundation's 2021 IRS Form 990, their annual Twilio+Azure+AWS+GCP cloud spend was $15,196,853. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202212729349301631/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- k_bx 3y ago
  They've established their name and reputation, now they need to build on top of that. Like Mozilla and their VPN product, Signal can do a similar thing, keeping the Signal free.
  - pjerem 3y ago
    I would be surprised if Mozilla’s VPN was a substantial source of income. They are just reselling Mullvad’s VPN but for double price. That’s incredibly lazy and I hope Signal will find something more ambitious.
    - k_bx 3y ago
      That is a mistake by Mozilla IMO. They could've done better. But VPN is just a beginning, there are many other opportunities. Like recently-launched containerized JS playground. Or hosted email. Or Nextcloud-like product in general. Many ways to go.
gorgoiler 3y ago
”Signal [pioneered] end-to-end encryption, a feature that WhatsApp turned around and copied from Signal.” It wasn’t copied from Signal — at the protocol level, it is Signal: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/
- wolverine876 3y ago
  It's part of Signal.
  - gorgoiler 3y ago
    Thanks, I’ve edited my comment to be clearer.
  - foo-bar-bat 3y ago
    No, WhatsApp is not part of Signal. That's false. The opposite is true: Signal is part of Whats App. The problem is we have no idea what else is.
    - anonym29 3y ago
      I've always laughed at people who insist Whatsapp messages are just as secure as Signal messages. Like, prove to me Facebook isn't logging and storing every single cryptographic key generated in that entire protocol. Oh, you can't because the entire app is closed source? And you just blindly trust that Facebook is doing the right thing and not decrypting every message to scour it for every bit of information possible? lol.
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Correct, and that's what I meant. The person to whom I was responding understood me.
- pharmakom 3y ago
  WhatsApp is a closed source client, however.
- 3y ago
wolverine876 3y ago
I'm not complaining, but I'm curious: Why would a post with 43 points and 54 comments in two hours be way down on page 3 of HN? Should I not have edited "How" back into the title?
- dang 3y ago
  It set off the flamewar detector. (the usual answer)
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. My flame detector goes off all the time when we're cooking - you need to open a window and let in some fresh air. ;) :D
    - kristofferg 3y ago
      Might help with the detector - but not the flames :)
kornhole 3y ago
Or Signal could be the most well orchestrated honey pot. The server code is already partially closed source. What I don't understand is how a small organization like that cannot be convinced or compelled by a very powerful government intelligence agency. I will stick with decentralized protocols I can host myself.
- espe 3y ago
  this. also, they have a payment feature that opens them up further on grounds of regulatory scrutiny.
- nunobrito 3y ago
  People here will massively downvote your comment. The truth is that you are 100% correct in suspecting about that messenger. Since a long time that is known how Signal was initially sponsored by Radio Free Asia, which in turn is fueled by the CIA. For some reason western pages are disappearing on this topic, but after some search there are still some: https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-app/ https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-... Then comes the development of the algorithm itself. Moxei invited more crypto experts to write the algorithm while surfing in Hawaii. Quite strange of a chouse and zero details how those trips were sponsored but would know by "coincidence" what else is headquartered in Hawaii? NSA. Last but not least comes WhatsApp. With a billion users decides almost overnight to switch to the algorithm developed by this relatively unknown and smallish group called Signal. I'm not even observing how mainstream media is invariably supporting Signal with positive news while Telegram is negatively pictured. All these "signals" (that is an intelligence term btw), plus the fact of closed source code should be enough to raise eyebrows. But nope, you will see a sea of pedantic answers and downvoting whenever pointing the facts. Don't worry, you are not alone.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    NSA has an office in Hawaii, but is headquartered in Maryland.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Does the actual cryptography has anything suspicious-looking? I generally share your suspicion of the origins of Signal, but wouldn't the cryptography itself also look fairly odd if it were designed to be weak?
hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago
"Walking the line between anarchism and pragmatism" isn't good business. Change my mind.
- mhitza 3y ago
  If you want genuine responses or discussions, I'd recommend in the future to open up with an argument for the belief/point you are holding, instead of a catch-all opener.
upofadown 3y ago
> It also required its users to think like engineers, which included participating in exceptionally nerdy activities like attending real-life “key-signing parties” to verify your identity to other users. In fairness to PGP, Signal uses exactly the same method as PGP does for verifying identities. You need to check a ridiculously long number which represents your correspondent's identity. It's a 40 digit hex "key fingerprint" in the case of PGP and a 60 digit decimal "safety number" in the case of Signal. The difference is that Signal will cheerfully let the user have an insecure conversation before the user has verified the safety number. PGP makes it very difficult to fail in that particular way. Signal has a separate safety number for each of your devices. So it makes it significantly harder to keep up with the user verification than with PGP which has a single key fingerprint per user. So you could totally have a Signal identity party for exactly the same reasons as in the PGP case...
- hnarn 3y ago
  I think it’s pretty important to point out that Signal allows you to import this number with a QR code, so it’s not very arduous to do to verification.
  - georgyo 3y ago
    Various OpenPGP clients have this feature as well, such as OpenKeychain. OpenGPG, the the most commonly used implemention of OpenPGP, doesn't have QR codes because it's meant to be a cli and a library. With an open standard different clients will have different client facing features.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - burkaman 3y ago
      I enjoy the internet because I can interact with and learn from people with very different skillsets and experiences than me. I don't think I would enjoy it very much if it were only used by computer enthusiasts.
nologic01 3y ago
