Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
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Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
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Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#2I find the non free dependencies and centralization as annoying as the next person interested in the P2P sphere but I think Signal and Moxie have legitimate reasoning for their actions.
Signal is intended for consumption by every day people not security enthusiasts. Any complication or inconvenience jeopardizes this goal. Something like picking a server, choosing an implementation, exchanging identities, setting up an account somewhere are all complications that people don't normally want to think about. As it is, someone installs Signal from the play store, it becomes their default messenger, and they are done in a few taps.
I think the great success Signal has had is because of this mindset compared to the dozens of other projects.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#3Can someone provide a short technical summary for folks, like me, not closely tracking libre signal, F-droid, etc.? I get the freedom arguments, but what is the technical crux of the issue?
Did a reimplementation (competitor?) of signal without nonfree dependencies get removed from google store? If so, why? Etc.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#4By denouncingly Movlxie Marlinspike (not Merlinspike) authoritarian because he run his free software project, the author pushes the communications ecosystem toward actual authoritarian systems.
Fortunately the argument is utterly unconvincing as it is buzzword-based without logical reasoning.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#5Can someone provide a short technical summary for folks, like me, not closely tracking libre signal, F-droid, etc.? I get the freedom arguments, but what is the technical crux of the issue? Did a reimplementation (competitor?) of signal without nonfree dependencies get removed from google store? If so, why? Etc.
The founder of Signal did not like them:
a) Using the Signal backend infrastructure which Signal pays for
b) Using the Signal name which I'm guessing Signal has a trademark for
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#6Just two nitpicks:
1. Marlinspike is misspelled throughout the article as "Merlinspike" &
2. This article is super mamón. That's a word here in Mexico I'm not sure how to perfectly put into English, but here are some examples from the article:
>Open Whisper Systems led by Moxie Merlinspike, who is behind Signal, is and was never behind freedom.
>People died for freedom, they are still dying and struggling around the globe. Then someone comes and stomps over every ideal which human society ever build up until this point in history and proclaims themselves the world leader! Think about it!
I think in English I might say something like 'Oh please', or 'stop wanking yourself so hard'.
The core message of 'I would prefer a decentralized messaging service and Signal is lacking in that regard' is severely diminished by the suffocatingly wanky [I want to say mamón, whoever has a better word here please offer suggestions!] tone of this article
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#7I did not know about the Wire incident.
It is a shame that the main decision maker and owner of Signal is such an untrustworthy person - authoritarian, abuser of copyright and trademarks, working together with Facebook and helping Google keep their control by sabotaging fdroid.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#8"This approach is not only a threat to free software it is a recurring threat to human kind!"
wut?
From 'Decentralized systems are hard to build' to 'Democracies suck because...'.
The mental gymnastics in this post.
Sounds more like someone has beef with Moxie.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#9My only thoughts are: put your money where your mouth is and help build a better solution that does follow your ideals. You can apparently even use the Signal source code to start as long as you don't use their servers and don't use their name.
Build things up rather than tearing others down for doing things differently.
Re: Authoritarianism Through Coding: Signal
#10I find the non free dependencies and centralization as annoying as the next person interested in the P2P sphere but I think Signal and Moxie have legitimate reasoning for their actions. Signal is intended for consumption by every day people not security enthusiasts. Any complication or inconvenience jeopardizes this goal. Something like picking a server, choosing an implementation, exchanging identities, setting up a…
Even without federalization Signal the platform is decidedly unfree. It is hard-tied to either Android or IOS (the desktop version requires the app on a smartphone with one of those two OSes) and requires the user's mobile phone number as identifier.
These issues should be fairly trivial to solve from a technical standpoint (decidedly not something Open Whisper Systems can't handle), but these restrictions still remain.