zlacker

>>domano+(OP)
So it just took close to a year to dump thousands of private commits into the public repo! Is there an official response as to why they stopped sharing the code for so long and more importantly, why they started sharing it publicly again? Who gains what with the publication now? And seriously, why is it even relevant anymore?

>>newscr+f4
The first commit that they omitted in April 2020 is related to the payment feature they just announced. So the two events coinciding (server code being published and payment feature being announced) might not have been a coincidence. They apparently didn't want to bother creating a private test server running a private fork of the server code and just pushed their experiments to production, just not releasing the source code to prevent people from seeing the feature before an official announcement. They neccessarily built test client apps because I couldn't find any old commit mentioning payments in the client app git log.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26718134

>>est31+zk
This leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. Unclear how much practical damage this caused (how many security analysts are using the Signal server source to look for vulns?) but this is damaging to the project's claims of transparency and trustworthiness.

It’s quite clear that this crypto integration provides a perverse incentive for the project that points in the opposite direction of security.

>>thepti+qm
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but how exactly is that the case?

It's been damaging to their claims of transparency for almost a year now, if anything this should be the first step in repairing that slight. How is dumping a year's worth of private work into your public repo somehow doing damage to their trustworthiness?

>>_dibly+Ko
You're right that the damage to trustworthiness was always there. (I.e. they did the damage when they stopped publishing their source code, and they compounded that damage the longer they declined to publish their code). My point was more that the damage now seems to be directly attributable to the new payments integration.

Prior to seeing this post, I was already concerned that adding a crypto/payments integration would damage the Signal project, and this appears to be an immediate example of the kind of harms/perverse incentives I was concerned about.

(A counterargument to my theory here would perhaps be "Signal was always doing stuff like declining to publish their server code even prior to the payments integration", I'm not familiar enough with the history of the project to know the details there.)

>>thepti+yr
Reading the other article on HN definitely helped me understand more. I think really it comes down to me not understanding why they had so much trustworthiness to begin with.

They've been obscuring their code for about a year and even then, it's not like Signal has always come out and said "we love the passion our fellow developers have for our commitment to privacy and security". They just let people sell their relatives on that promise and waited until they had a massive userbase to start monetizing their platform.

Thanks for your reply, I just wonder where all this trustworthiness has been coming from for the last 12 months while they've been quietly working on the platform without publishing any changes. It feels like a beta tester for a game being mad that there were lootboxes in the full release of the game when they weren't in the beta. Even if you didn't know they were coming, you had to assume something like it was inevitable given enough traction.