Wire – Modern Communications Network
wire.com
wire.com
"Are Messages And Calls Encrypted? Yes. Wire uses industry-standard encryption on all of your Wire messages and calls."
"WHAT SECURITY MEASURES DO WE TAKE TO SAFEGUARD YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION?
We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect information we process and maintain. In addition, we restrict access to personal information to Company employees who need to know this information in order to develop, operate and maintain the Service."
Come on guys...how can anything this vague be trusted?
And by European they mean Swiss, so not specifically EU.
One of the typical evasive phrases...
From the Guardian Article:
"Locating its head office in Switzerland was Wire’s first decision taken on security grounds. “If someone is interested in accessing our user data, there’s a formal and well-regulated process in Switzerland for that. They’re very mindful of privacy, and the same is true in Germany."
Swiss naturally implies safety for many people (which is deceptive...real, verifiable, audited, end to end encryption is safety), for anyone unsure about the reality of "Swiss" cooperation with NSA since the 70s, read about Crypto AG
http://mediafilter.org/caq/cryptogate/
For those wondering about "Swiss privacy laws," if you are a foreign national you are effectively fair game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_%28interception_system%29
http://www.iclg.co.uk/practice-areas/telecoms-media-and-inte...
I'd prefer a honest "We are no security experts, don't use this for critical conversations!"
a) I hate the discoverability. Just because I install an app doesn't mean that my ex from ten years go should see that I'm online. Heck, my mom or aunt don't need to see me showing up in the address book either.
b) Desktop clients. Tablets with wifi only.
They offer these 'challenges', but other than that? For me, this comment of yours would we something I'd agree with if
- Telegram would start out with a protocol that works/is 'accepted' (OTR, TextSecure)
- Would make chats encrypted by default/all the time
That'd be awesome. Given that they seem to know a bit about cross-platform development and design the result might be extremely interesting. Right now? I'm not convinced.
I hope they applied more (security-related) common sense in their apps than in their website.
I'm German and use en_US here, so for ö I'd need to compose a character manually. Which is probably what was mocked (whether that is right or wrong I do not know - I certainly cannot judge the style of writing of someone in his native language, as a foreigner myself).
You are entirely correct about needing compose to type the symbol, but I use it so rarely, that I just copy-pasted.
It's not an umlaut though, it's a different diacritic called diaeresis. It makes me feel like I'm speaking a more awesome language when I use it.
The 'not an umlaut' part doesn't seem to be relevant though, since we talk about the character composition. 'ö' is the same character both as o-umlaut and as o-diaeresis (I admit I checked if there's a different way to write the latter), so the argument is weird.
de_DE has a character 'ö' on the keyboard, if I use that as umlaut or not is a different problem.
Composing " and o (or whatever you use) produces what looks like o-umlaut to a German speaker - and my understanding was that you were 'attacked' (if you will) for going out of your way to write 'ö'. Whatever that character signifies here.
(I actually didn't know the name diaeresis, but the usage isn't uncommon here. I've driven my share of Citroën 2CVs in the past)
I'm complaining about security implications by introducing unnecessary complexity.
"It’s in our terms of use: we’re not going to look at your data and cultivate it for advertising," said Christensen. "We’re not going to put advertising in the client. My head of design would kill me! It’s more about finding the right kind of opportunities that are additive to the user experience, and that they’re motivated to pay for. We’ve found what we think are a couple of good ones."
Probably more than US laws anyway.
If they can prove one end of the conversation is not American or not in the U.S. you're recorded... but because it's so hard to do that on the fly, you're recorded anyway and they'll figure out the legal repercussions later... by hiding it, diverting the question or flat out lying about it.
It's a shame, this looks on the surface like a great product. But I agree with the point made earlier: In the age of Snowden, statements as vague as "Wire interactions are secure and we comply with European privacy laws and regulations." aren't enough for anyone to stake their security on.
The fact is, when it comes to communication security, the Government has proven themselves untrustworthy too many times for us to believe them anymore. Once could be written off as a mistake, twice, perhaps oversight wasn't good enough. But three, four, five times... the fact is, Governments have torpedoed any reasonable person's ability to trust them when it comes to looking after their privacy. So saying that you "comply with privacy laws and regulations" is no comfort. In today's political climate, if you want the trust of the people, you need to go above and beyond in the name of the people.
Saying "we use encryption" isn't any good; this isn't 1996. People need to have the details available if they want them (a little "More Information" link going to a page showing their actual security model, list of ciphers and modes of operation, etc. would do).
