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Comment by AlyssaRowan | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely agreed. I didn't see this one coming - WhatsApp have earned a very poor reputation for security in the past. But this is an unexpectedly very good choice, and a very solid step forward.

As closed-source, I still couldn't recommend WhatsApp above Signal/TextSecure, but this means that the squillions of WhatsApp users out there right now will hopefully get strong protection and probably won't even notice - and that's fantastic.

Makes me wonder if perhaps other clients for the TextSecure protocol are viable, maybe even possibly standardisable (although please let's not start going design-by-committee on it, don't allow any changes that haven't been security-reviewed). A desktop TextSecure client is something I would like to have right now.

Especially curious what happens if you properly plug together TextSecure, a DHT (or two), and a mixnet like Tor. (Are you listening, Project Tox?)

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i really am a fan of what moxie et al are doing with textsecure. i am less of a fan of redphone, but that's another matter (zrtp, woof).

while i trust textsecure, it is hard to trust any mobile OS and mobile hardware.

Does this mean that Whatsapp users could send encrypted messages to Textsecure users and viceversa?

Someone in the article's comment thread posted Moxie's reply to that very same question: "Very unlikely".

According to moxie, that's unlikely.

Source: https://twitter.com/moxie/status/534757705466908673

It would be ideal, but let's face reality. If they stay separate, there's a chance Whatsapp, Hangouts and let's say Skype (long stretch here, especially after Microsoft worked so hard to make it wiretappable back in 2009 [1]) would all adopt this solid and secure protocol. But if they have to interop, they'd never agree to it. Google even removed XMPP support so Microsoft can't build Gtalk support into Outlook/Skype (among other reasons).

[1] - http://www.computerworld.com/article/2509604/data-privacy/mi...

Google has not removed XMPP support, although it's true that some new Hangout features have no XMPP equivalent.

Google Hangouts does not support federated communications. This means that users on XMPP-compatible networks cannot communicate with Google Hangouts users.

All you can do for now is to connect to Google Hangouts with an XMPP client, which doesn't mean much, doesn't work so well and given that Hangouts is explicit in its lack of support for XMPP, we don't know for how long this will last.

You mean like group chat? One of the key features of Hangouts?

Oh well, it's Google's loss, we've moved to Slack where I work instead.

XMPP support is alive and well. I don't know why microsoft didn't integrate it, but that's another matter (it may be argued that the google video chat never truly worked on open standards, and rather than implement a "broken" IM they just preferred to leave it out )

Anyhow, the only real reason to stay separate would be to compete with each other, with the slim chance to push the competition out of the market (at every services' users expense), and I agree how this has come to be a sad reality

Google Hangouts does not support XMPP federation, meaning the ability to connect people on Google Hangouts to people that are not on Google Hangouts.

Ironically, in May 2013 at Google I/O it was Larry Page that was expressing his dissatisfaction with the state of the industry for the lack of interoperability with messaging, lambasting Microsoft. But then just after Microsoft announced their support of XMPP in Outlook.com, Google announces Hangouts.

I guess that was provided as an excuse for dropping XMPP support. Well, welcome to the club Google, now you're part of the problem.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs: both facebook chat and google support xmpp, but neither support federation.

I just tried right now and federation is still "working". Or at least I can send messages to people on other networks, but I cannot receive them.

I wonder if Google is truly phasing it out, or if it's just an issue with the service I'm using.

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