Signal could easily become a mass utility if governements would encourage their citizens to use it. Same with all the fediverse type platforms. The reason these efforts struggle with unfathomly limited resources while surveillance capitalism doesnt know what to do with their adtech trillions is that governments have sold their citizens short. The fate of Signal is tied to the fate of democracy.
bovermyer 3y ago
The way I got some of my coworkers to adopt Signal was when we went to Re:invent as a group, and texting no longer worked reliably. I suggested everyone install Signal, and we didn't have a problem communicating after that. Now everyone still uses it. It's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.
- MoSattler 3y ago
  This approach, unfortunately, won't work in the majority of the (western) world where WhatsApp has already replaced text messages as the de facto standard.
  - bovermyer 3y ago
    I don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I live in the eastern United States.
    - MoSattler 3y ago
      Yeah, the US is one of the few exceptions.
boredumb 3y ago
I've been using Matrix (and element as a client) for a little while now for personal and business stuff - I even wrote some fun little bot to shitpost random memes on my behalf. Anyone else using matrix actively for professional stuff? Any thing I may find later on that is a show stopper?
- AndroidKitKat 3y ago
  I believe parts of the French government are using Matrix for their communications [1]. I've been wanting to use Matrix more and more over IRC, but I've never really liked any of the Matrix clients. I think I'm just too stuck in my ways about my favorite IRC clients. [1]: https://element.io/case-studies/tchap https://element.io/case-studies/tchap
  - boredumb 3y ago
    I have spent years using discord, slack and teams now so the migration to element as a client was definitely a welcome change. I like the idea of not having my companys historical communication tied directly to a single vendor and being able to host my own local server (and have options of which). Not surprised governments are taking a look at it, the encryption and usability seem like a good fit and don't require them to rely on google/microsoft/salesforce for chatting.
- doublepg23 3y ago
  I’ve just generally found the polish in Element lacking - which seems strange to me. I was under the impression a benefit of Electron was you get very nice building blocks with edge cases taken care of.
kevinak 3y ago
People should switch to SimpleX instead: https://simplex.chat https://simplex.chat
- timbit42 3y ago
  Is that related to Twitter, I mean X?
pimpampum 3y ago
Everytime Wired or Vice publish one of this articles I cannot help but wonder who is pushing that narrative and why?
- RektBoy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - ectospheno 3y ago
    Signal is widely used in government.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - chris-orgmenta 3y ago
      Sure, but government isn't a leviathan; it's a shoal of fish.
  - testtestabcdef 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - gfdsgvbcd 3y ago
      [flagged]
RektBoy 3y ago
Signal privacy-focused messaging app aka treasure trove of metadata for NSA.
ccity88 3y ago
Signal is great, easily one of the best apps I've ever used. As someone who's privacy conscious, I've been trying forever to get my network of friends, family and colleagues to use signal with literally no success. Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Most people I've convinced have downloaded Signal, gave it a go with a few messages, and them promptly went back to WhatsApp because that's where the majority of their communication happens. I'm convinced that it doesn't matter how good the product is, what matters is the network effect. Nobody cares about privacy, what they care about is whether everyone else is using the same app. Until there's some doomsday scenario of everyones messages getting leaked or something (the closest was the WhatsApp privacy policy changes that triggered worldwide scrutiny and was a general PR nightmare), nobody will be moving en masse to a plucky small app that their network isn't on. Also doesn't help that Signal are implementing features like crypto transactions that most people don't care about.
- TacticalCoder 3y ago
  > Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Several countries in Europe have already 1/10th of their population using Telegram. Telegram sees more than one million download per quarter in the UK alone. Telegram is simply a much better app (better UI/UX) and nobody around me finds it weird. As soon as friends and family tries Telegram, they're hooked. The network effect is already there and I guarantee you that if there still people finding it "weird", it won't last long. There's also zero problem using both WhatsApp and Telegram (which many people do: I don't but many do).
bigdang 3y ago
> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?
- renewiltord 3y ago
  I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to be moderated.
- AbrahamParangi 3y ago
  The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it. I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - printforest 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
      I was more talking about this kind of reaction.
      - maxbond 3y ago
        If you say something incisive to piss people off and trigger a reaction, and you get the reaction you're looking for, what we've established is that you are willing to piss people off to serve your rhetorical ends. Nothing else. This of the "stop hitting yourself" form of argumentation.
Aeolun 3y ago
Signal just works. Thst’s the only thing I need it to do, and it does it beautifully.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
  Can't you only install it on a single iDevice?
  - mdhen 3y ago
    No, you can have it on multiple devices. It just won't be able to grab any chat history when you first add it to a be device
AndrewKemendo 3y ago
As an anarchist I accept that we have literally the worst branding and need to start over. It’s not by accident of course, but yet it remains true that 99% of people see the word “anarchist” and think about the Anarchist cookbook or teenagers making prank calls and being angsty and throwing the odd Molotov cocktail. No wonder then these comments are filled with people equivocating between “anti-government” Christi-fascists like the oath keepers and anarcho-communists like members of the DSA. They couldn’t be further apart, but because both are “anti-government” then people assume it’s all the same cause it’s a binary system conceptually. You’re either state capitalist or state communist there is no third option (or fourth! How absurd!).
flerovium 3y ago
It's quite likely that the purpose of this story is to push a narrative for anti-encryption advocates. Cf. US and UK pushes against encryption.

