- Just because it's not perfect, does not mean it useless.
A central signal message service receives millions of messages, I've seen claims of 40M active users a month. If each user sends 25 messages a day, that's 12,000 ish a second.
Drawing conclusions about who is talking to each other out of a 12,000 message per second stream is far from trivial since both signal users are just sending and receiving encrypted packets to a central service. Much depends on how much you believe about how signal handles things on the server size.
Not sure federation or pure p2p would improve things, especially since some fraction of the service could be malicious.
- Signal seems pretty good, not sure it could be better and have evolved so quickly and gained so many users. Sure it could be more resistant to traffic analysis. What do you use?
I've pondered writing a p2p client that uses the signal encryption (double ratchet) and bounces fixed size packets off 2-3 other clients before delivery. All packets would be the same size, including those for the upkeep of the DHT.
To help make traffic analysis more difficult forwarding would include a random delay, DHT traffic would be indistinguishable from message traffic, and chaff would be added to allow for plausible deniability. Your client would talk to at least 3x as many other peers with similar timings and frequencies.
However the inherent compromises of P2P like increased CPU, network, and battery usage combined with higher latency and startup time seems like the adoption would be lucky to hit 0.1% of signal and then it's less useful since using it would raise flags.
Signal is so valuable because it has good e2e, it's popular, and whoever you want to talk to is likely to have at least heard of signal if not already running it.
- Right, but 1€ isn't free. So if you manage to spam 1M people and make less than $0.05 * 1M = $50,000 then you are losing money.
Thus no spam on signal.
- Wow, that's a pretty negative take.
Signals mission seems to be something along the lines of helping the most people increase their privacy. Better to help millions resist the dragnet of surveillance by ISPs, governments, and large organizations then to have perfect security for a few. This requires a very easy to use client (i.e. click on signal in the app store and launch), features users want (send receipts, typing notifications, emoji, video, calls, etc), and making wrong choices hard. Like say installing a random compatible with signal client from an untrustworthy source.
So Moxie is fine with people forking the open source client, but wants them to use their own servers.
Distributed/decentralization isn't some magic pixy dust that makes everything better.
So sure federation can work, but it's harder, and you run into things like XMPP. Are there secure XMPP servers out there, sure, but how do you tell? Which XMPP server supports which extension? How many people use XMPP for their chat/calls on a daily basis?
Seems kind of weird to pick on signal for doing things well and getting popular. Could it be more secure/private, sure. Could it do so AND be more popular, not so sure.
- The network issue is the windows driver, only relevant if you are running windows. There is a work around by pinning the old version and I believe there's a new driver that works, but isn't the final driver.
Several reviewers have mentioned this.
- I got my framework desktop a few weeks ago, I'm quite fond of it.
- What's worse is that the email is often delayed at the sender (cheap bulk email services) or the receiver (gray listing), but for no reason I can fathom have a short expiration date.
What's worse they are often unique AND delivered out of order AND have no timestamp or sequence number. So you get to guess which is the newest, using any other fails, and the ones that succeed often time out before they can be used.
Having an expiration date as short as 15 minutes seems insane and counter productive.
- Only if you are in a hurry, say an advanced civilization has been around for 1M years (0.07% faster than us). It might well be worth sending out millions of drones to the most promising areas at 1% of the speed of light, their advanced sensors and telescopes and science would likely be able to pick the most likely stars based on metal content, vicinity (i.e. stable of 1B years), water, temp, etc.
Not to mention they could send probes closer and further from the galactic center to take advantage of the slower and faster rotation rate to see new stars.
As for the nuclear fission blast I have my doubts. Ham radio folks brag about 1000 miles a watt, in a lossy atmosphere and multiple bounces that reflect less than 1% for each bounce. Using advanced things like tubes of transistors and a copper cable thrown over a tree branch.
Using the 1 watt per 1000 miles the largest nuclear explosion would be 22 light years, and clear line of sight through space is going to transmit quite a bit better than bouncing off the atmosphere then off the ground several times.
An advanced civilization could make say a square km array (which us lowly humans have managed) and would understand nuclear bombs enough to know their likely signature, decay rate, shape of the curve, etc. Much like how astronomers use supernovas as standard candles for distance, despite crazy different red shifts.
