A Message from Signal's New President

https://signal.org/blog/announcing-signal-president/

by feross • 4 years ago

113 122 4 years ago

fefe23• 4 years ago

I never understand modern corporate communication strategies.

I'm not interested in her feelings or whether she thinks she is qualified. I would like to know her name so I can find out for myself what she has done before.

I also don't need to be told that Signal is important. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be reading their blog post.

HuwFulcher• 4 years ago

You can find her name (Meredith Whittaker) in 2 clicks from that article. I agree the name should be present but it's not exactly difficult for someone semi tech-literate to find.

bauruine• 4 years ago

If you click on the author you get to her github profile that contains her full name. It's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker

djaychela• 4 years ago

I'm not interested in her feelings or whether she thinks she is qualified.

Maybe not, but a lot of people will be, particularly if their favourite thing is being 'taken over' by said person.

I would like to know her name so I can find out for myself what she has done before.

Kind of unfortunate that the link in the blog entry is to a currently-empty Github account (in terms of public repos, anyway).

However, a brief search turned up her Wikipedia page [1], and going on what's in there it looks as if she's better aligned to what she said on the Blog page than if you just looked at her briefly and saw she was an employee of Google for some time.

I also don't need to be told that Signal is important. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be reading their blog post.

You may not need to be told (and neither do I), but there are oceans of people out there who don't know that there is a workable alternative to using WhatsApp. It took me a long time (and leverage via a friend-group holiday) to get my friends on Signal (I'm not on any Meta properties, by principle), and most of them hadn't heard of it. Most people just use WhatsApp because it's become the default, and most of them don't care about Meta (or anyone else's) policies or warping of society. They just want to communicate, and don't want to use SMS/MMS (because of the limited features or cost), or can't use iMessage (because they aren't on an iPhone).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker

t6jvcereio2• 4 years ago

Maybe not, but a lot of people will be, particularly if their favourite thing is being 'taken over' by said person.

Wouldn't those people rather be told what her plans are?

lavventura• 4 years ago

well said

Mandatum• 4 years ago

This isn’t written for you. It’s for investors and middle managers internally.

samuel8• 4 years ago

That was my first instinct, to look what she had done/write before.

I have to admit, being anti-woke myself (not American), that this article caught my eye:

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tech-labor-progres...

Not the kind of person I would expect to be in charge of Signal, TBH.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 4 years ago

Not the kind of person I would expect to be in charge of Signal, TBH.

Actually, to me, it seems fairly consistent with Signal’s mission.

She appears to be fairly qualified (including a mindset, as she is in a leadership role) and I wish her well.

gsatic• 4 years ago

The type of people who can take on big tech barely exit.

She has proved she can be a pain in the ass. These type of people are rare and they required.

Most outside big tech who can do something are already bought and paid for by big tech.

There are very few who have the combo of the right values, the ambition, the technical pedigree, the financial independence and are well networked.

Which is why we have an ever expanding exploitative shit mountain range of tech being produced every year.

anfogoat• 4 years ago

I read a few paragraphs but had to stop for fear of wasting my time reading through the whole thing and coming up empty handed. To save some time: what parts of it specifically signal wokeness to you?

t6jvcereio2• 4 years ago

I have to admit, being anti-woke myself

What does anti-woke mean? Also not American.

potatototoo992• 4 years ago

An activist in charge of a privacy tool, not often a match made in heaven.

erokar• 4 years ago

We're all activists.

potatototoo992• 4 years ago

*An activist-but-not-security/privacy-activist

blueflow2• 4 years ago

I would hate being called an activist, because that puts me in the same bucket as some really obnoxious self-promoters...

the_third_wave4• 4 years ago

No, we're not. Some of us are activists but most people are conformists who care more about being accepted by their peers than they care about leading those peers towards some goal. A conformist may join the parade when this is required to be accepted but it does not matter much what the parade is for since the reason for joining it is not activism but conformism.

rdl• 4 years ago

Biggest issue with Signal IMO is that not enough people use it. (and, technically, the horrible dependency on PSTN addresses, but I don't expect the Signal foundation President to fix that).

