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Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
- Dunedan 3y ago> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year. > Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year. > Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year. > Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year. > Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year. Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.
- bilal4hmed 3y agois there any way they can reduce that cost?
- java-man 3y agoYeah, decouple Signal user identity from the phone number.
- tapoxi 3y agoThis will probably never happen. One of the reasons WhatsApp blew up is because using a phone number as your source of identification means there's much less friction in the signup flow. No username/password to create and your social graph is already there in your contact list. My mom was able to get our entire extended family on Signal without my involvement, which is a testament to how easy that is.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoThey're already working on it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/signal-tests-usernames-that-keep-your-phone-number-private/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/signal-tests-... Not whether that's a good idea is more debatable; you're not wrong about discoverability.
- tapoxi 3y agoThose are in addition to the phone number, but it will still require a phone number under the hood.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoIn the short term it will, and quite possibly in a long-term also, but if you were going to fully make phone numbers optional, I'm pretty sure this is the first step you would take. At the very least it sure looks like they're starting to build the possibility.
- GuB-42 3y agoThey also blew up because it was also quite decent SMS app, so you just had to install Signal and use it instead of your default SMS app. All your messages are there, you can continue to communicate exactly like you did before, except that now, if the other person also has Signal, your messages are encrypted. They stopped doing that (and I uninstalled Signal as a result), so they can also stop with the phone number thing, in fact, it would make more sense than with the current situation where Signal needs a phone number but doesn't use it (except for registration). I could even reinstall Signal if they do this.
- panarky 3y agoWhy not both? If I want discoverability, let me provide my phone number. If I want privacy, just assign a random identifier.
- lxgr 3y agoNobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods. I'm not mad at all if somebody prefers using their phone number and not having a password for a service – just give me the option to use my email address and/or a username. There are too many "phone number only" services out there these days.
- tapoxi 3y agoUsernames are currently available in beta, the post I was replying to wondered if SMS verification could be removed because it's expensive.
- goodpoint 3y ago> Nobody is demanding them to stop supporting phone numbers as identifiers/verification methods. Plenty of people are, and for good reasons.
- goodpoint 3y agoIt has nothing to do with friction...
- xhkkffbf 3y agoWhich might be said to increase privacy. I suppose there's something to the point about combating spam. But surely there are other ways to do this, right?
- smt88 3y agoGetting rid of phone numbers would make anonymity easier, but it wouldn't affect privacy. Signal is explicitly private but not anonymous. In most countries, you can get an anonymous phone number anyway.
- j45 3y agoPhone numbers are the easiest login for people, especially in a world where not everyone has an email address. I know this will invite comments about usernames. I would like usernames a lot too.
- i67vw3 3y agoSend them via whatsapp. A lot of online services give an option to send OTP via whatsapp along with SMS/Email.
- lxgr 3y agoAs far as I understand, this is even more expensive than SMS in many cases due to WhatsApp's B2C messaging fee structure. It's also not a great idea to make sign-ups for an instant messaging service contingent on having an account with another, competing service.
- blakesterz 3y agoTwitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/business/twitter-blue-two-factor-authentication/index.html#:~:text=Disabling%20text%20message%202FA%20won,year%20%E2%80%9Con%20scam%20SMS.%E2%80%9D https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/18/business/twitter-blue-two-fac...
- chimeracoder 3y ago> Twitter said that's why they got rid of the SMS 2FA. They said it was costing millions to have that enabled for them. Previous Twitter employees have said that this is incorrect. Because Twitter began as an SMS-only (and then SMS-first) application (remember 40404?), they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets. Twitter still has to maintain that infrastructure, because they didn't get rid of SMS 2FA - they just restricted it to Twitter Blue users, so the overhead is still the same. Almost nobody else who delivers SMS today has that infrastructure, because it doesn't make sense for most services to build. The only place where Twitter was paying significant amounts for SMS was due to SMS pump schemes, which is a consequence of Twitter gutting its anti-spam detection, resulting in them paying for SMS pumping which was previously blocked.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> they very early on established direct-connection infrastructure for sending SMS, meaning that they have a marginal cost of literally $0.00/message in most markets. I am very, very interested to understand how that works, because without more detail or sources I'm calling bullshit. I definitely understand how Twitter could have greatly reduced their per-message fee with telecom providers, but at the end of the day Twitter is not a telecom and is still at the mercy of whoever is that "last mile" for actually delivering the SMS to your phone, so I don't understand how they have no marginal cost here. Happy to be proven wrong.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
- baby 3y agoI really wonder why it’s so expensive to run. I always hear things about scaling but I used to run a top 500 alexia website and it was just a php app running on a mutualized offer for $5/month. Lots of manual caching though but still. My wild guess is that either the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) or they do other costly things at scale (sgx?)
- suriyaG 3y agoI guess, then the question is how real time was the website. Was it as real time as supporting, instant messaging, voice/video calls etc
- baby 3y agoOh I forgot that signal is not just about forwarding messages. I’m wondering how much the VOIP costs.
- AlecSchueler 3y agoDon't forget media!
- zimpenfish 3y agoFTA: "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.) and to enable voice and video calls."
- willsmith72 3y agohow is that in any way comparable? it's not about java vs php
- mi_lk 3y ago> the stack is not really optimal (last I heard it was java) how's java relevant here?
- 3y ago
- RunSet 3y agoI did my part to help reduce costs by switching to the decentralized alternative, Session.[0] Bonus: Session does not demand users' phone number. Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1] [0] https://getsession.org/ https://getsession.org/ [1] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/signal.html
- bsilvereagle 3y ago> Also no bundled cryptocurrency.[1] It seems like Session relies on Oxen's network, so while there is no inherent coin it is blockchain backed. > Session’s onion routing system, known as onion requests, uses Oxen‘s network of Oxen Service Nodes, which also power the $OXEN cryptocurrency. Check out Oxen.io to find more information on the tech behind Session’s onion routing. https://getsession.org/faq#onion-routing https://getsession.org/faq#onion-routing
- pluto_modadic 3y agoSession depends on the Loki blockchain, so I dispute point 1.
- RunSet 3y agoI don't consider Session to "bundle" the Loki blockchain or the Oxen network in any sense. Here is more information about what I meant when I used the term "bundled". https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4240/bundled-software https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4240/bundled-software
- xkcd-sucks 3y agoCool, glad to hear about this - However, it is still coupled to a cryptocurrency (https://oxen.io/ https://oxen.io/) even if not bundled wechat-style
- itstaipan 3y agoI think simpleX[0] is a better choice at this point with all the recent issues around oxen: not coupled to any crypto, no user ids, can host your own servers if need be, etc [0] https://simplex.chat/ https://simplex.chat/
- jawns 3y agoPhone numbers have become the de facto version of "Internet stamps" for identity verification. They are near-ubiquitous on a per-user level, but hard to accumulate without significant cost. (Unlike email addresses.) But the down side is that phone verification tends to be on a per-service level. So, for instance, Signal incurs these costs when they verify their users, and every other service incurs these same costs when they verify _their_ users. There are a number of businesses out there that are trying to act as clearinghouses, where they verify the users once, then allow the users' verified profiles to be confirmed by multiple services. I wonder if any of those could be used to reduce these "registration" costs.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoPhone number verification is used to verify the user's registration intent, so not really.
- explaininjs 3y agoA Flow: > Service A => User: Please Enter Your Phone Number and Email > Service A => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (SMS): Please respond with the Email you used at signup to confirm you want an account with Service A Later... > Service B => User: Please Enter Your phone number and Email > Service B => Clearinghouse: Please verify phone number XXX wants to sign up for an account with us > Clearinghouse => User (Email): Please verify you want an account with Service B Not saying it's great (providing email twice is annoying), but it's something.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rezonant 3y agoThis does not reduce the overall cost, it just shifts it to the clearinghouse. Who pays the clearinghouse so that they can cover their own exorbitant SMS costs?
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings. I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce costs (and in one case I've personally observed, by upto two orders of magnitude). This obviously pushes a lot of complexity on Signal's side, but is usually worth it.
- slaw 3y agoAny idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives? Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoAs I understand it, you have to often use multiple gateways based on which one is cheaper and can deliver your message to the recipient, and also take care of handling retries in case one gateway fails. This is not something you typically want to handle if you're not aware of it, and the process of having to talk to each vendor and figure out their limitations is tedious.
- lxgr 3y agoThere's a lower bound on what these services can charge in the form of interconenction fees charged by the mobile service providers delivering the messages. In the US, that's effectively zero due to the US phone infrastructure largely using a shared-cost model, but in most other countries which use "sender pays", these fees can be significant.
- wolverine876 3y agoIn business, you get what you pay for. Cheaper hosting might raise more issues that need to by handled by your employees, who also are expensive, and also the organization's focus gets disrupted. The hosting company / cloud vendor has an enormous economic advantage, with access to the entire hardware and software stack, the engineers who built it, people whose full-time job is operating it. Often it's cheaper to pay more for better. As I have to explain about open source, 'Free is only free if your time is worth nothing.' (And I use a lot of FOSS, it just not always the solution.)
- munk-a 3y agoSMS rates are absolutely bonkers considering the technical way they're transmitted. The US is an outlier in SMS rates actually being reasonable (usually unlimited or close to) for consumers - but for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage.
- lxgr 3y ago> for the rest of the world the insane mark up on that communication method has mostly obsoleted it... For P2P communication. SMS is alive and well for B2C messaging, most importantly for 2FA OTP delivery, but also as a first line of defense against spam/bot account creation. It's not a good solution to either problem, but it's slightly better than nothing (which apparently makes it good enough for many), so I suspect we're stuck with it for now. > That'd be all well and good... the technology would die naturally, but all my American relatives continue to stubbornly use iMessage. iMessage is not SMS, though. It just uses phone numbers as identifiers, but so do many other popular over-the-top messengers, including the most popular one globally.
- munk-a 3y agoTo clarify - iMessage does not use SMS if you're going from Apple to Apple device and both devices have data/wifi available. iMessage refuses to support messaging to Android clients and defaults to SMS for these messages. I've got an Android phone so all iMessage transmissions come across as SMS (or MMS).
- tofuahdude 3y agoWhy is it that SMS is so damn expensive? (or more specifically, what is it about Twilio et al's businesses that makes them cost so much?)
- j45 3y agoNothing just profit and existing system access costs set by the incumbents.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoIn the US, shafting customers as hard and fast as you can is the current business model. What are they going to do? Move to 1 or 2 remaining competitors with the exact same business model?
