No surprising news but I learned about https://signalstickers.com/
Surprising for me. I just shared the link with my COVID pod, and I’m giddy for the mayhem to begin. Thanks for the link!
Signal AMA on Reddit
71–80 of 84 posts
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#72They say now they are working on letting people sign up without having to use a phone number.
I've hated this about Signal since first beginning to use it. Forcing everyone to use a phone number makes it so much harder to have a partially anonymous way to communicate.
I can't help but feel this was intentional to prevent use by those wishing to remain anonymous. I don't believe they'll ever actually do this.
If they could have they would have done so already imo. Perhaps they are fighting whatever restrictions force them to do this. We can only hope.
My belief is that various governments prevent Signal from allowing anonymous registrations and will continue to prevent them from allowing it.
I expect that what they will allow is something like "you can now register with a gmail account". That is the same restriction since you need a phone number to register for a gmail account these days.
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aside from network effects, UI/UX is really king when it comes to getting people to switch messengers. It's why Telegram has managed to stake as large of a following as it has, despite its glaring flaws when compared to Signal, Matrix, etc. I understand wanting to focus on security and privacy at the cost of all else, but if the goal is to get as many people on a reasonably safe messenger app as possible, UI/UX is un…
I would argue that Element on android is really good in terms of UI/UX. But I think the desktop experience is definitely behind others, and I have no idea how the iOS client is like.
It is good, but not good enough for the mainstream user. With Signal, you can just install it and all your contacts who also have signal are instantly there. The UX is similar to WhatsApp.
With Element, you first need to create a username that in the format :. This is a new notion and non-tech users don't know what this is about. I usually need to explain "it's like email, but instead of the @ there's the :".
Furthermore, there is this new concept of "Rooms" that people are not used to.
Also, there are some UX flaws like that you need to include the @ when adding use (it won't find the user if I try to add "joe:matrix.org", I need to enter @joe:matrix.org). This even threw me off for a minute or so in the beginning.
There are some clients that look and feel more like WhatsApp (like Nio), but they are still in early development. So, I'm hopeful.
See the clients here: https://matrix.org/clients/
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is, why is the user forced to update in order to use the application, even if no critical security issues arose? Because they’re adding new features, both security improvements and user‐facing sugar. Moxie’s thoughts on this are well‐known: he believes he can build a better and more secure messenger by keeping deployed clients as closely aligned as possible. Even if you disagree (and plenty of people disagree,…
So when Signal decides to stop supporting your device, you're left with no choice but to get a new one. So there's no point in auditing a Signal release. So as Signal becomes more and more disagreeable (something that's bound to happen with any actively changing software), you're forced to take it or leave it. It's a trap. I am a user of Signal, and have been using it for a number of years now, but this concern remai…
Until you have a contract with someone explicitely saying what you want and what you don't want, no one owes you anything. Signal creators are doing it this way because they decided it's the best way to bring the best cryptography available to the masses, considering that they don't earn any money.
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you start a chat with someone on the central server if the central server refuses any communication with the federation you're on?
I guess there's something I'm missing here. I understand it is phone -> Signal server -> other phone. So don't you only need to know how to talk to the Signal server? Which should be in the OS app? So your app would just need to know which server to communicate with the right person. People that are on the Signal server get contacted through the Signal server. People on a federated server get communications passed th…
Not allowing incoming connections from anything besides their signed app.
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the points of Signal is that the app is owned by a non profit and not a company. I highly do pressume that it means that it can't be sold to the highest bidder.
A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation".
I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed?
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
A for-profit FAANG cannot own a nonprofit like Signal, yes. I don’t know if it’s a 501c or a 501c3, but I think that’s irrelevannt. But a for-profit company can select all of the nonprofit’s board members and thereby largely control the nonprofit. This happens all the time w/conservation groups and environmental non profits and their unholy alliance with real estate mafia.
Now I don't know how these legal structures work. For what it is worth, it looks to me as if Singularity University transitioned from being a non-profit to being a "for benefit corporation". I also have no idea what that means, other than it looks like some kind of fluidity is allowed? - https://su.org/about/how-we-do-business/
Also OpenAI.
