Paying over 100 USD per 1 TB of data transfer is just stupidly expensive. That's insane pricing...
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
401–410 of 965 posts
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#402I've loved Signal. It's been the only consistent way I've been able to send and receive high-quality pictures and videos at all. It's been the only way I've been reliably able to send texts when I'm in an area with poor reception, which is frequent. The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use. I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100%…
> Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good.
Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collecting and forever storing sensitive user data in the cloud they've refused to update their privacy policy to alert people to that data collection.
If you advertise your service to human rights activists, journalists, and whistleblowers whose freedom and/or lives are on the line you owe it to them to be extremely clear about what their risks are by using your service, but Signal outright lies to them in the very first line of their privacy policy.
This isn't "perfect being the enemy of good" this is either a massive dead canary warning people not to use/trust Signal, or it's completely immoral and irresponsible.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#403>Privacy That’s a very bold statement from an app that still requires a phone number using a broken protocol (gsm) to “verify” your identity and authenticate it, sim swap attacks can be carried out by kids these days. Also, don’t expect privacy when you are using a proprietary OS like iOS or one full of Google services that also have proprietary firmware drivers, they (the adversaries) don’t need to even decrypt thes…
I'm always intrigued by people that have this POV. Security and privacy are not binary for fucks sake. Improvement on the status quo is great and Signal improves a hell of a lot. Not to mention that half of your comment is non-issues.
there's a big social cost to trying to get others to use Signal, and it's not worth it if the advertised features don't work as advertised..
that said I stopped using Signal years ago because of basic deliverability being less reliable than SMS.. I switched back to SMS so I could communicate reliably with a loved one during an emergency when Signal randomly stopped letting me respond to messages, and I won't pay the social cost twice of trying to convince contacts to use it after having to abandon the service when I really needed it.
Actually between Element and Signal and the differences between their usability as advertised versus the reality of using them with non-technical users, I've used up all of my social capital for convincing people to use "better" networks and mostly just use SMS/RCS now.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#404Total salary bill: $20m. 50 staff so average salary: $400k. I'd be happy with $200k USD - that's more than I get paid in my country at current exchange rates.
I've actually posted Signal's tax return before, but a great thing about US nonprofits is the tax return is publicly available from the IRS website: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_... The last one available is from 2020, though. They tend to lag a few years behind. They're required to report key employees plus top-five compensated who aren't "key." Brian Acton and Meredith Whittaker both…
> The expense being reported is total cost of employment, which includes FICA taxes paid by the employer, 401k matches, and probably most notably healthcare, but all benefits and in-kind compensation.
This is incorrect, reportable compensation on a 990 is the amount in box 5 of the employee's W-2, which does not include health insurance, taxes, etc.
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio...
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#406Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of people, myself included, have it installed but never use it after they dropped SMS support. Only a tiny fraction of my contacts use Signal, and most of those are also on Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord, and others. Signal offers essentially nothing to me.
Except real privacy?
Why is it more private than WhatsApp?
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
Messages inflexible reliance on SMS for communication to non-Apple devices is definitely an Apple issue, in my opinion. Apple has made it clear that they continue to default to SMS for non-iPhone communication solely because it's unpleasant for everyone involved.
There's apparently even "green bubble bullying"[1] of kids who have Android devices and thus have their messages appear different. In this particular way Apple is happy compromising the mental health of young people to secure a larger market share - it's awful and they deserve a lot more negative PR for it. 1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
Agreed.
It reminds me of the "Blue eyes/Brown eyes" exercise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott) so let's say this was a real psychology experiment. Middle-schoolers and high-schoolers are encouraged to communicate via a chat application with rich multimedia functionality. But any conversation that includes even a single individual who belongs to an arbitrarily-defined "out-group" has its functionality degraded and the application highlights who the out-group member(s) are. After a year you compare the mental, social, physical, and academic well-being of both groups. Would your university's IRB approve such an experiment?
I initially gave Apple the benefit of the doubt that this was simply a technical limitation. And of course kids will always bully each other about something. But at this point it does indeed seem like a billion-dollar company is intentionally amplifying and leveraging this sort of bullying to drive marketshare. If you don't find this immoral then I'm not sure what to say.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#408Earlier 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…
For the purpose of 2FA and account registration let’s view it as a tax for fraud prevention, where the real value in SMS is in verifying someone’s identity rather than transmitting messages
If SMS actually worked for this purpose, it would be acceptable. However, SMS provides no guarantees about:
1) If it actually gets delivered
2) If it is delivered to the intended recipient
3) 1 and 2 without anyone reading or tampering the message while in transit
Now, even if stars align, your SMS ends up on a route where nobody is mitm-ing or hijacking it, the telco systems work and it gets delivered, it is STILL not a guarantee of identity. It simply verifies that you have somehow got access to a particular phone number.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#409I've loved Signal. It's been the only consistent way I've been able to send and receive high-quality pictures and videos at all. It's been the only way I've been reliably able to send texts when I'm in an area with poor reception, which is frequent. The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use. I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100%…
> Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good. Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collec…
Every single time I've seen Signal asked for data in a court case, they've basically handed back a unix timestamp of when the account was created and said "that's all we have". Or it was last access time, I could have misremembered.
Either way, that seems quite good to me.
Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
#410You have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.
Wikipedia is particularly insulting because they make enough money to cover the actual costs of running Wikipedia (the site) in days if not hours, and could operate for years without any additional donations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32840097
Is that including staff + trying to do new stuff or just the servers.