So either you trust them to do a good job or you don't. Whether someone in marketing knows the name of your favorite encryption doesn't really change that.
I'm much more likely to trust if various indicators suggest they're being sane, reasonable and knowledgeable.
Bottomline: You either trust them or you don't.
One reason for them not sharing the details could be that they want the potential hackers to keep guessing rather than making their life easier (No encrytion is foolproof)
Obscurity may only buy you time while you fix your security problems (before someone stumbles across the mistake you've made), but if you can manage to correct flaws before they are exploited, well, that's a good thing.
That said, Wire would do better to share enough details to show that they are putting real work into security and encryption. Compare Wire's security detail with something like Crypho's: http://www.crypho.com/features.html
They're still omitting plenty of details in their implementation, but it's obvious they have a strong focus on security. Wire doesn't really say anything (yet).
That's not true at all. Trust isn't blind faith. Their choice of algorithm, and other factors they can disclose tells a lot about their understanding.
"One reason for them not sharing the details could be that they want the potential hackers to keep guessing rather than making their life easier (No encrytion is foolproof)"
This is security by obscurity, an example of a poor choice. Overall, your statement says more about your lack of understanding of software security than anything else; as their statements can about theirs.
There is no security silver bullet - a properly secured system is security by many strategies. One of those strategies may indeed be obscurity.
You could perfectly well trust that they're earnest without trusting that they're competent. If that's your position, which is resonable, given enough information you can alleviate some of the competency concerns.
That said, given the landscape they're working in, it's hard to trust any commercial entity is genuinely willing and able to keep your communications secure.
Exactly.
Transparency in how you secure your shit is basic diligence, then the user trusts that that is accurate and properly implemented. I'd never use a service that didn't do that; just as I have a firefox addon (CipherFox) that shows what cipher a site is on, so if I see, for example, RC4, I know it's secure in name only.
They have features like syncing the read status of messages, so I assume their server knows about all messages and conversations (although maybe not the contents if encrypted properly).
While I sympathize with what you're saying, nothing is going to make people who actually care happy with whatever security a company puts in place. Unless that company releases their source code for everyone to see. Which I would hope most people would be reasonable enough to realize why that's usually impractical. (see the previous HN post about the guy who shut down his business and was debating open sourcing his entire codebase, and all the problems he would have had to tackle to do so)
That means you can run your own server and encrypt your own data, and the encrypted data can still be sent to other servers in the federation.
To your point about open source, if something like this can take off it needs to be fully open and transparent, without fees or central data ownership - which is why matrix.org is a non-profit organisation and the standard open source.
(disclaimer: I'm involved with matrix.org)
Why would encryption ever be "optional"?
But in my day we've been spending years fighting this sort of short-sightedness: https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg0274...
curl -XPOST -d '{"msgtype":"m.text", "body":"hello world"}' "https://matrix.wherever.com/_matrix/client/api/v1/rooms/$roo...
...and we'd like to keep it that way. But you can always insist on only ever communicating with folks who are on E2E crypto clients if you so desire.
In the absence of some forcing function, the trend is for it to get worse, not better.
If a company is unable to profit off of making FOSS software then they can go ahead and keep it closed source, but they should not be claiming that their software is secure when their claims cannot be verified. That's simply dishonest, and only proves the critics right about their trustworthiness.
You're making an assumption of guilt. The fact that something isn't open source doesn't inherently make it insecure.
I was thinking the same thing! But you seem to be assuming guilt and I am not. Honestly, I can see it both ways. It just seemed spurious to me to state that if we don't know it's good, it must be bad.
On the other hand as well, open source most certainly does not mean secure. I don't even have to argue to make this point, I merely have to point out Heartbleed or Shellshock.
The reason both were found and had the absurd propaganda campaigns behind them as they did that are the only reason you can even name them to begin with, is precisely because the underlying software was free.
On the other hand, let's name drop another vulnerability and its exploit: SMBRelay. Took 7 years after it was made public to introduce an incomplete and partial fix. Still exploitable to this day, 13 years later.
As a business model open-source arrangements such as Red Hat or the countless Hadoop services show that you don't really need to lock down the source code to create a successful business around it.
With communications software, the costs a closed-sourced software with magical trust-us crypto getting fully compromised is incredibly high. If people can't trust their basic tools to be private, nor be able to verify it, than they can't assume any conversation they have is private. That's a scary world IMO.
This is particularly true for broken encryption more than the presence of memory exploitation such as Heartbleed or Shellshock.
