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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#41

Post by mi_lk »

baby wrote: post #9
Dunedan wrote: post #2

> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

I really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)

> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java)

how's java relevant here?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#42

Post by yetanotherloss »

Who is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame.

Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#43

Post by sky_rw »

vjk800 wrote: post #29

> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me?

Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#44

Post by jedberg »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #23

If you really wanted to talk to somebody in a "non-decryptable" fashion, could you set up like a channel that encrypts itself with a ton of different encryption methods, keys, etc. (encrypted payloads inside each other) Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was sayin…

You don't need multiple security protocols (and in fact that is almost always a bad idea). You just need one good protocol and a way to securely exchange the keys. What signal solved for the most part is the secure key exchange.

If you want to talk to one person, you can give them a USB key in person with a set of crypto keys and then use that to encrypt your messages over any transit method and it will be secure.

The hard part is the key exchange.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#45

Post by zitterbewegung »

jph wrote: post #21

Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…

Focusing on app features is one thing but the bigger picture is that Signal is at risk of not existing without capital… (just donated $20 today and I wish I could buy stickers off of them).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#46

Post by [deleted] »

jph wrote: post #21

Signal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are rea…

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#48

Post by candiddevmike »

sky_rw wrote: post #43
vjk800 wrote: post #29

> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?

I keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.

Only thing I can think of is it incentives them not to put backdoors into Signal/get fired.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#50

Post by abadpoli »

nicolaslem wrote: post #27
sandworm101 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a step backwards for me. Our organization uses signal in many situations where SMS isn't an option. When I land in a new country it is normal for my cell/SMS not to work. But I can hop on some local wifi and get signal messages. We had a widespread cell outage in my area last year. Signal not being on cell/SMS meant that I could still communicate with family without need of cell towers. This is a big step fo…

> When I land in a new country it is normal for my cell/SMS not to work. But I can hop on some local wifi and get signal messages. WiFi calling is a standard feature that does exactly what you describe for texts and calls, without using a third-party. I have cell connectivity turned off constantly on my phone and yet receive texts and calls via WiFi. It is actually an awesome feature for receiving 2FA SMS at my paren…

WiFi calling isn’t always free internationally though, it often gets charged according to your phone plan’s international rates, which is discouraging for many people. Signal, on the other hand, just sees WiFi as WiFi.
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