Technology

60052 readers

3130 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

613

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive (signal.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

177 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Believe me, one seriously awesome software developer for 400k achieves more than 10 shitty ones at 100k each.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't need to believe, I work with these guys on a daily basis (not the Signal guys, but devs) and I know your statements to be true. Still, I very much doubt that they need 50 devs with that salary. It's a chat app! Of course they have other people too, like marketing, project leads, blah blah - still doesn't put the price into my mind.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They develop a lot of software themselves. They aren't just throwing together a few established libraries and call it a day like 80% of software development. They also take the hard and correct way every time instead of the fast, easy and bad way. Quote from the article:

The same dynamic played out again when Signal introduced support for animated GIF searches on Android and iOS. Instead of quickly and easily integrating the standard GIF search SDK that most other apps were using, engineers spent considerable time and creativity developing another unique privacy-preserving technique that hides GIF search terms from Signal’s servers, while also hiding who is searching for those terms from the GIF search engine itself. We later expanded those techniques to further obfuscate GIF search information by obscuring the amount of traffic that passes through the proxied connection.

When Meta acquired GIPHY, and many other apps were scrambling to contend with the privacy implications of the deal, Signal employees slept soundly knowing that we had already built this feature correctly several years earlier.