I'm no longer involved at Signal
twitter.com1. MobileCoin premines 250m coins
2. Moxie is paid for being on their board
3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin
4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale.
5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60
6. Moxie steps down as CEO of Signal but remains on board
7. Mobilecoin price today is $0.09
8. Moxie is no longer involved at Signal
This is why we need decentralization.
> This is why we need decentralization.
That's an interesting interpretation. I read it as 'all cryptocurrencies are scams'.
Not all cryptocurrencies are scams, not all traffic on Tor is CSAM, and not matrix messages are spam. Some of us use all of these decentralized systems daily for their actual intended use cases of sovereignty and privacy.
Things like money and messaging are too important to a functioning society to allow any single party to control.
We need -actually- decentralized money and -actually- decentralized communication.
MobileCoin and Signal are neither and the results are predictable.
That's why there is no single party to control communication, and even for money there is US vs EU systems.
"Actually decentralized" has a lot of problems, especially with things like spam and scams (see also: usenet). Federation makes sure no single party has too much power, and yet allows one to have usable systems.
Cryptocurrencies are securities not money. Unless you have force (army) that enforces your money you will not have money.
Well I have clients that pay me in cryptocurrencies monthly, and I pay for goods and services with them regularly without Visa or Mastercard learning my purchasing behavior to sell to advertisers.
Sure cryptocurrency is not as widely accepted online or in person locally as US dollars, but it is far easier to spend those same places than my Euros which actually meets your definition of money.
Surely if you're concerned about privacy, an indelible public record of all transactions you made in and out isn't the way to accomplish that?
People will trade with amazon gift cards or weighted gold. The fact something has value and people will exchange it is not what makes thing money.
money /mŭn′ē/ noun
A medium that can be exchanged for goods and services and is used as a measure of their values on the market, including among its forms a commodity such as gold, an officially issued coin or note, or a deposit in a checking account or other readily liquefiable account.
If 'all cryptocurrencies are scams' then those that staff their boards are scammers.
Agree
I remember watching a conference video featuring Moxie - he was the golden child, and there was an older guy saying "We've been doing cryptography for so long... how do we get paid?"
Sounded very much like a inner circle backroom deal kind of moment.
Guess they figured it out!
I can’t imagine many people less interested in $, that could make boatloads of it, than Moxie. Dude would rather weld, help society cryptographically, and enjoy life with friends than be the billionaire founder he obviously could be.
Judging by Mahar's TED talk about the diminished value of truth vs. alignment circulating on twitter, it looks like the Signal Foundation has finally fallen under the influence of the nihilists as well. FOSS doesn't need non-profit orgs, and people in tech aren't equipped to secure them from the people trained to take them over.
This video?
Being a non-profit is a huge advantage to Signal as they are not beholden to profits or shareholders. A messaging app that is used by millions worldwide, is a very juicy target for profit making via advertising otherwise. Meredith (Signal president) equates it to a a rampart against tech surveillance gobbling up Signal
> signal is an 501c3 nonprofit and that's a sort of you know an incorporation of you know in the US where you you agree not to take you know profits you get Revenue you can get Revenue but you're you not for profit and you have kind of a charitable aim and that requires that you do certain transparency protocols so there's sort of forms we file that show our finances that also means that we don't take sort of investment in the classic venture capitalist sense and that we cannot be acquire we could be acquired but you know the executives and the the board would not get a payout so if we sold signal for billions of dollars to say you know Palantir here or something evil like that um we would have to reinvest that money in charitable causes um now why is our incorporation structure important well it's actually one of the key barriers or key protections I would say like a rampart that allows us to keep fully focused on our mission of providing you know meaningful private Communications and in Tech that is you know particularly important because the barrier we're protecting against is the fact that the business model in Tech is monetizing surveillance so if we had investors if we had you know you know limited partners breathing down our neck if we had you know shareholders who were sort of hassling that one old guy on our board about you know increasing revenues or growth or this doesn't look too good the Privacy thing that seems a little dated we're not getting the kind of growth we need um we would be pushed to compromise our privacy Focus because the money lies in surveillance
There’s older blog posts from Signal explaining the same, but I feel the current Signal team is very well equipped to avoid hostile takeovers.
I have tremendous respect for Whittaker. The alarming change is that the founder (Moxie) is no longer on the board, and one of the board members is someone publicly opposed to the freedom signal provides, who is also member of organizations who advocate against what signal provides, and appears to be a former employee at agencies with an interest in mass surveillance. Even Peter Theil would be a more reliable and trustworthy board member than Maher after what's come out about her views.
The other problem is Signal is now in a tacit monopoly position because neither the Apple or Google app stores will allow an app that does not do content moderation, and there is zero chance of them being challenged on that by the current US admin. I'm not sure what the current status is, but Element/Matrix was quietly cut out of the mobile market through that coordination. Judging by the stakes and the players, to me there's something very, very sinister about Marlinspike's exit as well.
