Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

signal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 965 posts

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#721

Post by saagarjha »

Barrin92 wrote: post #582
rglullis wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

You can trust Signal all you want for data security. It doesn’t help you when they run out of money and shut down and all your messaging is gone.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#722

Post by saagarjha »

lrvick wrote: post #662
chimeracoder wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 advantag…

What’s your solution to this?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#723

Post by HKH2 »

nvy wrote: post #193
rogerkirkness wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.

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.

I really don't get why people are still using SMS. Is data really that expensive?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#724

Post by qingcharles »

slaw wrote: post #72
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…

Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives? Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

I use Hetzner, but they have a bad rep for killing services that attract too much attention, e.g. DMCA requests

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#725

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

Sol- wrote: post #371
ActorNightly wrote: post #49

Has anyone tried setting up their own Signal server? Be cool to do this, and then give all your friends the ip for truly private messaging. https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.

Offering self-hosted servers would probably just degrade the security guarantees of Signal if people misconfigure them. Doesn't seem to be worthwhile for the Signal foundation to run into this risk of undermining their own reputation for a niche user base who cares about self-hosting.

In my mind, the whole point of using Signal is that I don't have to trust the server. Why would it matter who hosts the server if we can trust that the clients' communications are E2E encrypted?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#726

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

Aachen wrote: post #412
kyawzazaw wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up

And the people those friends want to talk to. And the friends of those friends. To have self-hosted chat services, you either need a niche enough service that you'll never have two parties that would want to talk to each other while being on different servers, or federation. Signal chose the former, so here I am with eight communication apps on my phone. Maybe the next best thing could be to support multiple servers,…

Layer it on top of something like Matrix, then?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#727

Post by nativeit »

halyconWays wrote: post #361
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.

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

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2022-annu...

Seems almost mundane, as if they’re running a very effective foundation that’s actively achieving their goals. See the recent Cambridge study that explored how their governance has been effective at promoting moderate discourse while suppressing misinformation and hateful content: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-s...

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#728

Post by maerF0x0 »

water-data-dude wrote: post #712
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.

I donated to the Southern Poverty Law Center a few years ago. A physical address was a required field on the donation form. I have never stopped regretting it, because GODDAMN! They started hammering me with physical mail asking for more money immediately and have not stopped.

I had this happen years ago, ironically I'm pretty sure they spent more hounding me for the next dollar than i gave them (like $25).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#729

Post by [deleted] »

V__ wrote: post #36

Signal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/

[deleted]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#730

Post by calderknight »

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.

We are really the ones who provide that high quality. Wikipedia isn't edited by the Wikimedia foundation.
Post reply on HN