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I'm no longer involved at Signal
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nocobot 2y agocan someone explain why dhh has such strong feelings about katherine maher?
- thinkingemote 2y agonot sure. I searched comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=Katherine%20Maher&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments. Edits. From the Signal page: "She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
- rand846633 2y agoCan anyone explain what the deal is with that Us department of state foreign affairs policy board?
- huslage 2y agoDHH only has strong feelings. Katherine Maher is a great CEO and leader and has been taken out of context in order to isolate her and make her unsupportable by people who claim to not like cancel culture. The whole thing is ridiculous.
- slim 2y ago[flagged]
- probably_jesus 2y ago[dead]
- thegrim33 2y agoYou're the second person in this small thread to make a quip about "people claiming to not like cancel culture". Smells pretty fishy to me. Also the whole "she's a great CEO and leader" bit, what are the odds that you have personal experience to where you can make this claim? Even if you did, you could at least provide reasoning for why you think that. Anyways, all put together, I suspect a non-genuine person (or bot/LLM) posted this.
- sp332 2y agoRufo, the guy who invented the Critical Race Theory conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo , posted a video clip of her and wildly misinterpreted it for clicks. There have been a bunch of submissions and I think all of them have been flagged dead. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40080036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40080036
- vlod 2y agoMaybe it's this tweet: https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848 https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848 From the tweet: EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be." There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
- htk 2y agoThank you for the link. Now I have enough to form an opinion about her.
- theossuary 2y agoTotally. She seems really thoughtful and aware of how absolute freedom (anarchy) just leads to a situation where implicit power structures are created by those who get there first. Hope she and others keep doing good work to ensure that the site lives up to its goal, to catalog all knowledge, not just the knowledge that's easy to catalog.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoA large part of how DHH stays relevant is by getting outraged about things on the Internet.
- tim333 2y agoThere's an article here (admittedly a bit biased against her) "NPR Chief Bragged About Taking Censorship Orders From Feds As Head Of Wikipedia" https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/17/npr-chief-bragged-about-taking-censorship-orders-from-feds-as-head-of-wikipedia/ https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/17/npr-chief-bragged-about... which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
- lrvick 2y ago1. MobileCoin premines 250m coins 2. Moxie is paid for being on their board 3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin 4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale. 5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60 6. Moxie steps down as CEO of Signal but remains on board 7. Mobilecoin price today is $0.09 8. Moxie is no longer involved at Signal This is why we need decentralization.
- flooow 2y ago> This is why we need decentralization. That's an interesting interpretation. I read it as 'all cryptocurrencies are scams'.
- lrvick 2y agoNot all cryptocurrencies are scams, not all traffic on Tor is CSAM, and not matrix messages are spam. Some of us use all of these decentralized systems daily for their actual intended use cases of sovereignty and privacy. Things like money and messaging are too important to a functioning society to allow any single party to control. We need -actually- decentralized money and -actually- decentralized communication. MobileCoin and Signal are neither and the results are predictable.
- theamk 2y agoThat's why there is no single party to control communication, and even for money there is US vs EU systems. "Actually decentralized" has a lot of problems, especially with things like spam and scams (see also: usenet). Federation makes sure no single party has too much power, and yet allows one to have usable systems.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago[flagged]
- lrvick 2y agoSo is the paper money in your pocket people historically traded in their gold for. Gold is objectively more inflation resistant and useful, but the paper gold certificates fit in a wallet better. Society made a convenience tradeoff. One day the US government arbitrarily decided to not allow gold trade-ins anymore, but we had all learned to assign psychological value to this worthless paper by then and carried on anyway. Remember it is not a scam if a government does it. Money is all fake. It is a shared delusion. If we must use "worthless" money for practical reasons, would you prefer the rate of production be set by predictable math or by whatever politicians are in power this year?
- querez 2y agoWell this is certainly an unexpected and weird announcement. I actually thought Moxie was (the main person behind) Signal. Not giving any details about this feels weird to me. How are we supposed to trust an organization that prides itself to be the beacon of free communication, when they communicate so... cryptically? Does anyone have more information on what happened here? (And what/if any are the current alternatives?)
- ignoramous 2y agoDHH's "I trust Meta over Signal because a board member at Signal is woke" is utter content-farming clickbaity dishonest discourse for someone of his skill and intelligence (given the guarantees inherent in the Signal protocol and its opensource nature) and his previously stated stance against cancel culture [0]. This quest for influence seems to break people's brains in weird ways. [0] https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1283892240314580992 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1283892240314580992
- huslage 2y agoWhy is this getting downvoted?
- 0xy 2y agoHer work history is indeed extremely concerning, but you're probably being downvoted because you invented a fake quote. Double quotes means a literal quote, he never said that. You invented it.
- ignoramous 2y ago> you invented a fake quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase#Analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase#Analysis > double quotes means a literal quote https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation#Quotative_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation#Quotative_verbs
- lolc 2y agoI for one read it as paraphrasing and not a literal quote.
- thinkingemote 2y agoTweet reads: > "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
- timeon 2y agoIs it replay to someone or just statement?
- thinkingemote 2y agoits a reply to dhh expressing surprise at the signal board membership of Katherine Maher.
- motohagiography 2y agoJudging by Mahar's TED talk about the diminished value of truth vs. alignment circulating on twitter, it looks like the Signal Foundation has finally fallen under the influence of the nihilists as well. FOSS doesn't need non-profit orgs, and people in tech aren't equipped to secure them from the people trained to take them over.
- captn3m0 2y agoBeing a non-profit is a huge advantage to Signal as they are not beholden to profits or shareholders. A messaging app that is used by millions worldwide, is a very juicy target for profit making via advertising otherwise. Meredith (Signal president) equates it to a a rampart against tech surveillance gobbling up Signal > signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you know an incorporation of you know in the US where you you agree not to take you know profits you get Revenue you can get Revenue but you're you not for profit and you have kind of a charitable aim and that requires that you do certain transparency protocols so there's sort of forms we file that show our finances that also means that we don't take sort of investment in the classic venture capitalist sense and that we cannot be acquire we could be acquired but you know the executives and the the board would not get a payout so if we sold signal for billions of dollars to say you know Palantir here or something evil like that um we would have to reinvest that money in charitable causes um now why is our incorporation structure important well it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a rampart that allows us to keep fully focused on our mission of providing you know meaningful private Communications and in Tech that is you know particularly important because the barrier we're protecting against is the fact that the business model in Tech is monetizing surveillance so if we had investors if we had you know you know limited partners breathing down our neck if we had you know shareholders who were sort of hassling that one old guy on our board about you know increasing revenues or growth or this doesn't look too good the Privacy thing that seems a little dated we're not getting the kind of growth we need um we would be pushed to compromise our privacy Focus because the money lies in surveillance There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers. https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIhLQrldq0s https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIhLQrldq0s
- anonymousiam 2y agoIf it looks like a canary, and sounds like a canary, it might be a canary.
- rand846633 2y agoDid not cross my mind while reading. Please elaborate how you come to this conclusion.
- zecg 2y agoIf it sounds, however, it's still alive.
- poisonborz 2y agoFor adversaries, it's just easier to take over tech companies than good willed folks to build them. Going on, the community should just not trust anything that is centralised. Implementing that well, lack of profit and fatigue are the great challenges.