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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#791

Post by The_Colonel »

starttoaster wrote: post #570
wpietri wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What is the mission for Wikipedia beyond doing what they already do, which is just hosting the largest internet encyclopedia? Purely curious because I thought Wikipedia was pretty much at its end game for what it wants to accomplish that is the job of the organization rather than the job of all of its volunteers.

> The Wikimedia Foundation's mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."

Its mission is not just "hosting" - actually creating an encyclopedia is much more than paying for the server costs.

Wikimedia produced many very useful projects which often integrate into Wikipedia, but work well standalone as well, and work towards the stated mission - projects like Commons, WikiData, WikiSource. Some projects are more useful than others, but that's just normal.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#793

Post by ysnp »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #770
Drblessing wrote: post #710

2022 Salaries for those interested: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824... Compensation Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343 Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557 Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500 Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208 Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $…

Aside from the salaries, which I agree are a problem, I think there are a lot of architectural issues that are both costly and not so secure. > We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed. 6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do d…

Their #1 goal is not to be the most private solution. Their goal is to make day-to-day communications of most people difficult to surveil.

Day-to-day/People is why they keep the registration process familiar to other platforms like WhatsApp/Telegram. "Most" is why they try to compete with Telegram/WhatsApp on features to drive adoption (see Stories and Announcement Groups).

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#794

Post by leshenka »

marvinborner wrote: post #525
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.

Username registration is currently being tested: https://community.signalusers.org/t/public-username-testing-...

So this puts signal on par with telegram, not above? Am I missing something?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#795

Post by eviks »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #778
eviks wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That $ figure tells us nothing as it includes those same huge SMS costs that Signal is on an unsustainable path to rack up With just a bit more effort you can see that most of those $148 are not related to the extra customer support we're discussing, but rather to the things that Signal is already doing Costs and expenses in 2013: Cost of revenue 53 (payment processing fees, infrastructure costs, SMS verification fee…

So for $10M revenue, they had $53M cost of revenue. I think asking for $1 is never going to be sustainable, even if leave all other costs. My guess is that "employee compensation for part of operations team" is the primary one taking all the cost, as payment processing fees couldn't be more than the revenue itself and one message is pretty cheap.

Why not? Someone calculated above that total costs are below $1 for Signal even with all the SMS waste (also, it doesn't have to be a literal $1)

Besides, the original point was about huge$ from running a paid vs free app, which isn't the case

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#796

Post by leshenka »

YeBanKo wrote: post #320
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.

This can be a premium feature. Run your own server and for a little bit of money you can configure your client to use an alternative server. Client code is what make it private and secure, so you want to use their verified client even with your own server.

This makes sense and in the same time it doesn't. You're supposed to pay to use your infra, not theirs?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#797

Post by dijkstra_j »

jwestbury wrote: post #785
jillesvangurp wrote: post #770

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from the salaries, which I agree are a problem, I think there are a lot of architectural issues that are both costly and not so secure. > We use third-party services to send a registration code via SMS or voice call in order to verify that the person in possession of a given phone number actually intended to sign up for a Signal account. Simple solution, go distributed. 6M $ for that. Stop doing that. What do d…

> which I agree are a problem Are they? These salaries are much lower than most tech competitors. I know we like to call out "high" salaries when a useful service is struggling - but they'll struggle even more if they can't retain good talent because their pay is too low. There's a reason tech skill in government is generally lower than that in industry, for instance.

I agree, if you lower the salaries now they will probably leave.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#798

Post by fwn »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #359
lxgr wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using WhatsApp when the nominal $1/year fee was still around, but somehow never ended up being actually charged, and I don't know anyone that did. It's possible that they were only enforcing it in some regions, though.

Indeed. I just ignored the dialog box the first time it popped up. But next year I paid. It was quite a big deal because back then it was equal to my entire monthly cellphone bill in Pakistan. But I remember other people started to en masse switch to other messengers like Viber(?). And Whatsapp had to stop enforcing the fee.

I was billed 0,99€ (Germany) exactly once, but was able to use WhatsApp without payment for most of the time just by ignoring the notification. I remember that they repeatedly gave grace periods and just set another payment date a few weeks later.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#799

Post by jhgg »

CranberryDefuse wrote: post #789

> Signal spends around $2.8 million dollars per year on bandwidth to support sending messages and files (such as photos, videos, voice notes, documents, etc.) [...] At current traffic levels, the amount of outbound bandwidth that is required to support Signal voice and video calls is around 20 petabytes per year (that’s 20 million gigabytes) which costs around $1.7 million dollars per year in bandwidth fees just for…

Paying 2.8m for 20pb of bandwidth is two orders of magnitude more expensive than it needs to be. You pay significantly more using cloud hosting providers rather than dedicated server resellers. I would recommend signal consider just renting dedicated servers from providers like OVH for their voice relays.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#800

Post by fransje26 »

darthrupert wrote: post #758
Drblessing wrote: post #710

2022 Salaries for those interested: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824... Compensation Key Employees and Officers Base Related Other Jim O'leary (Vp, Engineering) $666,909 $0 $33,343 Ehren Kret (Chief Technology Officer) $665,909 $0 $8,557 Aruna Harder (Chief Operating Officer) $444,606 $0 $20,500 Graeme Connell (Software Developer) $444,606 $0 $35,208 Greyson Parrelli (Software Developer) $…

I'll ask the question you're implying out loud. Why does an organization with about 50 employees need 4 C-level executives, totalling about 2M compensation per year? Or perhaps it's 7 C-level executives (3 hiding under the "Software developer" title) totalling about 3,7M compensation per year? I'm absolutely not donating money to such a thing without an answer to this question. As a counterpoint, I am a member of a l…

> We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate

And from the link: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...

- Other Salaries and Wages $9,665,761 - Executive Compensation $744,037

So about $10,400,000 a year in compensation and wages, or about 21% of their running costs.

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