trailee

Meta: I’ve noticed a lot of VOA links on Lemmy lately, and I’d like to understand why. As I understand it, VOA is essentially a national propaganda news organization targeting an international audience (similar to RT). Why is that a good source for article sharing? Especially in the case of the article at hand, which is just a VOA republication of an Associated Press piece that could have been linked originally.

If I had an expensive EV with an expensive battery in it, I would not want to be wasting my precious limited number of charge cycles on running my house.

Unless you’re talking about a home-scale project to repurpose retired EV batteries for stationary storage. I’ve only ever read about grid-scale versions of such projects.

They don’t store anything about your association with other numbers; that stays on your devices. Your phone number is used as your identifier for account creation and originally for finding other people to talk with, but the only data Signal keeps associated with your number are registration timestamp and last connection timestamp. You can see that by reading the redacted subpoenas and responses that they publish.

They have recently introduced usernames so that you can avoid having to share your number to communicate with someone else.

I don’t have a good citation for this, but I believe the phone number registration requirement will remain indefinitely, likely to cut down on spam and bots. But there’s a difference between privacy and anonymity - I’m looking for privacy in my communications, not anonymity from my friends. State actors can know that you use it but not what you’re saying or to whom (unless, say, the NSA is specifically targeting you, but that compromise will be of your device as a whole rather than breaking Signal or getting data from them).

For $4.2 million, the administration had just sold off the first 561 acres of Blue and Gold, an estimated 83,259 trees.

They’re selling off rights to log (miscategorized) old growth forest for an average of Fifty. Fucking. Dollars. Per. Tree. That’s damn near free.

You can get tiny rubber hands that each go onto one of your fingers. There are lots of vendors that sell these on Amazon, and presumably many other places. Different skin colors exist.

I’ve also seen even tininer ones that you can put on the first set of hands, so maybe you can find those as well.

A free app with no advertising doesn’t make that kind of money, it gets progressively deeper into debt to a good Silicon Valley rich guy who got it off the ground, Brian Acton.

His biography on the Signal Foundation website:

Brian Acton is an entrepreneur and computer programmer who co-founded the messaging app WhatsApp in 2009. After the app was sold to Facebook in 2014, Acton decided to leave the company due to differences surrounding the use of customer data and targeted advertising to focus his efforts on non-profit ventures. In February of 2018, Acton invested $50 million of his own money to start the Signal Foundation alongside Moxie Marlinspike. Signal Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to doing the foundational work around making private communication accessible, secure and ubiquitous.

Prior to founding WhatsApp and Signal Foundation, Acton worked as a software builder for more than 25 years at companies like Apple, Yahoo, and Adobe.

The Wikipedia article on the Foundation says the loan balance was up to $105M later in 2018. Meanwhile, Acton is still worth $2.5B according to Wikipedia, so things are probably fine for now, even 6 years later.

But you’re right that Signal eventually needs revenue to keep even a small team of high caliber software engineers and devsecops folks around. You very much want excellent engineers to continue to be involved with critical encrypted communications software on an ongoing basis, so it will cost money indefinitely. Presumably Acton does not wish to bankroll it indefinitely.

Again back to the interview:

I wouldn’t imagine that most nonprofits pay engineers as much as you do.

Yeah, but most tech is not a nonprofit. Name another nonprofit tech organization shipping critical infrastructure that provides real-time communications across the globe reliably. There isn’t one.

This is not a hypothesis project. We’re not in a room dreaming of a perfect future. We have to do it now. It has to work. If the servers go down, I need a guy with a pager to get up in the middle of the fucking night and be on that screen, diagnosing whatever the problem is, until that is fixed.

So we have to look like a tech company in some ways to be able to do what we do.

I’m really glad they pay those engineers that much, so that Zuckerberg and his ilk can’t entice them away with oodles of money. One presumes they also believe in the cause, but I think this currently looks like Acton fighting surveillance capitalism with what capitalism got for him earlier in his career.

Cofounder Moxie Marlinspike is clearly a brilliant hacker and coder who was crucial to Signal’s creation, but I think it makes sense that he hasn’t stuck around to try to solve the long term business problem of keeping it aloft infinitely.

So what to do about it? The OP interview is with Meredith Whittaker, who’s entire job is figuring that out:

Since she took on the presidency at the Signal Foundation, she has come to see her central task as working to find a long-term taproot of funding to keep Signal alive for decades to come—with zero compromises or corporate entanglements—so it can serve as a model for an entirely new kind of tech ecosystem.

I’m a recurring donor because I want Signal to succeed and I want to vote now with my wallet, but fundamentally it’s on Whittaker to figure out how to make the long term work. Here’s what she says:

I see Signal in 10 years being nearly ubiquitous. I see it being supported by a novel sustainability infrastructure—and I’m being vague about that just because I think we actually need to create the kinds of endowments and support mechanisms that can sustain capital-intensive tech without the surveillance business model. And that’s what I’m actually engaged in thinking through.

Don’t forget voice calls! It has some rough edges there (my audio doesn’t always connect successfully, etc), but when it works the codec sounds better than a standard phone call and there’s no mass surveillance. I use it in place of phone calls for all the people in my network who have it, including my immediate family.

but translation certainly isn’t [done on device]

Google Translate has downloadable language packs and runs on device, including offline in foreign countries without roaming data. Including the live video OCR and replacement.

That’s not to say that what you experienced isn’t creepy, but it’s not necessarily cloud-driven.

Signal is the best thing going on in tech these days. I’m very glad it’s being led by Meredith Whittaker.

Did you know you can get a cool badge on your profile pic if you’re a recurring donor? $5 a month is far less than the value I get from it, but that’s all it takes for a cool badge (and knowing that you’re doing something active against the awful state of big tech today).

The article is very misleading. It says

The research paper…notes that the human body is particularly efficient at generating 40 MHz RF energy. Tapping into that through a ‘worn receiver’ provides power without using any invasive means.

But I read much of the pdf linked at the bottom of that link, and there’s nothing about the human body generating energy at 40MHz. The trick is that skin is pretty effective (sort of) at conducting energy at that frequency, so the authors hooked up a power transmitter worn on the forearm, 5 or 15cm away from a receiver on the hand.

This isn’t about powering anything by body energy, it’s about strapping a battery-powered transmitter somewhere on your body and then having another device pick it up when strapped somewhere else on your body. No thanks.

Oh and it’s actually pretty inefficient and won’t provide much usable energy.