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.
> 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.
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?
Ok, but we can agree that doesn't seem to be a designed-in defect, right? The fact they took funding from the US doesn't seem to have ultimately mattered for the answer to this question.
>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.
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.
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.
Not Matrix because I've been running XMPP since it was a thing, also because it is a standard which works everywhere. I'm not opposed to Matrix but XMPP+OMEMO do quite well for now so I have not had a reason to jump ship. If I feel that need Matrix is one of the options, as is something like Delta Chat which uses SMTP and as such interacts with everyone and his dog without the need to convince them to install some app or open an account on some site.
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.