225 points by wolverine876 3y ago

> The motivations that led to end-to-end encryption going mainstream lie far out on the political fringe. The original impetus for Marlinspike’s entry into cryptography, around 2007, was to challenge existing power structures, particularly the injustice of how (as he put it) “Internet insecurity is used by people I don’t like against people I do: the government against the people.” But sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat. What a reflection of the massive political shift from individual liberty and 'all men are created equal', for which privacy is necessary, to compliance with power. Now that's "far out on the political fringe" and even "anarchy"? I know most people don't think philosophically about it, but Signal's principles are pretty mainstream American (and probably other free countries), afaik - or knew? EDIT: > Signal has managed to maintain an unusual focus on the autonomy of the individual, a wariness of state authority, and an aversion to making money, characteristics that are recognizably anarchist. Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? EDIT2: I think that's what the article really is about: The author's theory that this sort of vision is utopian, very fringe, and therefore impossible. It's pretty shocking to see it in Wired, which once led in exploring, beliving in, and bringing to the world's (or its readers') attention exceptional innovations well beyond the conceptions of the norm. Now they doubt such things ipso facto. Nobody seems to remark on the extraordinary reactionary philosophy that is flooding the public space, the antithisis of creativity, freedom, innovation, and 'intellectual curiosity'.

throwayay583739 3y ago
> Doesn't that describe, to different degrees, a great many open source projects? Mozilla? BSDs? etc? Or a lot of englightenment political theory about democracy and republicanism and the rule of law that all lie at the roots of most modern states? It's one thing to meet with refutation of this philosophy. It's another thing to meet with the wired article author's incredulity & astonishment at these well established ideas.
mc32 3y ago
Not to be Debbie downer but there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship. It’s clear that principles can shift over time and Wired is toeing the line.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  It's a problem across the spectrum. "Don't say gay" and the whole book banning business across the US come to mind. Is there legislation anywhere implementing "left wing censorship"?
  - mc32 3y ago
    That was about introducing sex ed to third graders. Have third graders put down their toy cars, dolls and blocks yet? And then you have a Cal governor suinf a school dist demanding they teach the curriculum he believes is correct. So you have an example of two governors, one on each side, tellig districts what to teach But, the thing is, liberals _used_ _to_ espouse free speech as long as it was legal and defended it to the death, so to speak. Conservatives, well, they were conservative and were more on the "decency" argument but today that is reversed and the liberals are tending more autocratic than the conservatives.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed) Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”
      - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
        I would government employees to not talk about sex, their partners, their bedrooms, and all manner of topics to 5-9 year old kids.
gcanyon 3y ago
There's a case to be made that encryption/private communication has gone through the same sort of progress as personal weaponry has, only on a much shorter time frame and to a much greater extent. In weaponry, it's taken ~200 years to go from bespoke muskets with a firing rate of a couple rounds per minute to semi-automatic and automatic weapons capable of firing multiple rounds per second. In just the last 20-30 years we've gone from "if the government wants to know your speech, they are a warrant(-ish) away from getting it" to "as long as you don't make a mistake, no one will ever know what you said." To be clear, I'm not advocating for encryption restrictions. I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka, and it could reasonably be argued that a bazooka isn't remotely equivalent to the present ability of just about anyone to conceal their speech.
- komali2 3y ago
  > I'm just saying that almost no one advocates for the 2nd amendment right to a bazooka This isn't necessarily true. To believe that the 2nd amendment allows the right to carry a concealed weapon basically anywhere sort of requires one to believe every citizen has the right to carry any weapon. The amendment is meant to indicate that congress simply can't regulate whether citizens choose to own and carry around weapons, and what sort of weapons those might be. If the weapon could be considered an "arm," it can't be regulated. This is one of the obvious modern flaws with the USA constitution and why the 2nd amendment should be abolished before any reasonable gun control can happen in the USA. Kavanaugh and other justices right now seem to think that there are "of course" conditions and restrictions that should be allowed, like not carrying guns into "sensitive places" or not allowing felons to have guns, but a future justice can simply disagree, and that's that. Also, many people in the USA believe they should be allowed to have a bazooka.
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    I absolutely believe I should be able to own a bazooka, and that the second and first amendments are equally critical for a free state. People use exactly the same arguments you’re making to justify speech restrictions. It’s my belief that there’s an underlying social pathology wherein some people are happy to hand power to the state in order to feel safe, regardless of the ultimate consequences, whether we’re discussing arms or speech or any other fundamental right.
tptacek 3y ago
The authors of the Declaration of Independence are also the authors of the Constitution, premised in part on English Common Law, in which the public is entitled to every man's evidence.
- schoen 3y ago
