Why signal even host their servers on aws
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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The Signal messenger and protocol.
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Because it's cheap. And there is no risk since all the data is encrypted on your device by the code that was written and built and signed in a secure environment.
but you are still giving money to someone who is in blatant opposition to your ideals. it is as if vegan society outsourced some services to slaughterhouse, inc., because it was cheap. doesn't make sense.
Does Signal have a position in the first place? As far as I know they only get political when encryption is threatened.
They did give away those neck thingies during the BLM protests, but if I remember correctly they gave them away to people protesting (not specifically BLM). After that I think they have been pretty neutral.
they may not have a positition in "harris/trump" sense, but their world view is quite different from the one of bezos, i would say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Whittaker#Google
She joined Google in 2006.[14] She founded Google Open Research[22] which collaborated with the open source and academic communities on issues related to net neutrality measurement, privacy, security, and the social consequences of artificial intelligence.[23]
In 2018, Whittaker was one of the core organizers of the Google Walkouts, with over 20,000 Google employees walking out internationally to protest Google's culture when it comes to claims of sexual misconduct and citizen surveillance. They released a series of demands, some of which were met by Google.[24][25]
The walkout was prompted by Google's reported $90 million payout to vice president Andy Rubin who had been accused of sexual misconduct, and the company's involvement with Project Maven,[24][26] against which more than three thousand Google employees signed a petition. Τhe project was established by a contract between the US military and Google, through which Google was to develop machine vision technologies for the US drone program. Following the protests, Google did not renew the Maven contract.[27]
Whittaker was part of the movement that called for Google to rethink their AI ethics council after the appointment of Kay Coles James, the president of The Heritage Foundation who has fought against LGBT protections and advocated for Donald Trump’s proposed border wall.[28] Whittaker claimed that she faced retaliation from Google, and wrote in an open letter that she had been told by the company to "abandon her work" on enforcing ethics in technology at the AI Now Institute.[24][29][30][31]
Thank you for the reply!
I am not wholy convinced by this. For one Whittaker is not Signal. Whittaker as part of Signal will represent Signal's position, not the other way aroudn.
Secondly, opposing sexual misconduct, LGBTQ-rights, and opposing AI are not inherent political standpoints. They can linger broadly on a political spectrum.
Ignoring my first point, and assuming that Signal has absorbed Whittaker's standpoints; has AWS or Amazon as a whole and as a company a stance against the points Whittaker (personally) advocates for?
whittaker is pretty clearly for freedom, while bezos is for his employees peeing in a bottle because they can't afford to take a break.
i think the difference is pretty clear and if you are discussing in good faith, there is no way you don't see it. if you are just sealioning, then bye.
I don't know why you suddenly have to respond like that. I merely wonder how you came to the conclusion that they are each other's opposition, because generally you separate personal opinions from corporate policy.
how you came to the conclusion that they are each other’s opposition
this is how: whittaker is pretty clearly for freedom, while bezos is for his employees peeing in a bottle because they can’t afford to take a break
because generally you separate personal opinions from corporate policy
i don't believe that to be true. unless you are true sociopath, you try to find a company, or an employee, that aligns with your own values. hence why vegan will be unlikely to seek a position as a CEO of slaughterhouse, inc, nor will board of directors of the slaughterhouse prefer such candidate.
Signal was down also in Europe, while AWS outage is said to be in the US. This is unfortunate and weird.
cant trust anything running on AWS
Was reading a bit about it earlier and the data centre in West Virginia does all AWS DNS queries globally so it's a massive single point of failure, as clearly demonstrated!
It's also the default option when setting up hosting apparently
A great reminder that Signal uses AWS cloud, plus Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud and Cloudflare, all under US legislation. If any of these clouds goes down or becomes otherwise problematic, chatting degrades or fails.
Is that why I couldn't load a bunch of sites. I assumed it was because I had got malware and someone had cloned by disk and was running a mirror image of it.
In the future, something like this could tell you if anyone else is having the same issues
So did you rip out all your disk and drilled them and threw the rest of chips in microwave?
No, I enabled the activity log on my email and then forgot about it entirely because I had my driving test the next morning.
I think it prevented me from impulsively spending way too much on some magic cards