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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#861

Post by discard124 »

rglullis wrote: post #830
discard124 wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "someone else in the OSS space to put in the work" to make it as convenient as the leading closed alternatives, which is a fool's errand. I don’t think I got you wrong at all - you’ve just reiterated that it isn’t as convenient, and can’t be made so . > Why can't that Best Buy rep be trained to setup Element instead? No reason. If some organization was willing to pay Best Buy to do that, I’m expect they would.

> can’t be made so. It can in principle, but not in practice. To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers ar…

> To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience.

What happened to open source?

> The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of their speech bubbles.

That’s a fair point, in that if consumers prioritized open infrastructure over convenience, a commercial enterprise would too. However this is back to the earlier point - there is no point railing about that. It’s just a fact that most people want to just buy the nicest thing they can with their money.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#862

Post by kalleboo »

JLCarveth wrote: post #860
kalleboo wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was embraced and extended by Google.

I was asking for a source so I could look further into this, do you have any?

Neither me nor GP said that it was started by Google. Just that it was adopted by them as a solution.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#863

Post by gwd »

tobinfricke wrote: post #631
gwd wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of the number I was looking for -- "Cover your own costs: $1/year. Cover yourself and five other people: $5/year." I feel like something pointing out that the costs are around $1/year on signing up, maybe with a reminder once a year, would get most people self-funding pretty quickly.

Reminds me of ... WhatsApp :D (Originally WhatsApp charged $1/year.)

And I was SOOO happy when I heard WhatsApp's business model: Finally, I'M THE CUSTOMER! I gladly signed up for the "free year" and started getting other people to sign up for it... only to have it bought by FB, and never charged my $1 yearly fee. :-(

Then I tried to get people to use Telegram, but hey never implemented encryption by default, instead implementing things like chatrooms with millions of people... then I signed up for Signal, but waited to see what would happen -- and they started doing some weird crypto thing. Thankfully that all seems to have not been an issue, so I might actually start recommending Signal.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#864

Post by _Algernon_ »

concordDance wrote: post #838
_Algernon_ wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Stop conflating wikipedia and wikimedia. Little of the new stuff is for wikipedia and what's there is of questionable value.

Why not? Wikimedia intentionally conflates the two in their own funding drives, which is exactly the issue we are discussing in this thread.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#865

Post by a5en »

"Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year." "the registration fees that cover the delivery of verification codes during the sign-up process to help verify phone numbers and prevent spam accounts"

Can you please change Signal to not require a phone number? Requiring a phone number makes me question Signal's privacy. Looks like it can save $6 million dollars.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#866

Post by zynker »

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) $…

Salaries: Pretty abusive salaries for a non profit but that seems to be pretty much the standard nowadays, right?

Bandwidth: I took at quick look and see that chat.signal.org resolves to AWS. If they are paying AWS for a lot of bandwidth, that is very expensive. Let's take a quick look:

   They say they use 20PB per year of bandwidth for voice calls alone, this costs them $1.7M a year.  
   
   According to AWS pricing for great customers (suckers) of over 150TB per month, the cost per GB goes waaaay down to $0.05, yay.  1.6PB per month is 1600000GBs, that's $80K a month and therefore $960K a year.

   Very roughly, a 10Gbp/s link to the Internet, from a Tier-1 provider will be around $800 (eight hundred dollars, you're reading this right) a month in a low-bandwidth-cost country like the US, possibly double that in say Asia.

   A 10Gbps link fully utilized (minus some overheads), translates roughly to 3 Petabytes per month, that's 36 petabytes per year, almost double their advertized amount of bandwidth needed for calls per year.

   So we have ~$10K a year (negotiable) for 36PB which is double their bandwidth needs but let's not forget that AWS graciously (geniously) charges for egess only, this means that their actual bandwidth needs are 40PB per year for whatever they are reporting.  So we have $10K for 36PB a year vs $960K a year for 20PB (actually 40PB) of bandwidth from dear Amazon.

