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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

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Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#571

Post by melbourne_mat »

Aachen wrote: post #437
Rastonbury wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth

> millions upon millions of new people suddenly switched to Signal in January 2021 after WhatsApp updated their Terms of Service From a footnote of the article. Maybe this is why they've stayed with "infinite scale, infinite costs" (commonly known as "cloud") so long? Surely at some point this is worth considering though, I would also be curious where that point lies Virtually anyone, also when spending only 100 euro…

I know AWS - and I would guess the others too - discourage hybrid by setting the egress traffic costs to extreme levels

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#572

Post by dheera »

vizzah wrote: post #523

$6 million per year on outgoing SMS? Do not send SMS to users, make users send SMS to you instead to confirm their numbers! I have this solution for years and it works >90% of the time. The rest 10% is calling a verification number which drops calls with busy signal (no fees for the caller) but sees who is calling and is able to verify their number.

Or just kill SMS entirely. SMS is old tech from the 1990s. We have better things now, like e-mail over LTE/5G, that work across countries, across devices (whoa!), across providers, across SIM cards (wow!) allow more than 140 characters (wow wow!), and allows easy-to-remember alphanumeric identifiers for user ids (wow wow wow is this the future!). I hate SMS confirmations, I don't want to use my phone number as a username, and I will most certainly never donate to an organization that is using my donations to pay for stupid SMS texts after e-mail was invented.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#573

Post by marssaxman »

akprasad wrote: post #255

I just donated $10 to Signal. Here's how to do so on iPhone in less than a minute: 1. Open Signal and click on your user icon in the upper left. 2. Go to "Settings" --> "Donate to Signal". 3. Click "Donate", select your donation options, and pay with Apple Pay.

Thanks for the suggestion; I just signed up for the $5/month plan. I have been using Signal for years, but never considered donating anything before.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#574

Post by pmlnr »

dheera wrote: post #572
vizzah wrote: post #523

$6 million per year on outgoing SMS? Do not send SMS to users, make users send SMS to you instead to confirm their numbers! I have this solution for years and it works >90% of the time. The rest 10% is calling a verification number which drops calls with busy signal (no fees for the caller) but sees who is calling and is able to verify their number.

Or just kill SMS entirely. SMS is old tech from the 1990s. We have better things now, like e-mail over LTE/5G, that work across countries, across devices (whoa!), across providers, across SIM cards (wow!) allow more than 140 characters (wow wow!), and allows easy-to-remember alphanumeric identifiers for user ids (wow wow wow is this the future!). I hate SMS confirmations, I don't want to use my phone number as a user…

> We have better things now, like e-mail.

Funny how email, being from the 70s, is actually better.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#575

Post by progval »

NoGravitas wrote: post #418
pierat wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a great case to get the fuck away from SMS and phone numbers. But hey, they still want your whole address book, and announce you're on signal to everyone else on signal. The whole "secure" thing is a joke. Its all linked to your identity via your phone#.

Signal actually jumps through quite a few hoops in order to let you and your contacts are on Signal without Signal actually having access to a copy of your whole address book. It's even mentioned in TFA. I do agree about being linked to your phone number - doing it that way means not considering a lot of people's valid threat models. They are working on moving to usernames, though. It's in beta now.

> Signal actually jumps through quite a few hoops in order to let you and your contacts are on Signal without Signal actually having access to a copy of your whole address book. It's even mentioned in TFA.

It doesn't say how it works. If Alice's phone can tell whether her contact Bob uses Signal without Alice and Bob doing any sort of a priori cryptographic exchange, why couldn't Signal itself do whatever Alice's phone is doing?

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#576

Post by traviswt »

illiac786 wrote: post #569
johndoe18637 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if Signal wouldn't require a phone number for account setup at all

this is in testing and coming to you early next year.

Would invites be a solution? Anyone can sign up if they provide a number, otherwise you need an invite from someone with a number linked. It would clump the identity/legitimacy for all invitees into origin number, but still allow disparate accounts.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#577

Post by melbourne_mat »

benreesman wrote: post #516
conductr wrote: post #509

I'm seeing all the comments about the $6m Twilio expense, but nothing commenting on how their cost per employee is $380,000 totaling $19m. I think they could optimize this easier if the will was there. I know HN is very SV/tech centric, and that number makes sense there given the run up of VC money, etc. but I'm willing to bet they could source talent from cheaper places and slash this in half; if they wanted to. Jus…

It grinds my gears when people on a hacker forum lobby for hackers to make less. When it’s people who are running a worldwide communications network on the cheap without getting hacked all the time? Absolute pros. I don’t downvote, let alone flag, but I hate this comment.

Silicon Valley is not the only place to find engineers who know what they're doing. Some of us want to stay in our home country and/or don't want to jump through the hoops that American tech companies demand.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#578

Post by psalminen »

hiatus wrote: post #379
nvy wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The sms decision made signal go from THE messaging app on my phone to an app I only use with a very small subset of my contacts. It is infuriating that they didn't allow users to retain that functionality when it costs them nothing, and they could have disabled it by default.

I still use Signal a lot, since most people I frequently talk to use it. However, this was extremely frustrating. Having 1 messaging app for so long was incredibly nice.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#579

Post by thewanderer1983 »

People should be aware that Signal may be able to provide good e2ee and methods to make reading your messages or calls a challenge, they don't do to enough to obfuscate. Therefore censors can identify who is using signal and even block it. https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63

Privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.

Re: Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive

#580

Post by gloosx »

I admire Signal and everything they do. Basically Software-as-Charity, for the greater cause. Now knowing this charity is actually millions drives me nuts. I hope the less expensive solution can be achieved in decentralization of the whole thing. Im sure it is possible to sustain it ourselves as a public service forever if everyone involved will have to pay with his personal computing resource - just like we are able to sustain decentralized finance now. And of course - the idea of a phone number as identity is very much flawed and unsustainable on itself, hopefully Signal team will be able to break through this problem as well
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