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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#221

Post by dexwiz »

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?)

You can't send an sms yourself like you can an email. Instead of setting up a server, you have to work with a telco provider (an aggregator specifically). Any SMS service eventually hands off to one of these. Many SaaS SMS providers are just frontends for legacy telco services. They charge insane fees because they can, that is all there is to it.

Sending mass email is still difficult. Its probably easier to pay a provider than set up and establish reputation for yourself. But they don't charge near the rates. Last time I compared rates it was something like 10x-100x to send an sms compared to an email, but it has been a while.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#222

Post by jedberg »

Buttons840 wrote: post #60
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…

It's a bit off topic, but I've wondered the same. We could stack a hundred layers of encryption algorithms, and if just one of them works, then the whole stack is secure.

You could, but you'd be adding complexity to solve a mostly non-existent problem. Security is rarely broken because the algorithm itself is broken. It's usually because one end has a key logger or other vulnerability. Or they are literally storing the unencrypted text in an unencrypted data store after reading it.

In the meantime, the added complexity adds new places for errors.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#223

Post by NOWHERE_ »

davidhyde wrote: post #156
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…

How about they pull their socks up and use peer to peer technology instead? Messages are asynchronous so they need to be temporarily stored but routing real-time audio and video is a technology problem that they have chosen the expensive way to solve.

If signal adds username only accounts it makes sense to relay calls if users don’t want their IP leaked to the other person.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#224

Post by myself248 »

lxgr wrote: post #173
myself248 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Huh, I knew those existed for voice calls, didn't realize they applied to SMS too. Makes sense, though.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#225

Post by j45 »

ocrow wrote: post #161
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…

So ... hire staff to manage that complexity?

Might not be cheaper at scale and truly globally.

The loaded costs should have the numbers run.

It would be a fascination under the covers look with signal.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#226

Post by wombarly »

ocrow wrote: post #161
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…

So ... hire staff to manage that complexity?

They probably already have that staff for GCP, Azure, AWS?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#227

Post by lxgr »

rezonant wrote: post #204
cmiles74 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My phone runs Android, I'm pretty much forced to use SMS in order to communicate with anyone who uses an iPhone and that's most of my family. While it can be argued that iMessage provides a good enough experience on an iPhone for most people, I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive.

> I have wondered if they are the one thing keeping SMS alive. Absolutely they are. Most of my friends and family are Pixel users and we all communicate using RCS. If Apple would just support the modern replacement for SMS (which includes end to end encryption), iPhone users would be much safer and would have a better experience.

I really dislike iMessage, but somehow Google has managed to deliver an even worse alternative with RCS:

It apparently just doesn't work with dual-SIM phones, requires a phone number and an active plan with a supported operator (at least iMessage lets me use an email address!), the multi-device story is non-existent, to just name a few.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#228

Post by [deleted] »

explaininjs wrote: post #184
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.

A Flow: > Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email > Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A Later... > Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email > Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone nu…

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#229

Post by renonce »

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.

Just wondering, are they relying on these big name cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP), known for predative traffic and storage pricing? Have they considered cheaper providers such as Backblaze B2 for storage and Hetzner/OVH for servers? The fees for storage, server and bandwidth could be cut by 80% if they did that.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#230

Post by beefee »

jawns wrote: post #24
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.

Phone numbers have become the de facto version of "Internet stamps" for identity verification. They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.) But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs w…

A service that requires a telephone number simply shouldn't be called an Internet service. It can't be used purely over the Internet.

Telephone numbers are fundamentally incompatible with privacy. Signal's leadership knows this, but they don't appear to care.

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