People get very reductionist about language in these things. I think she is right that the most logical choice was to partner with an existing hyperscale backend, they had choices of which and went with AWS for reasons which made sense to them. "no choice" isn't a literal statement of fact, its a choice they made, sure. There may be price, or jurisdictional, or complexity, or understanding, or willingness to sign a specific kind of contract, all kinds of reasons. The alternates all come with their burdens too.
They had choices beyond just other hyperscalers. Rolling their own probably would have meant both capex and opex, which reduced to opex in AWS and so made both logical and financial sense. In risk terms you might have said (before the incident) it was also the best way to lay off risk, but it turns out "too big to fail" actually doesn't mean what it says on the label.
I still back signal over all the other choices. I wasn't looking for an excuse to leave, and as a strawman if you leave signal because chosing AWS as a backend "was unwise" or "was the wrong choice" I think you're reading the signal wrong (sorry)
I would add that "the register" has a house style, and it's not tending to damp down. It likes to be inflammatory, it's tagline "biting the hand which feeds IT" rings true. I enjoy reading it, and I've had work repeated in it, but I also read it with a jaundiced eye. I don't like the comments section it's a minefield of in-group language, memes, bad behaviour.
I always assumed Signal favored AWS because AWS is valuable to a lot of foreign entities that might just as well block all signal.org and any IP network advertised by its ASN.
The advantage of bundling your service in a hyper scaler is in persuading censors that they’d rather tolerate Signal than lose AWS. This doesn’t work in China which has sophisticated alternatives, but it can help Signal hold on in other countries.
Telegram was not disrupted during the AWS crash, so they probably were not using it (or had a decent fail-over mechanism to a backup system). Telegram's user-base is two orders of magnitude larger than Signal, so 'we use AWS because we have to' argument clearly is bogus and nonsense.
That flag is tiny compared to the one telegram has been sailing with for years.
Despite there founder crying on twitter[1] how horrible and distopian chat control client side scanning to bypass E2EE would be, telegram is still only offering hidden and limited opt-in E2EE instead of making it global default like signal.
E2EE is nice to have, but not the magic cure Signal advertises it is. The #1 most authoritarian governments access chats is by forcing people to unlock their phone. At which point Signal's obsession with phone numbers becomes a huge liability. You can't claim security while tying a phone number to each and every account.
Couldn’t we try to rely more in other topologies other than client server. I see technologies like wireguard and Tailscale could reduce the dependence on data centers now that we have considerable compute on our homes.
1. It might not be unsafe, but it's still fragile: American government can decide anytime what to do with AWS servers, locking (non-USA) users out of the chat
2. My donations to Signal apparently also go to Bezos
WhatsApp grew to much larger scale than Signal: self hosted, not on cloud. Running Erlang and FreeBSD.
Telegram grew to much larger scale than Signal: self hosted, not on cloud (dc IPs here: https://docs.pyrogram.org/faq/what-are-the-ip-addresses-of-t...). They set up their datacenters carefully to make it hard for governments to access data via legal mechanisms, something Signal didn't bother with.
Threema, similar concept to Signal: self hosted, not on cloud.
Every other messaging app before these bunch? AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, iMessage... self hosted, not on cloud.
The idea there is no choice should be hyperbole but it seems she might really believe that. It says a lot that Signal is run by such a person.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadThey had choices beyond just other hyperscalers. Rolling their own probably would have meant both capex and opex, which reduced to opex in AWS and so made both logical and financial sense. In risk terms you might have said (before the incident) it was also the best way to lay off risk, but it turns out "too big to fail" actually doesn't mean what it says on the label.
I still back signal over all the other choices. I wasn't looking for an excuse to leave, and as a strawman if you leave signal because chosing AWS as a backend "was unwise" or "was the wrong choice" I think you're reading the signal wrong (sorry)
I would add that "the register" has a house style, and it's not tending to damp down. It likes to be inflammatory, it's tagline "biting the hand which feeds IT" rings true. I enjoy reading it, and I've had work repeated in it, but I also read it with a jaundiced eye. I don't like the comments section it's a minefield of in-group language, memes, bad behaviour.
The advantage of bundling your service in a hyper scaler is in persuading censors that they’d rather tolerate Signal than lose AWS. This doesn’t work in China which has sophisticated alternatives, but it can help Signal hold on in other countries.
It’s ok, the world won’t end.
You might get systems that are reliable and cost a great deal less if you exit AWS.
Lose your fear, have courage, find a better cheaper faster more reliable alternative…. well pretty much anywhere.
Telegram was not disrupted during the AWS crash, so they probably were not using it (or had a decent fail-over mechanism to a backup system). Telegram's user-base is two orders of magnitude larger than Signal, so 'we use AWS because we have to' argument clearly is bogus and nonsense.
Despite there founder crying on twitter[1] how horrible and distopian chat control client side scanning to bypass E2EE would be, telegram is still only offering hidden and limited opt-in E2EE instead of making it global default like signal.
[1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/1976420399970701543
2. My donations to Signal apparently also go to Bezos
WhatsApp grew to much larger scale than Signal: self hosted, not on cloud. Running Erlang and FreeBSD.
Telegram grew to much larger scale than Signal: self hosted, not on cloud (dc IPs here: https://docs.pyrogram.org/faq/what-are-the-ip-addresses-of-t...). They set up their datacenters carefully to make it hard for governments to access data via legal mechanisms, something Signal didn't bother with.
Threema, similar concept to Signal: self hosted, not on cloud.
Every other messaging app before these bunch? AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, iMessage... self hosted, not on cloud.
The idea there is no choice should be hyperbole but it seems she might really believe that. It says a lot that Signal is run by such a person.
No legal mechanism can access proper encyrpted data, something Telgram has to bother