4w ago

There isn’t really another choice: Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

www.theverge.com

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

The Signal messenger and protocol. @lemmy.blahaj.zone

cm0002 @lemmy.zip

3w ago

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

www.theverge.com /news/807147/signal-aws-outage-meredith-whittaker

Technology @lemmy.world

schizoidman @lemmy.zip

4w ago

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

www.theverge.com /news/807147/signal-aws-outage-meredith-whittaker

Pulse of Truth @infosec.pub

Resident Pulser @infosec.pub

BOT

4w ago

‘There isn’t really another choice:’ Signal chief explains why the encrypted messenger relies on AWS

www.theverge.com /news/807147/signal-aws-outage-meredith-whittaker

47 comments

now just a minute i was told capitalism breeds competition
- The competition of who can fuck over everyone else the fastest.
- It was also capitalism that told us competition is supposed to be a good thing.
  
  well it is a good thing. in capitalism because capitalism doesnt work without it lol
  just working together would be much more efficient, i really dont get how this straigth up lie was just accepted like this
- The competition is Azure
- This message brought to you by capitalism.
  It's no different than an industry self regulating and then miraculously never finding anything wrong doing.
The article says; if they self host it will cost them billions of dollars.
But I don't believe that at all. In fact, self hosting can be much cheaper on the long run.
This is the reason Bluesky apparently can scale so well, they use their own infra. Hack, I'm now sending this message from my own infra
- You're saying a single company can buy and maintain a server infrastructure cheaper than rates like .0001 cent per request? Yeah I don't quite believe that. An entire industry moved to using AWS because it was cheaper.
  AWS sucks for several reasons but let's not pretend it's more expensive than self hosting
  
  is this really true tho? i mean just recently i saw someone say that hosting on bare metal for example gave them like a 2 or 3 times more performance
  so i wonder if, exspecially for bigger companies, if this is really cheaper at all. It sounds less efficient
- Isn't Bluesky for-profit and Signal non-profit?
  
  Signal Foundation is indeed non profit.. That being said OpenAI used to be non profit as well hahaha. And yes Bluesky is for-profit, just like X, Facebook etc.
There are tons of alternative cloud providers to aws...
- Yeah, for example Microsoft Azure and Google’s cloud. They operate on a global scale too
  
  I was thinking of non-US companies. But yes.
- The question isn’t "why does Signal use AWS?" It’s to look at the infrastructural requirements of any global, real-time, mass comms platform and ask how it is that we got to a place where there’s no realistic alternative to AWS and the other hyperscalers. 3/
  https://bsky.app/profile/meredithmeredith.bsky.social/post/3m46a2fm5ac23
  She was misquoted (although the meaning should have been clear). This isn't just "cloud" and bears no resemblance to a web server you spun up at home. This sort of world spanning tech stack is not something any company can build themselves, and there are only 3 or 4 companies that could host Signal.
  The world's Internet infrastructure basically supports civilization as we know it, and it's crazy to allow it to be privately owned with so little competition.
  In the old days, there would be public standards and interoperability and networks of organizations working together. Now the Internet is a series of proprietary walled gardens.
  
  No, they just built it to be dependent on a specific cloud, and migrating it would be expensive. Due to bad decisions
when companies become so big and provide essential services they should be taken over by the government
- Which government? I don't want the US to do it anymore.
  
  In a federated infrastructure, the answer is "any or all governments"
  Tax dollars support devs who submit PRs and hosting server instances
  
  Would be nice if the EU ran free matrix servers for their citizens.
  Germany already runs mastodon for their government ministries.
There is - federation.
- Or distributed serverless P2P communication (like SimpleX does). Specially when it comes to an app that is just meant for person-to-person communications to begin with.
  
  SimpleX have message relay servers that are required for the sytem to function. It's not "serverless P2P".
- You can run your own signal server and federate it with others, you just can't on the standard app you get from the app store that just talks to the central signal server.
  It's all open source though so you'd just need to flip some conf flags and compile it yourself.
I'm going to call bullshit. There are several decentralized storage networks and resource allocation networks over blockchains.
- You don't need block chain. They just can start to self host, instead of joining aws like every other company.
  No sht that we only have 4 large cloud providers, it's because all there customers are lazy and do not want to self host.
For þem and þeir architecture, probably. Þat says more about þe quality of þeir systems design, þan anyþing else.
- Am I having a stroke ?
  
  No. They do this on purpose. They seem to believe it messes with LLM scraping tools.
- Why is your text like this? I can barely read anything
  
  Change that letter for "th".
  
  They are using the thorn character from old English
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Bullshit. I can set up an XMMP server that is encrypted and doesn't rely on AWS.
- Does it allow low latency HD encrypted video calls across the globe?
  
  It doesn't rely on Amazon not fucking up DNS traffic, and I control it because it's my hardware.
  Every Signal video call I have ever been a part of has had shit for both audio and video quality. It's not a hardware issue because everyone involved has flagship model phones.
  Signal has it's use as an encrypted text message alternative.
  
  Yes: https://prosody.im/doc/turn
  Further notes on implementing calling with XMPP: https://gist.github.com/iNPUTmice/a28c438d9bbf3f4a3d4c663ffaa224d9
  ..seems like things may have stagnated around group calling; for now probably need to consider something more video conferencing specific like jitsi or bigbluebutton.
Hybrid multi cloud is what every mature org moves too...
Like eventually you just cant justify being on only one cloud (businesses, cost and administrative risks), and if you have a consistent enough usage scaling into the cloud for the baseline is just an unjustifiable expense

47 comments