There is no such thing as the Whisper protocol, AFAIK.

Signal uses the Signal protocol, formerly known as TextSecure due to Signal being a merge of the earlier (proprietary) projects TextSecure for encrypted messaging and RedPhone for encrypted voice calls.

The two projects were initially started by Whisper Systems, co-founded by Moxie Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson. The name of this company may be the cause of confusion, but the protocol has to my knowledge never been called anything else than TextSecure and subsequently Signal.

Whisper Systems was acqui-hired by Twitter who then open-sourced both projects under the GPL license, after which the Open Whisper Systems organization was created by Moxie to continue development on what later got merged into the Signal project as we see it today.

The protocol uses the Double Ratchet algorithm (a.k.a. Axolotl Ratchet) for cryptographic key exchange, invented specifically for secure messaging and use in Signal (although naturally open source and applicable for oher use cases too).

Wikipedia (understandably) has a nice timeline over the various projects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ASignal_timeline.svg

End of nerd snipe transmission, over and out. :-)

In Sweden there were computer magazines that came with a CD-ROM that had at least one new Linux distro on it with every issue. I had so much fun trying them all out on my computer and noting down what I liked the best with each of them.

Sometimes when I was home alone for an extended period of time, I used to install a distro on the shared family computer as well, to use as a router and have the feeling of running a real server (so far I had only experienced UNIX/Linux servers via restricted shells on public services over dialup, but never as root…).

Before the family returned home I would reinstall Windows 95 and they would be none the wiser. At least I think so…

In case you haven’t already explored existing browser alternatives, Qutebrowser is a keyboard-driven browser that can be infinitely extended as it is written in Python and you have full access to the browser API (including the low-level internals) in your configuration file. You can import any Python modules you need, and it has native support for ad blocker lists + userscripts (Greasemonkey et al).

This is actually a great idea, especially if it also supported recurring payments. I’ve terminated all my subscriptions to various streaming services and am planning to instead use that money for monthly donations to FOSS projects I use - such a service would help, both for payment and possibly discovering other projects I haven’t thought about that offer ways to donate!