This is a clever way to do this, but it still seems like someone caring about their privacy should just do without gifs.
Edit: I should rephrase - I mean someone with a larger-than-usual need for privacy, someone paranoid for a reason. This is great for the typical privacy concious user. But if I was sending documents to WikiLeaks, I would not sum them up with a cute GIF.
Except that history has shown us that theoretically secure but feature deficient systems lose out to less ideologically pure systems that provide what users want, leaving the sum total amount of security provided to be less.
History shows us that you can't compete by being a lesser version of something else. There's nothing wrong with trying to make the application more attractive, but at the same time trying to shoehorn in features rather than doing things where you have an advantage is less likely to be meaningful.
A feature like this doesn't really matter in the context of competing with mainstream messaging services because their value is to a large extent in things like brand and network effect. The notion that you're just one feature away from mainstream adaptation is often a misconception. In reality there's limited potential in living in the shadow of something else.
I absolutely agree. Instagram/Facebook/Soundcloud have lost my interest as they've added extra features which just clutter the UI and distract from the purpose you were using the site in the first place.
If your original product isn't working. Maybe try being a different company.
It would be more interesting if people could reply why they disagree. I'm not the first one to come to this conclusion, hemlis is a public example. You simply can't compete with large companies several years after the fact without differentiating.
> And as Signal only tries to copy the features WhatsApp and co already have
Thats simply not true. WhatsApp does not support gifs, for example. Signal also has some features that others don't.
> they’ll get exactly the same security with WhatsApp, Telegram or Threema, and exactly the same features.
Telegram is less secure by miles. Threema is less secure by yards. WhatApp is less secure by inches.
> "You can create your own federated server"
Signal has never claimed that you can "federate" the server. They only mentioned that this is a feature that they might work on in the future. Since they have publicly said that they are not gone do so.
You keep repeating untrue claims in every thread about Signal, despite having been proven wrong before. At this point, I'll just have to assume that you're not interested in having a factual discussion. See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12689390 and its descendant posts.
At what point has Signal ever indicated that they were targeting users that were trying to send documents to wikileaks (or require similar levels of privacy/security). They have consistently said they are trying to build a messaging app that normal people want to use over stopping targeted attacks. eg [0]
Well, than I guess I got the wrong idea about them. I thought WhatsApp was supposed to be "for the common people", and Signal was more targeted towards the paranoid.
Signal is suitable to the paranoid, while targeting "normal" people. Snowden uses it, so that's a good indicator for the paranoid.
Similar: If my mom uses it as well, that doesn't mean she's paranoid. (And I'm not saying that you said this.) And interestingly, knowing some paranoid people (by disease not profession), they usually don't care about this.
And what I was originally trying to say, is that people like Snowden, or more precisely, people requiring Snowden-like security, should probably not use this feature despite the very impressive way they made it more secure.
Why should those of us who care about privacy be required to limit the media we use to express ourselves? By including this functionality Open Whisper Systems is giving the privacy conscious a way (albeit experimental) to have our cake and eat it too.
I also think it's fine as long as they clearly communicate to the user that their search queries will be transmitted to a server not controlled by OWS.
You seem to think that those options are exclusive when in fact gif memes are a blatant example of how they aren't.
The original creator of (say) a video expresses something, a remixer expresses something when they cut it into a gif, and you're expressing something when you send someone the gif in a conversation. The thing that's expressed is almost necessarily different, and each step involves creative choices.
When Ben Franklin said "those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety", he was making the point that, in his eyes, it would be foolish for the government of Pennsylvania, seeking help from the Penn family, to give up their freedom to levy taxes on the Penn family. When someone uses the same quote today, are they making the same point?
Martin Luther King was a full-throated advocate of affirmative action, which is to say applying penalties to white people for being white. When someone today talks about "a nation where [people] will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character", are they supporting the same idea?
So, I am an "HN bro" now...
Because I don't think this feature can possibly be up to the highest standards of security, despite being very cool and clever? I guess there are worse things to be called.
If your aim is to get more people to care about privacy, or to enable those who care about privacy to convince their friends to use a more private app, these things help.
This is Signal jumping the shark. Why is searching gifs their responsibility? Non-essential features should be skipped there is a single shred of security concern, which we can see there is.
Edit: I should rephrase - I mean someone with a larger-than-usual need for privacy, someone paranoid for a reason. This is great for the typical privacy concious user. But if I was sending documents to WikiLeaks, I would not sum them up with a cute GIF.