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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

#871

Post by discard124 »

rglullis wrote: post #870
discard124 wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then is seems like you do understand why Signal isn’t as open as you’d like.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#872

Post by aa1234556 »

_ugfj wrote: post #809
moravak1984 wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. A former student of mine worked for a non profit in Afghanistan (his home country) for a few years. Said non profit was flying in McKinsey consultants for very short gigs at six figures (USD). Same can be said about many LGBT non profits that have shifted their goals in the developed world on the "T" part of the acronym. On countries where marriage equality is a given, no one is going to fund an NGO focus…

to me this smells transphobic but it's possible the trans genocide several US states are working on made me oversensitive

[dead]

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#873

Post by bshacklett »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #683
JohnFen wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. I don't take them personally, of course, but they do encourage me to avoid forking over any money.

any excuse to not donate!

I donated regularly until I learned the darker side of their behavior. If they’d be more transparent, I might start donating again. Is it so awful to ask for organizations to act better to receive voluntary support?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#874

Post by hutzlibu »

amelius wrote: post #807
hutzlibu wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not meant as a anonymous messager, but an encrypted one, you can trust to not sell you out.

What is the basis of that trust?

Open source client AND open source server. And a quite transparent non profit running it.

But personally I actually would prefer a federated alternative like matrix.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#875

Post by mkaszkowiak »

zynker wrote: post #866
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…

> 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.

I understand this is napkin math, but shouldn't we consider that the load isn't evenly distributed? - in which case 50% average utilization seems extremely high

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#876

Post by unsungNovelty »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #773
philjohn wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a nonprofit?

A nonprofit doesn't mean it's a charity.

> 501(c)(3) tax-exemptions apply to entities that are organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, literary or educational purposes, for testing for public safety, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals.

Signal foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3). It is literally and legally a charity.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#877

Post by rglullis »

discard124 wrote: post #871
rglullis wrote: post #870

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Then is seems like you do understand why Signal isn’t as open as you’d like.

No. Signal has the funding, the technical talent and the customers. They are as "open source" as it can be. The issue with them is that they want to control the platform.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#878

Post by toast0 »

amluto wrote: post #868
toast0 wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh I see... yeah, WA never went direct unless it was zero cost to us, so I don't know what carriers tend to charge. Managing payment to a foreign telecom would be challenging, managing it to enough carriers so the difference in cost is meaningful would be a major endeavor. SMS aggregation is a business with many providers and a low barrier to entry, so while there are margins, I don't think they're very high. There are some telecom groups that run networks in many countries, and some of those offer SMS aggregation services, and the prices were in the same ballpark as pure aggregators, as I recall, but it's been many years since I saw the price sheets.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#879

Post by zynker »

mkaszkowiak wrote: post #875
zynker wrote: post #866

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I understand this is napkin math, but shouldn't we consider that the load isn't evenly distributed? - in which case 50% average utilization seems extremely high

Sure, so multiply it by whatever you want. 10? You still get less than 100k a year and not $1.7M :)

100k a year for 100GBps, leaving it up to you to calculate how many petabytes per year you can pass with that.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#880

Post by BlueTemplar »

bastawhiz wrote: post #706
SpaghettiCthulu wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: Does Tor fall under the definition of federation? Either way, a Tor-like model would have security benefits over a centralized system like Signal, right?

Tor is distributed, not federated. And it has drawbacks, like high latency and a lack of a centralized system for human-friendly names (because that would mean a system like DNS, which is centralized). As far as security goes, there's probably little benefit. E2EE doesn't get more secure because there's more encryption. The most comparable system to Tor that has practical properties I can think of is maybe ipfs, but…

Because code is law, centralized systems that grow bigger than the polity they started in are inherently problematic. See Facebook in Burma/Myanmar as one recent infamous example.
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