Imo, the canaries for some very serious political problems are dropping like flies, and one of their tools is stacking boards of software projects with assets from compromised institutions.
Or Moxie just got bored (and paid). Signal is now in position where main issues are not engineering or crypto but social, financial, political.
How was element/matrix cut out?
Element (or Matrix in general) hasn’t been cut out. The comment might be thinking about https://element.io/blog/element-on-google-play-store but it got reverted after we explained what decentralisation was to Google.
It is true to say that Matrix is more at risk than Signal, though, given Matrix allows for public chatrooms - whereas in Signal you have to invited into whatever abusive content rather than being able to selfinvite (ie join).
Tweet reads:
> "I'm no longer involved at Signal. While I may wish a lot of different things for it, the whole point of the project is that you don't have to trust your communication to anyone."
Is it replay to someone or just statement?
its a reply to dhh expressing surprise at the signal board membership of Katherine Maher.
If it looks like a canary, and sounds like a canary, it might be a canary.
Did not cross my mind while reading. Please elaborate how you come to this conclusion.
If it sounds, however, it's still alive.
For adversaries, it's just easier to take over tech companies than good willed folks to build them. Going on, the community should just not trust anything that is centralised. Implementing that well, lack of profit and fatigue are the great challenges.
DHH's "I trust Meta over Signal because a board member at Signal is woke" is utter content-farming clickbaity dishonest discourse for someone of his skill and intelligence (given the guarantees inherent in the Signal protocol and its opensource nature) and his previously stated stance against cancel culture [0]. This quest for influence seems to break people's brains in weird ways.
Her work history is indeed extremely concerning, but you're probably being downvoted because you invented a fake quote. Double quotes means a literal quote, he never said that. You invented it.
> you invented a fake quote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphrase#Analysis
> double quotes means a literal quote
I for one read it as paraphrasing and not a literal quote.
Why is this getting downvoted?
Well this is certainly an unexpected and weird announcement. I actually thought Moxie was (the main person behind) Signal. Not giving any details about this feels weird to me. How are we supposed to trust an organization that prides itself to be the beacon of free communication, when they communicate so... cryptically? Does anyone have more information on what happened here? (And what/if any are the current alternatives?)
He announced his stepping down as CEO of Signal way back in January of 2022.
ah thank you, I wasn't aware!
can someone explain why dhh has such strong feelings about katherine maher?
Maybe it's this tweet: https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1780929268949614848
From the tweet:
EXCLUSIVE: Katherine Maher says that she abandoned a "free and open" internet as the mission of Wikipedia, because those principles recapitulated a "white male Westernized construct" and "did not end up living into the intentionality of what openness can be."
There is a video of her speaking, which I find hard to translate.
Thank you for the link. Now I have enough to form an opinion about her.
Totally. She seems really thoughtful and aware of how absolute freedom (anarchy) just leads to a situation where implicit power structures are created by those who get there first. Hope she and others keep doing good work to ensure that the site lives up to its goal, to catalog all knowledge, not just the knowledge that's easy to catalog.
It seems a bit worrying to me as a frequent user of Wikipedia. I like a "free and open" internet.
We formed completely different opinions. And that's fine.
not sure. I searched comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...
Most recent are a reasonably mundane culture wars stuff but (more interesting to HN) it seems earlier Signal related ones appear to suggesting a degree of alignment with the USA government. The words "spook" and "compromised" are used in different comments.
Edits. From the Signal page:
"She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board, where she advises the Secretary of State on technology policy"
Can anyone explain what the deal is with that Us department of state foreign affairs policy board?
There's an article here (admittedly a bit biased against her) "NPR Chief Bragged About Taking Censorship Orders From Feds As Head Of Wikipedia" https://thefederalist.com/2024/04/17/npr-chief-bragged-about...
which may explain some of it. It reminds me of an odd experience I had with Wikipedia around covid time - I edit a bit and thought you could say covid may have arisen zoonotically like all previous such pandemics or may have come from the nearby lab which was running job ads for bat coronavirus researchers at the time of the outbreak and as an open wiki you could consider both but no - the lab stuff was largely verboten and unmentionable. I guess the above article explains a bit how that happened maybe?
Rufo, the guy who invented the Critical Race Theory conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Rufo , posted a video clip of her and wildly misinterpreted it for clicks. There have been a bunch of submissions and I think all of them have been flagged dead. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40080036
A large part of how DHH stays relevant is by getting outraged about things on the Internet.
DHH only has strong feelings. Katherine Maher is a great CEO and leader and has been taken out of context in order to isolate her and make her unsupportable by people who claim to not like cancel culture. The whole thing is ridiculous.
You're the second person in this small thread to make a quip about "people claiming to not like cancel culture". Smells pretty fishy to me. Also the whole "she's a great CEO and leader" bit, what are the odds that you have personal experience to where you can make this claim? Even if you did, you could at least provide reasoning for why you think that. Anyways, all put together, I suspect a non-genuine person (or bot/LLM) posted this.