- mardifoufs 3y agoMost of that cost is literally coming from sms outside the us though. The rates for us sms are much lower than almost anywhere else.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoI'll have to do some research here. Prices in the US for bandwidth, phone services, etc. are insane.
- renewiltord 3y agoWhen you control access to the customer you can charge people a lot. Just like Apple can take 30% primarily because they’re the gatekeeper to iPhone users, telecoms are gatekeepers to their users so they can charge you a lot to text them. You don’t really have a choice. L
- myself248 3y agoWhat's it cost to be an SS7 peer for a year? Could they spin up their own "phone company" for the purpose of delivering SMS verification and nothing else, cheaper than they're paying someone else's markup?
- bloggie 3y agoFunny, because that's the reason I can't use Signal - I don't have a phone number.
- barbazoo 3y agoIn case one isn't aware, you can get a $1/month throwaway phone number from Twilio for that purpose.
- lxgr 3y agoThat's a neat workaround for the people that can figure that out, but doesn't change the underlying problem for the majority of users at all.
- alternatex 3y agoMajority of users don't have phone numbers?
- lxgr 3y agoI'm referring to the majority of users not having (or wanting to use) phone numbers. Some of these will be willing and able to pay $1/month to Twilio for a workaround, but most probably won't.
- bonton89 3y agoAren't these VoIP? Almost every service blocks VoIP numbers for sign ups these days, but perhaps Signal is an exception.
- barbazoo 3y agoThey work with Signal, Facebook, etc. Sometimes you have to try another one to get it to work.
- pierat 3y agoSounds 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#.
- alternatex 3y agoThey want the address book because if you don't have engagement promotion features like that, there is no way to ever become remotely popular in the chat app space. Why is the security a joke? The data is e2e encrypted, and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration. Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures? If you don't offload identity checks to telecom providers during registration some bad actor will immediately create a million accounts and send millions of spam messages and destroy the slim chance of this type of app to exist for free.
- pierat 3y ago> They want the address book because if you don't have engagement promotion features like that, there is no way to ever become remotely popular in the chat app space. Intentionally ignoring the fact that Signal splatters your phone number to everyone else is a humongous problem. And you can even put your phone number block in your address book, and it'll tell you everyone who has Signal. This happens all the time, with Signal servers leaking all of this metadata. And doing "engagement promotion" is what companies do to sell more shit. So, exactly what are they "selling"? >Why is the security a joke? Metadata, pertaining to communication patters and to whom matters just as much as what's being said. And that metadata, like "your phone number" and "contact's phone number", and "when data is being sent to/from" is that metadata. > The data is e2e encrypted, > and isn't related to a phone number in any way after registration. Bullshit. I see new people hopping on signal fairly regularly. If that was true, it'd be a simple verify-once-and-delete. It aint. > Do you know of a better way of combining privacy and anti-abuse measures? I reject your claim of "privacy", with regards to metadata. Secondly, Tox has an alternate way to handle this, by allowing any number of accounts not tied to anything. Sure, it's a SHA256 id, but who cares. There, its secure AND anonymous. Basically, I look at Signal as "better than SMS, but not much". It's basically a way to keep the phone company from scanning messages.
- renonce 3y agoJust wondering, are they relying on these big name cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP), known for predative traffic and storage pricing? Have they considered cheaper providers such as Backblaze B2 for storage and Hetzner/OVH for servers? The fees for storage, server and bandwidth could be cut by 80% if they did that.
- macNchz 3y agoOut of interest, their top vendor costs on their 2021 form 990: $7m Twilio $4m Microsoft $3m AWS $1.3m Google https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202212729349301631/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wolverine876 3y agoSignal agrees: (from the article:) ... legacy telecom operators have realized that SMS messages are now used primarily for app registration and two-factor authentication in many places, as people switch to calling and texting services that rely on network data. In response to increased verification traffic from apps like Signal, and decreased SMS revenue from their own customers, these service providers have significantly raised their SMS rates in many locations, assuming (correctly) that tech companies will have to pay anyway. ... These costs vary dramatically from month to month, and the rates that we pay are sometimes inflated due to “toll fraud”—a practice where some network operators split revenue with fraudulent actors to drive increased volumes of SMS and calling traffic on their network. The telephony providers that apps like Signal rely on to send verification codes during the registration process still charge their own customers for this make-believe traffic, which can increase registration costs in ways that are often unpredictable.
- sowbug 3y agoSMS has become a kind of real-world PoW (proof of work) mechanism. A phone number typically has a recurring fee to keep it working. So a live number indicates that someone is spending money (a proxy for effort) to maintain it.* It still seems like a lot of money to spend on simple, old technology, but from the PoW perspective, making it cheaper would defeat its purpose. *Which is why many sites reject Google Voice numbers, for example, for SMS verification.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> In response to increased verification traffic from apps like Signal, and decreased SMS revenue from their own customers, these service providers have significantly raised their SMS rates in many locations, assuming (correctly) that tech companies will have to pay anyway. There's nothing that requires tech companies to use SMS for registration or for 2FA. The normal way to do it is by email, which continues to be free. For Signal, there is no need to do 2FA registration at all. Signal is ideologically committed to publicizing your phone number, and apparently they'd rather pay $6 million to hold to their commitment than just... not do that.
- chefandy 3y agoI wish their justification for dropping SMS capability from their Android app to move away from phone numbers was a little more transparent about the obvious cost aspect rather than solely sticking to the patronizing "we're saving insecure messaging users from themselves" messaging they had. I found it pretty obnoxious. I think people generally get "valuable nonprofit + huge expense = not-sustainable = bad."
- rstuart4133 3y ago> their justification for dropping SMS capability from their Android app ... was a little more transparent about the obvious cost aspect I'm not following. Signal gets stung for the registration SMS costs because they send the SMS to the user. They don't pay when one user sends an SMS to another user. If you send an SMS, you're the one who pays. (I didn't realise they were moving away from phone numbers. Don't they they stay mandatory when PNP comes along?)
- eythian 3y agoIt's a lot more nuanced than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33258684
- chefandy 3y agoIt would be great if that was what was in their announcement.
- mhh__ 3y agoI wonder if you could do something clever such that you can have people volunteer their SIM for sending 2FA?
- jjav 3y ago> Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive. Particularly when the phone requirement is the biggest weakness in Signal. Getting rid of it will make it substantially cheaper to operate and much more private. Win-win.
- knoxa2511 3y agoAll things considered. Pretty impressive how cheap it is to run given the adoption of the Signal.
- j45 3y agoSecond time around benefits too, and the guest time was pretty efficient in WhatsApp too.
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- craftkiller 3y agoBack in the day Signal was called TextSecure and it did everything over SMS which required no centralized infrastructure aside from the cellular networks. They transitioned to internet-based messaging to support Apple devices. It seems that decision is now a 50 million dollar per year step backwards.
- lovvtide 3y agoTextSecure! Wow this took me back to 2011.
- jadyoyster 3y agoSMS would be a complete non-starter in Europe. Many (no?) countries lack unlimited texting plans.
- BlueTemplar 3y agoWait, still ?? Which countries ?
- sandworm101 3y agoIt's not a step backwards for me. Our organization uses signal in many situations where SMS isn't an option. When I land in a new country it is normal for my cell/SMS not to work. But I can hop on some local wifi and get signal messages. We had a widespread cell outage in my area last year. Signal not being on cell/SMS meant that I could still communicate with family without need of cell towers. This is a big step forwards imho.
- nicolaslem 3y ago> When I land in a new country it is normal for my cell/SMS not to work. But I can hop on some local wifi and get signal messages. WiFi calling is a standard feature that does exactly what you describe for texts and calls, without using a third-party. I have cell connectivity turned off constantly on my phone and yet receive texts and calls via WiFi. It is actually an awesome feature for receiving 2FA SMS at my parent's place where there is great internet but poor cell coverage.
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- Night_Thastus 3y agoI've loved Signal. It's been the only consistent way I've been able to send and receive high-quality pictures and videos at all. It's been the only way I've been reliably able to send texts when I'm in an area with poor reception, which is frequent. The privacy is nice and it's been simple and easy to use. I hope they stick around. Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good. The hardest part has been convincing people to use it, and if I have to get people to jump to another one it'll all just fall apart.
- cloogshicer 3y agoI know it's unpopular to say this on here but Signal will never be popular as long as they don't add basic features that all other messaging apps have. - If you lose your phone or it no longer boots, all your messages are irretrievably lost. There's no way to create backups on iOS. Why the hell can't I enable iCloud backups? I know it breaks privacy in some ways but let me choose the trade off. Put a giant warning if you have to. - The desktop app is awful and requires signing in again all the time. See the Telegram Desktop app for how to do it better. In my opinion it should be the gold standard for desktop messaging apps - Desktop app keeps losing message history As long as Signal treats all messages as if they're so important that even super spies should not be able to read them, and as a result, goofing usability in a way that standard features don't work, I 100% understand that the majority of people won't use it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- autoexec 3y ago> Everyone likes to bash more privacy oriented companies if they aren't absolutely 100% perfect in every single way, but IMO perfect is the enemy of good and Signal has been very good. Signal has not been good. The absolute least we should expect from any "privacy oriented company" is that they're honest and fully transparent about the data they collect and store, and Signal is none of that. Since they started collecting and forever storing sensitive user data in the cloud they've refused to update their privacy policy to alert people to that data collection. If you advertise your service to human rights activists, journalists, and whistleblowers whose freedom and/or lives are on the line you owe it to them to be extremely clear about what their risks are by using your service, but Signal outright lies to them in the very first line of their privacy policy. This isn't "perfect being the enemy of good" this is either a massive dead canary warning people not to use/trust Signal, or it's completely immoral and irresponsible.
- jph 3y agoSignal can be better, IMHO, by separating from phone number requirements. In other words, let users have secure random ids, rather than forcing each user to hand over their phone number for phone company verification. It turns out the budget shows the phone number registration problem: the costs to deal with phone number verification seem to be $6MM, which seems to be 10% of the entire budget. If Signal staff are reading this, I'd gladly pay $100/year for a phone-free solution for all users.
- minedwiz 3y agoYou're in luck: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-feature-test-phone-numbers-privacy-security-pre-beta-2024-launch https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/9/23953603/signal-username-...
- SahAssar 3y agoThey will still require a phone number, it's just a alias.
- crossroadsguy 3y agoI just hope they don’t expose phone numbers if a conversation was started on usernames and one or both parties have phone numbers saved. I hope it is not this bad - something Telegram does. Also preferably clearing differentiating username and phone number messages.