   1. Not sure why they are saying the cost is $1.7M per year.
   2. Even at 960K it's daylight robbery.
   3. AWS makes an absolute killing on bandwidth costs.  Best. Business. Model. Ever.
   4. Don't these guys have a Devops pro at $300K+ a year? weird :)
Servers: I won't get into the numbers here as that's a lot more involved, and impossible without more data, but buying and maintaining your own infra, or possibly easier, renting it, would still be quite a lot cheaper than using AWS.

Takeaways: - Storage is something you should buy and maintain (Thanks B!), you swap out old/dying storage devices. See Backblaze.

   - Bandwidth, compute and storage costs at your favorite CSP are absolutely f'ing *outrageous*

   - If you care about your money, your bottom line, do things differently than the *insane* mainstream way of clickity-click on some UIs to provision services without understanding what's really happening under the hood (not saying Signal doesn't understand that part, I'm sure they do), or caring about the added costs of whatever gets so easily "added" to your "infrastructure". 

   - By having your stuff on a CSP you don't even have "infrastructure", but that's juts me.
Anyway, I do love Signal, what they do and what they represent. Keep up the good work.

Signal, mail me at m aaaat zynk.it if you'd like to talk.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#867

Post by caeril »

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…

> This "cost" puts people into danger.

They know this, but it's likely a precondition of not getting Joe Nacchio'ed. It's a feature, not a bug. Signal's partners* in FVEY IC/LE have given them a lot of latitude in developing a very solid e2e cryptographic protocol and application as long as the users themselves are identifiable.

The pigs don't need to backdoor the protocol or the keys as long as there is more than one party to a conversation and each party is identifiable. The prisoner's dilemma, in real life, almost always gives the pigs a defection.

My pet conspiracy theory is not that Signal is evil, but that Signal is being allowed to operate by the pigs as long as account identifiers are very difficult to anonymize. They are likely very good people with good intentions, but when the FBI or NSA makes you an offer you can't refuse, you do the best you can.

*: I'm not suggesting Signal is in bed with IC. Just that if you operate a communications service of any scale, IC/LE will be your partners whether you want them or not.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#868

Post by amluto »

toast0 wrote: post #739
amluto wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say what ordinary (non-discounted) pricing was like, per message? At least in the US, most carriers did I and, believe, still do operate free SMTP -> SMS gateways. They worked okay, although they resulted in oddly formatted messages.

Twilio has a public price sheet[1], I think they haven't actually updated this one lately, but it's a good representation of what ordinary pricing is like. This is not an endorsement (or non-endorsement) of Twilio, but having a public price sheet makes it easy to link to them. In general, pricing varies widely by destination (country and sometimes carrier), US and some other places are Those SMTP -> SMS gateways some…

I don’t mean what Twilio charges — I mean what the carriers charge to senders who are directly integrated.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#869

Post by rglullis »

Canada wrote: post #858
rglullis wrote: post #818

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would I be soliciting donations for something I don't favor? Because you are (consciously or not) creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for one champion over the others. Worse still, you are asking everyone else to devote resources to your preferred champion when we have no reason to believe that this is long-term sustainable. > The Matrix protocol is also inferior to Signal in that all metadata is stored in clea…

I don't care about your preferences. I'm consciously using and giving money to Signal, and I'm encouraging others to do so. Go ahead and work on or use or donate to whatever you like.

You sidestepped the whole point about systemic risk and tried to argue based on my "preferences". My friend, that's as cheap a copout as it gets.

Sorry to break it to you, but if it was only a matter of preference, I would've been fine with Signal or even WhatsApp.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#870

Post by rglullis »

discard124 wrote: post #861
rglullis wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can’t be made so. It can in principle, but not in practice. To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers ar…

> To become something attainable in practice we would have to start supporting the companies that are focused on the more important things first until they are mature enough to be able to dedicate time and resources to optimize for convenience. What happened to open source? > The problem is that when we prize convenience above other things and we end up with stupid things like customers arguing about the color of the…

> What happened to open source?

Open source is not magic fairy dust that can solve everything. You still need funding for developers, you still need to acquire customers to provide a feedback cycle, you still need device makers making it easy to install your app, etc.

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