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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#581

Post by dheera »

charles_f wrote: post #494
wpietri wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm good at detecting manipulation now, and the more someone tries to manipulate me the less I will give in.

I just put my money toward people who don't do that crap, and I want the manipulators to see that I'm giving money to their non-manipulating competitors.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#582

Post by Barrin92 »

rglullis wrote: post #562
danielheath wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how many activists have used it in overthrowing dictatorial governments, self-sovereignty seems an odd choice of words to claim it doesn’t support.

Perhaps it was a bad choice of words. What I mean is that they say "you don't need to trust us", yet they require you to run through them. They refuse to build their system in a decentralized way, and the more that time goes by the more the decentralized alternatives are showing they are as secure as Signal without forcing us to accept their restrictions like mandatory use of phone numbers for authentication.

> "you don't need to trust us"

you literally don't. It's a fully encrypted service. The literal purpose of encryption is to move data securely through insecure or even adversarial channels. Which you can verify, it's audited and open source.

They refuse to build the app in a decentralized way because decentralization is an ideological obsession that is useless in this context, and because centralized organizations can actually ship polished software that works for normal people and move quickly.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#583

Post by marssaxman »

DavidSJ wrote: post #548

Personally, I refuse to financially support Signal so long as they're still holding my chat logs hostage on my old iPhone and seem not at all concerned about solving this problem, which has existed for years. There was (and still is, so far as I know) no upfront warning to users that if they don't first sync with a desktop client, and their phone gets lost or stolen, their iTunes backups do not (unlike most iPhone ap…

Perhaps Signal is not the right choice for you? It seems odd to be so concerned about data retention from a system which prominently features support for disappearing messages!

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#584

Post by TacticalCoder »

RunSet wrote: post #10
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 did my part to help reduce costs by switching to the decentralized alternative, Session.[0] Bonus: Session does not demand users' phone number. Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1] [0] https://getsession.org/ [1] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html

And as a bonus Session has the best line ever: "Send (encrypted) Messages, not metadata".

They've given Signal quite the fork.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#585

Post by novok »

traviswt wrote: post #576
illiac786 wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is in testing and coming to you early next year.

Would invites be a solution? Anyone can sign up if they provide a number, otherwise you need an invite from someone with a number linked. It would clump the identity/legitimacy for all invitees into origin number, but still allow disparate accounts.

It’s not about legitimacy but having a bootstrapped contact list to talk to along with other user friction reasons

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#586

Post by DavidSJ »

marssaxman wrote: post #583
DavidSJ wrote: post #548

Personally, I refuse to financially support Signal so long as they're still holding my chat logs hostage on my old iPhone and seem not at all concerned about solving this problem, which has existed for years. There was (and still is, so far as I know) no upfront warning to users that if they don't first sync with a desktop client, and their phone gets lost or stolen, their iTunes backups do not (unlike most iPhone ap…

Perhaps Signal is not the right choice for you? It seems odd to be so concerned about data retention from a system which prominently features support for disappearing messages!

I expect messages to disappear when I turn on disappearing messages and not when I don’t turn them on.

But yes, I agree it’s not the right choice for me and many others who want to have full ownership over our data, and they should make that clear in advance.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#587

Post by asymmetric »

yankput wrote: post #568

Didn't they do some sort of cryptocurrency thing. How is that going? edit: it was called MobileCoin right edit2: they do https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In... is that generating any revenue?

I have held off donating to signal so far exactly because there is no clarity around this token, why it was even added to signal and who profited from that.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#588

Post by jmprspret »

yankput wrote: post #568

Didn't they do some sort of cryptocurrency thing. How is that going? edit: it was called MobileCoin right edit2: they do https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In... is that generating any revenue?

Probably not much at all. Thankfully they didn't shove it down user's throats - its kinda hidden behind a setting. I guess if they did push it harder to users it may have generated more revenue, at the cost of users who won't put up with cryptocurrency rubbish.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#590

Post by conductr »

drapado wrote: post #530
conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

Are you the same kind of people that think that NGO workers should work for free or for a small wage that is not representative of the market wage for their positions?

No, I’m the type of person who thinks tech salaries are bloated in certain areas and certain companies and that does not follow the distribution of talent. It’s followed the distribution of VC money and profits of large companies. The evidence of such is that the median software engineer in the US is in the low-mid $100s (depending on what source I want to believe it’s $110k-$140k). But I also believe that same talent can be sourced outside the US is many cases and for far less expense.

I also view most apps/tech as not very novel. It’s largely the same engineering “problems” that are known and well documented. A lot of it can be done by average developers and “top tier” talent isn’t usually needed other than probably the cryptographic components in Signal’s case. Scale is certainly a concern, but that is a familiar problem that’s has a lot of documentation solutions and approaches.

I could be wrong. Maybe they’re already doing this and it just happens most of their expense is going to a couple high paid execs. Could be that I’m underestimating the complexity as well. But I find my statements to be true in many cases. I can even point to the number of times I’ve talked to consultants and top tier devs about building things for me. What they would charge $1m for I can often piece together for less than $50k by hiring a few folks in low COL areas and then just spending a little effort refactoring their code to be as pretty as I like it to be; sometimes I outsource that too but the point is having a whole company of top tier talent isn’t usually necessary, it’s a choice. Just like believing that top tier talent only exists in the high cost tech hub cities is a choice more so than the truth.

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