- zitterbewegung 3y agoFocusing on app features is one thing but the bigger picture is that Signal is at risk of not existing without capital… (just donated $20 today and I wish I could buy stickers off of them).
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- foundart 3y agoHow would it be better? Is there anything beyond not having to provide a phone number? How would it be worse?
- MuffinFlavored 3y agoIf you really wanted to talk to somebody in a "non-decryptable" fashion, could you set up like a channel that encrypts itself with a ton of different encryption methods, keys, etc. (encrypted payloads inside each other) Signal encryption is its main feature (I think) and how easy it makes it (abstracts handling key transfer and all that), I'm just trying to think through... if I wanted nobody to read what I was saying , would I use an app/target as popular as Signal or something homegrown?
- jedberg 3y agoYou don't need multiple security protocols (and in fact that is almost always a bad idea). You just need one good protocol and a way to securely exchange the keys. What signal solved for the most part is the secure key exchange. If you want to talk to one person, you can give them a USB key in person with a set of crypto keys and then use that to encrypt your messages over any transit method and it will be secure. The hard part is the key exchange.
- Buttons840 3y agoIt's a bit off topic, but I've wondered the same. We could stack a hundred layers of encryption algorithms, and if just one of them works, then the whole stack is secure.
- jedberg 3y agoYou could, but you'd be adding complexity to solve a mostly non-existent problem. Security is rarely broken because the algorithm itself is broken. It's usually because one end has a key logger or other vulnerability. Or they are literally storing the unencrypted text in an unencrypted data store after reading it. In the meantime, the added complexity adds new places for errors.
- kube-system 3y agoYep, people who think about messaging security as a problem of sending data from one computer to another are missing a huge part of the attack surface. To fully understand the entire problem set, we need to consider the entire pathway from one human's brain to another.
- vjk800 3y ago> Another $19 million a year or so out of Signal’s budget pays for its staff. Signal now employs about 50 people, a far larger team than a few years ago. What? I know silicon valley salaries are a thing, but absolutely everywhere else in the world this would be insane. Maybe change the headquarters to somewhere cheaper?
- sky_rw 3y agoI keep re-reading this section of their blog post trying to figure out what I'm missing here. $2.6 million full load per employee on avg? Is this heavily weighted to a few executives? Can somebody explain this to me? Edit: I'm stupid and did the math backwards.
- candiddevmike 3y agoOnly thing I can think of is it incentives them not to put backdoors into Signal/get fired.
- jedberg 3y agoYou mathed backwards. It's $380K per person fully loaded. Which is pretty inline with decent tech salary these days.
- dangoor 3y agoI think your math is off? $19M/50 people = $380,000?
- dale_glass 3y ago
- V__ 3y agoSignal had 40 million active users in 2021 [1]. With 14 million in infra cost, that comes to .35 per user/year. Total expenses are about 33 million, so about .825 per user/year. All in all that seems very reasonable. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/signal-statistics/
- rogerkirkness 3y agoBased on App Store downloads on both platforms, they are well over 200M at this point.
- nvy 3y agoA 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.
- rasso 3y agoExcept real privacy?
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoNot even that, because it is linked to phone numbers.
- yetanotherloss 3y agoWho is the active user base for signal these days? Everyone I knew who was using it dropped off after the SMS debacle, which was a shame. Edit: Wow some weird haters on HN today. I was honestly curious as an active signal user that was no longer able to use it to message people in North America and had never seen anyone using it in East Asia. Apparently this makes some other signal users very angry.
- freeqaz 3y agoI've converted all of my friends and family to using it. It's the "social media" for my world now. I'm probably an outlier for that, but it makes me happy!
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoI've been to a lot of meetups in the last year and exchanged contacts with people. As a nerdy idealist running a deGoogled Android with no proprietary software, I always have to tell them that I don’t have WhatsApp, just Signal. Again and again I have heard the reply, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got Signal, I use it to buy drugs.” So, that’s some of the active user base in my city, but none of those users are very motivated to use Signal with their network of contacts in general. There WhatsApp reigns.
- Krasnol 3y ago> “Oh, yeah, I’ve got Signal, I use it to buy drugs.” Funny, people around here in Germany say that about Telegram.
- bongripper 3y agoBuying drugs from shady people online like on Telegram channels is a good way to get you not high or killed. Apparently they're selling HHC now that looks like bud? No thanks. I'll stick to my local guy straight from behind the bushes next to the park.
- rchaud 3y agothose users probably have a far lower impact on Signal's operating costs because they're only sending the occasional message instead of using it as a broadcast platform.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ActorNightly 3y agoHas 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 https://github.com/signalapp Seems like all their stuff is open source.
- kyawzazaw 3y agounlikely the people i want to talk will bother setting this up
- Aachen 3y agoAnd the people those friends want to talk to. And the friends of those friends. To have self-hosted chat services, you either need a niche enough service that you'll never have two parties that would want to talk to each other while being on different servers, or federation. Signal chose the former, so here I am with eight communication apps on my phone. Maybe the next best thing could be to support multiple servers, like how email clients let you fetch data from more than one email provider, if they're so worried about federation inhibiting their ability to control the ecosystem that they plainly won't go there and hold speeches about how harmful that situation would be. Then we could have self hosting and also Signal wouldn't have to care about federating with my self-hosted server.
- MrDrMcCoy 3y agoLayer it on top of something like Matrix, then?
- ActorNightly 3y agoI mean the idea would be you download the app but use my server instead of of the default ones.
- newscracker 3y agoWhich app would they all use and from where would they get it? Signal does not (intentionally) support the official app using other servers or the platform itself supporting federation. [1] [1]: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
- exabrial 3y agoSome of these things raise an eyebrow and I'd like them further broken down (but in the mean time, I'm still donating): * $19 million for 50 staff - That's $338k/head on average. At face value for a nonprofit, I'd like these costs broke down as this seems excessive. There is far cheaper IT labor available outside SV. * 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year - I'd drop these features if possible, or give them to donors. * Storage: $1.3m, Servers: $2.9m - I was actually expecting this to be far higher - Long term storage should probably be donor-only - Servers could likely be optimized by going hybrid cloud with colocation and owning own hardware, but again, was surprised how "little" they're spending on this. * Sms registration fees: $6m - Stop contributing and supporting the "Your phone number is your identity" problem. - Move towards helping educating society and establishing a set of encryption keys as their long term identity It's easy to criticize from the bleachers. Still thankful for the app and I'll continue to donate.
- simcop2387 3y agoOne thing I question with that is that if you gave features to donors only, wouldn't that mean that signal now needs to track users in ways that aren't privacy preserving? I.e. you'd be able to know if any given user using signal now has given payments to signal. I'm not sure that'd work with what they want to do as an organization.
- asylteltine 3y agoThey need to dump sms entirely. Use on device private keys. If users mess it up, it’s on them. People need to get educated about how to manage private keys.
- vore 3y agoAs someone technically savvy, I don't trust myself to manage my own private keys sufficiently for a service that's the point of contact for all my friends and family. I think it's a much taller order for someone without the technical knowhow – remember that Signal's audience includes very non-technical people who don't have time to learn the technical ins and outs but absolutely require its utility, like journalists and dissidents.
- kuon 3y agoI wish I could use signal without a phone and phone number. Otherwise it is useless to me.
- codemac 3y ago> As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world. This is really the crux of the problem. ~$3M of servers per year is more than enough to start purchasing hardware, I wish there were easier ways for people like me to participate and help Signal on the cheap. As someone who participated in the builds they complain about being expensive (and ignoring their , I don't think it's a function of centralization or "troubling" as much as it is practical. Meta, Google, etc all have many billions they could be saving if they could figure out how to make it cheaper too.
- RosanaAnaDana 3y agoIs it possible to self host signal? Can signal move towards a model like the fediverse where the software development is decoupled from the hosting costs?
- dindresto 3y agoThey are actively working against self hosting, which is why I want matrix to succeed and signal to die
- rufi 3y agoRegistration Fees: $6 million dollars per year... how come sending sms cost so much?
- nvrmnd 3y agoI donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Even better would be to charge users in a way that reflects the costs. For instance, maybe verifying a new number over SMS should cost $0.10 if that's going to make up 14% of the operating costs. Begging for donations to subsidize excessive use by other users just doesn't seem sustainable.
- arsome 3y agoI would certainly prefer the donation begging - chance of getting family and friends to use it with an upfront cost: 0.
- lxgr 3y agoHow are you going to charge users $0.10? Micropayments is a huge unsolved problem.
- renonce 3y agoBuy 50 invite codes for $5
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoYes, let’s tie every user of this privacy-focused messaging platform to a credit card number.
- mmanfrin 3y ago> I donate to signal, and use it frequently. But I would much prefer for the app to simply charge users rather than beg for donations. Hard disagree. If you charge, the number of people who will use it shrinks by several magnitudes, and then you lose your network effect, you lose the ability to get your less technically inclined friends to install it.
- ruffrey 3y agoI would pay for a few signal features: 1. encrypted backups or backup integration of my chats, photos and videos. 2. business features (backup, directory integration, search) I have not used: 1. voice and video Incredible that SMS costs so much. I wonder if it's worth it because it _saves_ so much in spam and other sorts of fraud or bad behavior?
- Aachen 3y agoI have some good news: go into the settings and turn on encrypted backups. The clients also all come with a search function, even if it only matches against start-of-word (which includes URLs, so you can't search for domain names which regularly bothers me). Directory integration, as in, importing a vcard with everyone's phone number into your device such that you can tap on anyone's name and message them on Signal if they've got Signal installed?
- crtasm 3y agoThe backup option is Android-only.
- Aachen 3y agoO.o TIL. That's weird, apple users already have plenty of lock-in and own-data-inaccessibility, but so maybe they figured they clearly don't care? Weird as heck either way Then what I can recommend is installing the desktop client on a server somewhere and reading its sqlite-like (but with some flaky encryption extension) messages database
- lannisterstark 3y ago>: go into the settings and turn on encrypted backups. Fair warning: It will...bloat. It usually keeps 3-4 copies of most recent backups in the folders you select and if you send a lot of photos, imagine it eating tens of gigabytes of storage just for backup. (My current backups are 9.75 gigs each, approx 3 of them)
- rodlette 3y agoI'd prefer a federated solution, but XMPP doesn't yet have decent support for group chat that doesn't depend on being connected. https://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/xep-0369-0.1.html https://xmpp.org/extensions/attic/xep-0369-0.1.html is still experimental. Bravo to Signal for being easy enough for my family to use!
