Category: Tech

Tech

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Signal, the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, made a blog post about their operating costs. They are estimating that by 2025 Signal will require $50 million dollars per year to operate.

They provided a breakdown of their current expenses:

Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.
Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.
Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.
Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.
Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.
Employees: $19 million dollars per year

So that’s around $14 million per year in infrastructure and $19 million per year in employees. Whats shocking to me is the $6 million per year in fees to send registration codes via SMS or voice calls. They really should consider moving away from using phone numbers as identification.

Anyway, if you are a user of Signal, you should consider making a donation to the foundation. You can donate directly within the signal app (and receive a digital badge in return), or on their website.

Games Tech

GameCube Modding Adventure

I made a few simple modifications to my GameCube recently. I removed the dead CR2032 that was soldered in and replaced it with a 2 pin battery holder. This will let me easily replace the battery next time it dies. Next I replaced the fan with a Noctua NF-A4x10 FLX. This required a 40mm fan adapter plate and fan cable. The big mod was replacing the optical drive with the GC Loader PNP HW2 loaded with Swiss. This allows you to load games from a SD card instead of relying on the aging optical drive. I got a CARBY by Insurrection Industries for the video output along with a support brace. Lastly, I got a Retro Fighters BattlerGC Wireless Controller. Overall I am really happy with this GameCube setup.