They’re not losing profits or anything. They’re hosting a free service. When they get the service back online users will have a secure messaging option that is even more battle-tested.
They are losing face. In oriental cultures, that's bad.
EDIT apologies for bad wording. In certain situations, losing face is worth, than losing money - in this very moment, in my opinion, this is rather bad for Signal.
Despite your deliberate conflation of them, shill and recommend are not synonyms
> Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.
How is a non-profit charity saying "we are having trouble right now but thanks for all the support" insulting? How did these folks insult you?
> Tesla, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp
These are all corporations that ultimately only care about money. They have customers. Signal has supporters.
> because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out
Just like all the other 501c3 IPOs and buyouts, right?
> this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back
A charity is having a temporary problem most HN readers would kill to have: They literally can't scale up fast enough to meet demand. Truly a disaster.
> I fully expect to be downvoted to oblivion
I wonder why.
If so, they couldn't have picked a worse corporate structure, because their current one forbids this.
BTW, is there an authoritative source whether these cloud backups to Google Drive are unencrypted/encrypted with Google keys, or encrypted with keys held by Facebook?
I see no reason not to encrypt them the same as local backups (with a key that is held by Facebook, and provided to your phone once they verify your phone number).
The difference between these against the US government filing warrants is just one piece of paper, but against an attacker that compromises your Google account, it does make a significant difference.
Of course you got all the metadata going to FB, but it's still a good messenger feature-wise for now, so I'll keep it as a backup in case my favorite privacy-conscious messenger is down again for 10 hours.
There is no evidence that messages ever leak outside of WhatsApp via means other than potential unencrypted backups that you may or may not be using at a cloud provider not connected to Facebook or your IME.
If you're targeted by NSO or whatever nation state that would be interested enough in you to compromise you, you got other things to worry about.
WhatsApp does filter messages on the client side but it’s stuff like submitting image hashes to the CP database. If Signal reaches the scale of WhatsApp they will be forced into doing this as well. And nothing in Signal’s architecture prevents this kind of data exfiltration the same as WhatsApp.
> Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions.
Distributed systems design is hard, Signal team might not be equipped to deal with the sudden surge of users and this definitely is not a good look. But federated/decentralized servers doesn't make this problem any easier, you still have to diagnose and fix your issue across a fleet of multiple servers. You can offload the problem to users, but then you will not have the adaption to begin with to create this problem.
What do you mean by centralized and what makes you think they can’t scale?
Reliability is more important than privacy for messaging most of the time. Some major balls are being dropped here.
Obviously, The Signal team should have done a better job of coordinating the mass user migration with the WhatsApp team at Facebook. Such a failure. /s
I don't get why some people see the need to bitch about Signal at every opportunity. The criticisms are usually unfair (like this one), missing the point, or a self-centered whine that Signal didn't decide to focus on catering to the whiner.
for a platform that bills itself after installation as a suitable drop in replacement for your SMS service (and encourages you to shill it to friends as such) this is completely unacceptable and could have easily been avoided with better leadership and architecture.
Cheerleading your users endorsement of privacy on twitter during an outage is insulting.
Most sites and apps monitor things like news sites, twitter and the like for instances where their namesake may be trending. This is done in order to quickly head off DDoS type outages due to things like the slashdot effect. Signal doesnt do this for the same reason Signal is centralized: Moxy writes code like he still lives in 2006.
- Nobody scrambled to bolster capacity after the electric car porn star (Elon Musk) gave a full throated endorsement?
- Nobody raced to improve capacity after Apple looked to be in a position to piss in Facebooks cheerios?
- Nobody even thought to reconsider capacity after Whatsapp showed up in the news JANUARY 6 with a bombshell announcement of privacy changes for users? we waited over a week?
It also needs to be said --yes im aware of my audience-- that centralized services DO NOT scale. Moxys response to this has been cantfix/wontfix, so in traditional dev fashion he throws more hardware at the problem to make it go away instead of looking into a better architecture.
Microservices do not scale. Yes, they scale across the cloud, but they do not scale across support channels. Microservices trade gaming cloud providers for precious pay-by-the-second service for an endless byzantine dumpster fire of almost impossible to diagnose failure conditions. A highly secure end to end encrypted service that expects to replace your SMS needs to be quick to diagnose and fix. Again: NINE HOURS.
A more callous review would suggest that Signal remains centralized because Moxies waiting for an IPO, or an offer from FAANG to buy him out. Im certainly not of that opinion, but FWIW this was a disaster for Signal and most of HN is about to break an arm patting the company on the back.
Whatsapp certainly took notice, and certainly used it as an opportunity to win back some of its detractors.