Meredith Whittaker

Signal President Meredith Whittaker joins The Moynihan Report YouTube video by The Moynihan Report

Looking for a convivial convo w me & Michael Moynihan covering everything from Snowden to Babbage to why Michael actually cares about privacy to our impoverished def of "AI" and the need to expand it?

👉 7pm EDT tonight, Nov 13th, streaming + archived thereafter: www.youtube.com/live/ZYNJ0zp...

PSA: tips to protect yourself from scams on Signal.

Every major comms platform has to contend w phishing, impersonation, & scams. Sadly.

Signal is major, and as we've grown we've heard about more of these attacks--scammy people pretending to be something or someone to trick and abuse others. 1/

And finally finally, here's a resources you can share and reference with more about how to detect, and protect yourself from scammers and abusers. support.signal.org/hc/en-us/art... 7/

Finally, to help you determine the fake and malicious from the genuine, we have signposts (support.signal.org/hc/en-us/art...) in the application that can aid you in identifying fakers and phishing attempts.

We also have tools like Registration Lock to help protect against account takeovers. 6/

If you do receive a message you think is suspicious, report it as Spam and block the sender so that they cannot contact you again. AKA basic comms hygiene to preserve your peace. 5/

Contact with Signal (support.signal.org/hc/en-us/art...) or any Signal representative will ONLY come from an @signal.org email address, not from within the app.

And again, we will never ask for your PIN or verification code. And we do not reach out proactively, only in response to your requests.4/

To be crystal clear: Signal will NEVER message you this way. Ever.

And just like with your bank details or passwords, NEVER EVER share your Signal verification code (SMS/Call) or PIN with anyone. Ever. 3/

Right now we're hearing about increased phishing attempts that go like this:

Attackers pretend to be Signal or Signal Support, then message people and try to get them to hand over their verification code or Signal PIN. Information that can let the attacker take over the victim's Signal account. 2/

PSA: tips to protect yourself from scams on Signal.

Every major comms platform has to contend w phishing, impersonation, & scams. Sadly.

Signal is major, and as we've grown we've heard about more of these attacks--scammy people pretending to be something or someone to trick and abuse others. 1/

Great expose on the status of attack capabilities at Cellebrite, the defense company used by homeland security agents to crack your phones both at the U.S. border, airports, and interior.👇

Now on Desktop: Customizable chat folders

Keep healthy boundaries between friends & family or work & leisure.

Filter 1-on-1 and group chats, put all of your unread messages one place, or make project-specific folders for related chats.

Settings > Chats
Or right-click any chat

Wired and 404 Media make FOIA reporting free. Other news outlets should too We spoke to Katie Drummond of Wired, Joseph Cox of 404 Media, and Lauren Harper of Freedom of the Press Foundation about the case for unpaywalling public records-based reporting

When @wired.com made FOIA-based stories free, subscriptions went up.

When @404media.co published public records reporting without a paywall, new sources came forward.

We spoke to both about why dropping paywalls like this is good for journalism — and for business.

This thread does a better job of capturing why the cloud isn’t merely “renting a bunch of servers” than anything else I’ve seen recently.

Apple runs on the hyperscalers, too.

Federation ≠ decentralization.

This is a key misunderstanding & it's concerning. The infra on which a federated protocols/systems run must still be maintained/provisioned by someone. As we saw w all the 'decentralized' chains going down last week, such infra is often licensed from hyperscalers.

Informative thread.

We do have a multi cloud approach.

You should do a bit of research on Signal and this question ❤️

Matrix is distributed at the protocol/interop level. Not at the infrastructural level. People running their own Matrix servers also, generally, license hyperscaler infra to do so.

This is a lie❤️

We are spread across multiple hyperscalers and some smaller players.

Yes, we do.

Good thread from @signal.org CEO, @meredithmeredith.bsky.social underscoring our critical dependencies on a few key orgs, and an increasing challenge in organizational and national resilience. We have a lot of work to do. cc @gate15.bsky.social

Excellent thread that I kinda had been waiting for.
👇

To conclude: my silver lining hope is that AWS going down can be a learning moment, in which the risks of concentrating the nervous system of our world in the hands of a few players become very clear. And that this can help us craft ways of undoing this concentration and creating real choice ❤️ 13/

So, Signal does what we can to provide a service w integrity in the concentrated ecosystem we're working in. We protect your comms w end-to-end encryption, so that we can use AWS and others as a highway across which to send Signal data in ways that don’t let AWS, or anyone else, gain access. 12/

In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/

So, yes, Signal runs on AWS. It also runs on your phone, which runs on iOS (Apple) or Android (Google). And on Dekstop, via Windows (Microsoft). Each of these presents similar dependencies on large entrenched tech companies, and concomitant barriers and risks. 10/

But even if Signal had the billions needed to recreate AWS, it’s not just about money. The talent to run these systems is rare & concentrated. The expertise, the tooling, the playbooks, the very language of modern SRE came out of these hyperscalers, and is now synonymous with 'the cloud.' 9/

Meaning that infrastructure like AWS is not something that Signal, or almost anyone else, could afford to just “spin up.” Which is why nearly everyone that manages a real-time service–from Signal, to X, to Palantir, to Mastodon–rely at least in part on services provisioned by these companies. 8/