WhatsApp will become interoperable with other messaging apps in Europe
tuta.com
tuta.com
* you can respond to messages but are very limited in what you can initiate (as such they got you as part of someone else's contact list)
I've never tested it without contacts permissions though.
Is this true? How does Apple enforce this? I ask because WhatsApp initially worked fine on an iPhone, without any access to the contact list, but after a few upgrades, it demanded access to the Contacts list to send messages to new numbers, and did not allow you to do so by typing a phone number directly.
I've never given it access to my contacts. (iOS.) It's worked fine. I recently started giving it access to a limited set of my contacts, but that was for convenience.
It seems to no longer even scan the contacts by itself, only when you hit "New Chat", press the triple dots and then "Refresh".
Still a pretty garbage app but at least in terms of this it seems to have actually improved.
You may be interested in our monthly updates https://discourse.imfreedom.org/tag/state-of-the-bird
How to middle man and gatekeep otherwise?
That is why its so useful! It was just designed to work not enslave or en-silo.
The opportunities came after the market was created and adoption was wide-spread because it was just so useful.
The security business opportunities exploded once Microsoft got into the market and things like computer viruses spread via email due to their total negligence and enabling ;)
I can still remember nasty things like Lotus notes or ccmail but once email became widespread and the momentum was undeniable they could not give that sh*t away -- they did try that too.
The problem is that you cannot make as much money as you would by gatekeeping, which means billions of dollars of VC money goes to the gatekeeping app that offers its experience for free and no ads, and spends hundreds of million on ads, influencers, and partnerships to promote their offering and kill the open competition.
And once they’re entrenched enough that’s when they turn the screws on the customer.
Unfortunately our antitrust laws didn’t imagine a world where the marginal cost of serving a new customer was close to 0, so offering a product for free in order to kill competition doesn’t really trigger antitrust laws even though it’s the same kind of behavior.
I think the closest we came to something like this was Slack suing MSFT for bundling Teams, and that probably only stood a chance because of Microsoft’s history.
And yet using those different chat services would have been unimaginable if it wasn’t for Trillian and then later Adium when I moved to a Mac.
Combining them into a single app with a singular UI, the same KB shortcuts, and being able to easily control notifications etc was a game changer.
I love the idea of Matrix but the complexity of key management and federation for the average person is far too high. Signal is a perfect direct replacement for WhatsApp but it still requires a phone number.
RCS is good enough... as a fallback protocol. I don't want a dependency on a phone number or a single physical device.
Why is email so durable but federated messaging so fragile? If we can make PGP/GPG email more accessible I wonder if that could translate to instant messaging?
That was vaguely the state of things before the DMCA here in the US. Sega had no legal ability to stop other companies from selling cartridges that played on a genesis for example, and in one court case the Judge ruled that the company was legally right to breach Sega's trademark rights to achieve that interoperability. Sony, Nintendo, and others all lost similar suits about trying to restrict interoperability with their products and software.
In fact, Sega was going to lose that case so badly, and the precedent was so clearly beneficial to the consumer and market, that they chose to settle it to prevent the precedent from being established. That this is something you can choose to do well after it becomes obvious how the case should end is an atrocious feature of the US "justice" system. You shouldn't get to take a case all the way to a verdict, and then have an appeals court poke holes in your claims and then say "actually we don't want any of this on the record anymore"
The DMCA as written makes it very easy to prevent interoperability by law simply with a bit of code here or there to make token efforts to prevent access.
You might be amazed...
The downside is only the "gatekeepers" have to provide this interoperability, when it would be far more useful if all the popular platforms were facilitating it.
Still I agree that pre-2012 IM status was much better when open protocols were more popular. Of course there was the Windows Live Messenger thing but even you could use something like Pidgin to chat with it.
>In order to maximize user security, we would prefer third-party providers to use the Signal Protocol. Since this has to work for everyone however, we will allow third-party providers to use a compatible protocol if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.
>To send messages, the third-party providers have to construct message protobuf structures which are then encrypted using the Signal Protocol and then packaged into message stanzas in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
>Meta servers push messages to connected clients over a persistent connection. Third-party servers are responsible for hosting any media files their client applications send to Meta clients (such as image or video files). After receiving a media message, Meta clients will subsequently download the encrypted media from the third-party messaging servers using a Meta proxy service.
You also have to connect over XMPP and through a proprietary "Enlistment API", etc.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess...
Hmm.
Remember when gTalk had XMPP and Facebook killed XMPP by refusing to support it and launching the chat silo wars?
At the same time, making it possible to choose WhatsApp for the default messaging app has been a great relief for those not locked into Messages.
Despite having the appearance of a messaging app, iMessage operates as a backbone for a lot of OS capability that is surprisingly deep.
What the heck are BirdyChat and Haiket? Both of those don't seem to actually exist, they just have a waitlist on their homepage.
Literally the only post on BirdyChat's blog is how they're now WhatsApp-compatible, but their initial Google Play release happened 45 days ago (Oct 16th).
Haiket's website similarly contains only one press release, which is to say that they're accepting waitlists since Nov 11th, but they're somehow funded by the "former CEO of AT&T Communications and board member of Palo Alto Networks and Lockheed Martin".
Still bad, sure, but there are worse offenders.
Really annoying! Respect my decision as a user to choose the language I want, not where my IP comes from...
Shameless plug on the topic: https://www.fer.xyz/2021/04/i18n
Of course, this is still only an unfounded guess but I can't believe they're doing this selflessly, out of the goodness of their hearts.
What other differentiating factors can you implement that can steer the masses from one messaging platform to the other. I cannot think of any.
But in this case, how exactly does Meta prevent people from India downloading and using another messaging app?
We need a modern Trillian or Pidgin that just connects to and talks to everything. To be fair, Pidgin still has lots of plugins for many different chat protocols. I don't know how well maintained they are and if they work consistently.
https://pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=Protoco...
Your comms are only as secure as the node receiving them.