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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#491

Post by jtakkala »

raesene9 wrote: post #449
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outside of London average developer salaries are probably under $50k in the UK For top-notch security developers, I call bullshit. Signal would be worthless if it started offshoring development to nickel and dime.

I said Average for a reason :D I didn't say you can get "top-notch" security developers for that. I don't think there's industry numbers for that set of people in the UK, as it's not a big enough set. However I'd be surprised if they were 150K plus though, that's a very rare salary in the UK. Also there are cheaper countries than the UK who have great devs.

There's definitely top-notch software and security engineers making well north of £150k in the UK. As you go up in levels, it's indeed a small set of people, but FB / Google comp for a top L7 engineer working in the same space as Signal engineers can be $700k+ in the UK. Just have a look at levels.fyi, and you'll see that even finance will pay over $500k in London. Furthermore, given how small the group of people are at the top of these companies, very few will self-report their incomes publicly, which is why you'll rarely hear about the engineers making $1M+ – but those cases do exist.

The people behind Signal pioneered end-to-end encryption, and as is pointed out in the blog post, there's still a lot of novel cryptography development involved in building a privacy-first messenger. You can't do that without top-notch talent.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#492

Post by nurple »

caeril wrote: post #475
leptons wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be happy to pay $1/year for signal, and I'd pay $2/year if it were decoupled from my phone number.

I'd pay much more than $2 if they offered account identifiers other than phone numbers. Trying to get a burner SIM or DID while still staying anonymous is getting increasingly difficult. But I think it's pretty clear by now that this is a feature for FVEY IC, not a bug. FFS, they burned development resources on stickers , but abjectly refuse to offer alternative account identifiers. The standard apologist response is…

Agreed, at this point I don't believe the "privacy" aspect of Signal's sales sheet means anything. Most that I know use it primarily because they can have clients on all platforms, including desktop.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#493

Post by wpietri »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #461
mhh__ wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that including staff + trying to do new stuff or just the servers.

Why should Wikipedia do new stuff? Or rather, why is it okay for Wikipedia to lie to people to get funding for their new pet projects?

> Why should Wikipedia do new stuff?

Because it's not perfect yet?

The point of Wikipedia is not to have some servers ticking over. The project has a vision: "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge."

I agree it's not ok for them to lie, and am bothered enough by their dubious fundraising tactics that I stopped donating. But that's a totally separate concern than whether Wikipedia's mission is complete.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#494

Post by charles_f »

wpietri wrote: post #487
GabeIsko wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works. I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowmen…

> Don't take them personally No. They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally. More broadly, I don't have to excuse bad behavior just because somebody's making money off it or because it makes some too-narrow metric go up. Yes, it's a complex and imperfect world. But to me that's a reason to work harder to make things better, not a reason for people to…

> They are meant to manipulate me personally, as well as other persons I care about. I will take them personally.

This, absolutely! they play on people's psyche and mental cabling by trying to guilt you in the same way your parent would ; it's manipulative, and I have an absolute hatred for these tactics.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#495

Post by kroltan »

School-Cotton wrote: post #406
rasso wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except real privacy?

Why is it more private than WhatsApp?

Pay attention to WhatsApp's wording (all privacy/security claims start with "your messages"), and their privacy policy, and you'll see that while message involving with individuals (non-Business users) are secured, your contact list is not, neither are chats with businesses or the metadata about you chatting (destinations, frequency, time)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#497

Post by Krasnol »

nurple wrote: post #477
akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

I guess maybe I'm missing the purported point of signal, attaching your phone number to use it notwithstanding, but attaching payment identity to it as well? Like, what's the point of going through the pain required to use it?

Signal is not for anonymity.

It's for security.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#499

Post by toast0 »

peanut-walrus wrote: post #441
toast0 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carriers that run their own messaging infrastructure can allow for direct connections from 3rd parties, and set the price per message to whatever they want, including zero. For something like Twitter where you could post by SMS, the balance of traffic might have been such that giving Twitter free outbound SMS was balanced by the charges incurred by customers sending to Twitter's shortcode. Or it might just be balance…

If you require global connectivity, managing hundreds of carrier APIs, contracts, etc seems like major overhead. Also, there are companies whose only purpose for existing is providing messaging, like Twilio, are they just...not doing this or do the carriers just not play ball? In that case, why would the carriers agree to sell to you at a discount?

Aggregators do some of this, and they can negotiate pricing to some degree, but a carrier is unlikely to intentionally give them zero cost traffic, and even if they do, they're not going to pass that through at zero cost.

I ran the engineering side of carrier integrations at WhatsApp. Carriers wanted to sell data plans with special pricing for data with WA and use WA branding in advertising, because it attracted customers that might later convert to a bigger general purpose data plan. As part of that, we would ask for zero rated SMS to their customers for verification. When it was available, it was generally faster and higher success vs sending messages through an aggregator.

We also had some, usually small, carriers approach us asking us to set up direct routes to them for verification, because their customers would not always receive our messages when we sent through an aggregator. Early in my career at WA, we would just send these carriers to our aggregator contacts, and often things would get linked up and then we'd still pay $/message but it would work better. As we got a little bigger and built support for direct routes anyway, it was usually not too hard to set up a direct connection and then there'd be no cost for that carrier. Messing around with IPSEC VPNs and SMPP isn't fun and the GSMA SOAP messaging APIs are way worse, but once you get the first couple implementations done, it becomes cookie cutter (and FB had built way better tools for this, and a 24/7 support team, so I never had to be up, on the phone with telco peeps at 3 am kicking racoon or whatever ipsec daemon we were running until it finally connected)

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#500

Post by hutzlibu »

nurple wrote: post #477
akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

I guess maybe I'm missing the purported point of signal, attaching your phone number to use it notwithstanding, but attaching payment identity to it as well? Like, what's the point of going through the pain required to use it?

It is not meant as a anonymous messager, but an encrypted one, you can trust to not sell you out.
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