Cruft is like dust bunnies, it grows if not cleaned up!
I literally just removed some code from 2021 that was echoing huge JSON files into build logs that nobody looked at.
It reduced the pipeline run duration from 45 to 30 minutes.
Now, a crypto coin will probably be harder to remove, but there's a weird inertia around long-lived repositories where people are afraid to make any changes. Although I hope the crypto portion is feature-flagged and can be somewhat easily disabled.
I've encountered this argument ... repeatedly. Let's explore the DIY route:
If you can build your own Signal server, you too can serve you and your own circle of friends. The bar is not that high (Java and VPS).
Signal clients are even easier but it remains mostly an unique build-challenge due to not so strong documentation and by the virtue of mastery of multi-platforms.
Having said all that jazz, step back and ask yourself this, what am I losing by building my own Signal-protocol network?
Anonymity
Now, you would easily stick out like sore thumb to all the Internet overwatch, even within VPN tunnels.
That's a risk for me.
What am I actually gaining?
Not much: a more unique hash signature of client app (it has downsides); the ability to perform a unique but slight tweak of hash/key/encryption algorithm using same Signal protocol (dangerous rabbit hole), and avoidance of XDR/NDR/IPS/IDS firewall, and the biggest one: zero spreading of hashed contact info (more on this below).
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Alternatively, let's take the original route: your own client against "the" Signal server:
Now, Signal protocol would be open to misshapen protocal usages (think "fuzzing"). Might be a good thing but certainly not at this early stage; do we have the manpower to stand guard over a protocol like ISC Bind9 team do with their DNS?
The one area that is not firmed up 100% (more like 99.999%) yet is the Privacy Information Protection axiom and that is centered around the exhanges of hashed "Contact" address book.
This there is largely understudied and under-whitepapered: how to exchange contact info in safe privacy order just to build your network: I keep that Signal client app option off for now and manually add my contacts. That's why I think that Signal team is moving away from telephone number.
I've had an issue with my phone for the past few months that could be solved by erasing it and restoring from backup, but I use Signal a bunch and I'm not currently feeling risky or motivated enough to migrate my whole Signal state to a spare phone and do it.
Lack of backups is not a retention/deletion policy. Signal chats can, in fact, have a deletion policy set. Instead it directly ties retention to "how long can I last without losing or erasing my phone", which is not a useful proxy.
Anyone sufficiently motivated to keep messages forever can (a) set up the desktop client and back up its data store or (b) set up signal-cli and save everything that comes out of it.
No backups doesn't defeat this, it just makes life harder for everyone who relies on scrollback. Imagine if email worked this way.
Indeed they do, as I just learned today. That really doesn't make any sense then – I vaguely remember Moxie stating that the lack of backups was intentional, but now having them on Android but not iOS makes no sense at all.
Signal does have backups, it just refuses to reveal anything about them. Fortunately thanks to reverse engineering efforts you can now do pretty much whatever you want with them: https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
That's essentially an Android system backup, i.e. a disk dump of the app data folder, right?
Almost nobody uses these in practice, so I think my point largely still stands.
I'm pretty sure that, given their stance on this issue on iOS, they'd start locally encrypting the message database using a key stored in the Android Keystore system (which won't be backed up or extracted).
No as in, this is not the Android backup system, but rather something custom-built by Signal? If so, how do I enable this on my phone, and what's that passphrase the tool alludes to? I don't see an option to set one in the Android app.
Yes it's custom-built by Signal. I thought it was enabled by default — I don't remember ever turning it on — but it might not be. Here is how to do it:
> Your backup folder is listed under Signal Settings profile_avatar.png > Chats > Chat backups > Backup folder. Use the files app or plug your phone into a computer to go to the folder.
> For older versions of Signal, the backup file signal-year-month-date-time.backup can be found at /Internal Storage/Signal/Backups or /sdcard/Signal/Backups
Maybe they should add good backup encryption then lest people decide they don’t want to use Signal because it doesn’t have this feature and end up with weak/no backup encryption.
I'm pretty sure they would, if they could think of a good way. Usable, yet secure backup encryption is so far an unsolved problem, as far as I can tell.
The two options, roughly speaking, are: Force users to store some high-entropy passphrase (which most users will then store somewhere not very secure), or let them pick their own passphrase (which won't be very good). This is what WhatsApp does.
A third one would be to allow a short passphrase and guard that by a server-side HSM or maybe SGX, which Signal seems to be somewhat fond of; I'm glad they're not doing that.
Monopolization in big tech is far more economically significant. The Big 3 cell carriers make $250 billion in annual wireless revenues combined. Their profit margin is about 15%. Google alone makes $300 billion in revenue, and has a net profit margin of 25-30%. Meta’s revenue is $130 billion and its profit margins are even higher, over 30%.
The tech industry is extracting vastly more monopoly profits from consumers than any other industry.
Most of Google revenue is not made from US consumer. Telecom revenue on the other hand is mostly attributable to the US consumer, whom FTC is responsible to protect.
Monopoly is about choice, not revenue. I don't care how little Comcast or Spectrum makes compared to Google or Facebook when I'm forced to use their terrible service because there are no other options available.
In antitrust law, the key focus is on the excess profits companies can obtain from consumers through their monopolistic conduct. Profits is more important to that analysis than choice. Tech companies are in a state of monopolistic competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopolistic_competition. There’s theoretical choices, but because tech companies have big moats, those choices are largely imaginary and the companies enjoy significant monopolistic pricing power. Telecommunications service, by contrast, is largely fungible. Even a small amount of competition is sufficient to curb the ability of providers to exert significant monopoly power to achieve excess profits.
