Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#171

Post by rchaud » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #77

yetanotherloss wrote: post #42

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.

I've been to a lot of meetups in the last year and exchanged contacts with people. As a nerdy idealist running a deGoogled Android with no proprietary software, I always have to tell them that I don’t have WhatsApp, just Signal. Again and again I have heard the reply, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got Signal, I use it to buy drugs.” So, that’s some of the active user base in my city, but none of those users are very motivated to u…

those users probably have a far lower impact on Signal's operating costs because they're only sending the occasional message instead of using it as a broadcast platform.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#172

Post by frivoal » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

olah_1 wrote: post #147

So charge everyone $2 per month to use it? shrug If you're not going to show how much money you get via donations, I'm not donating. I'm not going to donate more than you actually need, for example.

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#173

Post by lxgr » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

myself248 wrote: post #143

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.

What's it cost to be an SS7 peer for a year? Could they spin up their own "phone company" for the purpose of delivering SMS verification and nothing else, cheaper than they're paying someone else's markup?

What's expensive isn't (just) the technical infrastructure, it's termination/interconnection fees charged by the destination mobile networks.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#174

Post by irrational » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

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.

What did WhatsApp win? I've never used it, so I'm not sure what anyone uses it for.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#175

Post by oconnore » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

flower-giraffe wrote: post #92

Did I read that right $19m people cost for 50 people.

Would you actually want Signal to be cheaping out on the developers that are maintaining the cryptography software that protects millions of people?

Someone with that level of expertise is going to be expensive.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#176

Post by callalex » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

hotnfresh wrote: post #67

mi_lk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) how's java relevant here?

Java in theory and in synthetic benchmarks: damn near as lean and mean as C. Every actual Java project: “oh, did you want that memory and those cycles for something else? Yeah, sorry, I need them all. Why no, I’m not actually doing anything right now, why do you ask?”

In this case we don’t need to speculate at all. Signal is open source. Back when I was at Twilio we even did some at-scale experiments with running Signal. The intensive parts have absolutely nothing to do with Java because the server logic is relatively simple. The hard parts of Signal are the database storage/retrieval and the encryption.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#177

Post by yt-sdb » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

> $19 million for 50 staff. That's $338k/head on average.

How did you compute this? 19/5 is 3.8

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#178

Post by dghlsakjg » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

dzikimarian wrote: post #134

linuxdude314 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Experience on WhatsApp, Telegram or any other IM is vastly better than SMS. Unless by SMS you mean iMessage - then it's even simpler - most of the world doesn't use iPhones.

I think that's the gp's point.

Given the choice between SMS and a service that provides the same functionality is free, superior in most ways, borderless, etc. the choice to use whatsapp is obvious.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#179

Post by bpfrh » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

mushufasa wrote: post #114

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…

It's easy to say that "you should do x" from the bleachers but when you're in the arena you run up against reality. For example, Signal had a blog a while ago about how they tried to avoid the sms features, actually for privacy reasons, but they found people just didn't use other alternatives. Here's a reddit thread of users advocating for SMS support https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/y3ymfl/keep_sms_sup... .…

That was for sending SMS via Signal, not for verifiyng users via sms and they did remove that.

https://signal.org/blog/sms-removal-android/

edit: wording, forgot the word remove

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#180

Post by itslennysfault » Thu, Nov 16, 2023, 5:22 PM UTC

aalimov_ wrote: post #117

munk-a wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use…

> stubbornly use iMessange. Personally, I prefer it over downloading yet another client, dealing with additional credentials, wondering about who can access my messages, and so on and so forth… And all that just to message the handful of people that I know who use .

If only someone would release a universal protocol that the app's native messaging apps could utilize to eliminate the need for these 3rd party messaging apps. Oh, right, it's called RCS and Apple refuses to support it.