On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part due to the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
  • kpw@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.

    • ExpensiveConstant@kbin.social
      0·
      1 year ago

      Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects

      • ZickZack@fedia.io
        0·
        1 year ago

        You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.

        As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.

        This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    If signal can collapse because of a single contributor withdrawing support, then it kind of deserves to die. If It’s not robust enough to withstand the lack of money, it would never stand up to government intervention.

    Though I suspect signal is perfectly fine, this is just an outrage seeking article for clicks. Or unnecessary conspiracy. If you don’t trust signal, you have other options like simple x, briar…

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        It’s a good thought experiment. Let’s assume signal is a conspiracy.

        What do we do now?

        The article doesn’t seem to have any thesis here. If signal becomes untenable:

        Briar and simple x are the most promising in my mind, but I know there’s a lot of proponents of matrix.

        I personally don’t think session is sustainable, simply because they don’t have any development going on, no perfect forward secrecy added.

        If we’re talking about the signal replacement, we need a way for people to find their contacts. A phone contact list as a social graph is pretty good. I could see that being added as a discovery, optional, service for simplex, or even briar. But that would probably take quite a bit of development of work to do it in a non-Spammy fashion