No one is forced to use G or M but they make better products. It is not monopoly. There are excellent alternatives available very easily.
Comcast, ATT are different. You simply dont have much of a choice even in cities meant for internet. San Jose has like 1Gbps ATT and 100Mbps Comcast as the only options.
Lina Khan has honestly been doing an amazing job in her position. She's taking on the amazons of the world and you're complaining she isn't doing enough? In a perfect world we could just clone her so she could also break up these other industries.
She's single-handedly responsible for denying public markets investors the ability to reap the benefits (by investing in) from all of the hot tech startups that are too-small to go public but would have been attractive acquisition candidates in the past.
Now Meta/GOOG/MSFT/AAPL/AMZN know they cannot acquire anything large, so these companies either sell to PE or continue to raise from huge late-stage funds.
I don't like a lot of what "big tech" does but this isn't a good situation either.
pulling investment would be a hard power. Imagine if Microsoft says the change in leadership and idiotic board means the contract is done, no more compute for openAI and then goes on to back Sam Altmans new company
openai will be writing papers and asking for donations within a weeks time at that point as the rest of openAI quits
Unless sam Altman is actually GPT4 and is typing like mad at all times I don’t see how this impacts OpenAI in the least. There are plenty of suitors waiting for a chance to back OpenAI and forge such close partnerships. Sam is a talking head, backing his venture is backing vaporware until it’s not. OpenAI is here and now, and even if he churns senior leadership and line people, their advantage is so extreme at the present it’ll be a few years of disruption before anyone has caught up, it’s when that happens it’s more likely to be Claude than some new venture.
No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult. You don’t tell your partner investing billions of dollars of value you’re about to fire a CEO over perspective differences in a very public way, coloring it as malfeasance or dishonesty, and you think someone is ever going to take you seriously again?
Anyone with even a basic level of business sense isn’t going to hold Microsoft responsible in a negative light for prudent reactions to volatile partner behaviors. These are not just startup cloud credits being given to OpenAI.
> No one is going to leave Microsoft because of some amateur hour non profit board fuckery that had Microsoft stepping in as the adult.
But will they leave Microsoft (or, at least, be less inclined to rely on Microsoft in the future where competitors exsit) because of Microsoft terminating a relationship on which their access to a technology at the core of an enterprise service that enterprise customers rely on is based?
Microsoft will make the case that those customers should onboard to Microsoft offerings when at parity due to the unreliability of OpenAIs governance. And they won’t be wrong. Enterprise customers don’t want to hear about a critical vendor staging a board coup on Bloomberg, with a bunch of key employees quitting in solidarity, and then reading only a day or two later “on second thought, we were wrong, CEO is coming back.” This will make your vendor/third party risk team very twitchy. This will make executive leadership give the command down the chain to constantly explore alternatives.
OpenAI’s actions do not give people who approve tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in spend the warm fuzzy feeling. Microsoft knows exactly the consistency and stability these customers desire. They are the conduit by which value flows from OpenAI to Microsoft customers until Microsoft can deliver the value themselves.
(also why people get fed Teams vs Slack; because of who is making the purchasing decision, and why it’s being made)
> At the same time, companies that depend on OpenAI’s software were hastily looking at competing technologies, such as Meta Plaforms Inc.’s large language model, known as Llama. “As a startup, we are worried now. Do we continue with them or not?” said Amr Awadallah, the CEO of Vectara, which creates chatbots for corporate data.
> He said that the choice to continue with OpenAI or seek out a competitor would depend on reassurances from the company and Microsoft. “We need Microsoft to speak up and say everything is stable, we’ll continue to focus on our customers and partners,” Awadallah said. “We need to hear something like that to restore our confidence.”
Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend?
And Microsoft has total rights to the models and weights, so they can CONTINUE their services and then spin up with Sam's new company.
*Uh, you have a nonprofit board firing a CEO at a board meeting that doesn't even sound like was properly noticed. Was the board president even given time to attend?*
I think it's reasonable to assume that even a controversial board checked with their lawyer and did what was legally required. Especially as nobody involved seems to be claiming otherwise.
If they had written consents from a majority of the board to remove Altman and Brockman from the board, then depending on the applicable nonprofit law and corporate governance documents, the board removals may very well have been legally conducted without need for a properly noticed board meeting. (For the actual firing of Altman, that might have been legal either through written consents or through a board meeting after the removals of Altman and Brockman.)
Having no information on what laws and governance documents apply to OpenAI or on what steps the board took, I express no opinion on whether the legal requirements were actually met, but it’s possible they were.
This. The OpenAI board as of now looks incompetent by sacking and then trying to rehire their most public figure in the span of a few days. Lacks determination, confidence and commitment
> pulling investment would be a hard power. Imagine if Microsoft says the change in leadership and idiotic board means the contract is done, no more compute for openAI and then goes on to back Sam Altmans new company
...losing their licenses to OpenAI's technology and thus the Azure OpenAI service offering for which they have enterprise customers who went with them because Microsoft is the secure, enterprise vendor whose reliability they have learned to count on.
Good way to make the "Nobody got fired for hiring Microsoft" that followed the same thing for IBM a thing of the past.
Yeah, with the right people, Sam's company might eventually give Microsoft a technically-adequate replacement technology, but Microsoft's enterprise position isn't founded on technical adequacy alone.
this is it ... chromeOS is dead
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