Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Signal Server is effectively closed source software right now (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The Signal Server repository hasn't been updated since April 2020. There are a bunch of links about this here but I found this thread the most interesting.

To me, this is unforgivable behaviour. Signal always positioned themselves as "open source", and the Server itself is under the best license for server software (AGPLv3 -- which raises questions about the legality of this situation).

Signal's whole approach to open source has constantly been underwhelming to say the least. Their budget-Apple attitude (secrecy, i.e. "we can never engage the community directly", "we will never merge/accept PRs", etc) has lead to its logical conclusion here, I guess. I have been somewhat of a "Signal apologist" thus far (I almost always defend them & I think a lot of criticism they get it very unfair) but yeah I'm over Signal now.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (12 children)

We had huge discussions about it here on lemmy.ml a few weeks back. In the end I think the main problem with Signal is that (while surely better than WhatsApp) it does not fundamentally change anything about the dependency on a walled garden with servers and developers based in the US. No amount of Signal apologizing can change that, and we should really strive for something better than such a gradual improvement at best.

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