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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#121

Post by lxgr »

munk-a wrote: post #102
lxgr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation. It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspec…

To clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages. I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).

Ah, I see what you mean. That's not what I'd call iMessage though, that's just SMS:

The iOS application is called "Messages"; iMessage is the over-the-top Apple-exclusive messaging service.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#122

Post by zimpenfish »

baby wrote: post #15
suriyaG wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess, then the question is how real time was the website. Was it as real time as supporting, instant messaging, voice/video calls etc

Oh I forgot that signal is not just about forwarding messages. I’m wondering how much the VOIP costs.

FTA: "Signal spends around $2.8 million dollars per year on bandwidth to support sending messages and files (such as photos, videos, voice notes, documents, etc.) and to enable voice and video calls."

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#123

Post by vore »

exabrial wrote: post #51

Some of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alon…

  - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV.
You get what you pay for, though. $338k/year seems like a reasonable salary for people working on something as privacy critical as Signal – just because you're working for a nonprofit doesn't mean you have to work for less competitive wages.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#125

Post by linuxdude314 »

zamalek wrote: post #65
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…

The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

No, WhatsApp won because it successfully replicated and replaced the SMS experience in the developing world, where the cost of data was dirt cheap in comparison to the cost of a single SMS message.

This is why it still has a stronghold as well…

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#126

Post by sterlind »

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…

lots of drug traffickers went with something homegrown (Anom), which turned out to be an FBI front. they'd have been a lot safer sticking to Signal. and you can audit the Signal client's source code, which is enough to verify its secrecy.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#128

Post by aquova »

Retric wrote: post #113
aquova wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.

It’s the building a social network part that’s frictionless not creating user name process that’s frictionless.

The lack of a social network is why I settled on Signal. Before using Signal I tried Telegram, which requires a phone number and if they recognize your number in any of their user's contact list (which many people seem happy to allow access to), they'll send them a notification telling them their contact has joined. I got a nasty message within 10 minutes of making an account from a woman accusing me of pretending to be her deceased father. I had inherited his phone number a decade prior, and it told her I had made an account. I was so shocked they not only allowed, but encouraged such behavior that I deleted it promptly and swore I'd never use it again.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#129

Post by just_boost_it »

aquova wrote: post #89
zamalek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone number requirement is why WhatsApp won the space over in the first place. There were loads of username+password-based services before it, but none reached the market it did. Why? An incredibly wide user funnel, singing up is frictionless. You might understand that it's a bad idea, but that makes you an outlier.

I don't really buy this argument. Is signing up with a phone number really that much easier for the average user than using a username/email account? Billions of people seemed to have no problems making a Facebook or Google account.

With WhatsApp, your phone number allowed you to see everyone in your contacts that you could message on there, so you could see everyone straight away. Without that, you'd have to bring your friends along and have them sign up as well, then give you their username so you can connect.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#130

Post by lxgr »

slaw wrote: post #72
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings. I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce co…

Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives? Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

There's a lower bound on what these services can charge in the form of interconenction fees charged by the mobile service providers delivering the messages.

In the US, that's effectively zero due to the US phone infrastructure largely using a shared-cost model, but in most other countries which use "sender pays", these fees can be significant.

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