Christian: 'If we can give it a higher rating or if we can dispel rumors, then we
need to make that part of our first post.'
Discipline first: debunking a rumor must not buy score, or the instrument
becomes a PR department with a database attached.
What the rumors actually did was correct one under-informed dimension.
- incident_record 7 -> 8. The 2026 'Signal was hacked' panic is a documented
phishing campaign. FBI/CISA PSA260626 says plainly that the app and its
encryption were not compromised, Signal published a precise correction within
days and shipped linkage confirmations by 2026-05-13. Fast, accurate,
independently corroborated.
- Total 75.9 -> 76.4. Half a point. That is the correct size.
- Everything else was already priced in: the OTF funding was already docked under
ownership, the phone number already docked under user control.
Evidence rows added for the FBI advisory, Signal's statement, the itemised
,955,000 OTF funding record (2013-2016), and the UK/Sweden exit commitments.
The recompute gate verified 76.4 from the weights and scores, not from trust.
Christian, 2026-10-29: 'Closed source software, you have no idea. And then all
we have is reputation. So you kind of start with one arm or two arms tied
behind your back.'
That is now arithmetic instead of an opinion.
- assessment.source_available: 1 = we can read the code, 0 = we cannot.
- Closed source cannot exceed 5 on ANY dimension without tier-1 or tier-2
evidence of kind 'capture' or 'filing'. Reputation is tier 3, and tier 3 is
not a measurement. The build fails if a closed-source score breaks the rule.
- Verifiability still caps at 3 with no reproducible build.
Practical ceiling for closed source: 86/100 in theory, if every dimension is
backed by a capture or a court filing. In practice it is a fight for a C.
- product.priority puts a human's ask ahead of a crawler's discovery.
- v_backlog orders by priority, then measured usage.
- migrate(): the database authors itself, so it must survive its own schema
changes. Add columns, drop views, let schema.sql recreate them. Never drop
and rebuild, which would destroy the self-authored roster.
On the board: Slack (closed, capped) and Kino (closed, capped, founders call
2026-10-30 17:00). Neither is scored. Neither gets a number until it has
evidence.
The database is the source of truth; the site is a view over it.
- packages/core/db/schema.sql: vendors, products, categories, the 8-dimension
instrument, assessments, scores, evidence, findings, off-ramp, plus the
derived v_product_score view the game reads.
- packages/core/db/build.mjs: rebuilds bigtech.db, absorbs the legacy 43-product
roster as unassessed, applies seeds, then verifies the instrument's own rules
(weights sum to 100, totals recompute, grades match bands, every score has a
rationale, no tier-4 evidence on a scored dimension, reproducible-build caps
actually enforced).
- packages/core/db/seed/0001-signal.sql: Signal Desktop 8.36.0-alpha.1 on linux,
75.9/100 grade B, weakest dimension local_data_exposure. Evidence points at
the re-runnable audit artifacts in the Servetus vault.
- packages/core/src/data/generated/catalog.{ts,json}: generated export.
Verified: 44 products, 1 assessed, all checks pass.
