I hate to break it to you, but essentially all Android and Apple devices on US carriers can (potentially as a capability, but it's extremely unlikely in the real world) be remotely screenshotted, location tracked, and microphone and cameras activated by US intelligence agencies because they can get whatever they want inserted onto endpoints (phones and other SIM devices) by the carriers. This probably happens in most countries. State actors therefore don't really need RCE or local priv esc 0days to break into any phone or backend, social engineer an engineering shop, or plant a spy software developer to gain in-app access. WhatsApp maybe good enough, but it leans heavily towards MAANG feudalism while Signal doesn't currently. Signal won't help this massive endpoint vulnerably either, but it's backed and design is more trustworthy. Only an audited FOSS hw/sw stack that doesn't agree to carrier and local regulations requiring unknown, untrusted code loaded on a user's device would. And, honestly, I'd like a phone that can switch to e2e voip automatically should the other party have Signal or similar installed rather than making a conventional call. IDK if Silent Circle's Blackphone 2 did this or not, but the Silent Phone app that replaced it defeats the whole purpose of a Blackberry-like device.
Is there a problem with that? It's difficult to tell from your post whether you think that's a good idea, other than the quotes which intimate you think the ethics are off?
Free market and money vote and yadda yadda yadda requires consumers to be aware of and mobilize on boycotts. If we want competition, anti-consumer practices to disappear, price transparency, privacy, and on and on, then we need to be willing to mobilize on a boycott on the grounds of ethics or morality.
We all have this theory of the invisible hand and market dynamics but as soon as people actually, you know, practice that then we get a sour taste in our mouth. The truth is cancel culture, or whatever you want to call it, is fundamental to capitalist economies in a classical sense.
How does Signal make money? All chat apps suffer from the same problem that users want to use someone else’s infrastructure for free. WhatsApp is great because it is run by a for—profit company, listed on a stock market, allowing users to take an ownership stake.
It is sustained by grants and donations, although I'm not clear how near or far it is from being
indefinitely sustainable.
The Signal foundation was established in 2018 with $105 million from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and it actively solicits donations. I give $20 a month.
They released a blog post at the end of 2023 emphasizing the need for donations and estimating operating costs would cross $50m/year in 2025.
> WhatsApp is great because it is run by a for—profit company
That also what causes the problems. The sad part is that it didn't have to be this way, but being publicly listed currently means that you got to pump those stocks. Very few people invest in stocks because they believe in the long term future of a given company, that's old school thinking.
The types of stockholders that "take ownership" also isn't going to help fund the company long term. They buy the stock once and the hold on to it. How is that going to help?
WhatsApp needed to be a subscription to not go down the ads and data collection rabbit hole. Now there's no going back, more and more ads will appear and more and more tracking will sneak in. This is a Meta product after all, so I don't even understand why people are surprised.
Mostly donations [1]. The yearly budget is around $30M, which is a lot but pretty tiny for an app so many people use. They only have around 40 employees [2].
Personally I think the small staff, donation-based funding, and security-focused security constraints are a plus: the platform seems way more stable than most and does what it needs to do.
IA stopped respecting robots.txt in 2017. I had to issue a DCMA takedown to get my sites delisted. They are arrogant and think themselves above normal netiquette. They deserve to lose.
If anyone is arrogant it's those that think they can make information publicly available but then still control where it is shared.
You don't get to define "netiquette" to whatever you want it to be.
robots.txt in particular has been a giant mistake that only seves to entrench Google. Anyone that wants to archive or index the web as it appears to humans SHOULD ignore it.
I will not be donating, not now, or ever. They do not respect robots.txt and force companies to use the DCMA to remove their sites from the archive. They are self-righteous pests.
Some months ago I contacted them and requested they remove a domain I owned. I was ignored.
Hunting around I found someone who said to send a DMCA formatted in a certain way. That was ignored.
I sent another DMCA. They replied and wanted a list of every url to be removed. I got back to them saying it was .example.com/
They said they would get to it.
Two or three weeks passed, nothing changed. I got in touch asking why. They said my request was scheduled and would be completed soon. More time passed, no result.
I then sent them an email which listed their upstream provider. I said I felt they had adequate time but had failed to act in accordance with my request. I told them they had 7 days and then I would go upstream. Then they deleted what I had asked for.
Not in the case of me. I emailed them a request to remove my github pages and they responded with instruction. I fulfilled the instruction and got my pages removed later.
> Being a self taught software developer who has been programming since I was 12, I had no idea how to reverse a binary tree.
I'm also an autodidact having taught myself how to program at 15 but never pursued a bachelor in CS. I've failed coding interviews before when asked to diagram a sort function. So I upped my game, took an algorithm course on coursera, coded up some binary tree examples, learned about algorithm complexity. Then I got through the interview process at a FAANG.
Algorithms are not a part of my daily job but perhaps they are like an honor code for software developers as much as a martial artist will never use violence in real life.
