> ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ...
https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704
I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watching. Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried?
I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from.
Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate.
Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999.
Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
Complexity comes from hiring. Nobody wants to work on old reliable tech because it’s boring and uncommon.
However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues.
Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.
Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
At least, that is what I do.
Signal is simple, recognizable, very much like WA. A WA outage is indeed a good point in time to have a lighthearted conversation about messengers and platforms. A lot of people still don't realize Meta owns WA.
What I like is that the normy friends I have on Signal are now telling all their normy friends/colleagues about Signal and how we are still apping away while WA is down.
You should recruit people to Matrix , which supports Federation.
It was a struggle to get my core group of friends to sign up, and I just sort of haven't bothered trying to get anyone outside that group to try it. They are not technical people in the hn sense but are vastly more competent than the average joe.
It's the normies at large who dictate comms platforms really. Things like matching emoji support and easy + performant video and picture sharing are absolutely crucial.
Nobody said it was perfect. It's just better.
https://gizmodo.com/whatsapp-moderators-can-read-your-messag...
It does say that 'WhatsApp can read some of your messages if the recipient reports them'. That 'if' is doing a lot of work in this sentence. It means that the recipient has to decrypt your message.
Although there are forms etc. within the app for doing this, it's essentially no different to taking screenshots.
There is no way to ensure 100% privacy if the other party you are communicating with does not keep data they have access to private.
I'm not a big Meta fan, but as far as I am aware, they can't normally read your messages. The fact that it's closed source just means that we can't verify that for ourselves.
That's really the whole point. As far as we know, it could be that it is not e2ee at all.
Also from the moderation article, it's not clear to me what that means: if I report you, does that mean that the moderators will get access to all your recent conversations? Could be, right? But then the FBI could report you for no reason, and then ask WhatsApp to provide your recent conversations. Which would effectively act as some kind of backdoor, right?
But my understanding is that the 'report' is from a user's WhatsApp client—if someone sends you a message that you think is reportable, you can report them to Meta. As part of the report, your WhatsApp client will forward some information to Meta.
Assuming Meta are not actively lying, this would not mean that it's not E2EE.
Reproducible builds: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...
They publish the subpoenas they receive and the dump of relevant data to the authorities, and it's usually a timestamp associated with some ID and that's it.
https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
The metaverse better be real good, else Meta will be in serious decline.
They’ve invented legs, I’m not sure what else you’d need.
Imagine a headset with a 360 degree camera, so you can broadcast your surroundings, and someone else can wear their VR headset and be seeing what your camera is seeing. Or use some transformation/extra gear so they can view the world/your avatar from a few feet next to you.
This technology needs drastic minimization to become seriously popular.
And I feel like people are high on fumes and refuse to see that there’s nothing there, none of the actual problems are solved, and there are no real use case being addressed. Someone just went “this is the next hype” and… is it?
Most next hypes flounder and die a lonely but well deserved death.
> his vision is that the Metaverse future is Skyrim or GTA5, I guess that'd be a Matrix-like virtual world.
Except for all the difficult bits which make matrix matrix, you know, the part where you don’t crash into a wall or destroy a display if you forget that you’re very much still in the real world outside of your helmet?
> Imagine a headset with a 360 degree camera, so you can broadcast your surroundings, and someone else can wear their VR headset and be seeing what your camera is seeing.
Yes because if there’s one thing that’s missing to my life, it’s an office supervisor being able to see my surroundings when I’m taking a shit.
Sure there's nothing there now, and I'm not cheerleading or hyping him on, but if I were in charge of this project I'd look if the tech which is portable and affordable could be developed (in a 10-15 year timeline) to prevent running into stuff. I look at your response and think "Why so much of the small-mindedness?".
I've seen people walk around tourist spots while video-calling their friends/family, the other side would be in their tatty t-shirts in their bedroom, but hey, they can enjoy a part of the caller's travels and adventures. Of course it's also currently possible to take a shit and video call your supervisor, geez, I wish you a better job than one where you have to answer supervisors' calls even while crapping...
Decentralization is not a panacea. You just have to pick your poison.
E-mail is decentralized, but every now and then a hn post pops up, complaining about how you can't run your own email server these days. Billions of people don't use email for personal communication, but use centralized apps like WhatsApp and many businesses do the same with WhatsApp, Slack and similar apps.
To me it looks like running a centralized service works really well for companies like Meta and Google and the fast majority of people pick those services over something else. I don't think many people will change their mind about this because of one outage.
