Signal's Brian Acton Talks About Exploding Growth, Monetization and WhatsApp Data-Sharing Outrage (techcrunch.com) 42
Brian Acton is crossing paths again with Facebook. From a report: Over more than a decade of building and operating WhatsApp, the company's co-founder first competed against and then sold his instant messaging app to the social juggernaut. Only a few years ago he parted ways with the company that made him a billionaire in a bitter split over messaging and privacy. Now Acton says the ongoing outrage over what Facebook has done to the messaging service he helped build is driving people to his latest project -- Signal. Acton, who serves as the executive chairman of the privacy-conscious messaging app's holding company, told TechCrunch in an interview that the user base of Signal has "exploded" in recent weeks. "The smallest of events helped trigger the largest of outcomes," said Acton on a video call. "We're also excited that we are having conversations about online privacy and digital safety and people are turning to Signal as the answer to those questions." "It's a great opportunity for Signal to shine and to give people a choice and alternative. It was a slow burn for three years and then a huge explosion. Now the rocket is going," he said. The event Acton is referring to is the recent change in data-sharing policy disclosed by WhatsApp, an app that serves more than 2 billion users worldwide. Poll: Which Messaging App Do You Prefer To Use?
Free speech and privacy (Score:2)
In before "only fascists, nazzzis, racists and bigots would want communication privacy".
The state needs to police wrongthink! /s
Re: Free speech and privacy (Score:2)
We need to police the state.
That is literally our job as xitizens of a so+called democracy.
The sad thing is, that nutjobs seem more competent at using the "four boxes" than we are (or should have been, with Trump, Cheney, Bush Sr., etc).
Re: Free speech and privacy (Score:2)
Ok, correction... "competent" is not the right word.
Willing to actually use them, even in their incompetent ways, more like.
Uuum, Acton JOINED Signal. (Score:3)
Moxie's the guy behind Signal.
Stop portraying it as if Acton was somehow leading anything at Signal! Because I know you're only doing that in an attempt to poison discussions about Signal with "... but former Facebook employee!!". Which I already had the pleasure to witness.
That's called "Poisoning the well." Get something good, attach something poisonous, and every discussion about the good can be mentally linked to the poison, until people start avoiding the good even though the poison is unrelated and was artificially added.
So it is curious that this pops up now, with it being *exactly* the tactic the NSA usually uses in the Snowden leaks.
Moxie likely only accepted him because of of desperstion wjen starving for resources. And now it feels like a trap. Even though I think Acton himself is a unaware pawn in this and his heart being in the right place.
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Even if he had joined Signal, I would have done the same thing.
1) Make a messaging app to take advantage of a gross market failure (SMS rates)
2) Sell app to giant corporation for ridiculous $
3) Create, assist or join effort to make an actual secure messaging app, which is open source and managed by a non-profit, to provide some protection against it being sold.*
* Not saying that's what Acton intended to do
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Yeah, it's important to note that what Acton actually did is - along with Moxie - founded the Signal Foundation in 2018. He's working to help fund Signal - not working on the app or the protocol itself.
But it's funny how many of these guys only "get religion" after they've made their billions. And it is certainly legitimate to question how devoted they would be to the privacy cause if those pre-existing billions somehow evaporated.
If Acton claims Facebook misled him or lied to him (about their intentions wi
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You forgot steps 4 through infinity...
3) Create, assist or join effort to make an actual secure messaging app, which is open source and managed by a non-profit
4) Sell the open source project to a giant corporation, similar idea to CentOS or MySQL...
5) Let the sold-off project fester and die under poor management.
6) Fork off another open source project.
7) Rinse and repeat for eternity.
USA played itself (Score:3)
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Tell us again - which ones are the bad actors?
Those that break the law, or conspire with groups to break the law, especially when conspiring to cause harm to people or property.
Reporting such activity to the authorities should be the first action.
Any banning should be done in conjunction with authorities.
Unless you are an anarchist.
With anarchy, the assumption is that government and police are evil, and communities/mobs should self-rule.
Of course, with anarchy, rules/laws form and policing policies form and people are selected to enforce.