  I think "entitled to every man's evidence" means that there is a compulsory subpoena power to make people testify. One can call a hostile witness, and in the absence of a corresponding privilege against testifying, the witness can be punished for refusing to testify, as a contemnor (or for testifying falsely, as a perjuror). This idea is distinct from search and covert eavesdropping powers, which may have also existed at common law but perhaps not under that same principle?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Yeah, I don't think the public claim to every person's evidence vindicates dragnet surveillance! I think these are complicated issues, we can make our own policy decisions and we can find a right to privacy even if one didn't exist at the time of the founders. I'm just reacting to the notion that we've departed from the principles of the founders by giving law enforcement access to evidence. My impression, from the bit of reading I've done, is that wouldn't have shocked the conscience of the founders at all.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  I'm not sure how you mean to apply that idea. If you mean that it balances the right of privacy, that seems like a stretch to apply to encryption. My evidence might be in my head, for example. Nothing stops me from burning records unless they already are potential evidence in an active case. I could delete this comment.
skybrian 3y ago
Yes, Wired was originally pretty libertarian, but that was a long time ago. I don’t know what it’s like now. As for what’s mainstream American, people disagree. Historically, we’re a pretty unruly people. Still are, sometimes. But here is the Fourth Amendment: > The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. (Emphasis added.) You can argue about whether that should also apply to secure online communications, but the idea that there are compromises between state power and individual rights is pretty fundamental to US law.
- autoexec 3y ago
  We've seen example after example of the Fourth Amendment being trampled all over with zero consequences. Why bother arguing over possible edge cases (and I personally don't see any reason online communications wouldn't be covered) when there are no meaningful consequences for even the most cut and dry violations. Like, why argue the finer points of a right that we effectively don't have?
  - skybrian 3y ago
    In a large country, I think it could be true that there are many violations of a rule, and at the same time, the rule is often enforced and is doing some good. I haven’t researched it, though.
    - kelnos 3y ago
      And on top of that, for the most part we only hear about the violations. The rule being followed won't make the news. That doesn't mean the violations are acceptable, of course.
cempaka 3y ago
Only Nixon could go to China, and only Obama could normalize total mass surveillance.
r00fus 3y ago
Follow the money - Wired is a Condé Nast property (for some time) which is in turn, owned by Advance Publications, one of the largest media conglomerates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_Publications
safety1st 3y ago
What sets the modern era apart from the rest of human history is that Marlinspike's ideas are radical yet commonplace at the same time. He's in the company of people like Thomas Jefferson who advocated the idea of permanent revolution, or that the rebellion against unjust government would never end. It would keep on happening through the ballot box. That is what democracy is. It is continuous small, non-violent revolutions against the government. This is quite different from almost every prior form of social system in human history and it's arguably the single largest idea which has contributed to lifting humanity out of poverty, war, oppression and misery (the scientific method is a very close competitor for that distinction, but without permanent revolution most scientists probably would have been burned at the stake or ignored). There will always be people - the powerful, the entrenched, and maybe just the ill-informed, cowardly or intellectually lazy - who are terrified by the notion of permanent revolution, so to them it's radical. (One wonders what camp this writer falls in, because usually journalists are well aware of this stuff, for many it's their raison d'etre. Has this one taken a civics class? Do they believe Jefferson was arguing for anarchy? If so have they looked up the definition of that word in a dictionary?) But despite the fears of those people, permanent revolution is the secret sauce modern society is built upon. Western civilization has a long line of prominent thinkers and historical examples which has led to this way of organizing ourselves. It is precious and it is still new and if we lose it we might never get it back again. Anyway, I like the argument that Signal's CEO makes here [1], which is that for virtually all of human history, privacy has been the default. The Constitution was written before the invention of the telegram. At that point in history you could always go into a room alone with someone else, have a conversation, and be reasonably assured that the conversation was private. Bugs and wires didn't exist. Wiretapping didn't exist, surveillance didn't exist unless you had a third human physically present. This makes privacy akin to a natural right, something we have always had, that we are entitled to by nature of being human. I'm of the view that the US needs a Constitutional amendment to protect it, and if any government seeks to deny it we should give them a reminder of what permanent revolution is and show them how it works. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--bVV_eQR0
- bombolo 3y ago
  I remember, as a young italian studying about risorgimento, asking my mother why did the people in venice and milan not want to be under the austrian empire. My mum told me "it was an oppressive government". When I asked to elaborate she said "they used to read people's mails so that they knew whom to arrest." In italy you can end up in jail if you open mails… and yet somehow we are completely ok with the government reading every electronic communication?
gorgoiler 3y ago
In a previous era of journalism an article such as this one would include comment, if there was one, from Whisper themselves. There are quotes in there but they are ones reported by other journalists for other articles. That’s fine — it’s what editorial is after all — but it could have been made clearer.
didntcheck 3y ago
Yeah. It's been sad to see how far we've fallen back, in the 10 years since Snowden. I'd argue we've gone even further than regressing, with an outspoken support for civil liberties and healthy skepticism of authorities being seen as not merely "kooky", but increasingly "harmful to society" I was hoping to maybe be able to skirt around it, but I think it's unavoidable to discuss this without explicitly saying: the concerning part is that it's increasingly the left doing this. When I was younger I used to be able to rely on that side of the spectrum to be at the forefront of calling out creeping authority like that, which should be unsurprising, given their core philosophy. Yet in the past 5 or so years they seem determined to throw that away and declare that a healthy distrust of the government is in fact a right-wing-exclusive thing, for some reason. Strange self-sabotage, and especially strange when it manifests as people of that affiliation implicitly (or explicitly) praising alphabet agencies