I tried to convince people to move to Signal, but 1) they're not immune to outages as well, 2) the network effect is too strong, and 3) signal doesn't seem to get the QoL niceties that made WhatsApp appealing in the first place and insisting they know better. No easy chat history backup is a no-go for most people. No live location sharing is also a bummer. Plus their Android app is a second class citizen in quality and lacking tablet support.
If you use Telegram with only the secret chats, then Signal is better. If you use all the cool features of Telegram, then your communications are not end-to-end encrypted (i.e. the Telegram server and whoever can hack them can read everything).
Edit: I feel like every response I'm getting is: 'but texting is expensive, especially with foreign contacts'. Sure, but do you really need to send 100 texts in the odd hour that Whatsapp is offline sometimes, or can they wait?
Parent wrote 'This is a big issue in Europe', which is what I'm responding to. I live in Europe, I have foreign contacts. This should not be a big issue, because for pretty much everything that can't wait, texting or calling will be worth it. If it isn't worth spending some money to get in touch with someone, it can probably wait. This may be an actual issue for a very, very small number of people. But the majority is just exaggerating because they feel disconnected without being able to send Gifs to their friends for an hour.
There's so many alternatives, I'm always surprised that a Whatsapp outage seems to mean the end of the world to many people.
- many people I talk to have phone numbers from different countries. Making such communication expensive.
- also, I suspect many people around me have not updated their WhatsApp number for a while (or have multiple SIMs)
- no one here optimises for SMS or call minutes. Some people will be on data only (either data only SIM, or Wi-Fi only)
> It will be left to the national authorities to decide whether the network accepts emergency calls without the SIM/USIM/ISIM.
[PDF] https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/122100_122199/122101/09...
I’m all for living under a privacy rock, but WhatsApp is a much better rock than SMS.
Whether you pay for SMS or not depends on your telco. Regarding roaming, let's say that you pay the same you'd pay if you were in your country if you leave the country, but you still pay different rates if you try to call or text someone from another country (whether you are roaming or not)
>Do we live in divergent Europe timelines or something?
Despite what the propaganda may have lead you to think, life in Europe is very different depending on your country.
I have a LycaMobile NL bundle (which you can get without having an address there) which is 15euro for 20 gigs + unlimited calls/sms national/international. Roaming too due to EU regulations. I've had service from the westmost point to the eastmost point of the EU with this SIM.
> life in Europe is very different depending on your country.
I know, I've lived in 4 countries by now in different regions. Thus the need to obtain cheap international SIMs, which are easy to acquire in most countries.
Thought it was quite weird/concerning that that could happen.
My guess is that this particular outage was caused due to a scaling constraint somewhere in the stack.
Would be interesting to see the RCA if/when it’s published.
Mine got delivered though
The Android app shows messages with the clock icon (unable to send).
Are we so dependent on these tools?
If there is something really urgent I don't think people would use WhatsApp in the first place, or when did you text with 911 the last time using WhatsApp?
Maybe we got even more productive and thoughtful during these cutt-off hours. Hours without notification, chit-chat and that social background hum we so much used to be in doesn't sound that bad, does it?
I was trying to send a message to wish good morning to the girl that I’m seeing, and WhatsApp was stuck on “connecting”.
https://downdetector.com/status/whatsapp/ confirms that many other users are currently having problems connecting too.
Does WhatsApp have any official status page? I found an old twitter account that appears to be official but it hasn’t posted in ages.
Will they write post mortem analysis somewhere?
It currently shows major disruptions.
Really, why can't everything be like DNS? You ask the nearest available authority about something, and that in turn asks the next nearest authority, until that shit is found. Would work for web search too.
When you need a pretty UI just put different client apps on top of it, just like we did/do for email and newsgroups.
Open source, doesn't require a phone number, and a big strength is that it's decentralized, which makes it much less vulnerable to outages like this.
"Session utilises the decentralised Oxen Service Node Network to store and route messages. This means that unlike P2P messaging applications you can message Session users when they are offline. This network consists of community operated nodes which are stationed all over the world. Service nodes are organised into collections of small co-operative groups called swarms.
Swarms offer additional redundancy and message delivery guarantees even if some service nodes become unreachable. By using this network, Session doesn’t have a central point of failure, and Session’s creators have no capacity to collect or store personal information about people using the app"
Will carriers charge for RCS? How has Google got them to sign up without some fee?
Just tried WA again, the messages are definitely being sent & received.