Signal's Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as 'parochial, magical thinking' | TechCrunch
Signal's Meredith Whittaker scorns anti-encryption efforts as 'parochial, magical thinking' | TechCrunch
AI is "not open in any sense," the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal's principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate
Well, she's not wrong that we need more influential people fighting back against this latest push in the global coordinated effort to put an end to communications privacy. It's really quite alarming how little attention it seems to get most of the time. Civil society seemed much more robust when it fought off similar attacks in the 1990s. I do hope that the "VC community" isn't our only hope.
But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly
Signal is supposed to be free software. You could probably manage to interoperate at least with other operators of actual Signal-Server instances, if you wanted to.
There's already something like this and it's called SimpleX. Messages are sent through relays and a very familiar form of ratcheting encryption is used.
It's still in its infancy, but anyone can run and use their own relay.
The problem with trying to be compatible with everything is that no one can agree on what a good protocol should be. Trying to force apps to work together is problematic as you end up creating a large attack surface.
I appreciated what they want to do but the GDPR has kind of gone over the top in my opinion.
I run a matrix server that interoperates with signal, whatsapp and discord so people who need to use those platforms are able to use one app instead of three and also keep their info private.
free software doesn't necessarily mean federating with other services.
They have stated their reasons why they don't wanna do it. You might disagree with them or not. But the technology they built is still open. Anybody could take what they created and use it as a foundation that does federate.
I have been disappointed by signal so much that I'm not suprised by this. There is no legitimate justification to why they don't distribute on F-Driod.
Why is Signal not on FDroid, or heavily use Google services?
Signal doesn't "heavily use Google services". They only use proprietary libraries and integrations for 2 purposes: Donations and push notifications. Signal uses the platform's native way of handling push notifications, on iOS it's APNs and on Android it's FCM. This is also the reason why it's not available on F-Droid. You can use a fork of the app like Signal-FOSS or Molly. These remove all proprietary dependencies and you can download them from their custom F-Droid repositories.
there is a fork with proprietary dependencies removed called Signal-FOSS, whose repo you can add to F-Droid if you decide to trust it
There are several Signal forks on f-droid that remove the need for Google services iirc.
To answer your second question: they advertise Signal as a secure and private messenger, so heavily using Google services would be kind of counter-productive. To answer your first question: here.
Because signal doesn't care about privacy or anonymity
Because they don't seem to care about free software I guess
You can use Molly if you want more freedom. I do wish that Signal would build in orbot to avoid censorship.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker.
“We’re seeing a number of, I would say, parochial and very politically motivated pieces of legislation often indexed on the idea of protecting children And these have been used to push for something that’s actually a very old wish of security services, governments autocrats, which is to systematically backdoor strong encryption,” said Whittaker.
” ‘Accountability’ looks like more monitors, more oversights, more backdoors, more elimination of places where people can express or communicate freely, instead of actually checking on the business models that have created, you know, massive platforms whose surveillance advertising modalities can be easily weaponized for information ops, or doxing, or whatever it is, right?
One specific such proposal is comes via the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom, under which the government there threatens to prevent any app updates — globally — that it deems a threat to its national security.
“And honestly,” she added, “I think we need the VC community, and the larger tech companies more involved in naming what a threat this is to the industry, and pushing back.”
But of course Signal can’t interoperate with another messaging platform, without them raising their privacy bar significantly,” even ones like WhatsApp that support end-to-end encryption and already partly utilize the protocol.
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