- fsflover 3y agoWhat about Matrix?
- rodlette 3y agoI've tried a few times. It always felt... clunky? I tried Element. UI felt slow, I was unable to find notifications in scrollback. Clicking the notification button would take me to random messages.
- fsflover 3y agoThere are very many clients lighter than Element.
- rodlette 3y agoI remembered another issue with Matrix. Signal and XMPP (via Quickly) have a simple phone number based signup workflow that my family have grown used to. My family are not happy on having to remember/use passwords/keys. That's a shame, but is ultimately a constraint I have to deal with when persuading them to install/use an IM app.
- ZeroCool2u 3y agoSignal is one of the non-profits I happily donate to. Myself, my family, and my friends use it almost exclusively.
- Canada 3y agoSeriously consider setting up a recurring donation if you prefer Signal. They have delivered consistently over the years. I set the $20/month back when they introduced the option. I'm curious what the breakdown of donations is. I only have 1 contact with a $10/month and 1 with a $5/month badge. Of course there could be others not displaying the badge. Signal really needs 500,000 people giving $20/month and plus the rich guys giving some millions on top of that to be in a safe financial position. Maybe something that could be done to encourage donations is have the client estimate how much raw infra costs your usage created and display in the donation screen.
- rglullis 3y agoI fail to understand the point of supporting an organization that is completely against self-sovereignty like Signal is. Why would I want to pay someone to develop something that traps me into their platform and does not offer a way out?
- BlueTemplar 3y agoNot completely ? Their server seems to be open source too now (with the exception of the spam filter) ?
- rglullis 3y agoCan I operate my own Signal server and talk with people on the "main" one?
- Caligatio 3y agoYou're moving the goal post from "self-sovereignty" to supports federation with an infinite number of servers. Nothing is stopping you from compiling your own Signal server and modifying a Signal client to use your server. Given that Signal is free as a service, supporting federation only increases their expenses.
- 3y ago
- Aissen 3y agoThe cloud tax is crazy (especially bandwidth). Pretty sure Signal has reached the scale where they would be cheaper by building their infra, maybe starting with the most expensive (storage + bandwidth), and then doing others. SMS is (unfortunately) core to the product, so I'm not certain how they could make it cheaper, while retaining the same properties (user+pass registration would be a nightmare for spam and change the UX).
- Rastonbury 3y agoAnyone know much does it become worth it to build your own? They spend around $3-4m on storage and bandwidth
- maxfurman 3y agoData centers cost billions. Signal, and pretty much everyone else who isn't already in the data center business, is far away from breakeven on that.
- Symbiote 3y agoThere are several steps between using AWS and building a datacentre. - Using similar services from cheaper cloud providers - Renting VMs - Renting whole servers - Renting rack space + power - Renting larger spaces (many racks, or part or all of a whole floor)
- hotnfresh 3y agoThe small ISP/phone/cable company I worked for in high school had a data center. Maybe 20 racks. It was pretty damn reliable (old-school phone infra techs knew how to make shit stay “online”). I guarantee it wasn’t above the single-digit millions to build, inflation adjusted.
- frakkingcylons 3y agoThat example of your small telecom company isn't really relevant here, is it? Signal needs to work well for people around the world.
- bayesianbot 3y agohttps://archive.is/k90dC https://archive.is/k90dC
- flower-giraffe 3y agoDid I read that right $19m people cost for 50 people.
- notachatbot123 3y agoIt's crazy, 400,000k per person. It would feel like nothing but an unfair waste of my "cheap-country" money to fuel "overpriced-county" with a donation.
- atlasunshrugged 3y agoBut that's not salary, that's the total cost per employee. So if you factor in ~40% cost for healthcare, pension, perks, and various taxes, then the average salary is closer to $240,000 which will still a bit high, is probably less than market for the average engineer working at the company.
- gamblor956 3y agoPer the 990, which is just salary, multiple employees at Signal are getting paid over $650k. That's way above market for the nonprofit sector for comparable positions.
- macNchz 3y agoFrom page 2 of Schedule J (at the bottom) they break out the components of the compensation, showing that most of those numbers incorporate a base salary that looks fairly normal with 2-600k of bonus & incentive comp on top. In curious Googling to see if there was an explanation for how their structure works, I stumbled on this interesting Glassdoor review: > The bonus structure promised up to a 100% match with salary, but in practice the system was set up so that nobody got more than 50%, if that. Had I understood this I probably would have taken a competing offer that ultimately would have had much higher comp. > The quarterly cliff on the bonus system, where a feature failing to ship within the quarter specified (even if just by a single day) was counted as if you hadn't done it at all. This led to death marches each quarter as everyone scrambled to try to finish unrealistic goals. It wasn't possible to get help from anyone else at these times since of course they too had the same problem. > Nominally, the quarterly goals were set in a collaborative process. In practice it was a 2 day full day meeting where we were told what Moxie had decided we were going to do - our input wasn't really considered at all, including if it was even viable to complete in a quarter. I'm fine with top down control, that's how most corps work, but I disliked the false patina that this was some democratic process. > Internal communications are a disaster, because Signal uses Signal for everything, including things Signal isn't at all designed for or good at. Bug tracking is literally done in a giant group chat. I have a newfound appreciation for JIRA. https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Signal-Messenger-Reviews-E4764804.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Signal-Messenger-Reviews-E...
- poutinepapi 3y agoUnderstood, $7 CAD per month are heading your way since I use Signal quite a bit.
- jdoss 3y agoI started paying for Signal when they rolled out the subscription feature at the $5/mo plan and after reading this post, I just moved to the $10/mo plan because of how much I value this service since I use it every day. I hope other users subscribe if they are able to do so.
- narinxas 3y agobut what does this mean in terms of VISA vs MasterCard?
- kirbypineapple 3y agoI would pay a subscription fee if only to get back SMS capabilities.
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291427
- popol12 3y ago2 ideas to limit costs: Make it a 2 tier plan: free tier is text and images only, paid tier adds audio/video calls Remove the need for phone number verification I'd be happy to pay 10 bucks a year for Signal.
- alternatex 3y agoThey do that and everyone moves to WhatsApp or Telegram. Your comment ignores the whole private chat app landscape.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoI am too cynical by far, but Signal being run by an ex-Googler is not at all reassuring me of its long-term commitments to security and privacy.
- nottorp 3y agoTo be cynical in another direction, if it wasn't run by an ex-Googler it would probably cost 1/3 of what it does now to run it :)
- mushufasa 3y agoEvery time I hear about Signal's donation notices I start thinking about ways they might generate revenue. I'm sure Signal staff have considered a ton of options already. Anyway, - can't do personalized ads or geo-specific ads, so doing generic ads wouldn't drive a ton of revenue anyways - can't require users payment because when payment (most forms, including bitcoin!) can be used to identify people - No real benefit to themed group chats (like discord nitro) since it doesn't focus on community groups I'd love for someone to figure this out, though, because a nonprofit structure for an app is not sustainable.
- olah_1 3y agoSo charge everyone $2 per month to use it? shrug If you're not going to show how much money you get via donations, I'm not donating. I'm not going to donate more than you actually need, for example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bongripper 3y agoSignal already has a very hard time competing against the network effects of WhatsApp and Telegram and getting people on the app, a fee would only increase that. But making it n$/year but with the option for an account withiot a phone number like other people are suggesting sounds nice, peace
- AnonHP 3y ago> Signal already has a very hard time competing against the network effects of WhatsApp and Telegram May not be the best thread to say this in, but Signal isn’t as good as Telegram and WhatsApp on features. People can be persuaded to switch, but may have different expectations than what Signal can satisfy.
- frivoal 3y agohttps://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- lxgr 3y agoTheir competitors are free. Charging $2 would make Signal a non-alternative for many of their users, and due to how the network effect works, it would greatly reduce the utility for everybody willing to pay as well. And that's all without even considering the significant overhead of collecting low-value payments internationally.
- olah_1 3y agoIf you have a sustainable business model, you don't need the network effects. Threema is fine with a smaller userbase because they have a business model that works.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoI always wonder why no one ever mentions Session. Is there some defect in its tech, or is it just not a comparable product?
- RunSet 3y agoIt's an uphill battle. I asked to recommend Session on the privacy subreddit- which the moderators denied because Session lacks a well-documented endorsement from a public figure regarded as an authority with regard to privacy. That is a non-starter specifically in the context of vetting privacy-enabling software. Anyone got a list of privacy celebrities with enough spare time to vet reddit content?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoIt really comes down to that? Wow. Thanks for answering though, it really bugged me, and I couldn't find anything on it.
- RunSet 3y agoIf you ever have nothing better to do, view the revision history on the wikipedia entry for Session Private messenger and witness the petty roadblocks thrown up as objections to allowing it to have an entry. I'll just say Session had to meet a lot of criteria merely to have a wikipedia entry that Signal's entry did not meet at the time. To this day Session's hard-won wikipedia entry is saddled with a "limitations" entry best summarized as "Session is not Signal". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_(software)
- swaraj 3y agoLove Signal over Telegram, Wickr, etc.
- collaborative 3y agoFB only wanted whatsapp to preempt a potential competitor. They are happy to give the service for free (at a loss) There is no room for monetization because of FB. In other words, you can't compete with a monopoly, even if you are in a different business. They simply take all
- newscracker 3y agoFB is getting and using some metadata from WhatsApp. FB also said it would be introducing ads in WhatsApp. While WhatsApp may not be raking in a lot of money, it’s not a complete loss for Meta either.
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- Brian_K_White 3y agoI am imagining a donate page in the app that incorporates this willingness to be public about the costs. It offers a way to configure a recurring donation for whatever amount and whatever schedule you want. $100/year for instance, but as you slide the slider or enter a number, it shows you if that number leaves Signal in deficit, covered, or surplus, if all other users who are currently paying anything paid this much. Instead of just trying to suggest an amount with no explaination of what it means, is $5 still leaving them starving? is $5 5x more generous than needed? You still get to use it for free. But if you are of a mind to be one of the ones chipping in to keep it alive, you see exactly what is the right amount. When 10k people are paying for 10m other people, that "covered" amount may be pretty high, apparently 5x what the average donater is currently paying. (article says it's 20% of total) But with that little bit of non-repulsive non-abusive game theory, just honest information but presented in an immediate way, a lot of those other 10m users would start to chip in, and the covered amount would come down. Some users will say, well, I can swallow 5x what I was paying, and others can just leave their donation level in the red. But I think a lot more people would go from 0 to a few bucks if they could see exactly what it means and know that it wasn't a waste. Maybe the donate function could even have a setting track the current covered value automatically so that your bill automatically comes down as other people start adding to the pool. Also have it display the 3% or more transaction fee overhead going to the debit card and other payment processors, to show right there graphically how much you're wasting by paying a small amount monthly vs a large amount yearly. Everyone always hides that but I say show it prominently.
