Technology

to do with a 1mb text file

God you must be like my wife and write fucking novels as text messages.

If you are curious, you should give XMPP a shot, it's equivalent to Signal in terms of encryption, but anyone can host their own. Signal is ideologically opposed to anyone but themselves being in control of your account, and because of that I don't want to trust them.

It's difficult to maintain privacy in a P2P environment. In naive implementations, your IP address will be visible to all the peers you connect to. This is the case in e.g. BitTorrent.

Signal has this issue with video/voice calls as well; by default they operate on a P2P basis for performance reasons, and they expose your IP address to the second party. Signal has an option in the settings to relay voice/video calls through their servers specifically to mitigate this.

There are some workarounds for anonymizing P2P, like routing through Tor or I2P. Tor, however, has known exploits and is probably not suitable if you need to hide your activity from advanced adversaries like world governments (e.g. political dissidents, journalists, etc.)

I2P sounds interesting but I'm not deeply familiar with it. I understand that I2P clients also act as relay nodes, which puts an additional bandwidth burden on users. I'm not sure if I2P is more resilient against government-level attacks than Tor. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who is more familiar with the protocol.

I‘m not an expert on this topic, so someone correct me if I’m wrong. Signal is only storing stuff temporarily to pass it on, so I’m assuming you’d have the exact same costs even if it weren’t centralized. Maybe even more as it’s probably cheaper to have it managed in one place. I’m assuming all this would do is distribute the cost, but otherwise be the same?

I imagine not paying for it and being overloaded with spam bots would be more expensive (otherwise they wouldn't be doing it this way!)

Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing.

I'm all for decentralised networks, but they do have their flaws. I use Matrix every day, and there are a lot of times the keys need to be resent, messages don't get sent or deleted on shaky internet, etc. Issues like this make it seem broken to normies. Signal Just Works™️

When running a business, you need to budget 3x salary for actual TCO of a staff member:

1x covers their direct salary 2x covers retirement fund, electricity, office space, and infrastructure items unlike server and laptops for corporate use etc.

The 3x multiplier is for when you're a services company, and that represents a possibly profit margin.

So for signal, your $380k becomes $190k which in my experience is average for a US tech sw dev at a mid to early senior level.

I donate to signal monthly and I have no problems with the costs they're posting. I work in SV tech and I've seen 20x worse numbers.

As an American dev, you should check out other silicon valley salaries. After hearing what some folks there make 190k doesn't make me bat an eye.

I don't care if employees are well paid. I do care that Signal takes 50 employees to operate. What are they all doing? This is a genuine question

Not necessarily.

Signal has people who are experts in their field. They engineer solutions that don't exist anywhere else in the market to ensure they have as little information on you as possible while keeping you secure [0]. This in turn means high compensation + benefits. You don't want to be paying your key developers peanuts as that makes them liable to taking bribes from adversaries to "oops" a security vulnerability in the service. In addition, the higher compensation is a great way to mitigate losing talent to private organizations who can afford it.

[0] Signal has engineered the following technologies that all work to ensure your privacy and security:

• Post-Quantum Computing Resistance
• Private Stories
• Group calling
• Private admin permissions
• Secure Value Recovery
• Private Stickers
• Sealed Sender
• Private GIF search
• Private Contact Discovery
• Encrypted Profiles
• Reproducible Builds

My guess: People who can be as competent with security as they need are very expensive.

For the current distribution I quote from the linked source :

Current Infrastructure Costs (as of November 2023): Approximately $14 million dollars per year.

• 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.

Not at all. That's $380K per person if everyone is making the same. Engineers with a few years of experience at Meta make $400K+.

Role of thumb is an employee costs roughly twice their base salary, as the employee still needs to cover insurance, taxes, sick time, and other benefits.

That leaves an average salary of 190K for the 50 employees. That isn't much for tech.

The costs are distributed as there is not one single instance. Just like with Lemmy.

Although there is one huge instance on matrix (matrix.org), a bit like lemmy.ml here. But it doesn't have to be like that, they can close signups or discourage them similar to the way lemmy.ml is doing that now.

The load distributes across more shoulders automatically.

If you only host a server for yourself and 10 friends it costs next to nothing, if you have a big operation it can get just as expensive, it depends on what you are willing to do.

With centralized systems there is no choice but for the one centralized host to host everything.