Here is an interesting read (HN thread/comments mentioned in the article too)
[..] By March of 2017, 15 months in, the leadership realized it was time for more focus. So Brockman and a few other core members began drafting an internal document to lay out a path to AGI. But the process quickly revealed a fatal flaw. As the team studied trends within the field, they realized staying a nonprofit was financially untenable. The computational resources that others in the field were using to achieve breakthrough results were doubling every 3.4 months. It became clear that “in order to stay relevant,” Brockman says, they would need enough capital to match or exceed this exponential ramp-up. That required a new organizational model that could rapidly amass money—while somehow also staying true to the mission.[..]
[..] That structure change happened in March 2019. OpenAI shed its purely nonprofit status by setting up a “capped profit” arm—a for-profit with a 100-fold limit on investors’ returns, albeit overseen by a board that’s part of a nonprofit entity. Shortly after, it announced Microsoft’s billion-dollar investment (though it didn’t reveal that this was split between cash and credits to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform).
Predictably, the move set off a wave of accusations that OpenAI was going back on its mission. In a post on Hacker News soon after the announcement, a user asked how a 100-fold limit would be limiting at all: “Early investors in Google have received a roughly 20x return on their capital,” they wrote. “Your bet is that you’ll have a corporate structure which returns orders of magnitude more than Google … but you don’t want to ‘unduly concentrate power’? How will this work? What exactly is power, if not the concentration of resources?”[..]
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai...
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you start a chat with someone on the central server if the central server refuses any communication with the federation you're on?
I guess there's something I'm missing here. I understand it is phone -> Signal server -> other phone. So don't you only need to know how to talk to the Signal server? Which should be in the OS app? So your app would just need to know which server to communicate with the right person. People that are on the Signal server get contacted through the Signal server. People on a federated server get communications passed th…
Signal probably ties message encryption to client authentication. You could give the 'federated' server your plaintext and encryption keys which acts like a client app on your behalf, but that obliterates the purpose of Signal and E2E messaging entirely. And still, they can ban your server IP at any time at their discretion. Maybe you can try to create a federated server that acts as one user but publishes an authenticated encrypted message on behalf of a different user, but there's no api for that... exactly the api that is being asked for in these requests to add a federation api.
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think OP is implying that there may be more beans in the can to be spilled than there are signal users. Probably signal occupies a far greater mind share than it's userbase actually warrants. If they say they have 10000 DAUs, more people will write it off as worthless rather than he interested in trying it.
My thought as well. I have 8 contacts on Telegram, one(!) conversation. Meanwhile everyone from family and friends is at Telegram now and used to be on WhatsApp. I wish Signal all the best: it is totally impressive, they got their incentives aligned totally unlike WhatsApp and to a larger degree than Telegram I think. Personally I'm rooting for Matrix, but for now, based on my limited understanding Signal seems to hi…
In this video, Rob Braxman argues that most Matrix users use either Matrix.org or Element.io servers (may have gotten the names wrong). Matrix is a federation in theory but not in practice, so it's not good for privacy. What do you think?
Re: Signal AMA on Reddit
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
My thought as well. I have 8 contacts on Telegram, one(!) conversation. Meanwhile everyone from family and friends is at Telegram now and used to be on WhatsApp. I wish Signal all the best: it is totally impressive, they got their incentives aligned totally unlike WhatsApp and to a larger degree than Telegram I think. Personally I'm rooting for Matrix, but for now, based on my limited understanding Signal seems to hi…
In this video, Rob Braxman argues that most Matrix users use either Matrix.org or Element.io servers (may have gotten the names wrong). Matrix is a federation in theory but not in practice, so it's not good for privacy. What do you think? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke8pXQQPaIw&t=623
I think the German Army and the French Police is already putting in place their own infrastructure and the company I work for might do so withing a year or two if we want.
Also, should anyone get banned from mainstream messenger because they live in the wrong country or have the wrong opinions they can run their own.
This is a huge step forward :-)