Seems quite reasonable for a civilization to keep track of anything going on in their fraction of the galaxy.
"People for some reason refuse to comprehend just how hard is it to send a speck of dust over light years of distance" It's only hard if you are in a hurry, in fact we have 3 rocks come through our solar system from well more than a light year away.
- send 1 a day, that way you only have to communicate to the nearest probe.
- The launch system isn't consumed by launch, so launch them as often as necessary to keep the communications gap as small as needed.
Not like a 1 gram probe is going to be expensive compared to the launch system.
- Dunno, training maybe, for inference pytorch and llama seem more important.
- Great justification for switching to Graphene OS, more secure, more control, and google has to ask permission to install things and the play store is optional.
- Right, but the system needed maintenance, and people would still need to ration water and not water their lawns, even if the water they sell to outsiders (less than 1%) stopped.
- From the article is sounds more like, some town folk don't like not being able to water their lawns. Said folks targeted the people buying water, despite them being less than 1% of the water used. Not to mention apparently they are providing 45% of the towns tax revenue with their water purchases.
So an irrational decision fueling conflict.
- 24TB drives are quite available, $300 on newegg.
Buy a Data60 (60 disk chassis), add 60 drives. Buy a 1U server (2 for redundancy). I'd recommend 5 stripes of 11 drives (55 total) with 5 global spares. Use a RAIDz3 so 8 disks of data per 11 drives.
Total storage should be around 8 * 24 * 5 = 960GB, likely 10% less because of marketing 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30 for drive sizes. Another 10% because ZFS doesn't like to get very full. So something like 777TB usable which easily fits 650TB.
I'd recommend a pair of 2TB NVMe with a high DWPD as a cache.
The disks will cost $18k, the data60 is 4U, and a server to connect it is 1U. If you want more space upgrade to 30TB $550 each) drives or buy another Data60 full of drives.
- Ah, interesting. Did you get a ship date? I do like the idea of dual 10G. It would be nice to see a review on how well the GTR9's cooling works and how quiet it is under full load.
- Well sort of. Apple makes a competitive mac mini and macbook air with a 128 bit memory interface, decent design, solid build, nice materials, etc starting at $1k. PC laptops can match nearly any aspect, but rarely match the quality of the build, keyboard, trackpad, display, aluminum chassis, etc.
However Apple will let you upgrade to the pro (double the bandwidth), max (4x the bandwidth), and ultra (8x the bandwidth). The m4 max is still efficient, gives decent battery life in a thin light laptop. Even the ultra is pretty quiet/cool even in a tiny mac studio MUCH smaller than any thread ripper pro build I've seen.
Does mystify me that x86 has a hard time matching even a mac mini pro on bandwidth, let alone the models with 2x or 4x the memory bandwidth.
- Sure, you could. The design would do something like:
We need a bigger memory controller.
To get more traces to the memory controller We need more pins on the CPU.
Now need a bigger CPU package to accommodate the pins.
Now we need a motherboard with more traces, which requires more layers, which requires a more expensive motherboard.
We need a bigger motherboard to accommodate the 6 or 8 dimm sockets.
The additional traces, longer traces, more layers on the motherboard, and related makes the signalling harder, likely needs ECC or even registered ECC.
We need a more expensive CPU, more expensive motherboard, more power, more cooling, and a larger system. Congratulations you've reinvented threadripper (4 channel), siena (6 channel), Threadripper pro (8 channel), or epyc (12 channel). All larger, more expensive more than 2x the power, and is likely to be in a $5-$15k workstation/server not a $2k framework desktop the size of a liter of milk or so.
- Dunno, nice, quiet, small machine, using standard parts (power supply, motherboard, etc).
If you want the high memory bandwidth get the strix halo, if not get any normal PC. Sure apple has the bandwidth as well, and also soldered memory as well.
If you want dimms and you want the memory bandwidth get a threadripper (4 channel), siena (6 channel), thread ripper pro (8 channel), or Epyc (12 channel). But be prepared to double your power (at least), quadruple your space, double your cost, and still not have a decent GPU.
Also the falling pieces don't accelerate downward, which looks unnatural