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When it comes to security, I don’t think it’s close at all.

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Yes, the article makes the point that Signal needs to compete for talent with the rest of Silicon Valley. I get that. And we’ve all heard about the nearly unfathomable amounts of money that tech companies throw around. When you break it down to individual salaries, though, and see that even normal people in normal jobs are making a million dollars a year between salary and stock… well, I think it really exposes the spectacular wealth inequality that we have allowed to fester. I mean, sure, shelter costs may be high in Silicon Valley, but the cost of other goods remain about the same. A $50,000 truck that an average person in Nebraska might have to save for years to afford is barely a rounding error for folks making a million a year. I’m no economist, but it does seem like there are consequences for this kind of ever-growing wealth inequality.

It is also absurd on its face for a multi-millionaire developer to place a “Donate Now” button in an app and talk about being a non-profit to tug at the heart strings of people who make one-tenth of what the developers are making. It’s feels like Scrooge asking Tiny Tim for a donation.

Anyway, I don’t blame the developers for this absurd situation, and I do appreciate Signal, and Meredith is clearly a cool person who is fighting the good fight against big tech surveillance. But every once in a while an article like this reminds me how deeply fucked up the world is. It seems we are approaching pre-French Revolution levels of economic disparity, and maybe it helps explain why so many working class people are pissed off.

A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.

His biography on the Signal Foundation website:

Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.

Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.

The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.

But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.

Again back to the interview:

I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.

Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.

This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.

Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.

So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:

Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.

I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:

I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.

Don’t forget, cross-platform!

Don’t forget voice calls! It has some rough edges there (my audio doesn’t always connect successfully, etc), but when it works the codec sounds better than a standard phone call and there’s no mass surveillance. I use it in place of phone calls for all the people in my network who have it, including my immediate family.

I’m guessing they probably want stickers or something

Edit: apparently this is available on signal so I have no fucking idea then

Yea we heavily use it in the army

My guess is it heavily private and does not have channels

Yeah idk I’ve read it like 4 times and still struggle to find a coherent thought here.

Poster was made fun of in the past for saying Signal gave metadata to the feds. He has a learning disability (regarded = deliberately misspelled R slur). They’re looking for someone else to corroborate the metadata claim.

That’s my interpretation at least.

Signal uses Google Cloud Platform for their servers, for one.

Then I think it’s something to do with metadata.

They also added stories which, despite what the internet might have you believe, was one of the most popular feature requests on the Signal message boards for many years

This was weird for me personally. I consider Signal a messaging tool which in my mind is separate from an actual social media app, so it was a bit of a head scratcher for me to see stories as a very popular feature request. I don’t really care about sharing “stories” in that format to my contacts or seeing theirs, but then again that’s just me.

Does signal meta data allow for signal to time stamp witu who you communicate using their app and servers?

Side note, PR like that costs about 15k fyi

I feel that but people can’t just move since we need somebody to talk on these super duper 69 layer quantum resistant protocols.

Looks simolex is gunning for the crown nowadays tho but there other viable contenders baking.

Once new leader arrives, going to need to tell my group we migrating again 🤕