@b0rn_dead the original Signal announcement was a kind of iphone only zombie version of Redphone, Whisper Systems' earlier app. Signal as you know it (calls and messaging, cross platform, etc) didn't exist until mid 2015.
https://signal.org/blog/signal/
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shibacomputer@post.lurk.org
@shibacomputer@post.lurk.org
Posts
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In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. -
In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal.@dissident @groxx Signal used to alert you to someone on your contact list joining Signal, with no opt out and no prompt in the interface.
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In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal.In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.
In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?
The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.
It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.
California has a lot to fucking answer for.
Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?
We bet an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack, and now fate has come to collect that wager. California has a lot to fucking answer for.
(newdesigncongress.org)