ftyers 3y ago

https://archive.ph/FbSrC https://archive.ph/FbSrC

greyface- 3y ago

No mention of criticism for requiring use of phone numbers as identifiers. Falsely claims phone numbers are not linked to usernames.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
j_crick 3y ago
Yeah, any discussion of anonymity and Signal can start and end with phone numbers. They could maybe offer an option to use just a username and some kind of authentication? But somehow they don’t :(
- asynchronous 3y ago
  So many are missing the point here- Signal is *private*, not anonymous. They are two different things.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    We'd hope it's that, but the data collection isn't a good sign that it's private either.
nathanaldensr 3y ago
That has always bugged me about Signal. It seems like such an obvious hole--one that other services like Telegram and Wickr don't suffer from. I think Signal implies that you always know and are comfortable with the person on the other side of the message, but that is not always the case.
- zen_1 3y ago
  Telegram also requires phone number signups
  - pepa65 3y ago

komali2 3y ago

I don't think the article accurately represents anarchism / Marlinspike's philosophy. The article seems to be trying to say that anarchist values are the root of Signal, but this is a barrier to pragmatism or general adoption. It describes anarchism, or, the principles of it that Marlinspike adopted (which aren't inherently anarchist. Though Marlinspike is of course an anarchist), as "far out on the political fringe." It says explicitly "sticking to anarchism would imply an almost certain defeat." It implies Marlinspike agrees by dropping his quote on anarchist failure. However, in the quoted article from Marlinspike, he absolutely doesn't imply something being anarchist relegates it to failure. From his article https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/ https://moxie.org/stories/promise-defeat/ > Anarchists are best known for their failures... And yet, far from trying to suppress these histories, these are the stories that anarchists recount. ... This is unusual. American Patriots do not speak, with a gleam in their eyes, of the incredible number of battles that George Washington lost (and he lost almost as much as anarchists do). ... The difference between the ways Nationalists and Anarchists talk about their histories seems critical. > Will there ever be a night — one glorious evening — when the world is won? Where suddenly civilization, the spectacle, class, racism, and patriarchy all simultaneously topple and remain in ruins? ... It seems unlikely to happen in one moment. ... The George Washingtons of the world offer success. This is based on "realism" and the logic of quantifiability, where it is necessary to make compromises, pass laws, and assert control. Because these are the things that can be won; this is where success is found. > Anarchy, by contrast, offers us defeat. ... Anarchists are such failures because, really, there can be no victory. Our desires are always changing with the the context of our conditions and our surroundings. What we gain is what we manage to tease out of the conflicts between what we want and where we are. ... Remember that success is a word used to measure. It describes dollars made, people counted, votes cast. In other words, it's a swindle. The rejection of quantification, the emphasis on the role of the individual, is what makes anarchism unique. By my interpretation, the article is pulling a George Washington, trying to quantify the success of anarchism-in-software, or perhaps private communication, to whether signal can "go mainstream." > For an idealistic engineer to succeed, he will have to build something that is useful to many.... Signal’s success depends on maintaining its principled anarchist commitments while finding a wide-ranging appeal to the masses No, Signal is already successful, it's probably already achieved Marlinspike's goal of actualizing a "normal" way to do end to end encrypted private communication (and made it easy for his friends to do so), and it's absolutely achieved the general philosophical goal, through