- superseeplus 3y agoWhile I would be willing to pay a fee to use Signal, most people won’t and then Signal would turn into a deserted landscape full of privacy nerds who only talk with each other. On the other hand, being better at soliciting donations more often would be more helpful. I’m a regular Signal user and didn’t even know I could donate.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoJust donated $100. I’ve gotten way more than $100 of value from them.
- bilal4hmed 3y agoIf your employer matches don't forget that ... Easy way to double your donation
- amluto 3y agoI find this surprising: > As a small nonprofit organization, we cannot afford to purchase all of the physical computers that are necessary to support everyone who relies on Signal while also placing them in independent data centers around the world. Only a select few of the very largest companies globally are still capable of doing this. Signal may be “small,” but they’re spending plenty on this. Registration is expensive and hard to do without using one of the large expensive providers. But there’s $7M for servers, storage and bandwidth. These are comparatively easy: servers and storage (especially for a service like this where availability for the substantial majority of the data is not terribly important) come in nice pre-manufactured boxes that can easily saturate 10Gbps and can store quite a few TB at very very high IOPS. [0]. And the forwarding model isn’t very latency sensitive - several hundred ms for most users is fine, and sending media via Signal is quite slow regardless. So having many points of presence doesn’t seem terribly important. I bet that two small colocated facilities could cover all of North America quite nicely. Bandwidth costs outside the cloud world, at least in North America, are comically cheap compared to the major clouds. [0] A service like Signal ought to need relatively little processing compared to bandwidth and storage for the data plane. AWS and the like may not have a particular good match in their catalog for this use case.
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- Maskawanian 3y agoI would use Signal, but it ties to a mobile number, that is why I don't use it. Been using Element/Matrix instead. I'd consider switching if I could primarily use it on a Desktop decoupled from a mobile device.
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- rob74 3y ago> she wanted to call attention to how competitors pay these same expenses: either by profiting directly from monetizing users’ data or, she argues, by locking users into networks that very often operate with that same corporate surveillance business model. There is also a third alternative: Threema (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.threema.app&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ch.threema.app...) is a privacy-focused messenger app that tries to cover its costs by *gasp* asking for money for the app! But of course those notoriously financially-conservative Swiss can't hold a candle to Signal, who first decided to give away their app, same as those other messenger-making companies flush with cash, and then found out that supporting all those users who download your free app actually costs money...
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- newscracker 3y agoThis was a nice, detailed read. At some point, Signal would have to move out of cloud providers at least for a few things to manage costs better. I was happy to note this about employee compensation since paying them well is a good thing apart from their personal motivation to work on this (even at a comparatively lower pay than in other companies/projects): > When benefits, HR services, taxes, recruiting, and salaries are included, this translates to around $19 million dollars per year. > We are proud to pay people well. Our goal is to compensate our staff at as close to industry wages as possible within the boundaries of a nonprofit organization. That said, I really dislike Signal for a few reasons. The first is what many people have already talked about very often — forcing to use a phone number to register. Since the SMS or call costs are quite high, Signal could adopt the iMessage approach to verification, which is having the user send an SMS to the service (this will cost the user some money depending on which country the SMS is sent to). This could be decided based on the country code so that the current SMS OTP model can coexist. Signal is obstinately user unfriendly on a few aspects on user experience, more so on iOS/iPadOS. Firstly, it refuses to provide a data backup mechanism for iOS/iPadOS. If someone loses their devices, there is no way to restore older messages. Even setting up a new device requires the old device to be in physical proximity to transfer the data. Signal does integrate with CallKit (to act like a phone app) and with Apple’s notification services, but refuses to allow the user to backup the data with a password to encrypt it. Secondly, I found this paragraph in this post to be disingenuous: > Such practices are often accompanied by “growth hacking” and engagement maximization techniques that leverage dark patterns to keep people glued to feeds and notifications. While Signal is also free to use, we reject this kind of manipulation, focusing instead on creating a straightforward interpersonal communications app. We also reject business models that incentivize such practices. Signal on iOS/iPadOS wants the user to enable notifications and to share contacts. If notifications are disallowed and if contacts upload is disallowed, it will pester every few days about it. One might think this is a silly mistake that Signal isn’t aware of. But it was reported some years ago and Signal responded that it will not fix it because it believes this is the only way. [1] Not even an option where this is a toggle for those who want no notifications or don’t want to share contacts (Signal does have a toggle for contact joining notifications). Signal is also not that reliable in delivering messages in a timely manner compared to other apps (the GitHub repo has many repetitive issues on this topic over all these years). Finally, since Signal has poorer UX in general, which isn’t an easy or cheap thing to handle, I use it only with less than a handful of people who I know and who use it. I’d donate occasionally so that Signal can continue to exist, but I don’t feel like supporting it every month with all these issues, some of which look like Signal ignoring the user and UX issues completely. Edit: Removed some hard words. [1]: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-721152481 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/4590#issue-72...
- m3kw9 3y agoThey could use a free plus subscription model for really pro features, like “extra privacy”, “faster sending speed”, “create bigger group rooms”, these are bad features but you get it
- YeBanKo 3y agoAs soon as there is “extra privacy” for a premium, I would ditch Signal immediately. It’s either provate and secure or it’s not. Certain things cannot be half measured.
- eviks 3y agoOr the extra privacy could be the current misfeature where you can't properly sync messages across devices. No reason to ditch over that?
- BlueTemplar 3y agoNot having to rely on a phone number would be extra privacy. They are stuck with SMS though because it's a costly... signal that prevents spam. (Sounds like an opportunity ??) But then this might solve the funding issue for them, but being tied to most payment systems would only somewhat improve the situation for the users. I understand now why they dabbled with cryptocurrencies (Monero having proved that these can be anonymous short of having NSA levels of computing power ?). I haven't been keeping up, how did that work out ?
- nottorp 3y agoOk, have they decoupled my identity from my phone number yet? I mean, to donate to them I'd have to use it. I don't need another WhatsApp.
- contact9879 3y agoalmost, usernames and phone number privacy are in testing now
- AnonHP 3y agoThat’s only phone number privacy from other users. Registration would still require a phone number, which is what GP seems to be unhappy about.
- nottorp 3y agoI don't see the point of all that encryption when the ends of a conversation are tied to publicly available info like a phone number. Do you think $SECRET_POLICE will care that they can't decrypt my messages when they know I have exchanged said messages with a known dissident's phone number? $SECRET_POLICE doesn't do innocent until proven guilty.
- contact9879 3y agoSignal's design for usernames and phone number privacy means they won't know Also, dissidents aren't the only (and definitely not the primary) intended users for Signal
- akprasad 3y agoI 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.
- olejorgenb 3y agoDoes this entail a 30% cut to Apple/Google?
- bilal4hmed 3y agohttps://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Donor-FAQs https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360031949872-Do... Easy google , but no it doesn't
- smolyeet 3y agoDoes it matter. 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
- squeaky-clean 3y agoBecause this isn't the only one way to donate, and if it were subject to the 30% cut, most people would want to know they could spend a couple extra hours steps for 30% additional impact on their donation. Very few people are going "No apple pay? No donation."
- YeBanKo 3y agoNothing seems out of the ordinary in terms of costs. But there some features that would be pertinent to their core mission of providing a secure messenger, and stories and payments aren’t some of those. Stories button takes up half of the bottom navigation bar, I have not seen anyone using that feature. Their non-product approach is what prevents men from becoming a recurring donors. They are finally testing a build with usernames, but it has been long over due.
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- dang 3y agoRelated: https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/ https://www.wired.com/story/signal-operating-costs/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38291490, but we merged the comments hither)
- ilaksh 3y agoI donated $5.
- mortallywounded 3y agoI don't understand how storage can cost a million dollars when they don't store anything. Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... even if you receive and send trillions of messages I don't think you would end up storing much at all. As for registration fees, it sounds like they should use authenticator instead of SMS... and stop requiring a phone number to sign up. That is why I left Signal (went with Matrix). I don't see why anyone would want to tie their Signal to a phone. If you value privacy, why would you do that? Servers cost seems excessive as well. I don't believe you need that many servers, even if you served a boat load of requests. As for bandwidth.. okay, that may be the case. I am not sure how you can get that cost down.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AnonHP 3y ago> Even if messages are queued, how do you get millions of dollars in queued storage? It's hard for me to imagine... The details are there in this post, but I can offer a few guesses. Users may be using multiple devices. And the service has to deliver to all the linked devices before ejecting the message from its storage. The time limit for storing and waiting for linked devices to come online is about a month. With tens of millions of users, this could add up.
- mortallywounded 3y agoEven if every user had dozens of queued up messages, I don't think it equals millions in storage costs. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a storage/database/queue with billions of records and it costs <$700/month. shrugs
- CDRdude 3y agoI think some messages will cost more storage than others. I have 4 devices synced to my Signal account. Yesterday, my friend sent me a 6.8 MB cat video[1]. I presume Signal has to store this cat video until I boot up my 4th device and load the queued messages. [1]: It was a copy of this cat video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8Ud1Cr76j8s
- charles_f 3y agoYou have to appreciate the complete transparency, gently nudging towards giving without ever begging for it. Refreshing compared to the alternative that Wikipedia is showing, with the tantrum-like emails we receive from their CEO like "LAST REMINDER" or "We've had enough" ; which they ironically send to people who gave.
- GabeIsko 3y agoThose are just non-profit fundraiser consulting tactics. Don't take them personally, just ignore them. The reason they exist is that Wikipedia has too much money, so they spend some on consultants who say they can raise more. It's weird, but that's how the world works. I would much prefer the Wikipedia endowment model of non-profit orgs. They have a standard operating procedure with a predictable budget, and endowment that let's them run indefinitely, and we just have to suffer through pledge drives. I just block them with ublock filters. I gave them 6 dollars back in 2012, and according to their marketing that is enough for life.
- JohnFen 3y ago> 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.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoany excuse to not donate!
