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?

November 9th, the verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number

How?

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.

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

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.

Yup, that's a big reason why centralized protocols aren't sustainable. XMPP is 25 years old (which is older than almost anything else on the contemporary internet) and thriving. Unfortunately, judging by the cycle of messengers coming and dying, and people still being eagerly part of that, this isn't something that people value very much.

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.

Element has the same costs as Signal. So far, Element has been lucky in being able to raise money by selling support contracts to governments or companies using Matrix, but even that isn't enough, which is why Element has been raising money for the Matrix Foundation for almost a year now (with little success).