51–60 of 119 posts
When you share albums with someone else, the key is passed in the URL. Nothing prevents Ente from grabbing the key and decrypting all the data at this point.
So it's basically "E2E, trust me bro".
Or am I missing something?
What I don't get about Ente is their E2E promise. When you share albums with someone else, the key is passed in the URL. Nothing prevents Ente from grabbing the key and decrypting all the data at this point. So it's basically "E2E, trust me bro". Or am I missing something?
Implementation details here: https://ente.com/blog/building-shareable-links/
This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…
A client would pay an invoice and the balance would swing from -£20M to £0 and back down to -£15M for the next project within weeks! Revenue was in the £100Ms per annum.
As someone with almost zero business background it was a real eye opener how much we depended on a healthy relationship with the local bank manager. The business model clearly worked as they passed their 30th anniversary during my employment!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m speaking of things I have personally witnessed; but won’t go into more detail than that, for various reasons.
Man I love this kind of "evidence" that can't be dismissed, that is ultimately just a big "just trust me bro".
Did you know there are whole businesses that lend money through ‘receivables financing’? Basically if you have outstanding invoices, you can get the money for those invoices now, and you pay (let’s say) 15% in interest to get that money now. https://www.allianz-trade.com/en_US/insights/receivables-fin...
All else being equal, your profitability just went down by 15% taking that receivables loan; but businesses are willing to lend money at varying degrees of interest while the company that took that money still looks like they’re in great shape if you were to look at their revenue, but 2 or 3 of these sorts of advance loans can hurt a company really quickly.
The issue is that it takes a long time, if a business is engaging in shady business practices, for them to be held accountable (if they ever are), and there are lots of ways to keep a business afloat while effectively robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.
I came to the comments to say the same thing! I would love to take a seminar or a class from the folks in their design department.
Their design team has written a blog post, which may be of interest to you: https://ente.com/blog/ente-design-system / https://archive.vn/ucGnC
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots. The client / server relationship with Ente is peculiar, and on my test dataset of about 1000 images did not perform at all. Face recognition, semantic search, etc, it was not in the same league as Immich tbh. (Also hi Stavros!)
Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.
You mean, on a self-hosted Ente (or Immich), a off-device/server-side, capable multimodal LLM, like Gemma4 12b would do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the same boat. I had a so many comments under Immich videos about Ente that it made me wonder if they were just bots. The client / server relationship with Ente is peculiar, and on my test dataset of about 1000 images did not perform at all. Face recognition, semantic search, etc, it was not in the same league as Immich tbh. (Also hi Stavros!)
Hey Alex! Yes, exactly, I get that they're a fairly different category with different tradeoffs (trustless server), but also I own the server so I don't need it to be trustless. If it worked well, the tradeoff would be smaller, but as it stands it's not worth it for me over Immich.
Ente is a private hosted photo storage and sharing platform. Only trusted devices that can decrypt /encrypt would even be able to perform the kind of work to tag photos for face recognition, and in this category I'm not aware of any hosted alyermative that actually does this, and they do a _pretty good job_ considering the limitations of E2EE.
Immich, Google Photos, Apple Photos- these platforms don't have to work around the fact all user data is opaque ciphertext. I imagine you could extend the capabilities of machine learning to a trusted node (similar to what you can do with Ente Desktop, but with more capable models), but they still have to work around any of that metadata being visible to them as well.
This takes somewhat trivial problems and makes them entirely non-trivial to solve. Self hosted platforms that don't provide an E2EE story have significantly less headache to deal with, especially since most people justify it by "it's running on my server so it's okay". And I get that, you can generally work around this issue with disk-level encryption and you're all good. It's just not the same product at all.
This is one of those vanity blog posts, a “look at us, we’re open” blog posts without actual openness, or rather, limited openness where it helps their image and not openness that could backfire. Businesses don’t operate based on revenue. They operate based on profit. They operate based on operating expenses. They operate based off of free cash flow. Showing off revenue and number of accounts is showing off a tiny po…
I once worked for a company where they operated in the red for 95% of the year as they paid for project material costs up front. The CFO was quite open about how finances worked in our niche sector. A client would pay an invoice and the balance would swing from -£20M to £0 and back down to -£15M for the next project within weeks! Revenue was in the £100Ms per annum. As someone with almost zero business background it…
You end up leverage for all the goods but the final settlement of payment happens much later, making them hard to survive in without a lot of capital and good relationships.
You can screwed very easily and understanding the model and not scaling faster than your capital allows is a skill in itself.
My friend failed at it while I was working with them.
Buffer.com is famously open as well, if you like this kind of stuff. Revenue: https://buffer.com/metrics Expenses: https://buffer.com/transparent-pricing Salaries of every employee (which seems like PII to me): https://buffer.com/salaries And more: https://buffer.com/open
Reminds me of Frappe (ERPNext) letting employees choose their own pay: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/choosing-your-own-pay-how-doe... / https://archive.vn/o7NtE
... which ended being, well ... eventful: https://frappe.io/blog/culture/in-the-aftermath-of-exuberanc... / https://archive.vn/BRaQc