Quoted:
Is Signal the one Jack Dorsey recently endorsed?

I have several questions as well, but I'm too dumb to know where to ask them, and doesn't look like GD is going to help much.

Whisper Systems in 2010. The company produced proprietary enterprise mobile security software. Among these were an encrypted texting program called TextSecure and an encrypted voice calling app called RedPhone.

In November 2011, Whisper Systems announced that it had been acquired by Twitter.

Shortly after the acquisition, Whisper Systems' RedPhone service was made unavailable.

later left Twitter and founded Open Whisper Systems as a collaborative open source project for the continued development of TextSecure and RedPhone.

In February 2014, Open Whisper Systems introduced the second version of their TextSecure Protocol (now Signal Protocol), which added end-to-end encrypted group chat and instant messaging capabilities to TextSecure.

Toward the end of July 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced plans to unify its RedPhone and TextSecure applications as Signal.

On 18 November 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the Signal Protocol into each WhatsApp client platform.

On 5 April 2016, WhatsApp and Open Whisper Systems announced that they had finished adding end-to-end encryption to "every form of communication" on WhatsApp, and that users could now verify each other's keys.

In September 2016, Google launched a new messaging app called Allo, which features an optional "incognito mode" that uses the Signal Protocol for end-to-end encryption.

In October 2016, Facebook deployed an optional mode called "secret conversations" in Facebook Messenger which provides end-to-end encryption using an implementation of the Signal Protocol.

In November 2015, the TextSecure and RedPhone applications on Android were merged to become Signal for Android.

On 4 October 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Open Whisper Systems published a series of documents revealing that OWS had received a subpoena requiring them to provide information associated with two phone numbers for a federal grand jury investigation in the first half of 2016. Only one of the two phone numbers was registered on Signal, and because of how the service is designed, OWS was only able to provide "the time the user's account had been created and the last time it had connected to the service". OWS said it was the first time they had received a subpoena, and that they were committed to treat "any future requests the same way".

On February 21, 2018, Moxie Marlinspike and WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is "to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal's mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous."[4][46] The foundation was started with an initial $50 million in funding from Acton, who had left WhatsApp's parent company Facebook in September 2017.

Once Signal messages are received and decrypted on a user's device, they are stored locally in a SQLite database that is encrypted with SQLCipher. The key to decrypt this database is also stored locally on the user's device and can be accessed if the device is unlocked. On December 10, 2020, Cellebrite published a blog post announcing that one of their products could now access this key and use it to "decrypt the Signal app." Cellebrite retracted the post a day later, replacing it with a summary of their product's capabilities.       representatives from Signal, who said the original post by Cellebrite had been about accessing data on "an unlocked Android phone in their physical possession" and that they "could have just opened the app to look at the messages.

Between 2013 and 2016, Open Whisper Systems received grants from the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Open Technology Fund.

Signal Messenger was initially funded by donations through the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which acted as Signal Messenger's fiscal sponsor while the Signal Foundation's non-profit status was pending. The Signal Foundation is officially tax-exempt as of February 2019.

Quoted:
went and yanked this off wiki.

I used to use the original products back in the day.

Having pasted all that, remember that it took about 25 years for people to realize the biggest european seller of encryption products was a company wholly owned by the CIA.

Previously, it would be concerning because of the types of people on signal, would make it... advantageous to crack. With everybody jumping on it last few years, it would be a bitch to separate the noise from the stuff you wanted to hear. Never mind, I don't know what I'm talking about.