On November 16th, Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal, published a detailed breakdown of the popular encrypted messaging app’s running costs for the very first time. The unprecedented disclosure’s motivation was simple - the platform is rapidly running out of money, and in dire need of donations to stay afloat. Unmentioned by Whittaker, this budget shortfall results in large part from the US intelligence community, which lavishly financed Signal’s creation and maintenance over several years, severing its support for the app.
Intentional conspiracy, judging by who the author writes for
It’s a good thought experiment. Let’s assume signal is a conspiracy.
What do we do now?
The article doesn’t seem to have any thesis here. If signal becomes untenable:
Briar and simple x are the most promising in my mind, but I know there’s a lot of proponents of matrix.
I personally don’t think session is sustainable, simply because they don’t have any development going on, no perfect forward secrecy added.
If we’re talking about the signal replacement, we need a way for people to find their contacts. A phone contact list as a social graph is pretty good. I could see that being added as a discovery, optional, service for simplex, or even briar. But that would probably take quite a bit of development of work to do it in a non-Spammy fashion
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