I am very interested in hearing the postmortem of this extended outage technology/architecture stand point.
Not to be cynical, but I wonder if this is caused by an attack by the company who is losing users!
Signal is having technical difficulties
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Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#82I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
your comment led me to do same!
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it's less magic and more the lack of E2EE.
I'm not familiar with encryption and how does either of services work on the backend, but shouldn't E2E happen on users devices? (like... end to end). And if that's the case - how does this impact Signal's infrastructure?
- You need to orchestrate key exchange between clients which is additional overhead (probs negligible).
- Messages can't be edited so any corrections made by users need to be entirely new transmission over the wire (probs negligible)
- Encrypted data can't be effectively compressed, and compression before encryption can lead to side-channel attacks. You can generally mitigate this by building your compression and encryption together (e.g. SSL does this), but not entirely sure this works for Signal with an E2EE arch. Either way I would assume that E2EE payload sizes transmitted over the wire are larger than stuff sent over the wire with GZIP/SSL (as Telegram is probably doing).
- MAIN REASON (my guess): group chats in the Signal protocol require sending a different encrypted message to each participant, rather than a single identical message to all participants. Honestly my algorithmic complexity chops aren't the best, but I think that would make Signal group chats O[2n] while Telegram group chats are more like O[log n], if they utilize clients sending the group chat to each other, which is a crazy level of difference in efficiency for what is effectively the same thing and a pretty common use case (group chats).
Long story short, secure things that are hard to mess with are less efficient than things that are easier to mess with. This is why blockchains like Bitcoin are much more lethargic than a normal database – there are some necessary performance trade-offs required when you want high levels of security in your system. There are a bunch of small little things that probably aren't a big deal, but every little bit adds up when you're trying to scale a service to millions of active users / billions of messages.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#84Just a friendly reminder that Signal runs on donations and that if you can go and give them some money: https://signal.org/donate/
Or that you can use that money for a Matrix server instead of supporting centralization.
Element is less polished than Signal app but they've been catching up quite fast. If you and your friends aren't locked into the Signal ecosystem yet, might be worth considering, especially if you're techies.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#85After getting burned by Keybase, I didn't even look at Signal. I am curious to see how Signal works in the long term without a revenue model. I paid for Matrix and got my team on it, working great. The nice thing about paying for something is you know what it costs.
Paying for something doesn't really tell you anything.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#86Guess who is not having technical difficulties, ever: Telegram
They are going to be the next Facebook. I don't understand why people underestimate them so much. When they rolled their own crypto in some areas, people made fun of them, yet no one could break it. When they published their source code openly, people say they aren't open source like signal. When FB bought WhatsApp, people seriously continued to choose it over Telegram, despite Telegram able to host much bigger chats, and so on. And being used all over the world, by the same government officials who were officially trying to get it offline LMAO.
I just don't get what's so bad about Telegram.
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I"m not saying this is what happened this time, but I would suspect we'll see a lot more outages of encrypted centralized chat like this as nation states try to prevent general society from moving away from the social media websites almost solely designed for mass surveillance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/13/technology/telegram-signa... > The result was a mass migration that, if it lasts, could weaken the power of Facebook and other big tech companies. On Tuesday, Telegram said it added more than 25 million users over the previous three days, pushing it to over 500 million users. Signal added nearly 1.3 million users on Monday alone, after averaging just 50,000 downloads a day last year…
Hey, who let the Signal devs write their backend in Ruby on Rails? :-p
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#88I am very interested in hearing the postmortem of this extended outage technology/architecture stand point. Not to be cynical, but I wonder if this is caused by an attack by the company who is losing users!
[deleted]
Re: Signal is having technical difficulties
#89I just donated to Signal after seeing the error banner in the app. I realised I was more than happy to pay WhatsApp's yearly charge back in the pre-Facebook days (think it was 70p or so?). Figured I could give Signal a few quid every now and then, maybe keep a server up for a few seconds :) Donation link should anyone be interested: https://signal.org/donate/
We have no info as to how much money they need or how much they currently have. For all we know, this was just an area of oversight and not related to funding at all.
I’d prefer to pay yearly than to feel the spectre of guilt for using a “free” app.