Someone with wild consumer app adoption experience (100mm+ users globally) who is ALSO super into privacy/self-sovereignty/security seems like the ideal fit. Not sure if there's anyone who fits the bill there, especially not anyone who would want this specific job.

rvz• 4 years ago

And it is facilitating in using a privacy-based cryptocurrency and forcibly shoving it in the app, just like what Keybase did but with a different crypto project.

If guess it has given Signal more of a use case for scammers, terrorists and criminals to hide and now fund their illegal activities with no trace. [0]

[0] https://www.theverge.com/22872133/signal-cryptocurrency-paym...

commandersaki• 4 years ago

I would say moxie shared many qualities of an activist.

UncleMeat2• 4 years ago

I would say that moxie would describe himself as an activist rather than just sharing the qualities of one. Signal has obviously been a project driven by principles of free and secure communication from the get-go rather than a traditional revenue-driven organization.

ghastmaster• 4 years ago

My support for encryption and private communications has been consistent and unwavering

So tell me about that support. I use signal for security. That is priority number one. This is the only statement in the message that explicitly mentions any support for security. Most of the rest of the message in fact focuses on aspects other than security.

She is very good at saying thing's that have no substance. For example, "So I bring a clear understanding of the environment shaped by the dominant tech business model, and of what it takes to build tech that rejects this model", is not explicitly stating she rejects that model, just that she is familiar with it. The message is full of implied, not explicit statements of principle.

I am a little disheartened. This message serves to make me pay more attention.

_0ffh2• 4 years ago

She is very good at saying thing's that have no substance

Jives with her qualifications, which are a bachelor's degree in Rethorics.

ticviking• 4 years ago

The Rhetoric here is terrible though. That or we're not the audience.

UncleMeat2• 4 years ago

Jennifer Widom was chair of the CS department at Stanford and is now Dean of the Engineering school there. She has a bachelor's degree in Trumpet. Criticizing people for their undergraduate degree is foolish.

FabHK2• 4 years ago

Yes, would have been nice if the statement had been more about the product and the product strategy than about the author.

_nalply• 4 years ago

What I expected is a concise message of goals.

What I found is that my eyes glazed over.

O__________O2• 4 years ago

Unless something has changed, all three board members have been responsible for running Signal Foundation within past year, which is highly unusual.

Signal’s list of board members:

https://signalfoundation.org/en/

Wish Signal would be more transparent and timely about there technical and financial status and plans. For example, might be wrong, but their most recent 990 should already be available, but they have not posted it (or any of their past 990s) on their own site. Tech wise, given users in mass have asked for it for years, feel like they owe the users a public explanation of why they only allow numbers.

codethief• 4 years ago

Since signalfoundation.org mentions that

Before joining Signal as President, she was the Minderoo Research Professor at NYU

here are her publications, for anyone who wants to read up on what she's been up to:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&q=Meredith+W...

O__________O2• 4 years ago

She joined Signal 2020; I personally do not care what she has been up to — Brian and Moxie know her, have worked with her for years, and agreed she was a fit for Signal’s needs.

fmajid2• 4 years ago

She's the lady who was fired by Google in retaliation for organizing the walkouts that protested the big payout Andy Rubin got despite being found guilty of sexual harrassment.

So she's got both principles and guts, good to know and a positive sign for Signal. Not enough to overcome the taint of its initial funding by the US Government, its unnecessary and privacy-busting requirement for phone numbers and the stench by association of cryptocurrency, but who knows, she may be able to influence away from that.

cmeacham985• 4 years ago

Does "initial funding by the US Government" really matter? Tor was funded by the US Government and it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

The phone number requirement is asinine and the reason I use Matrix, as I refuse to tie any identity of mine (even those I don't care about keeping private) to a phone number. Has Signal never heard of SIM swapping?

cpach2• 4 years ago

“Has Signal never heard of SIM swapping?”

Of course they have. Signal also has opt-in protection for that.

pydry• 4 years ago

it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

Do they? Their FAQ basically says that if your adversary is a nation state we aint gonna be much help.

I think they focus much more on anonymizing against ISPs and have basically thrown the towel in on defending against, say, correlation attacks by nation states.

room5052• 4 years ago

My family has been using Threema, which doesn't require a phone number.

indigochill• 4 years ago

and it at least looks like they struggle to break it.

