Free Republic

The encrypted-messaging service Signal is the application of choice for dissenters around the world. The app has been downloaded by more than 100 million users and boasts high-profile endorsements from NSA leaker Edward Snowden and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk. Signal has created the perception that its users, including political dissidents, can communicate with one another without fear of government interception or persecution. But the insider history of Signal raises questions about the app’s origins and its relationship with government—in particular, with the American intelligence apparatus. Such a relationship would be troubling, given how much we have learned, in recent years,...

Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto has joined Heroku, the San Francisco outfit that cut its teeth with an online service for building, deploying, and readily scaling Ruby on Rails applications. In recent weeks, Heroku's "cloud" service has expanded beyond Rails to Node.js and Clojure and it intends to embrace additional languages as well, but the Matsumoto hire shows that the Saleforce.com-owned outfit is still very much a Ruby shop. Its "platform cloud" was originally built to ease the deployment of applications in a way that mirrored the effect Rails had on how the company's founders built applications. "Discovering Rails was one...