Comment by gavinhoward
4 years ago
> "The Ecosystem Is Moving" post, where Moxie Marlinspike laid out his case, was received approximately as well at Steve Jobs open letter on Adobe Flash. And, like the Flash letter, it has been pretty conclusively vindicated.
The Flash letter was vindicated, but I do not see how the Moxie blog post was vindicated.
Unless you claim that federated E2EE is impossible, I believe you cannot claim that it has been vindicated. But I could be wrong.
Federated E2EE is possible but won't achieve widespread adoption.
Signal's choices optimize usability of E2EE messaging for the masses.
Federated E2EE can work. Matrix did it. But it took lots of extra time, a time cost imposed structurally on the project by being open to third parties who had to coordinate to get things deployed. It's especially painful when you run up against protocol vulnerabilities, doubly so when the fixes for those vulnerabilities involve policy decisions that are their own coordination problems, which is a jam I think Matrix is in right now. All of this is stuff Moxie Marlinspike more or less predicted in his post.
Again: you can get past this stuff, and Matrix will. But Matrix is going to get through this because their use cases (more or less: replace IRC and Slack) are forgiving. Signal's aren't.
My gripe isn't that HN users refuse to tough out Signal's rough edges; I certainly don't ask my own family to use Signal to talk to me (I use Signal for things that matter, and little else). My gripe is that HN people who should know better don't seem to respect, or at least understand, the painful decisions that Signal made to support its use cases, and instead write weird little essays about how Moxie Marlinspike, the "brilliant cryptographer", built Signal this way because it was fun. It doesn't look super fun to me.
Claiming that Matrix did it is even a stretch. Only a few core features are covered and just about every new feature ships without E2EE. Room topics aren't encrypted, sticker packs aren't encrypted, reactions aren't encrypted...
The devs will tell you that requiring every feature to be E2EE will slow down adoption too much, that can always be added later as another MSC (Matrix Spec Change).
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>Federated E2EE can work. Matrix did it
Kind of hard to claim they've done it given their current level of adoption.
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I don't understand why you use Signal only for things that matter. If you use Whatsapp, all your metadata is available to Facebook, which can learn a lot about you and your personal networks and use that information for personal advertising.
Indeed, the jury is still out on Moxie’s post. https://matrix.org/blog/2020/01/02/on-privacy-versus-freedom is the counterpoint.
Yes, that is a blog post that I've read and really like.
I hope you prove Moxie wrong, and once my business is off the ground, I'd like to contribute financially to that end.