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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> essentially, in the end, most of his positions just seem like a way to shill for centralized government control over everything, No one ever asks who is funding him, Signal development and their running costs.
A while back Brian Acton (WhatsApp guy) gave about $50m to the Signal Foundation, so I assume they a running off of that and smaller donations from individuals.
So in the beginning of the presentation Moxie brings up some valid cases where it's good that centralized services can rapidly iterate and improve such as WhatsApp being able to roll out end-to-end encryption with a single update, while email is still not encrypted despite the tools existing to do so for years. Basically centralized services can roll out changes quickly and decentralized ones are more or less set in…
This idea of phone numbers being easy to use is baffling to me. Phone numbers come with so much red tape it's unbelievable. I'm still paying for a phone service in a country where I previously lived (5 years after leaving) because I can't move all the stuff that's linked to that phone number. I even had to send them a government issued photo ID recently so I could keep the number. And to use the number without switch…
He keeps bringing data privacy and data encryption as the sole motive for decentralization but that's not really the point. The main point is data ownership and freedom of usage.
WhatsApp and Signal are good messaging services indeed but:
- We are tied to their official clients.
- Which means that we are tied to the platforms they support
- We are also required to have Google Play services installed on our Android phones
- We are tied to phone numbers
- And if (for whatever reason) we trip on their abuse detection services, we might get banned and completely prevented of using their own service (mistakes on their side can happen as we have been seeing with Google)
The point of decentralization is to avoid all these annoying constraints. Encryption and privacy are a bonus, not the selling point.
Also, all of his points about centralization are completely refuted by the efforts of the Matrix project.
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Why not use something like an email address instead of a phone number though. A phone number can be used to track you in the real world, it’s worse than having someone’s IP in some cases. In fact some countries (Russia, at least) require you to give over Government issued ID when you get a new phone number. So it’s directly tied to your real persona, this is not just one country doing that either. I believe it is als…
Because of contact discovery and migration. The success of those apps is directly related to the fact you can instantly see all your contacts with it when it first start. Email wouldn't have the same effect because poeple don't have them saved in the contact list. I think university should have a mandatory course where IT student go and interact with real users and have a budget to manage according to the success of…
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Not sure I agree. Although I’m not 100% certain of all smartphone implementations. But I definitely have emails for everyone in my addressbook/contacts list. It’s the only thing that exists which can be anonymised properly and is static through many centralised providers. Otherwise it’s back to usernames and the bazaar that is: does this person /actually/ have their names on telegram/skype/whatever
See second part of my comment. You are in the HN bubble.
In my experience, for reasons like this, people do not generally bother swapping phone numbers any more.
Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia recently, I was unable to sign up for Discord because they required verification with a phone number. My local phone number was rejected because it was prepay, not a contract. I wonder how many people in that part of the world have a phone contract? Does Signal also enforce that requirement? Should access to secure comminications really be linked to one's credit history in that way?
In this video, Moxie Marlinspike--the developer of Signal, someone who has been consistently extremely negative on not just the idea of federated and decentralized systems but of open protocols and alternative clients for centralized systems (to the point where it shocks me he still does any development as open source, given how hard he pushes on the idea that people who fork his clients are actively doing something…
I hypothesize that the reason for this is time poverty, not lack of expertise or desire to learn. People are more time-poor today than even 20 years ago. Even people who know computers well and could figure out how to use more DIY systems do not have time to do so.
I have a rule of thumb when designing systems: each step required to install or use something halves the number of people who will try it. If 1000 people discover something with a 10-step install, only 1-2 of them will actually try it. Remove a few steps and that number doubles a few times. Most successful "viral" apps have three or fewer steps.
Decentralized, federated, and generally more open systems have been consistently unable to deliver anything close to the ease of use of vertically integrated systems.
Link is dead now. 404
In this video, Moxie Marlinspike--the developer of Signal, someone who has been consistently extremely negative on not just the idea of federated and decentralized systems but of open protocols and alternative clients for centralized systems (to the point where it shocks me he still does any development as open source, given how hard he pushes on the idea that people who fork his clients are actively doing something…
> because decentralization doesn't _automatically and inherently_ solve hard problems _merely due to the technology being decentralized_, we should not waste time working on decentralized systems and instead work on and support centralized ones (one would imagine, particularly his) That is an extraordinary mischaracterization of his talk. What he actually says is that decentralization makes many desirable characteris…
Most decentralized systems seem to have more surface area for surveillance, not less. Why couldn't surveillance agencies and data-grabbing corporations just launch a bunch of "Sybil" nodes to surveil everyone? These would be virtually undetectable as they would be otherwise well behaved nodes and could be put behind ordinary looking cloud or ISP connections. Most shared data stores can be trivially scanned and data mined, decentralized networks like DHTs can be crawled, decentralized apps can be MITMed with Sybils and honey pots, and so on.
I predict that if any decentralized or federated system really becomes popular enough to merit attention from data-grabbers we will see the launch of an industry of companies and consulting services dedicated to mining and surveilling it. Security is hard, and security across a heterogenous decentralized network run by users and volunteers is many times harder.
I suppose you can see something analogous in the cryptocurrency space. I've argued for a while that Bitcoin and similar CC systems were in fact rapidly compromised, but not by attacking their cryptography or protocols. They were compromised via social engineering and financial game playing that transformed them from currencies of the sort they were intended to be into decentralized Ponzi schemes and money laundering vehicles. They were taken over and repurposed, not taken down or hacked in the conventional sense. The same thing would probably happen to e.g. Matrix or Mastodon if it got popular enough. Companies and governments would just assimilate and repurpose these things into surveillance and spam-delivery vehicles. With superior resources and economic forcing functions this would be quite easy.
A centralized system has a single point of failure, but that also limits attack surface. I assume centralized systems to be surveilled by their own operators and their host countries, but it's a lot harder for other actors to do so.