ICOs were killed by Solidity and the Ethereum ecosystem more generally being insufficiently expressive to create anything of value other than pyramid schemes (insofar as those have value).
This is the exact sort of thing that allows people to think that things like Telegram are acceptable equivalents to Signal instead of disastrously poor imitators. It's a shame the discourse around secure messengers has become so polluted.
In the paper they were still able to cover 100% of US numbers for Signal and discover all of its users, but less than 0.02% for Telegram and discover only 908 of its users due to simple rate limits, how is Signal better at this exactly? On top of that the paper purposely chose unrealistic threat models and assumptions about privacy, as if letting other people know your phone number is somehow acceptable for privacy in the first place (it isn't and never was).
Rate limits are trivial to skirt with rented botnets. Some "Free VPN" apps allow inbound traffic from paying clients to be redirected out to the internet.
How is user discovery of Telegram at 0.02% worse than Signal at 100%? It isn't like they could possible get it any higher and Telegram's couldn't get much lower. People who know what they are talking about have been critical of Signals use of phone numbers since the start but Signal have always brushed it off as irrelevant.
Ironically, Nietzsche is considered (by some) to be one of the fathers of postmodern thought. His criticism of the objectivity of science in "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", his deconstruction of the Western concept of self in "The Anti-Christ", and to some extents his criticism of 19th-century historiography in “On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life” and other books are touchstones which presage a lot of postmodern discussion of these topics.
Lots of people ITT seem to have an incorrect understanding of the term postmodernism. It basically boils down to the observation that history and human experience don't really move towards a single goal, but instead consists of lots of independent narratives going nowhere in particular.
These observations invalidate Modernist ideas that held that human historical development lead toward specific outcomes or followed observable patterns. For instance, postmodernist thought argues Marx was wrong in thinking that history followed a dialectical pattern, and instead holds that history follows no pattern.
I think that from mankind's innate curiosity and propensity to teach our young it is impossible to conclude that culture is without pattern. Like so, all of that seems invalidated.
I think that the mistake that postmodernism made was analogous to painting itself into a corner, where people fully studied culture from the outside without immersing themselves in it. They built abstractions until they no longer corresponded to observation and then concluded that there were contradictions in the subject of their study when there was none.
It rocked my world when out of the blue Regular Car-guy about-faced from a youtube hyuckster into a sleeper intellectual in relating the PT Cruiser with the modern world in the context of postmodernism. Zeitgeist, dumbed down to a car analogy without missing any of the salient points. It is some kind of perfection. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoxqtnI4I4c
A postmodern critique of this argument might start with your identification of a single "culture" that has a pattern. Who decides what this culture is and who its adherents are? What if there are exemplars of the culture that do not fit this pattern; are they inherently excluded from the culture by the fact that they do not fit the pattern? If so, it may be the case that we are fitting a pattern we would like to see onto a culture that is in fact varied and diverse, and which does not in fact have a particular direction.
I didn't mean to imply 'a' culture. I meant culture, like water.
Cultures don't have a name. Cultures are people. People sharing a history probably disagree in subtle ways about what their culture is as it is a matter of individual experience.
This doesn't validate postmodernism since there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny. Our history isn't human history. 'We' go back 3.5 billion years because we experience influence from then as a matter of evolution. The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. Life is not anthropocentric.
The ideas that "culture is a matter of individual experience" and that "there was no dichotomy to begin with and nothing to deny" seem to affirm the postmodern idea from my POV. That's basically what they argue.
By contrast, many Modernist philosophers believed that human history moved inexorably towards more-just society or that human knowledge moved towards perfect understanding of all phenomena.
Edit: not sure I understand what you mean when you say "The pattern is much broader that postmodernism claims it to be. "; the project of postmodernism is in part to show that there is no pattern.
I won't argue that Modernism is right. My position is that Modernism was moving in the right direction, that I don't know where to go next, but postmodernism definitely is not the right direction.
I think it is right to say that postmodernism was born out of the nuclear shadow. I think it a degenerate expression of nihilism as I believe I recognize certain philosophical missteps. Summa summarum one must adopt a constructivist approach to logic and be very weary of double negation. "No dichotomy and nothing to deny" is a double negation and certain conclusions can not be made from it. We can in particular not conclude that all information is of equal value from the equality of information channels. We currently do not have the means to conclude that the medium is the whole of the message, but postmodernism seems to claim we do.
Edit: That probably came off as a bit arbitrary. I'm not very good at communicating this stuff outside of dialogue so please only see this as something to frame a perspective with a fair bit of thought behind it, and not as a convincing argument.
While this article does do a good job of illuminating the potential challenges, it's a bit frustrating that there's such scant discussion of solutions.
IMO, this problem has been solved pretty comprehensively by the TUF framework[1], which has a number of solid implementations[2][3]. Many of these implementations even have reliable third-party reviews, so should be pretty trustworthy.
For a solution geared more towards the automotive use-case involving multiple vendors, see Uptane[1], a customization of TUF. The IETF is also working towards a standard for IoT updates[2] which I've found helpful.
I use the high level concept pretty regularly in my day-to-day as a security consultant specializing in cryptography, and this project is a fantastic way to democratize the use of differential fuzzing. The only negative thought I have about this is that I didn't think of it first!
The widespread usage of Telegram in a situation as sensitive as the Hong Kong protests is a failure on behalf of the security industry in educating the public.
Even WhatsApp is miles better, but in reality it should be a no-brainer for the relevant people to use Signal or perhaps Threema/Wire. What a shame that charlatans have successfully marketed themselves to the top of this segment with a distinctly inferior product.
charlatans? You mean like when Facebook claims they have implemented the signal protocol but then scan your messages for keywords in order to disable encryption for governments? There is no way for you to check my claim nor Facebook's as it's closed source.
Same goes for threema which will shortly be required by Swiss law to comply with Büpf as they will reach a size requiring it. It's closed source, we can't check what they are doing. Their external security audit was a long time ago.
At least with telegram if I install the android version off fdroid it is compiled from source and I can verify that.
I can gets users to switch to telegram, I can't get them to switch to signal. There is a trade-off but I would argue telegram over whatsapp anytime.
I don't think Signal supports very large groups well (hundreds of users or more). Or things like announcement channels where tens of thousands can subscribe, but only a handful of accounts can post. Sounds to me like they have a superior product.
WhatsApp does secure group messages with end to end encryption, but what good is encryption in a public protests group where everyone can see your phone number?
I think it will be interesting to see the details of this project. Most of the current offerings do not have anywhere near the technical sophistication that FB can bring, and especially as they iterate I think they will leave every other cryptocurrency in the dust.