the popularity of the protocol, of giving people the chance to be in control of their surroundings. If Signal "fails," I guess by not growing its userbase more, the anarchist solution is to build again for whatever the new context is. The Win is there, we'd have the memories of Signal, it existed and let us maintain control of our surroundings if even only briefly. Example: > Signal also doesn’t do a good job serving some of its core users. Activists and organizers deal with huge amounts of messages that involve many people and threads, but Signal’s interface lacks ways to organize all this information. The solution is build again. Or, squat. If people can find a way to make Slack work to organize an antifascist protest, even if it means trading end to end encryption, then, that's a win.

nathanaldensr 3y ago

I did get a good chuckle at Wired's implication that only right-wing fringe groups use or need E2EE.

asynchronous 3y ago
Apparently that is now a right wing fascist idea. Call me names all you want, I’m not changing my ideals.
- cevn 3y ago
  Yeah I am not clicking on wired posts again. What garbage.

XorNot 3y ago

Signal would be a lot more pragmatic if they would develop a funding model based on selling something for actual money, rather then subsisting off donations. Sell "Signal for Business" accounts or something so I can stop having my bank or local government depend on SMS to communicate with me. I know a number of doctors who'd really love to be able to use Signal to talk to their patients (and would tell them to install it) if it was possible to sanely integrate with it from their practice management software. As it is, Signal lives in the same space that every other "free" internet service does - if you're not the customer, you're the product. And we get to just wait till that bill comes due.

greyface- 3y ago
And that bill will be substantial. According to Signal Foundation's 2021 IRS Form 990, their annual Twilio+Azure+AWS+GCP cloud spend was $15,196,853. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202212729349301631/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
k_bx 3y ago
They've established their name and reputation, now they need to build on top of that. Like Mozilla and their VPN product, Signal can do a similar thing, keeping the Signal free.
- pjerem 3y ago
  I would be surprised if Mozilla’s VPN was a substantial source of income. They are just reselling Mullvad’s VPN but for double price. That’s incredibly lazy and I hope Signal will find something more ambitious.
  - k_bx 3y ago
    That is a mistake by Mozilla IMO. They could've done better. But VPN is just a beginning, there are many other opportunities. Like recently-launched containerized JS playground. Or hosted email. Or Nextcloud-like product in general. Many ways to go.

gorgoiler 3y ago

”Signal [pioneered] end-to-end encryption, a feature that WhatsApp turned around and copied from Signal.” It wasn’t copied from Signal — at the protocol level, it is Signal: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp/

wolverine876 3y ago
It's part of Signal.
- gorgoiler 3y ago
  Thanks, I’ve edited my comment to be clearer.
- foo-bar-bat 3y ago
  No, WhatsApp is not part of Signal. That's false. The opposite is true: Signal is part of Whats App. The problem is we have no idea what else is.
  - anonym29 3y ago
    I've always laughed at people who insist Whatsapp messages are just as secure as Signal messages. Like, prove to me Facebook isn't logging and storing every single cryptographic key generated in that entire protocol. Oh, you can't because the entire app is closed source? And you just blindly trust that Facebook is doing the right thing and not decrypting every message to scour it for every bit of information possible? lol.
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Correct, and that's what I meant. The person to whom I was responding understood me.
pharmakom 3y ago
WhatsApp is a closed source client, however.
3y ago

wolverine876 3y ago

I'm not complaining, but I'm curious: Why would a post with 43 points and 54 comments in two hours be way down on page 3 of HN? Should I not have edited "How" back into the title?