- vander_elst 3y ago19M for ~50 people is quite a good compensation
- nwellinghoff 3y agoWish they provided some numbers of actual messages, type etc. per day. Seems like a good game plan would be. 1) Get off the major cloud providers that charge insane egress fees. 2) Remove SMS verification. A simple solution might be the app gives you a code and then you dial in to them and punch in the code to them. Like a reverse voice based authentication. 3) Remove voice and video calling for non donating users. 3) Remove media texting until both users allow a p2p connection. 4) Remove no contact list message hosting for non donating users. Lot of unpleasant trade offs there. But I would rank having a text based private messaging app as the top feature. Everything else is a "very" nice to have. I applaud what they are doing and the sacrifices that have been made so far.
- rando_person_1 3y agodoes the dial-in suggestion work? Seems like spoofing phone numbers is trivial, while spoofing numbers for inbound SMS is harder.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jpollock 3y agoAbout the SMS verification, it depends on the goal. If the goal is to verify a phone number, you can't trust the _sender's_ address in the phone network. So, you can't trust the address in the "From" on an SMS or the "From" of a phone call. That means a voice call to Signal would not work to validate phone numbers.
- nwellinghoff 3y agoGood point, I guess we are proving why the resorted to using numbers in the first place. Unless you have a verification point that includes a "charge". Indirect or direct, your platform gets flooded with spam/bots. Does anyone have ideas of how this problem can be solved while also preserving privacy? Problem: A system that enforces a monetary penalty to prevent sign up abuse while also not tying a users identity to said system. Without doing some pain in the a crypto stuff it seems like there are no easy solutions other than the #
- dpc_01234 3y agoSignal should be able to bring in some revenue other than donations. Premium features that don't compromise the privacy? Premium stickers? Extended emojis only if one paid $1 etc.?
- vlovich123 3y agoI feel like investing in p2p approaches and having people donate spare server capacity might be better. For example, relay calling was p2p in the original Skype and worked well. Apple private relay is a similar concept whereby there are two intermediaries to make things private. It gets trickier since in mobile land you can’t run servers really, but I feel like the Signal population has enough spare capacity to offload bandwidth and stuff and could be an easier sell than “please give us money”. For the sms verification, I feel like forcing the requester to do some bitcoin mining for you could potentially pay for itself.
- siliconc0w 3y agoCan they require users to send them a SMS instead for verification or that more easily spoofed?
- greyface- 3y agoAn entirely peer-to-peer instant messaging network, which doesn't rely on a central authority, is technically possible. A $50M/yr burn rate to implement that authority as an act of charity is simply unsustainable. Why do we insist on continuing down this path? Attempts to decentralize or federate Signal are met with hostility. The Signal Foundation tells us that this is the only possible way; "the ecosystem is moving", and we must exist in competition with commercial offerings, rather than build something small, sustainable, and decentralized. This is great, until the AWS bill is due.
- contact9879 3y agoBecause peer-to-peer messaging is not a solved issue. People want asynchronous conversations and not have to expose their location to everyone they talk to. There are other platforms that are working on federated e2ee services (it's not easy. matrix was completely broken a year ago).
- greyface- 3y agoI'm not suggesting that it's a solved problem, but it's a solvable problem, and the Signal Foundation should be using its (significant) resources to solve it, rather than slowly bleeding them out to AWS, GCP, Azure, and Twilio. Unfortunately, solving that problem also significantly reduces the scope of the Foundation, so there's little incentive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- melbourne_mat 3y agoTotal salary bill: $20m. 50 staff so average salary: $400k. I'd be happy with $200k USD - that's more than I get paid in my country at current exchange rates.
- cfn 3y agoProbably includes taxes, social security, health insurance, etc
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nonameiguess 3y agoI've actually posted Signal's tax return before, but a great thing about US nonprofits is the tax return is publicly available from the IRS website: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_2022010619398981.pdf https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/824506840_202012_990_... The last one available is from 2020, though. They tend to lag a few years behind. They're required to report key employees plus top-five compensated who aren't "key." Brian Acton and Meredith Whittaker both earn no salary at all. Their COO got $290 in 2020. Moxie Marlinspike and their top five developers/managers were all in the 400-600 range. I'm sure they pay well (don't have much choice if you're going to be based in San Francisco), but I highly doubt 400 is an average salary. The expense being reported is total cost of employment, which includes FICA taxes paid by the employer, 401k matches, and probably most notably healthcare, but all benefits and in-kind compensation.
- hiatus 3y ago> The expense being reported is total cost of employment, which includes FICA taxes paid by the employer, 401k matches, and probably most notably healthcare, but all benefits and in-kind compensation. This is incorrect, reportable compensation on a 990 is the amount in box 5 of the employee's W-2, which does not include health insurance, taxes, etc. https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organization-annual-reporting-requirements-meaning-of-reportable-and-other-compensation-in-form-990 https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio...
- wolverine876 3y agoIt's amazing what they produce with their headcount: First, we have three distinct client teams, one for each platform (Android, Desktop, and iOS). These teams are constantly working: adjusting to operating system updates, building new features, and making sure the app works on a wide variety of devices and hardware configurations. We also have dedicated engineering teams that handle the development and maintenance of the Signal Server and all of its infrastructure, our calling libraries like RingRTC, and core libraries like libsignal. These also need constant development and monitoring. Product and design teams help shape the future of the app and determine how it will look and function, while our localization team coordinates translation efforts across more than sixty languages. We even have a full-time, in-house support group that interfaces with people who use Signal and provides detailed technical feedback and real-time troubleshooting information to every other team. This is an essential function, particularly at Signal, because we don’t collect analytics or telemetry data about how people are using Signal. -------- How many people does it take to perform all that? In total, around 50 full-time employees currently work on Signal ... !
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rglullis 3y agoDoes anyone else think that this strategy of growing the userbase with a "free" product and then start panhandling for donations is outright dishonest? There are tons of smaller XMPP or Matrix providers that didn't get access to millions in funding from these big corporations like Signal did. Who have to run a business in a way that requires paying customers from the start. But now that cash is tight (and after they built a sizable user base) and they can no longer just outspend the competition, suddenly they remind you of TANSTAAFL and are asking you to cough up the cash. It is the same shitty playbook used by VC-funded companies, except that is now dressed as some virtuous thing of "looked at how much it cost to build all this..." It makes some emotional appeal but it tries to hide from the audience that these costs are solely due to them insisting on controlling everything. If it is so expensive to run Signal, then open it up to let other people run their own servers instead of trying to control everything. Don't give me this bullshit of "we are a non-profit but we are in the same lane of big tech corporations". You are there because it served you. You can not have it both ways.
- discard124 3y ago> open it up to let other people run their own servers instead of trying to control everything. If you know of a good open architecture that solves the problems of spam and impersonation while maintaining the convenience and ease of use necessary for mass adoption, please share it.
- rglullis 3y agoI could get my parents who are nearing their 70s to use Element (Matrix) and it took them less than 10 minutes, even with me asking them to register to a non-default homeserver. Screw "convenience". It's a poison pill. "Convenience" should never be put above "resilience" (not to mention "freedom") in a value scale. The American obsession with "convenience" is turning us all into cattle and it's getting harder and harder to get the rest of society to function without being controlled by some corporate overlord.
- discard124 3y ago
- wolverine876 3y agoSupport for Signal development supports all privacy-oriented software and systems, because Signal is open source. The Signal Protocol already is an industry standard. What other Signal development - either the components, the code, or the concepts - are used by others?
- contact9879 3y agoThe only issue I'm aware of is that The Signal Protocol is only really defined in Signal's GPL'd code. So it's almost impossible to write a clean room implementation (e.g. Wire tried and ultimately failed. they ended up also GPL-ing their library).
- wolverine876 3y agoIt's used by many major services, such as WhatsApp. How could it be that hard to define and implement?
- xor25519 3y agoGiven the few fees, what about charging/giving the option to pay $1/year? Whatsapp had this in practice before they got acquired.
- tamimio 3y ago>Privacy That’s a very bold statement from an app that still requires a phone number using a broken protocol (gsm) to “verify” your identity and authenticate it, sim swap attacks can be carried out by kids these days. Also, don’t expect privacy when you are using a proprietary OS like iOS or one full of Google services that also have proprietary firmware drivers, they (the adversaries) don’t need to even decrypt these “privacy apps” when it’s easier to access the backdoor-ed OS or hardware, but enjoy the illusion in the meantime.
- contact9879 3y agoI'm always intrigued by people that have this POV. Security and privacy are not binary for fucks sake. Improvement on the status quo is great and Signal improves a hell of a lot. Not to mention that half of your comment is non-issues.
- dingnuts 3y agothere's a big social cost to trying to get others to use Signal, and it's not worth it if the advertised features don't work as advertised.. that said I stopped using Signal years ago because of basic deliverability being less reliable than SMS.. I switched back to SMS so I could communicate reliably with a loved one during an emergency when Signal randomly stopped letting me respond to messages, and I won't pay the social cost twice of trying to convince contacts to use it after having to abandon the service when I really needed it. Actually between Element and Signal and the differences between their usability as advertised versus the reality of using them with non-technical users, I've used up all of my social capital for convincing people to use "better" networks and mostly just use SMS/RCS now.
- contact9879 3y agoI understand that. Signal has put in a lot of work since I started using it fulltime and is much more reliable now than it was just 2-4 years ago. The only time I've had issues now is when I'm backpacking in areas with spotty connection. SMS delivers quicker and is more reliable.
- jzb 3y agoI'll probably donate, but I find it annoying that Signal only offers Linux packages for Debian-based distros. I've had headaches with the Flatpak. I would think that the Linux desktop audience - while not huge - would be the most interested in Signal. That is, might not be a lot of Linux users but percentage-wise I'd bet more Linux users are interested in Signal than macOS or Windows users. Even an AppImage would be lovely.
- NoGravitas 3y agoThe Flatpak works fine for me on Fedora, though of course it's an Electron app, and it periodically has to be re-connected if I don't use it much.
- fourstepper 3y agoSeconded, the Flatpak is the way to go.
- zucker42 3y agoSignal Desktop is available in the Arch repositories. https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/signal-desktop/ https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/signal-desktop/
- jzb 3y agoThat would be very helpful... if I ran Arch.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NorwegianDude 3y agoPaying over 100 USD per 1 TB of data transfer is just stupidly expensive. That's insane pricing...
- godelski 3y agoJust a reminder, many of the places you work will match your donations. Edit: Not sure why people downvoted this. Boss, is that you? I'm increasing my donation.