This was true
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Protocols, not apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the kids don't use email because it's deeply uncool, but at least with email you can use Outlook and I can use Thunderbird and we're not talking about people leaving one for the other and severing half their contacts with that move. We need a better IM protocol, not a better app.
Re:Protocols, not apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Protocols, not apps. (Score:4, Interesting)
We already have that with Jabber/XMPP, and with the additional extensions (XEPs) it could rival Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. However no one wanted their IM to work outside their garden. GTalk and others used to work, but those were killed over time. Hell, even Signal doesn't interoperate.
Re:Protocols, not apps. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have used XMPP. It struck me as convoluted and it was difficult to tell what the requirements for secure communication were and if communication was secure if the requirements were met. The protocol was clearly designed with these things as an afterthought, and that is not what I mean with "a better protocol". Any protocol that wants to take Whatsapp's cake needs to be secure from the start and simple enough that I can install an app for it on my mothers phone and not get weekly support calls. XMPP is too much potential and too little implementation. At the very least it would need a "minimal implementation profile" that covers the basics which just have to work, including secure end-to-end encryption.
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Fear of spam has really negatively impacted spread of federated services. I recently started giving Element(Matrix) a try again. I've tried XMPP which was kind of killed by google with gtalk. And I also still have hope for something SIP based like Jami taking off. the idea of using a DHT to pass around E2EE keys and store public account data to avoid centralized servers is just kind of neat. the CPU cost is just a little high for mobile.
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I know the kids don't use email because it's deeply uncool, but at least with email you can use Outlook and I can use Thunderbird and we're not talking about people leaving one for the other and severing half their contacts with that move. We need a better IM protocol, not a better app.
A couple years ago client I was working with asked me about a photo of an error he had sent me, I had no idea what he was talking about.
Sometime later I realized he'd sent it over SMS instead of WhatsApp, and since my phone's default SMS app didn't understand the multimedia message it simply discarded it. I got no notice he'd sent a message and he got no notice the message failed to display.
It always astounded me how badly they had managed to turn the one major advantage SMS had over messaging apps into a c
Signal asked for my phone number, privacy? (Score:1)
Re:Signal asked for my phone number, privacy? (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy and anonymity are two different things.
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This AC post deserves to be modded up. Privacy and anonymity are indeed separate entities.
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Oh, sweet summer child. You can claim anything you want, but that doesn't mean the rest of us will stop pointing out that you are completely wrong.
You leak so much information just by visiting /. that your brain would likely explode if you attempted to fully grasp how stupid it is to even comment or have an account here. Do you only use this laptop at cafes? Do you use anonymous VPNs paid for with anonymous currency? Get a grip or go use 8chan already.
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They are however not orthogonal. It improves privacy to hide identity from everyone who is not concerned, even if the communication is not anonymous between the participants.
Of course it would be much harder to get bought out that way, phonenumbers are a really convenient way to tie all kinds of different forms of identity together and combined with the ability of a messaging provider to discover a social network simply from metadata makes them commercially interesting.
If Signal ever wants a big buy out, th
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End to end encryption (Score:2)
Signal, Confide, Wickr, Telegram, etc....whatever I can to do make it more difficult for The Man (Tm) to eavesdrop on my private communications, I will do it. Why make it easy for these jackals?
No SMS? (Score:3)
My (personal) phone plan only gives 250MB of data but unlimited SMS. This is quite common in Canada. Interestingly the Signal webpage seems to imply the opposite: that using data is cheaper. Is this more typical in other countries? As it is, this is a non-starter for me. Sending a few photos would quickly exhaust my available data.
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Does unlimited SMS include international SMS? It usually cost a bit to send SMS to another country. Many people use WhatsApp to communicate internationally for free.
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You cannot send photos over SMS, so that is not a relevant comparison. 250MB of data is more than a million SMS messages if you don't include overhead, and even with Signal overhead it is likely to be tens of thousands. How many messages are you likely to send?
Perhaps you are thinking of MMS? MMS does not have anything in common with SMS except the last two letters of the acronym. MMS is a data service, just like Internet access. Maintaining an extra data service just for one application (which frequently d