As I understand, that depends entirely on where you stand on the theory that the US government owns most of the exit nodes.

That said, the practical threat profile for most people is lower-level criminals and advertisers, so Tor is probably still a good idea in any case.

the_third_wave4• 4 years ago

Or she'll lead Signal on the same path Mozilla went after Mitchell Baker took over where political signalling has taken the place of product market share - not to mention personal remuneration taking the place of development funding. The fact that she gained name recognition through political activism does not bode well in the former respect, as to the latter we´ll just have to see.

I will keep on using Telegram with XMPP (prosody running on the server-under-the-stairs) as a backup for when they go bad. If Signal truly opens up, adopts federation and the client ends up on F-Droid I may reconsider but until such a time I'm happy where I am right now.

fmajid2• 4 years ago

Why not Matrix?

I agree the way Brendan Eich was treated is a disgrace, and Mozilla's governance and misplaced priorities are at the root of its increasing irrelevance.

Vinnl2• 4 years ago

its unnecessary and privacy-busting requirement for phone numbers

https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/

It lays the groundwork for the introduction of usernames and phone number privacy which will offer new privacy controls around your phone number’s visibility on Signal.

So not so much unnecessary as it is hard to implement privately. But it should be on its way.

imjonse2• 4 years ago

Is the whole internet tainted due to it having its root in a US goverment funded project?

rzr2• 4 years ago

Dear Signal's presidency

May you consider priority to get client published to f-droid (or debian):

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/signal-wickr-on-f-droid-2021/122...

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/127

Meanwhile I'll recommend freedom lovers to use matrix|XMPP|IRC (which can be also used on web or linux computer)

Freely yours

blueflow2• 4 years ago

Can't you install Signal without an App store? Directly via apk?

rzr2• 4 years ago

yes that's something I'd like to avoid... because it hasn't been rebuilt from source (and audited)

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/search/org....

Vinnl2• 4 years ago

Yes, and it checks for updates by itself (though that's still more cumbersome than it being managed by F-Droid of course): https://signal.org/android/apk/

b3nji• 4 years ago

Another political activist, I'm not certain how I feel about this. Seems like this might not go well, looking at what happens to companies with “activism” at their heart.

actionfromafar3• 4 years ago

Isn't the very existence of Signal "activism".

andrewinardeer2• 4 years ago

Exercising the right of privacy is now activism? Good grief.

wbsss4412• 4 years ago

As if privacy isn’t political.

The fourth amendment exists for a reason.

dade_2• 4 years ago

That’s wonderful. Will they make a proper desktop app already?

puyoxyz• 4 years ago

The desktop app seems good in my experience ?

tharne• 4 years ago

It's ok, but not great.

The biggest issue is that Signal is really designed to be tied to your smartphone and managed from there. I, and I suspect a lot of other folks who use the desktop app, would prefer Signal to be more platform and device agnostic, like email.

There are ways with the signal-cli utility to make your desktop Signal application the primary signal client, but then managing contacts and groups becomes a real hassle - you have to message with a bunch of json config files and the cli utility doesn't always work as expected.

I'll freely admit, this is probably not an issue for most regular users, but it's still something that could be improved.

PaywallBuster• 4 years ago

her profile links to an empty Github profile created days ago too

Markoff3• 4 years ago

No phone number required, decentralized network and third party apps allowed when? That's only information I care about Signal, until then Element (Matrix) FTW.

ryukoposting2• 4 years ago

Matrix and Signal are apples and oranges.

no phone number required

Signal has never claimed to offer anonymity AFAIK. The only reason this would be on their roadmap is if anonymity is one of their goals. Anonymity and privacy are both important, but they aren't both necessary at all times. Anonymity isn't desirable in some situations.

decentralized network

After trying some of the decentralized chat apps out there, I'm glad Signal made an app my friends actually want to use, rather than a half-baked, slow, prohibitively complex Discord clone.