- Funes- 3y agoP2P alternatives are less convenient (always on to deal with notifications, adding contacts typically requires extra steps, etcetera), but the difference in costs is abysmal. In any case, it's been years since I've tried to make my social circles move to any of those platforms (Briar, for example). It's a losing battle.
- sneak 3y agoIt’s somewhat puzzling that Signal doesn’t let me donate with Mobilecoin.
- daedalus_j 3y agoTells you how much faith they have in that "feature".... I'd love to see some usage numbers on it, and perhaps removal of it when it turns out the usage is near zero... (Or maybe I'm totally wrong, which would be interesting too!)
- sneak 3y agoIf they remove it, it would render several hundred dollars I have in that wallet inaccessible without extra work on my part. Usage numbers are not possible because Signal doesn’t include spyware in the app. There is no indication which transactions on chain came from the Signal app or any other app.
- kupfer 3y agoYeah, you only ever hear the naysayers. So second voice to combat that: I like the integration and use it with (admittedly few) selected friends to split bills. And I think it fits signals mission.
- rvba 3y agoI always wonder what is the level of safety of Signal fron state level actors. Signal uses telephone numbers as user IDs + sends those verification SMS. Also 50 employees? So how many are monitoring the infaratructure 24/7 (on a side note, a project with 50 employees is probably still better than those with thousands - what do those people even do). If the data leaks somehow, telephone number as ID sounds very bad.
- coyotespike 3y agoThis was the nudge I needed - super easy to donate $5 a month via the app using Apple Pay.
- james_pm 3y agoSame. I'd donated here and there in the past, but I easily get $7CAD/month of usage and would be sad if it didn't exist.
- sieabahlpark 3y ago[dead]
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- mikece 3y agoIf Signal drops the requirement to have a phone number I'll support them with money. If they allow me to change the name of a contact to what makes sense to me, I'll donate again. Follow the example of Session on this!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- conductr 3y agoI'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. Just an observation, not my place to tell anyone how to run their business, but for a nonprofit that is trying to drum up donations to fund their operations, I'd think they would want to be leaner.
- websap 3y agoIf you want to hire the best talent - engineering and ethics, you need to pay top dollar. 380k is senior engineer comp at most FAANG adjacent companies. It's not a lot.
- conductr 3y agoThis is SV tech logic that I mentioned. I’m just not usually of the opinion it’s necessary. There’s a lot of talent around the world. And I’d guess only a few really “top talent” folks are needed to build the unusual problems/cryptographic parts of their app. A lot of it could likely be build by an average dev with some oversight. I say this as a person that regularly and successfully hires devs from low COL areas. I know the common pitfalls of it and know it’s completely possible to manage and get high quality outcomes. It requires a management approach that’s slightly different than having 100% top tier talent from high COL areas but it’s possible all the same.
- wg0 3y agoCraftsmen's compensation is a non negotiable matter IMHO. It's not someone's fault if they happen to live in a particular economic climate. The real root cause isn't the engineering or infrastructure cost. It is about people paying their fair share myself included.
- conductr 3y agoI'd never advocate for unfair compensation. Only that what's fair is highly variable when the world is your potential labor pool. A lot of people and companies think or behave like only a few areas of the world produce quality software. It's absolutely false. I'd also want to question if a company full of Master Craftsmen are needed (if that's what's implied by the $380k/employee). To keep with the construction metaphor, most labor on a typical construction site is Craftsmen supervising unskilled/lower skilled labor; otherwise cost would be a major issue (more than it is already).
- vizzah 3y ago$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.
- illiac786 3y agoSignificantly less secure. Faking the sending number is much easier than hacking SS7 and getting SMS routed to you which are not destined to you (which is also doable but require an order of magnitude more skills and ressources in my view).
- johndoe18637 3y agoIt would be great if Signal wouldn't require a phone number for account setup at all
- illiac786 3y agothis is in testing and coming to you early next year.
- 3y ago
- walteweiss 3y agoIt’s so well written so long post, I afraid I well never read it as carefully. Tonight I’m too tired to delve into its depths. Tomorrow I won’t remember, possibly. And the day after that I won’t remember for sure. Sorry everyone for this off-topic, I just think it’s needed to be addressed, but I have no idea what to do here.
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoQuit using SMS and phone numbers. How hard would it be to use a different signal server?
- terminatornet 3y agoappreciate their transparency, but boy do their devs make a lot of money. their 2 highest paid engineers make around $750k USD yearly. I guess if that's competitive good for them, I'm mostly jealous. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202212729349301631/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- DavidSJ 3y agoPersonally, I refuse to financially support Signal so long as they're still holding my chat logs hostage on my old iPhone and seem not at all concerned about solving this problem, which has existed for years. There was (and still is, so far as I know) no upfront warning to users that if they don't first sync with a desktop client, and their phone gets lost or stolen, their iTunes backups do not (unlike most iPhone applications) contain their Signal chats. And furthermore, there's no way to export those chats in backup format from an old phone. (You can transfer, but the transfer deletes the data from the original source, which is extremely foolish and dangerous IMO, and anyways isn't a proper export accessible from other applications. Furthermore, so far as I know there's no support for transferring from very old versions of the Signal client.) This has been a critical bug for years [1], it's one of the most complained about issues, and Signal has done (and intends to do) absolutely nothing to fix it. It is absolutely unacceptable to have our own data held hostage by them in this way, especially without any upfront warning. [1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-message-history-when-switching-phones/1736/1 https://community.signalusers.org/t/ios-backup-keeping-messa...
- bhtru 3y agoInteresting, I always saw this as a deliberate feature aligned with what I first came across Signal for (sensitive communications between trusted parties that may need wiping at a moment's notice). If a journo reporting in a less than hospitable regime had their phone confiscated then they need not worry about their chat logs compromising them.
- DavidSJ 3y agoSorry, how is this any safer for the journalist? If their phone is compromised in a way such that someone can login and control their Signal app, their chat logs are already compromised. I’m just saying there should be the ability to export those logs once you’ve logged in. But if they don’t want to provide that, then: 1) Why does the Android app support this? 2) They should warn users of this BEFORE holding their data hostage, and not market Signal like it’s the right solution for everyone.
- codethief 3y agoMaybe I'm the only one here but this so-called "transparency" in the form of a single blog post doesn't instill much trust in me. I have been an avid Signal user since the TextSecure days and still recommend Signal over any other messenger. However: - There were times (e.g. during the introduction of MobileCoin) when the Github repositories hadn't seen any update for months, while they were still releasing new app versions on a regular basis. Heck, last time I checked there were not even public changelogs for any of the apps. Calling Signal "open-source" is a stretch at best. - The Signal team time and again has failed to react to criticism of the usage of Intel SGX, or of how they completely messed up the introduction of the Signal PIN. And let's not talk about MobileCoin. Yes, being "open-source" or "nonprofit" doesn't imply they need to ask their users for permission or respond to every complaint. However, a minimum amount of openness and debating critical features in public would go a long way here. - I would like to see some transparency regarding the overall foundation and corporate structure, beyond just silently filing form 990 years with significant delay. For instance, it seems Brian Acton can elect and dissolve the entire board just by himself[0, 1]? Long story short, before donating to Signal I'd like to see a proper and continuous commitment to transparency, not just a once-in-time blog post. [0]: (German) https://www.spektrum.de/news/mythos-signal-licht-und-schatten-beim-nicht-kommerziellen-messenger/2190072 https://www.spektrum.de/news/mythos-signal-licht-und-schatte... [1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840/202212729349301631/full https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824...
- yankput 3y agoDidn't they do some sort of cryptocurrency thing. How is that going? edit: it was called MobileCoin right edit2: they do https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In-app-Payments https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360057625692-In... is that generating any revenue?
- asymmetric 3y agoI have held off donating to signal so far exactly because there is no clarity around this token, why it was even added to signal and who profited from that.
- pushcx 3y agoAnd they stopped updating the server code repo for a year, apparently to hide the launch of this token: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725915 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725915 I don't think they ever confirmed that this was why they stopped updating, or did a postmortem on how poorly that launch went. I vaguely recall there was also an unexplained spike in MobileCoin trading shortly before the public launch that looked quite a bit like insider trading, though right now the stories I can turn up about it here are about similarly disconcerting and unexplained issues in its provenance: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mobilecoin&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... It's hard to take this fundraising plea seriously when this financial disaster is never even mentioned. I hope I've just missed whatever Signal has done to try to repair trust after the, but the fact that they haven't even removed it from the app is not promising. Can anyone share updates?
- android42 3y agoI for one will never donate to signal, and consider my $1000 (or $20k of never realized "fake" money, explained later) lost to mobilecoins to be my lifetime "donation" to them. Short timeline of events from my side: - Signal announces/endorses mobilecoin support, as their new and only cryptocurrency option - I figure I'll get on it early this time after missing out on Bitcoin, despite Signal only supporting this in the UK (for now) - Mobilecoin and Signal websites both mention FTX as being the only exchange where you can currently buy mobilecoin, never used it before but I go ahead, transfer $1000 worth (at the time) of bitcoin to buy mobilecoin - There are currently no other wallets for mobilecoin (except maybe some difficult to use or obscure ones that looked sketchy? don't like leaving money on the exchange but didn't really have other options) - Mobilecoin spiked on ftx, sold and bought back a few times, at the right time with some good luck, now have $20,000 of mobilecoin - Signal finally adds support for mobilecoin in my country, proceed to try and withdraw it - However, my country just announced legislation to require ID in order to buy/sell cryptocurrency, but it's not planned to go into effect for at least another 6 months or so, but FTX decided to start requiring it immediately and wouldn't let me withdraw without it (I could see they were still willing to take more deposits from me without it though!) - FTX had trouble verifying ID, I already suspected what was about to happen, tried my best to get my crypto out but they kept having excuses, the ftx fall out and everything became known some months later
- thewanderer1983 3y agoPeople 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 https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/63 Privacy tools can make you stand out. Unless methods are used to obfuscate your data.
- gloosx 3y agoI 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
- ponymontana 3y agogive the option to sign in without phone number paying a fee in bitcoin (sats on lightning network would be the perfect fit) would solve a lot of economic and privacy problems. Also dont waste money on phds post-quantum bullshits would be great.
- lrvick 3y agoSignal is centralized, expensive, and desperate. It results in decisions like this: 1. MobileCoin premines 250m coins 2. Moxie is paid for being on their board 3. Moxie directs non-profit Signal to integrate MobileCoin 4. MobileCoin offers 50% of their premine for sale. 5. Signal/Mobilecoin news spikes price to $60 This is why we need decentralization.
