I have mixed feelings about this article. It gets some stuff right, but also some stuff wrong and it misses some important details.
I don’t think Signal has actually received money from OTF (Radio Free Asia) since 2015 or so; if it needed any today it would likely get it from one of the less transparent US government internet freedom funding vehicles. There is no indication they are “facing collapse” beyond a blog post talking about their expenses and soliciting donations.
This article mentions “over a billion” people repeatedly, but doesn’t explain that number is actually referring to WhatsApp (which uses the encryption protocol developed by Signal). Signal says they have 40 million active users.
It doesn’t mention that Brian Acton (billionaire WhatsApp founder) gave them a $50M interest-free loan when he co-founded the Signal Foundation with Moxie in 2018, and became its “executive chairman” or whatever. That “loan” had increased to over $100M by the end of 2018, and is presumably much larger today.
It doesn’t mention that Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker worked at Google for over a decade, and co-founded a department there that worked alongside OTF on various internet freedom projects (and was later on the OTF advisory board herself)
it doesn’t mention the salient properties of Signal which actually make it particularly beneficial to US interests (keeping the communications of privacy-desiring people associated with their phone numbers while concentrating their metadata on Amazon servers)
I think most chromebooks allow you to disable their boot security? some even allow you to re-enable it with different keys so that you can have a different trust anchor instead of google.
there is no single universally agreed upon definition
There is an overwhelmingly agreed-upon definition. Look at who agrees with it: opensource.org/authority/
And who doesn’t agree? Historically, a few of the giant software companies who were threatened by the free software movement thought that “open source” was a way for them to talk the talk without walking the walk. However, years ago, even they all eventually agreed about OSI’s definition and today they use terms like source-available software for their products that don’t meet it.
Today it is only misinformed people like yourself, and grifters trying to profit off of the positive perception of the term. I’m assuming Louis Rossman is in the former category too; we’ll see in the near future if he acknowledges that the FUTO license is not open source and/or relicenses the project under an open source license.
there are over 80 variations of open source licenses all with different term and conditions. Some are more permissive, some less so. Yet they can all be considered a variation of open source, though I’m anticipating you wouldn’t agree?
There are many open source licenses, and many non-open-source licenses. there is a list of licenses which OSI has analyzed and found to meet their definition; licenses which aren’t on that list can be open source too… but to see if they are, you would need to read the license and the definition.
I can’t understand why you are acting like the definition police here, it seems very pedantic tbh.
It’s because (1) FUTO are deceiving their customers by claiming that their product is something which it isn’t, and (2) they’re harming the free and open source software movements by telling people that terms mean things contrary to what they actually mean.
It sounds like Sync is either blocking users client-side (which would be confusing, since server-side blocks do exist), or it is trying and failing to add a block server-side but suppressing the server’s error message.
this is way more beautiful than i expected. amazing work!
to everyone reporting this post as “malware”: 🤣 it really isn’t.
(i read it carefully before running it… if you don’t comprehend something like this, refraining from running it is a good choice.)
edit: lmao at the downvotes! For fun I ported it to Python… this version produces identical output to the original, but stops after a couple thousand seconds instead of running forever. and it is sadly 36 bytes longer.
(maybe the python version helps convince a few people it isn’t malware?)
i guess you didn’t click the link in my comment? here is another, with a list of governments and other entities who all agree about the definition: opensource.org/authority/