rcarback

There are a number of such systems that do this via revoting or dummy ballots. One of my projects, Votexx, uses vote nullification (or flipping) via a trusted third party chosen by the voter.

The general idea for all of these is if you add uncertainty you reduce what a coercer is willing to pay creating a mutually assured destruction scenario whereby the system being in place ensures nobody ever tries it.

Votexx.org if you want to learn more.

The "I don't trust Signal" articles were one of the things that inspired me to push for making xxm first over other apps. Since then a few other options have also sprung up (Session, cwtch, simplex to name a few).

Also, it wasn't mentioned in the articles, but another issue solved by us and many of these other messengers is use of a private keyboard instead of the vendor/isp ones that can spy on users.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that better privacy and security will not beat convenience and network effects when you are competing with "free", so we are changing our approach.

I think you are being too deferential here.

Reports from 2007/2008 had already indicated significant interference and government spying between agencies and with private corporations. Also, at that time it was widely believed but not yet confirmed Dual_EC_DRBG was backdoored via NIST/NSA collaboration.

Many folks equate any US government money with NSA money, and did so especially around this time, which is likely why you made this mistake. Taking any US-backed government money, even at the time Signal took it, was and should be suspect.

IIRC Signal continued to take money even after Snowden. So it is a fair point and not at all idiotic, and the over-reaction after you agreed to correct the article is suspect.

I do think Signal needed that money to survive, and it probably was put to good use, but I would have acted differently and more transparently about how my use of that money was communicated to the public.

Yes they are separate.

When I've taught and had opportunity to include an ethics discussion, Cellebrite has been the example I gave on the spectrum right before you cross into malware. AFAIK, they have no special government exemptions or other permissions to get around EULAs or library licensing, they just ignore it.

NSO group is worse after the pegasus debacle, but I think Cellebrite is only a stones throw away from being used to stalk and suppress benign soda tax advocates in Mexico...

Moxie at signal has an short writeup of the internals of Cellebrite: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-vulnerabilities/

Agreed that usernames aren't exactly anonymous, which is why the platform doesn't require one to use and you can share your QR Code directly instead. I think the mobile apps might force registration with user discovery (this is an active argument i've been having...) but it's not designed to be required.

It's not fully baked, but my expectation is that it will work similarly to how the .eth, namecoin, and other systems work, where you'll be able to register a user discovery service on a blockchain which the clients will recognize and use for searching. In this model, NYT registers "nyt.xx" and "rcarback" pops up in the interface as "rcarback@nyt.xx". As it stands, we've rolled out a basic version with a single central user discovery point for now.

I respect this position, but it is notable that this project and its goals are different from all other blockchain projects. The private messaging is meant to be an intrinsic part of this blockchain for transactions and to provide a platform for applications that rely on the private messaging properties to provide services.

As an example, one of the next applications I am working on with it is voting (a continuation of my PhD research). You can do things with this that you can't do anywhere else because you've got hundreds of untrusted, uninterested nodes, changing the threat model in a very important way. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other way to incentivize that without some form of payment system, which is why it is intrinsic to this chain.

It is fundamental to safe and fair commerce to be able to not be tracked in the ways we care about folks not being tracked. I want to do things like read my news subscription without them being a data vampire that tracks how long my eyes hover over each paragraph of every story then sells that to some advertiser. I also don't want my credit card company selling my purchase history to some government that then uses that information to decide if I am allowed to enter their country 15 years from now.

In other words, the project is not trying to be a slower, less private version of a credit card. We do not want to be just another privacy coin or utility for some pre-existing internet service and, unlike other mixnet projects, our goal is a much more ambitious resistance to global adversary threat model. We want to enable folks to do things over the internet with similar properties and experience as buying milk from the corner store with real money. We might not get there, but that's my vision for what we are trying to achieve.

No it can't use SMS as a transport.

It protects metadata using a mixnet and the E2E encryption for authenticated channels uses post quantum cryptography(SIDH) to establish symmetric keys. The infrastructure is run by 3rd party node runners and there's an open source API for other applications in addition to the messenger being open source.

First come first serve right now. Identity is based on keys generated on device and the usernames are based on a network service which I expect we will decentralize (i.e., set up your own like e-mail).

It protects metadata using a mixnet and the E2E encryption for authenticated channels uses post quantum cryptography(SIDH) to establish symmetric keys. The infrastructure is run by 3rd party node runners and there's an open source API for other applications in addition to the messenger being open source.

I'm not having issues with the website, but I will raise it with the web developers to see if they know what's happening.

It is early stage, but there is now an alternative to Signal that doesn't use phone numbers at all:

https://xx.network/messenger/

While you can add your number to be searchable by others, it doesn't let strangers with your number know you signed up automatically, either.

Full disclosure: I work on the infrastructure behind it.

"NeuralHash is a perceptual hashing function"

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

That depends on the criteria, which could be "the candidate that most people accept/approve" (my personal preference), "the candidate that the most people will choose over all others", or something else.

IRV has failure cases against both of these, and I wrote a good example of an IRV election which explains the issue here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410622/scoring-the-candid...

Warren's page on this with a lot more details is here: https://rangevoting.org/rangeVirv.html