- yandrypozo 3y agoI thought this was an article explaining how they move out of the cloud and saved millions using bare metal servers.
- JBiserkov 3y ago> millions upon millions of new people suddenly switched to Signal in January 2021 after WhatsApp updated their Terms of Service. https://archive.ph/wbF3T https://archive.ph/wbF3T
- devit 3y agoThese costs seem absurd. For instance, 1.3$ million per year for storage??? Apparently, they have 40 million users, so 1 MB per user (seems reasonable for Signal) means 40TB. You can buy a 4TB SSD for $200, which means you need $2000 one-time for 1MB per user. How they get from $2000 to 1.3$ million is a mystery. As for SMS registration, if they are spending 6 million, maybe they should find some way of doing it for free, e.g. Google might be offering it with Firebase, Twitter used to have it, etc. It's not great for privacy, but if they care about that they should just stop using phone numbers. Routing video calls through a server to obscure IP address seems totally pointless while you are revealing the phone number anyway. And again there might be a way to do this for free, e.g. perhaps using one of free WebRTC STUN/TURN servers that e.g. Google seems to run. As for bandwidth, a very conservative estimate seems 100 MB per month for each of 40 million users, giving 4 PB per month (though I guess the real usage is 1/10 that at most). Hetzner charges $1/TB, so that gives $4000 per month or $40k per year, overestimated. Again a mystery how they get from $40k per month to $2.7 million. Maybe the problem is that they use AWS/GCP/Azure/etc.? They have to be real idiots to use them since everyone knows they are insanely overpriced and should never be used unless a large corporation or deep-pocketed investors are footing the bills or they is no other possible solution. Perhaps they need to consider stopping dumping money down the drain before asking for donations.
- ghosty141 3y ago1MB per User? People share tons of pictures and videos, I‘d guess that the average is more in the 0.5 to 2GB range.
- devit 3y agoI assume they only need to store it between the time it is sent and the time it is received by the recipient. Maybe the problem is that the Signal app doesn't eagerly download messages upon notification? They should start doing that given the money issues.
- rbut 3y agoIf you only have the phone app then yes they are instantly downloaded and removed from their servers. But if you have Desktop client(s) registered, then they need to hold onto those messages until you open your client(s). That is why they have a 30 day login limit on Desktop clients. If they didn't they'd potentially have to hold onto messages forever. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4730 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4730 https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-unlink-devices-after-30-days/37414/70 https://community.signalusers.org/t/dont-unlink-devices-afte...
- spullara 3y agoWorked for me. $10/month seems reasonable.
- kjhdfgkjhdfkgj 3y ago[flagged]
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- cntrmmbrpsswrd 3y agoI know they have a Paypal account but I can't find a link via their site. I found https://www.paypal.com/US/fundraiser/charity/3675786 https://www.paypal.com/US/fundraiser/charity/3675786 on Paypal, but I'm not sure it's legit.
- t0bia_s 3y ago...we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure... What if that provider stop Signal to access to their services from whatever reson? It's not very independent service then. Decentralised, federated Matrix.org has more sense and looks more future-proof to me.
- astrostl 3y agoLove the product. Had a monthly recurring donation for many years. Dropped it over what I consider to be their serial mishandling of open source. See https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6186 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/pull/6186 for the latest chapter in the, "we won't implement desktop GIPHY that we announced in 2016, and also won't merge it when someone else thoughtfully implements it for us" saga.
- andrewguenther 3y agoI feel like they've made their position here quite clear and it's well-reasoned. I understand the disappointment, but this doesn't give any indications to me of "serial mishandling" unless there's some other context I'm missing? Open source != open to contributions. Signal has made it pretty clear that their motivations for open source are visibility and verifiability, not to get people to do work for them for free. It seems like the action item to update the CONTRIBUTING.md to make those expectations more clear is a reasonable one.
- astrostl 3y agoThey announced the feature coming to desktop "shortly" seven (7) years ago [1]. It has been implemented on mobile for ages, and is generally one of the most-popular features of any modern messaging service. In the years since, things like in-app cryptocurrency were implemented. Issues on GitHub dating back to 2017 were unceremoniously locked [2]. A community feature request has been open since 2018 [3]. When more issues on GitHub were created, they were told to discuss it in the one that was already locked, and didn't respond further once that was noted to be impossible [4]. When the PR was thoughtfully created long after it was clear that they wouldn't be honoring their own announcement, they said (approximately a year ago) that they would review and implement it with credit. After 6 months of darkness and petitioning, it was dismissed as being harder to review than to implement while disingenuously counting things like SVGs and license text as LOC. When some specific concerns were finally provided, the author responded point-by-point in how they were already researched and addressed, with a polite request for evidence so that they could correct any misunderstandings. The subsequent response ignored everything in that but the suggestion to update the contribution guide to align with their previously-unstated intent. Serially mishandled. I'm not moving off of that position. 1: https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ https://signal.org/blog/giphy-experiment/ 2: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1862 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/1862 3: https://community.signalusers.org/t/add-gif-search-giphy-to-signal-desktop/3266 https://community.signalusers.org/t/add-gif-search-giphy-to-... 4: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4841 https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/issues/4841
- activescott 3y agoI almost skipped reading into this article because I love Signal and it's mission (and their rare commitment to stick to it) and would have known it's good. Yet, the details on expenses and infrastructure was a good read. $1.3M/yr for temporary storage! $6M for verification codes during sign-up!? Toll fraud!? GOOG & FB data center spend, data breaches from GOOG, MSFT, et. al 50 full-time employees vs 3K or 4K for similar apps! All interesting.
- smarnach 3y agoThe link about the Google "data breach" appears to be about some tax companies being sued for using Google Analytics tracking pixels. Calling this a data breach may be a bit of a stretch.
- activescott 3y agoThanks. I hadn't dug into that link, but I did based on your comment. It is a Congressional investigation that is rooted on a report from The Markup [1] that, as you note isn't about an accidental breach by Google, but one where multiple companies send extensive PII to Google about site visitors. While not necessarily a "breach", I think this lead of personal data plays to Signal article's point though. The Markup article's git repo with HAR files of what was sent to Google was convincing.[2] [1]: https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websites-have-been-sending-users-financial-information-to-facebook https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2022/11/22/tax-filing-websi... [2]: https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes https://github.com/the-markup/meta-pixel-taxes
- 2oMg3YWV26eKIs 3y agoI just tried donating at https://signal.org/donate/ https://signal.org/donate/ It seems that with uBlock origin enabled in Firefox, I was unable to fill out either of the 2 donation forms on the page. It wouldn't let me fill in my Name in the first form, nor would it let me enter a custom amount in the 2nd form. Disabling uBlock origin seems to resolve.
- idlewords 3y agoHow do they contrive to spend over a million bucks a year on storage?
- dancemethis 3y agoThere they go, saying Whatsapp is using their tech without proof they haven't tampered with it. Doing propaganda for proprietary shovelware.
- noSyncCloud 3y agoEvery thread that Signal is mentioned, we relish this comment :)
- screamingninja 3y agoGuess who created WhatsApp.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoI lost interest in Signal when they started shilling a cryptocurrency that they had invested in. I really want a trustworthy replacement to Whatsapp but if I'm going to shill an app to people I know, it can't be something that has connections to investment fraud.
- nicce 3y agoI would say that is the only mistake they have done during their existence.
- Drblessing 3y ago2022 Salaries for those interested: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/824506840 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) $422,972 $0 $35,668 Jonathan Chambers (Software Developer) $420,595 $0 $28,346 Meredith Whittaker (Director / Pres Of Signal Messenger) $191,229 $0 $6,032 Moxie Marlinspike (Dir / Ceo Of Sig Msgr Through 2/2022) $80,567 $0 $1,104 Brian Acton (Pres/Sec/Tr/Ceo Sig Msgr As Of 2/2022) $0 $0 $0
- darthrupert 3y agoI'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 local (Finnish) non-profit organization, one of whose many services is Matrix. This costs me 40 euros per year and none of that money goes to C-level executives.
- temptemptemp111 3y ago[dead]
- jefozabuss 3y ago2M in comp distributed between 4 people is not a lot at this scale in my opinion.
- philjohn 3y agoFor a nonprofit?
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- austin-cheney 3y agoAs a counterpoint imagine instead if the cost of messaging went from $50 million per year to the even more lean $0 per year. Messaging operations are expensive because they need servers to route your traffic. They need to route your traffic to navigate around the restrictions of IPv4 NAT. In a world of IPv6 there is no NAT (but firewall restrictions still apply). I have created a relationship model that solves for privacy without need for third party servers and then routes messages based upon that model, but it’s limited by IPv4.
- CranberryDefuse 3y ago> 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 calling, and that figure doesn’t include the development costs associated with hiring experienced engineers to maintain our calling software, or the cost of the necessary server infrastructure to support those calls. 20 petabytes per year is around 5000 Mbps only for audio and video calling. So 5000 HD video calls all year round. Signal is known for the large bandwidth needed for calling but that sounds too much and not really scalable in the future.
- jhgg 3y agoPaying 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.
- cyclecount 3y agoYou can easily donate once a month via the in-app purchase subscription on iOS. Shows a nice little badge on your profile
- zelphirkalt 3y agoWhen will they finally get their donation box working properly (including not showing "weird" symbols, when Google is not informed about my visit by loading fonts from them)? Tried multiple times to donate, but I am unwilling to sacrifice my privacy for donating to a messenger that is supposed to protect my privacy. Once they get that donation box fixed, they stand a good chance to get my donation. Just like the Internet Archive, that still has broken donation box when Google fonts is not loaded ...
- pelasaco 3y ago"We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate—and this is very lean compared to other popular messaging apps that don’t respect your privacy." Kind of Exaggeration to say that the other popular messaging apps don't respect your privacy.. all of them do, some more, other less, just not all of them have it as their main feature.
- up2isomorphism 3y agoI would say at least 30% savings if they move out of Bay Area. Also the salary seems to be high for a nonprofit , I get paid much higher than their VP but would happily take that job than my current one.
- a5en 3y ago"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.
- nostrman 3y ago[flagged]
- simonebrunozzi 3y agoI love what Signal does. Perhaps they should try with a p2p approach, where every client provides bandwidth, storage, compute, in exchange for using the app.
- Kacidoo 3y agoContact this company if you're looking Best IP-TV Provider Whats-app: (+12023675323) I buy from him every year and I don't find any problems with the server, worth encouraging