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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#661

Post by tornato7 »

Rastonbury wrote: post #158
Aissen wrote: post #97

The cloud tax is crazy (especially bandwidth). Pretty sure Signal has reached the scale where they would be cheaper by building their infra, maybe starting with the most expensive (storage + bandwidth), and then doing others. SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and chang…

Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth

I found that with the bandwidth and storage that my company was using on the cloud, we could get ROI in under 2 months by building a server and running it in house. Now we've scaled up to a dozen servers but it's still just a handful of computers in a closet that saves us $50k/mo in cloud costs. It was dirt cheap to slap together and scale up incrementally.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#662

Post by lrvick »

chimeracoder wrote: post #612
lrvick wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Centralized supply chain, and metadata protection is anchored on SGX. They can use their pick of SGX exploits to undermine the weak metadata protections and they (or apple/google) could, if pressured, ship tweaked versions of their centrally compiled apps to select targets that use "42" as the random number generator. No one would be the wiser. Signal is a money pit with a pile of single points of failure for no reas…

> They can use their pick of SGX exploits to undermine the weak metadata protections and they (or apple/google) could, if pressured, ship tweaked versions of their centrally compiled apps to select targets that use "42" as the random number generator. No one would be the wiser. Signal builds on Android have been reproducible for over seven years now. That's not to mention the myriad of other ways that people could de…

Who is reproducing these and publishing results?

Moxie made it very clear he never wants third parties like f-droid -actually- reproducing and signing packages for distribution to de-googled signature-enforcing android distros etc. Providing side-loadable apks as an alternative a joke.

Third party builds and distribution would serve as public canary and be better for privacy forbidden. He argued the tracking advantages of centralized development and distribution outweighed any wins of allowing third party clients.

In reality a build published with a breaking change and a subtle crypto backdoor omitted from public sources may not be discovered for days or longer. Long enough to decrypt most every convo on the planet.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#663

Post by calt »

devit wrote: post #610

These costs seem absurd. For instance, 1.3$ million per year for storage??? Apparently, they have 40 million users, so 1 MB per user (seems reasonable for Signal) means 40TB. You can buy a 4TB SSD for $200, which means you need $2000 one-time for 1MB per user. How they get from $2000 to 1.3$ million is a mystery. As for SMS registration, if they are spending 6 million, maybe they should find some way of doing it for…

I really, really, want to go into a bunch of detail on exactly why this calculation is so incredibly naive. More as a personal thought exercise than for internet fame (since this will be buried under a buried comment).

Maybe I'll find the time...

But, like everyone else is saying, putting things in a datacenter in a resilient way for a high profile, high bandwidth, multi-national app is not the same as buying some ssd, or even running a hetzner instance.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#664

Post by willsmith72 »

Aachen wrote: post #376
Canada wrote: post #88

Seriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option. I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the r…

20/month for every chat service I use is very steep. I'd be spending more on chat services than on mobile data + unlimited calling + landline + DSL + streaming services combined! They actual costs are apparently about 1 USD per year per user. I usually at least double (usually more) my incurred cost when the donation is optional, to cover for those who can't or won't pay, but paying 240× the cost price seems wasteful…

how many chat services do you use? and how many are making money off of you in other ways?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#665

Post by DavidSJ »

bhtru wrote: post #643
DavidSJ wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, how is this any safer for the journalist? If their phone is compromised in a way such that someone can login and control their Signal app, their chat logs are already compromised. I’m just saying there should be the ability to export those logs once you’ve logged in. But if they don’t want to provide that, then: 1) Why does the Android app support this? 2) They should warn users of this BEFORE holding their da…

Wouldn't it be more damaging if the authorities are able to sync and recover the chat logs (they had time wipe the logs)? If they are able to take the journalist's sim card which is linked to their Signal account and then are able to recover the chat logs the journalist would be done for. Of course the supposed journalist we're speaking of is already in a bad spot if they're interred. However, they might have plausib…

I’m certainly not proposing that access to your SIM card should allow authorities to sync your messages! They should be stored encrypted on-device, and only exportable if you have login access to that device.

If authorities do acquire login access to the device, they can scroll through your chats and make screenshots, with or without an export feature. It’s true that exports make it slightly more convenient for them, but if you’re a serious target they’ll do it the hard way.

If Signal wants to provide some opt-in to disable exports, which can’t be retroactively reversed for old chats (otherwise it’s pointless), I have no problem with that. But if you’re worried about authorities with login access to your device, you shouldn’t be storing logs at all.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#666

Post by spiznnx »

hgomersall wrote: post #524
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.

There doesn't seem to be a way to pay annually, which I'd prefer to a monthly payment. £5/month is just a little high, but I'd merrily pay half that or £30/year.

If you really need a lower tier, you can switch currencies to JPY, there's a monthly option for 500JPY which is about 2.67GBP.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#667

Post by pardoned_turkey »

MrDresden wrote: post #635
halyconWays wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 it personally insulting to you that a completely free high quality services sometimes ask if you want to donate what ever small amount you'd like? You'll be proper mad when you realize how much money that other company, whom you regularly pay for access to their services, has in the bank.

Wikipedia is... nuanced. Keep in mind that the entity doing the fundraising is the Wikimedia Foundation. They pay the hosting costs, but return nothing to the actual Wikipedians (editors, admins.) Instead, what's left is used to pay the salaries for hundreds of administrative employees, fund third-party charities, and so on. You can love Wikipedia but have misgivings about the Foundation.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#668

Post by danielheath »

wkat4242 wrote: post #607
danielheath wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were well-known for not doing that, though.

Hmm but then how did they manage before asking for that 1 euro? There were a whole lot of years where it was completely free (yes before the Facebook takeover). Here in Europe we've only needed to pay once or so until it got taken over. There must have been some kind of venture backing because there was no money coming in at all from users for a long time.

I looked further and you were pretty spot on! It ran a loss of 138 million in 2013 alone according to their SEC disclosures for that year.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#669

Post by gamblor956 »

contact9879 wrote: post #353
gamblor956 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pensions aren't a thing in the U.S. anymore, especially not for tech. And when a U.S. company says "staffing costs" that does not include licenses, offices, etc. It's strictly salary and benefits. According to Signal's 990, it's paying multiple employees over $700k. That's above-market for corporate compensation, and it's way above market for non-profit compensation, to the point where it could be considered private…

They cover this pretty substantially in the post on Signal's website (I know they merged the Wired article into this one). Signal is trying to compete with the richest companies in the world; including for talent. And considering Signal's origins and motivations, they're not going to lower salaries or decrease benefits because some people believe that working for a non-profit automatically means lower compensation.

Engineers doing the same work on iMessage and Meta Messenger, i.e., their direct competitors, make less than 660k/annually in salary and benefits.

This means that the pay packages are likely not based on comparable market wages, which is an actual legal requirement for highly compensated employees for U.S. charities.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#670

Post by embit »

charles_f wrote: post #279

You 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.

Apologies in advance as I may be saying contrary to the sentiments here against Wikipedia fund raising. I also get the same emails and the banners. I diligently donate what I can. I don’t know where my funds will go. But what I do know is that I use that website practically twenty times a day and get something of value.
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