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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

I love how they always talk about "abuse with a significant increase in incidents recently" and the "desire to keep our community safe and secure". Whether it is about downloads or about disabling XMPP federation.

This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures.

I mean, what won't you do for the children? For keeping our community safe? What, you don't want this measure? It seems you aren't a team player then.

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Google Talk supports XMPP federation and has done so since January 2006. To deal with an onslaught of spam, Google disabled incoming subscription requests for a short time. During this time, all other XMPP federation features continued to work.

Hangouts does not use XMPP, but it's a feature that they didn't implement. It's not something that they disabled.

While Google has not announced an actual EOL of Google Talk, you can no longer download the desktop client and the Android application tries to directly upgrade to Google Hangout.

From a systems perspective, they have basically prevented anyone new from getting on Google Talk. I am expecting an EOL announcement at some point, as they are otherwise making it hard to get into.

See https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... and http://talk.google.com

Yeah, Google Talk will probably be included on the third spring cleaning list. When Google drops support for XMPP federation, it will be because they are killing an entire product. It will not be because they are disabling a feature.

> This may or may not be true, but it is exactly how late USSR and contemporary Russian bureaucrats reason every of their restrictive and reactionary measures

I would say that whether or not it is in fact true (and the question you don't address even indirectly of whether, if the stated problem is true, the response is proportional) is more important than whether or not bad actors have used somewhat analogous claims when they were false as pretext for restrictive measures.

Every legitimate justification for action has been used, at one point or another, by some bad actor to justify some bad act.

Wow. Your sense of entitlement is astounding.

Google's taking away a minor feature of a completely free "product", and your response is to compare them to bureaucrats in the USSR?

Feel free to use something else.

Downloads are hardly a minor feature. Having a downloadable package makes it significantly easier for users to try open source software. The average user is very unlikely to want to compile from source.

Google Code (and GitHub) aren't for average users. They're developer tools.

Download links belong on the project web page.

> Google Code (and GitHub) aren't for average users. They're developer tools.

Google Code has a number of features -- not just downloads, but also wiki, etc. -- that, while not intended to replace a user-centric site separate from the developer site Google Code is intended to provide, in practice facilitate projects using it that way.

People do publish open-source developer tools -- for developers. They even publish binaries for those developers.

> Downloads are hardly a minor feature. Having a downloadable package makes it significantly easier for users to try open source software.

While it has a set of features which may have made it usable for this use, I don't think Google Code was ever really intended to provide user facing web sites for open source projects, it was designed to provide developer facing project sites.

I don't use many Google product but yeah, I do feel entitled to mock them for Politburo-style decision process and rhetoric.

I sit with a bag of popcorn watching them ruining their image.

You may not be wrong, but the contrast you draw is still unnecessary and annoying.

Did you really just compare Google to a totalitarian regime responsible for millions of deaths?

Neither late Soviet nor contemporary Russia are responsible for millions of deaths. Any meaningful number of deaths anyway.

They're just boring and insincere.

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