Link: Signal's Meredith Whittaker on the Telegram security clash and the 'edge lords' at OpenAI  | TechCrunch

What’s unfortunate about this is that, unlike other instances of tech executives’ s— talk — which I’m fine engaging in and I don’t particularly care — this one actually harms real people and is incredibly reckless. Alongside a number of folks we work with in coalition, we have had to be in touch with human rights defenders and activist communities who were legitimately frightened by these claims because we’re in an industry, in an ecosystem, where there are maybe 5,000 people in the world with the skills to actually sit down and validate what we do, and we make it as easy as possible for the people who have that narrow expertise to validate what Signal is doing. Our protocol is open source. Our code is open source. It’s well documented. Our implementations are open source. Our protocol is formally verified. We’re doing everything we can. But there are many people who have different skills and different expertise, who have to take experts’ word for it. We’re lucky because we have worked in the open for a decade. We have created the gold standard encryption technology, we have the trust of the security, hacker, InfoSec, cryptography community and those folks come out as kind of an immune system. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to do real damage-control and care work with the people who rely on Signal. A lot of times we see these disinformation campaigns targeted at vulnerable communities in order to force them onto a less secure option and then subject them to surveillance and social control and other forms of harm that come from that type of weaponized information asymmetry. So I was furious, I am furious, and I think it’s just incredibly reckless. Play your games, but don’t take them into my court. #

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Yoooo, this is a quick note on a link that made me go, WTF? Find all past links here.