Markoff3• 4 years ago

I see you use Signal for short time, I used that POS for years, asking for years when I can send more than one photo at time and they just fixed it recently, before you could select only one photo at the time. When I stopped using it the mssage delivery was extremely unreliable when you switch between WiFi and mobile network, Whatsapp send message within seconds, Signal needs minutes/hours to realize network changed to send it properly. There was major downtime because their US admin slept overnight so people in Europe could forget for hours about sending messages. Last drop was requiring PIN to use app with nagging prompt taking 1/3 or even full screen making app without PIN unusable, until they backpedalled on this nonsense. But it was already too late, uninstalled that user hostile POS from phones of my (extended) family where we used it.

subjectsigma• 4 years ago

Y'all remember how well Mozilla getting taken over by activists went? Witch hunt firings followed by years of failed product launches and loss of market share while leadership basically just checks out and collects their salary?

ramesh31• 4 years ago

Yup. My first thought was “why does a messaging app need a board of directors?”. I guess I just don’t understand tech.

rafram• 4 years ago

Nonprofits need boards of directors by law, and a free, open-source app needs a nonprofit to back it, because the alternatives are probably a for-profit or abandonment.

gilrain• 4 years ago

Witch hunt firings

Translation from conspiracy speak: there was one resignation

the_why_of_y• 4 years ago

Do you mean since 2007, when Mitchell Baker wrote the Mozilla Manifesto?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/details/

andrewinardeer2• 4 years ago

Let's see if she can get rid of this ridiculous MobileCoin that has somehow embedded itself into my Signal app. I won't hold my breath.

aorth• 4 years ago

Does anyone actually use it? I seriously wonder why they put it in there. Moxie doesn't strike me as the type of guy who would fall for this cryptocurrency nonsense, so I'm seriously wondering if anyone uses it. The Signal project should do some case studies if so. For example: some farmers use it to pay for petrol in India, or some students from Myanmar use it to send money back home, etc.

tablespoon• 4 years ago

I seriously wonder why they put it in there.

Doesn't Telegram have some kind of payments features (I don't use it, so I don't know). Maybe it was an attempt at feature parity.

FabHK2• 4 years ago

Indeed. Some five years ago, one could have excused a venture into cryptocurrencies as idealistic support of some bold, pathbreaking, liberating, enabling technology. Today, not so much.

illiac786• 4 years ago

I like the idea of anonymous payments, although I fully understand how alluring this is to criminals as well.

MobileCoin has significantly lower environmental impact (PoS) and good anonymity features. Technically, I don't see what there is not to like, and no one is forced to use it?

I would not excuse a "buzz word" feature, but I do not think that is one, I think it has a lot of potential.

dividuum• 4 years ago

Hopefully. Got donor’s remorse from that decision and became hesitant recommending signal as a result.

egberts12• 4 years ago

I’ve learned that:

Signal is best at keeping your message content off of their server

- well-guarded against network-based MitM.

- Need work on hiding association with others.

- Your Signal message content remains retrievable only at and on endpoints, hence the timed message deletion.

Telegram is probably best at keeping your identity safer (than Signal)

- but needs work on hiding associations with others.

- well-guarded against network-based MitM.

- your message remains readable by Telegram at their server because Telegram holds your keys.

So, I’d gladly give up association for privacy and use Signal.

egberts12• 4 years ago

I could envision a private Signal server to deal with the anonymity part but that would require ample assistance of anonymized router hops.

bilal4hmed• 4 years ago

Does this mean signal has to pay back that loan and this will lead to further monetization of the app?

MomoXenosaga• 4 years ago

Greed will come for Signal if it gets big. Which is probably the reason why you wouldn't want it to become the replacement for WhatsApp.

sylware• 4 years ago

"trust us"... yeah, right...

janandonly2• 4 years ago

Am I the only one who found the "Taproot" [1] hint interesting?

In this sentence: > As President I will dedicate myself to helping Signal build a long taproot so it can grow and thrive in dynamic climates.

[1] https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/bitcoin-taproot-upgrade...

stereoradonc• 4 years ago

From a sudden high and then a consistent low, none of my contacts are using Signal. It has become irrelevant. Almost completely irrelevant.

IYasha• 4 years ago

If Signal stop requiring telephone number, its popularity might skyrocket. The scheme is easy: to prevent spamming, you can have a pool of registered numbers that are NOT associated with accouts. This is enough to check if a number is already in use. That's all we need!

(almost. subjective. required, but not limited to.)

A Message from Signal's New President

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