The other comment by @Pfosten@feddit.de focuses on the contents of the article, which are more important. I took a peek at the author, Kit Klarenberg.
The author also writes for The Grayzone (
thegrayzone.com/author/kit-klarenberg/), which gets posted on Lemmy occasionally. Among other questionable and misleading pieces, The Grayzone and Kit put out articles ‘calling out’ Bellingcat and TOR…For the stuff below, if you have doubts in the source, please follow up on the linked sources each one contains. To be clear, we do need to hold these tools and services accountable. Spreading misleading content does not help with that. Even worse if it’s intentional disinformation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grayzone
an American fringe,[7] far-left[19] news website and blog,[23] founded and edited by American journalist Max Blumenthal
The website, initially founded as The Grayzone Project,[24] was affiliated with AlterNet before becoming independent in early 2018.[4] It is known for its critical coverage of the US and its foreign policy,[1] misleading reporting,[25][26] and sympathetic coverage of authoritarian regimes.[4][21][27][28] The Grayzone has downplayed or denied the Chinese government’s human rights abuses against Uyghurs,[32] published conspiracy theories about Venezuela, Xinjiang, Syria, and other regions,[33][34] and published pro-Russian propaganda during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-grayzone/
Overall, we rate The Grayzone Far-Left Biased and Questionable based on the promotion of propaganda, conspiracy theories, and consistent one-sided reporting.
Literally the definition of FUD. Shit tier article.
Misleading. No sane person will trust that article
Wow. I really had no idea. I’m unsure if this implies anything about its security or not, the article kinda glosses over it I think.The other comments have clarified that the article was (at best) very misleading.
Considering another user mentioned that the funding was before Trump was in office, I’m sure there wasn’t an intentional reason to gloss over both of those points… /s
This is certainly one way to spin this.
It doesn’t touch on all the other donations signal receives, including the major loan from Brian Acton. The OTF isn’t the only source of funding that signal has.
Signal will be fine. In fact now that the OTF have withdrawn funding it’ll probably shake off the weird take that Signal is CIA tech.
OTF funding is also not a direct indication of funding from US intelligence or backdoors in the code. OTF could just be promoting development of software that breaks free of repressive regimes, which indirectly benefits US foreign policy.
which indirectly benefits US foreign policy
See the last part of my response to this article for one of the other ways it benefits the US.
If this were true, then it’d be a good signal it frustrates feds, no?
Lots of Greyzone tankie bullshit on lemmy lately.
This article may be bullshit, but people are still wasting their time on walled gardens like Signal. Organizations like Signal can easily disappear because they run out of money or, arguably worse, sellout because there is no other way to stay afloat. I wouldn’t use any messenger not compatible with the XMPP internet standard at this point.
Isn’t signal open source though? I know being open source doesn’t magically make it interoperable with other services but even if Signal or Whisper systems sell out, someone could just fork the projects
You cannot run Signal without “Signal - the company” existing. All of their systems are designed to be attached to one specific backend, namely the signal-run backend, meaning without re-engineering the existing infrastructure you cannot simply swap over.
As @kpw already mentioned, “Signal - the company” dying would involve a functional reset of everything: No contacts, no servers, no infrastructure. COULD you fork the thing and build you own system? Sure, but it would be functionally unusable since no one else would be using it, since everything relies on specifically the signal servers to function. A post-signal system could re-use some of their code (if it runs outside signal corp - “works on my machine” could be present in this project as well), but would need to rebuild the actual network.
This is in contrast to something like the matrix protocol: If a specific matrix instance goes kaput, you still have the overall network working. This means that even if an instance implodes, you would have an easy migration path since the matrix network itself persists.
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All your contacts will still be gone when their servers shut down.
So? Data permanence isn’t the main idea of Signal.
Now everyone is using WhatsApp again and all energy that went towards convincing everyone to use Signal is lost. A better use of that energy would have been be to promote provider independent internet standards.
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Using the current server distribution of my contacts, I would never loose more than 13% of my contacts if a single server shuts down. Federated systems are much more resilient against providers shutting down as well as takeovers. Think Reddit vs Lemmy, Twitter vs Mastodon, Signal vs XMPP.
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I tried XMPP. It was a nightmare.
Finding clients for all the platforms that support all of the extensions that make it a viable alternative to something like WhatsApp or Signal…
Here is what I found works pretty good
Android: Conversations Linux: Dino Apple: Monal Windows: Gajim