dang 3y ago
It set off the flamewar detector. (the usual answer)
- wolverine876 3y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. My flame detector goes off all the time when we're cooking - you need to open a window and let in some fresh air. ;) :D
  - kristofferg 3y ago
    Might help with the detector - but not the flames :)

kornhole 3y ago

Or Signal could be the most well orchestrated honey pot. The server code is already partially closed source. What I don't understand is how a small organization like that cannot be convinced or compelled by a very powerful government intelligence agency. I will stick with decentralized protocols I can host myself.

espe 3y ago
this. also, they have a payment feature that opens them up further on grounds of regulatory scrutiny.
nunobrito 3y ago
People here will massively downvote your comment. The truth is that you are 100% correct in suspecting about that messenger. Since a long time that is known how Signal was initially sponsored by Radio Free Asia, which in turn is fueled by the CIA. For some reason western pages are disappearing on this topic, but after some search there are still some: https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-app/ https://greatgameindia.com/how-cia-created-signal-messenger-... Then comes the development of the algorithm itself. Moxei invited more crypto experts to write the algorithm while surfing in Hawaii. Quite strange of a chouse and zero details how those trips were sponsored but would know by "coincidence" what else is headquartered in Hawaii? NSA. Last but not least comes WhatsApp. With a billion users decides almost overnight to switch to the algorithm developed by this relatively unknown and smallish group called Signal. I'm not even observing how mainstream media is invariably supporting Signal with positive news while Telegram is negatively pictured. All these "signals" (that is an intelligence term btw), plus the fact of closed source code should be enough to raise eyebrows. But nope, you will see a sea of pedantic answers and downvoting whenever pointing the facts. Don't worry, you are not alone.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  NSA has an office in Hawaii, but is headquartered in Maryland.
- stavros 3y ago
  Does the actual cryptography has anything suspicious-looking? I generally share your suspicion of the origins of Signal, but wouldn't the cryptography itself also look fairly odd if it were designed to be weak?

hsjqllzlfkf 3y ago

"Walking the line between anarchism and pragmatism" isn't good business. Change my mind.

mhitza 3y ago
If you want genuine responses or discussions, I'd recommend in the future to open up with an argument for the belief/point you are holding, instead of a catch-all opener.

upofadown 3y ago

> It also required its users to think like engineers, which included participating in exceptionally nerdy activities like attending real-life “key-signing parties” to verify your identity to other users. In fairness to PGP, Signal uses exactly the same method as PGP does for verifying identities. You need to check a ridiculously long number which represents your correspondent's identity. It's a 40 digit hex "key fingerprint" in the case of PGP and a 60 digit decimal "safety number" in the case of Signal. The difference is that Signal will cheerfully let the user have an insecure conversation before the user has verified the safety number. PGP makes it very difficult to fail in that particular way. Signal has a separate safety number for each of your devices. So it makes it significantly harder to keep up with the user verification than with PGP which has a single key fingerprint per user. So you could totally have a Signal identity party for exactly the same reasons as in the PGP case...

hnarn 3y ago
I think it’s pretty important to point out that Signal allows you to import this number with a QR code, so it’s not very arduous to do to verification.
- georgyo 3y ago
  Various OpenPGP clients have this feature as well, such as OpenKeychain. OpenGPG, the the most commonly used implemention of OpenPGP, doesn't have QR codes because it's meant to be a cli and a library. With an open standard different clients will have different client facing features.
- anonym29 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - burkaman 3y ago
    I enjoy the internet because I can interact with and learn from people with very different skillsets and experiences than me. I don't think I would enjoy it very much if it were only used by computer enthusiasts.

nologic01 3y ago

Signal could easily become a mass utility if governements would encourage their citizens to use it. Same with all the fediverse type platforms. The reason these efforts struggle with unfathomly limited resources while surveillance capitalism doesnt know what to do with their adtech trillions is that governments have sold their citizens short. The fate of Signal is tied to the fate of democracy.

bovermyer 3y ago

The way I got some of my coworkers to adopt Signal was when we went to Re:invent as a group, and texting no longer worked reliably. I suggested everyone install Signal, and we didn't have a problem communicating after that. Now everyone still uses it. It's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.

MoSattler 3y ago
This approach, unfortunately, won't work in the majority of the (western) world where WhatsApp has already replaced text messages as the de facto standard.
- bovermyer 3y ago
  I don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I live in the eastern United States.
  - MoSattler 3y ago
    Yeah, the US is one of the few exceptions.

boredumb 3y ago

I've been using Matrix (and element as a client) for a little while now for personal and business stuff - I even wrote some fun little bot to shitpost random memes on my behalf. Anyone else using matrix actively for professional stuff? Any thing I may find later on that is a show stopper?

