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Comment by MKais | Hacker News Reader

Whatsapp displays 404 not found when I send a link to Signal https://www.dropbox.com/s/0t5venwty2oe2re/Screenshot%202021-...

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One reason I support the DOJ action against Facebook is that with the power of subpoena and compelling testimony we might finally find out all of the dirty tricks Facebook have been up to all of these years.

Bill Gates squirming during his anti-trust testimony when answering questions from David Boies was game-changing for the company and our industry

I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better

> I don't think it will be pretty - but it will inform all users for the better

Yeah, right. Was this sarcasm? I think most day-to-day users have zero color on this kind of stuff.

Cory Doctorow was talking about this on the most recent Exponential View podcast, a great riff on how that really helped the competitive landscape, at least for a while. Worth listening to https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/exponential-view-with-...

Seems like a pretty blatant antiturst violation if this is happening consistently.

It would be weird that they'd make it display a 404 though. It's possible Signal could be returning that when they see FB perform a request to them for some reason (e.g. want to make sure no metadata leaks to FB).

Whatsapp isn't close to a monopoly in the US. Here iMessage, SMS, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger by far have greater market share. You can argue that FB Messenger should be linked to Whatsapp for the purposes of anritrust, but even then, there is very healthy competition.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/350461/mobile-messenger-...

In most european countries whatsapp is the no 1 medium of communication by far. I don't use it so i know in how many areas it has spread.

Source of this info? In Poland people use mostly Messenger. None of my friends use whatsapp. Telegram or Discord are both more popular.

When I lived in Holland it was #1 by far (as of 10 years ago)

When I visited some friends in Chile it was also #1 by far

It's actually really annoying that all my international friends are on whatsapp while all my US friends are not.

I can also say by having lived there that it is the same for Germany, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. There will always be an exception to the norm, but it is clear that Whatsapp is the number one tool for instant messaging/calling.

I live in germany and whatsapp is dominant in all social circles i have been in.

Yeah thats pretty much exclusive to US and Canada. Outside of upper North America, WhatsApp is to be expected.

Not true for the UK either. I don't even have whatsapp installed, currently.

You might not,but you don't speak for the UK. WhatsApp is ubiquitous here (in England), getting people away from it has been a challenge for years.

Whatsapp is extensive used across the UK. I don't even know where you'd get the idea it's not.

Monopoly is one part of antitrust laws but you don't have to be a monopoly to be breaking antitrust laws. This is pretty clearly anti competitive. Other examples would be price fixing or bid rigging (where you purposefully underbid so your competitor can win the contract for cheaper. And then your competitor does you a favor later).

> This is pretty clearly anti competitive.

No more than a Ford dealer buying a billboard outside a Chevy dealership. It's not anti-competitive to advertise in the same place your competition advertises.

The issue with Facebook doing this is the fact that they're a huge company that is buying these ads where the smaller company cannot.

It is illegal and anticompetitive to be a huge company using enormous resources to squash competition for smaller firms. There are many ways in which this is done. Not all of them are illegal, depending on how you look at it.

My opinion: Buying marketshare is usually bad for the user.

> The issue with Facebook doing this is the fact that they're a huge company that is buying these ads where the smaller company cannot.

You're telling me Coke can't advertise soda because there's a small local craft soda manufacturer here in town?

At the very least, they shouldn't be allowed to advertise for the words "Local Craft Soda (tm)" -- especially if competitor's name is what they are buying.

You are missing the point. The whole issue is that they are advertising with their competitor's name.

Facebook and Whatsapp are effectively the same entity, as the recent requirement of sharing Whatsapp data with Facebook shows. It's basically Microsoft with Windows and IE using special hidden dlls to execute faster than Netscape and that was of course a landmark and exemplary example of anti-trust abuse by a non-monopoly in either OS or browsers. Facebook needs to be broken up and the special ownership rules privileging Mark Zuckerberg need to be removed.

Haven’t tried reproducing, but it’s possible they just “don’t support” this.

Facebook also “doesn’t support” these sorts of links (at least to Telegram, Snapchat, others) on Instagram: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/03/instagram-starts-blocking-...

For what it is worth, I cannot reproduce

It looks like the link is fine when clicked by the recipient, but the preview comes up as 404.

Either fb/wa is doing something odd in the request when generating the preview, or the other end is responding badly to something unusual-but-correct that there's are doing. Perhaps due to the initial request's accept headers a redirect is being sent instead of the usual content, and requesting that results in a 404.

Could be malicious as many are suggesting, I certainly wouldn't put it past them, but I suspect cockup is a more likely explanation.

No, I mean I can't reproduce the preview. I think you experienced a fluke. If it was anything else wouldn't that mean that WA wasn't in fact e2ee? Or at least link previews (I know Signal does this client side, I don't know about WA)

https://i.imgur.com/Y8hg6zW.png

App linking (URLs that open apps) doesn't work in Messenger. You have to press-and-hold the link, tap "Open in Safari", and then safari will redirect to the app. Terrible UX.

can't reproduce

It's clearly still sending the link, just their service isn't generating the thumbnail, perhaps blocked from their internal network.

I'm fact I had always assumed those are generated by the local application

That would be a very easy way of getting someones IP address with near zero interaction.

iMessage works around this by generating the preview on the sender's side.

How? The user is sharing the link he already has. IP is already exposed via the browser which he just viewed the link on.

The preview is generated and sent along with the message. Nothing is loaded from the other chats' side.

The link preview is generated locally, but Whatsapp blacklists domains it doesn't want previews to be generated for by marking them as 'bad domains' in the app. It did this for telegram a few years ago, and an analysis of the android app's source code proved it was intentional.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blockin...

Do you mean the website preview that is built from Signals social link tags? It works fine for me. Signals OG-tags also looks fine.

Can't reproduce. My friend sends me a link to Signal but it works.

https://orat.io/blog/as-of-today-whatsapp-is-blocking-telegr...

Whatsapp blocking Telegram links

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