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Bitch all you want. No really. Do it. If you don't like the word, fine, use criticise in its place. Criticise ALL you want. Do it. Nothing is above reasoned criticism. Including my criticism of critics of signal who deride the choices made without acknowledging that the person who led those choices and the team and ultimately took responsibility for those choices also succeeded where nobody else had on a scale that is ridiculously large.

"I believe signal could have been as resoundingly successful in bringing e2e encryption to the masses as it was if it had done X and Y differently and tweaked Z." Is quite different to the critics around here who filled a page with comments without anyone acknowledging that they did pretty good in this one dimension. (Did ok in some others too, imho, but this one dimension is off the damn charts and there can be zero argument about that. They did it when it hadn't been done). So yeah, go right ahead, bitch all you like about my bitching about the bitching going on about signal. Please do. Nobody is being abused or disrespected here except maybe Moxie. I reckon it's happening to Moxie. Often.

It appears to me "Bitch all you want but ... " [emphasis mine] has changed meanings between GGP and this comment.

From "You can grumble all you want in this article but those complaints pale in comparison to Signals contributions which are above your trivial reproach."

To "No product is above reproach, your complaints are entirely valid and I was saying this all along."

It's also possible I just missed the entire point of GGP entirely, for which I apologize if so.

> in this article

> those complaints pale in comparison

> Signals contributions which are above your trivial reproach

There's the problem. I never said that or indeed anything like it. Quotes are really out of line there. Eg Never mentioned TFA. Never said complaints were invalid, never described all reproach as trivial in comparison.

> your complaints are entirely valid and I was saying this all along.

Nope not that either. Actually read it again maybe, just what it actually says?

When considering criticism of decisions that led to a billion people using e2e encryption and not mentioning that those decisions directly led to a billion people using e2e encryption then yeah, maybe think about whether that criticisim has been well thought out. At the time of writing there were about 50-100 comments all critical of signal policy and app functioning with nobody mentioning even once that maybe some aspects of that policy, yeah, they actually worked a little bit in a way that was pretty useful.

>It's also possible I just missed the entire point of GGP entirely, for which I apologize if so.

Fair. I'm sure that's general it should be and not directed to me.

> Apparently the good intent they assume in a hacker conference does not extend to a hacker forum.

That would be because this isn’t a hacker forum in the sense the OP was using. The OP was using hacker in the classic sense, security folks, the culture is different within that space compared to this one. (Not better or worse mind you just different with different values and understandings)

> The OP was using hacker in the classic sense, security folks

Really? I'd say that the classic meaning of "hacker" is what we have on HN. http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/h/hacker.html

HN is mostly people trying to get rich selling themselves to VCs, so I'm not convinced that this is where the spirit of "hacker" is kept alive.

I'm here to read articles about hardware, software, and social hacking in the sense of "exploiting a system for fun, education, and only occasionally profit".

I think that is rather uncharitable, there is a pretty good mix of people here.

Yes, some are trying to sell themselves, which may be distasteful to you but people need to eat.

Others are activists, pushing their views.

Others here are just reading and occasionally commenting, like myself.

But there are also a lot of very passionate and smart people here who are pushing boundaries and limits with what they can do in terms of hardware and software.

and here we have the problem, defense. stop defending people “trying to eat”. we all are, and many of us are programmers. many of us are not here to have others buy our meal.

I’m just here for the occasional Don Hopkins mega posts.

"However, the Jargon File reports that considerable overlap existed for the early phreaking at the beginning of the 1970s. An article from MIT's student paper The Tech used the term hacker in this context already in 1963 in its pejorative meaning for someone messing with the phone system."

https://web.archive.org/web/20071025200829/http://listserv.l...

I would disagree.

> Their main complaints are 1) Lack of good clients, driven by a mostly closed ecosystem 2) Lack of good federation which brings down the whole network occasionally.

Those might be security adjacent, but i'm not sure i would call them core security concerns.

> Their main complaints are 1) Lack of good clients, driven by a mostly closed ecosystem 2) Lack of good federation which brings down the whole network occasionally.

Both of these are very conscious, deliberate choices on Signal's part though. You can't "fix" them without fundamentally changing what Signal is trying to be. Demanding "fixes" for things without thinking about, or acknowledging the reasons why the current state of the world is how it is is just self-entitled "bitching".