AndroidKitKat 3y ago
I believe parts of the French government are using Matrix for their communications [1]. I've been wanting to use Matrix more and more over IRC, but I've never really liked any of the Matrix clients. I think I'm just too stuck in my ways about my favorite IRC clients. [1]: https://element.io/case-studies/tchap https://element.io/case-studies/tchap
- boredumb 3y ago
  I have spent years using discord, slack and teams now so the migration to element as a client was definitely a welcome change. I like the idea of not having my companys historical communication tied directly to a single vendor and being able to host my own local server (and have options of which). Not surprised governments are taking a look at it, the encryption and usability seem like a good fit and don't require them to rely on google/microsoft/salesforce for chatting.
doublepg23 3y ago
I’ve just generally found the polish in Element lacking - which seems strange to me. I was under the impression a benefit of Electron was you get very nice building blocks with edge cases taken care of.

kevinak 3y ago

People should switch to SimpleX instead: https://simplex.chat https://simplex.chat

timbit42 3y ago
Is that related to Twitter, I mean X?

pimpampum 3y ago

Everytime Wired or Vice publish one of this articles I cannot help but wonder who is pushing that narrative and why?

RektBoy 3y ago
[flagged]
- ectospheno 3y ago
  Signal is widely used in government.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - chris-orgmenta 3y ago
    Sure, but government isn't a leviathan; it's a shoal of fish.
- testtestabcdef 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - gfdsgvbcd 3y ago
    [flagged]

RektBoy 3y ago

Signal privacy-focused messaging app aka treasure trove of metadata for NSA.

ccity88 3y ago

Signal is great, easily one of the best apps I've ever used. As someone who's privacy conscious, I've been trying forever to get my network of friends, family and colleagues to use signal with literally no success. Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Most people I've convinced have downloaded Signal, gave it a go with a few messages, and them promptly went back to WhatsApp because that's where the majority of their communication happens. I'm convinced that it doesn't matter how good the product is, what matters is the network effect. Nobody cares about privacy, what they care about is whether everyone else is using the same app. Until there's some doomsday scenario of everyones messages getting leaked or something (the closest was the WhatsApp privacy policy changes that triggered worldwide scrutiny and was a general PR nightmare), nobody will be moving en masse to a plucky small app that their network isn't on. Also doesn't help that Signal are implementing features like crypto transactions that most people don't care about.

TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Here in the UK, WhatsApp is ubiquitous, and to even _think_ of using a different app is, by most laypeople's standards, absolutely weird. Several countries in Europe have already 1/10th of their population using Telegram. Telegram sees more than one million download per quarter in the UK alone. Telegram is simply a much better app (better UI/UX) and nobody around me finds it weird. As soon as friends and family tries Telegram, they're hooked. The network effect is already there and I guarantee you that if there still people finding it "weird", it won't last long. There's also zero problem using both WhatsApp and Telegram (which many people do: I don't but many do).

bigdang 3y ago

> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progressive and conservative?

renewiltord 3y ago
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to be moderated.
AbrahamParangi 3y ago
The rising intolerance of wrongthink on the left has been written about extensively but I’d love to read a sympathetic, anthropological investigation into it. I say sympathetic because I don’t believe you can understand anything without really seeing how a reasonable person could come to those same conclusions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- printforest 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    I was more talking about this kind of reaction.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      If you say something incisive to piss people off and trigger a reaction, and you get the reaction you're looking for, what we've established is that you are willing to piss people off to serve your rhetorical ends. Nothing else. This of the "stop hitting yourself" form of argumentation.

Aeolun 3y ago

Signal just works. Thst’s the only thing I need it to do, and it does it beautifully.

bobbylarrybobby 3y ago
Can't you only install it on a single iDevice?
- mdhen 3y ago
  No, you can have it on multiple devices. It just won't be able to grab any chat history when you first add it to a be device

AndrewKemendo 3y ago

As an anarchist I accept that we have literally the worst branding and need to start over. It’s not by accident of course, but yet it remains true that 99% of people see the word “anarchist” and think about the Anarchist cookbook or teenagers making prank calls and being angsty and throwing the odd Molotov cocktail. No wonder then these comments are filled with people equivocating between “anti-government” Christi-fascists like the oath keepers and anarcho-communists like members of the DSA. They couldn’t be further apart, but because both are “anti-government” then people assume it’s all the same cause it’s a binary system conceptually. You’re either state capitalist or state communist there is no third option (or fourth! How absurd!).

flerovium 3y ago

It's quite likely that the purpose of this story is to push a narrative for anti-encryption advocates. Cf. US and UK pushes against encryption.