There’s something particularly paternalistic about this statement from the PM: “Your personal messages, calls and statuses, they will remain end-to-end encrypted”.
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More to the point, I thought the principle was "Any man who must say, "I am the King", is no true king."? That seems to leave no room for hedging, like only distrusting "global data gathering conglomerate" or whatever. If you're have to do a holistic assessment of an organization's governance structure and incentives, you're basically admitting that witty one-liners like the above are pointless, which was my point.
What's preventing them from serving a backdoored version? xz was open source as well, that didn't stop the backdoor. There might be reproducible builds on android, but you can't even inspect the executable on iOS without jailbreaking.
This is a false meme spread because the Signal founder (who is no longer with the company) didn’t like people making forks without changing the API server URL and running their own servers.
Open source software doesn’t work like that, however.
Here’s one such example, which is also an interesting technical deep dive: https://signal.org/blog/building-faster-oram/
As you say, I do remember them issuing some threats about it, so it would be interesting to know if they’ve changed their stance on this.
(Discord, as an example, has banned users for using alternative clients.)
Also, separately, the idea that you can only use a service with a certain client is dumb.
Imagine if a website said you can only use a certain browser, or they ban you. It’s ridiculous.