Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the Signal secure messaging app, announced Monday that she was stepping down as the company’s CEO.
Marlinspike said he always intended to grow Signal to the point where it could continue without his direct involvement, but that wasn’t possible until four years ago, when he wrote most of the code, managed staff and handled support himself . Fast forward to today, and Marlinspike says he rarely writes code and is happy to leave things in the hands of the leadership team.
Signal is one of only two mobile messaging apps considered secure enough admired Proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where “secure” refers to end-to-end encryption with a certain degree of trustworthiness. Another bigger competitor to Signal is Meta’s (Facebook) WhatsApp.
Coincidentally, Marlinspike’s interim replacement will be WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, who left the company in 2018 to co-found Marlinspike Signal basis, 501c3 nonprofit that oversees the app company Signal Messenger, LLC.
The foundation’s mission is “to develop open-source privacy technologies that protect free speech and enable secure global communications.”
“I will remain on the Signal board of directors, committed to helping embody Signal’s mission in this role, and I will assume the role of CEO next month to focus on candidate search,” Marlinspike said in a statement. a post announce his departure. “Brian Acton, who also serves on the Signal Foundation board, volunteered to serve as interim CEO during the search.”
By early 2021, Signal has around 40 million monthly active users; WhatsApp has over 2 billion monthly active users.
Messaging Factory Trouble
Signal has been rolling out support for the past few months mobile currency, a cryptocurrency that purportedly offers private digital transactions — it uses an encrypted blockchain rather than a public blockchain. beta testing Started last April in England.
The group decided to integrate MobileCoin – Marlinspike acted as an advisor during development – controversial, and is not easy to reconcile with Marlin Spike’s recent The acclaimed “web3” IT infrastructure related to DeFi (Decentralized Finance), NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) and related cryptocurrencies. It also doesn’t fit the notion that Signal is run by a non-profit organization.
London-based software developer and cryptocurrency critic Stephen Deere last year denounced Signal’s embrace of MobileCoin as a blow to intuition and a betrayal.
“Many of us have spent a lot of time and social capital moving our friends and family from exploitative data-siphoning platforms like Facebook to Signal in hopes of breaking the cycle of commercial exploitation of our online relationships,” he said. wrote In an April 2021 blog post. “Some of us felt taken advantage of.”
Two days ago, Signal’s MobileCoin integration is now available to at least some app users in the US, said Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute, echo Alex Stamos Care Combining end-to-end encryption with hard-to-trace payments is a source of conflict with law enforcement authorities and governments.
Cryptographer Bruce Schneier provided a similar assessment of adding MobileCoin support to Signal last year.
“I think this is a very bad idea,” Schneier wrote in an article blog post. “It’s not just a bloat for a clean secure communication app. It’s not just blockchain that is simply stupid.
“It’s not even Signal that chooses to tie itself to a specific blockchain currency. Rather, adding cryptocurrencies to end-to-end encrypted applications confuses the ethics of the product and invites various government investigations and regulatory interventions: through the U.S. Internal Revenue Service Bureau, the SEC, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Bureau, and possibly the FBI.”
Marlin Spike did not respond to a request for comment. ®