Then there's another effect that I like - after the initial patch was released, the story went public, we got notified immediately, then we could discuss about what caused it and see the actual commits and who did it. Such a catastrophe can sink a company, therefore you never see such post mortems for proprietary stuff. And yes, even I as a developer cannot audit software for security, but the point is that I could hire somebody else to do that for me, like the Finnish company that discovered Heartbleed.
So yeah, there is no concrete proof that proprietary stuff is less or more secure than open source, but the point is that we'll never know, because nobody can know how secure something is without looking at the source code.
- Skype is "everywhere" (Windows, Windows RT, Windows Phone, OS X, iOS, Android, Linux, FreeBSD, Blackberry, XBox One) and opposed to a handful of places (Windows, Linux, OS X, Android, iOS, FreeBSD, OpenIndiana). Plus Outlook.com's Skype implementation supports most platforms with a HTML5 browser.
- Landline/cellular phone calling. Text message sending.
- Caller ID, Voicemail, etc.
- Skype Numbers (i.e. buy a landline phone number people can call your Skype via, which is insanely useful for SMBs and individuals alike).
- Tox's feature list is largely a myth. Most clients are missing major Skype features and none support all of them, see this: https://wiki.tox.im/Clients#Features
People who think Tox is a Skype replacement aren't Skype's core demographic. The landline/cellular/etc functionality is heavily used by many and nothing that claims to be a replacement can be taken seriously if it lacks that.
link please?
Specifically, the replies of the submitter in the comments
XMPP does OTR for example. And you know, the cool thing about an open standard is that it can have many clients. Throw federation in the mix and then many people will actually find it desirable.
Otherwise it's just a matter of being new and shiny. Because other than that, I don't understand how this new messenger competes with Hangouts, Skype, FB's Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, iMessages, FaceTime, Snapchat, Y! Messenger, Lync, HipChat, Slack, IRC in general, or plain old calls and SMS messages, which are pretty cheap lately in Europe (at least in my country). Note that I enumerated about a dozen of popular alternatives.
I expect new entries to brag about something more than UI. Because my phone has the best UI ever - I just call somebody and that somebody responds because everybody has a phone number. I want to see open standards, federation and encryption, because otherwise new entries are useless for me.
So another proprietary walled garden that promises to keep my conversations secure, cross their hearts? No thanks.
Go download an OTR client for iOS, like cryptocat and notice how it pings you after 10 minutes that you have to re-open the app to keep on receiving messages! It's because iOS does not allow you to keep an app running in the background indefinately for battery reasons. This is required for the XMPP / OTR model to work.
You need a protocol of some sort that would work properly with mobile, and I think textsecure is it.
I'm trying to introduce the Axolotl ratchet (behind TextSecure's security) into XMPP:
The Axolotl ratchet provides true asynchronicity so you don't need to keep the link open forever. You don't even need the other party to be up; the message can be stored on either server and forwarded when the recipient connects, and the recipient will only decrypt the message at this moment. This is what we need.
It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. It seems like it's the default goto for anyone that can't think of something more interesting these days.
People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.
I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.
What we need is a protocol people can make clients for. With end to end encryption and PFS, of course.
Edit: yes.
https://xkcd.com/927/ is the kind of situation we need to avoid.
True, but do you think it's easier to deploy an extension that already exists and just lacks implementations, or to create a whole new protocol from scratch ?
If you look at other successful protocols, you'll also see that some features we rely on were bolted-on as extensions to protocols that were defined before, such as DNS, IMAP, HTTP... Not that it's an excuse to do the same, but it's expected.
> it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication
I don't think that's not something you actually want.
- How do you send a message to someone who's offline ? You don't, you have to wait for you and your contact to be online at the same time.
- How do you traverse NATs ? You have to craft all that messy code, and it's not even guaranteed that it works... you're going to need a "known anchor" for everyone to connect, just like what we see with WebRTC. If you're aiming for a one single protocol, there's no way around that. By the way XMPP can do signaling over XMPP and actual communications over direct, P2P links (such as SOCKS5: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0260.html)
The sad state today is that many clients still haven't implemented Jingle, but at least there's something to start from.
Tox actually does NAT traversal quite well I've found, and it does support SOCKS5 connections out of the box, albeit through TCP relay nodes rather than direct P2P.
"Yet another messaging protocol is what we need said nobody ever" will be the top comment.
Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse.
Tox is looking really promising though: https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ
Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.
So far only TextSecure does this.
One needs to have source released, audited and verified to match prebuilt binaries that are actually used by the unwashed gray masses. Without all three checked for each public build you have zero assurance that you are running a binary built from the released source and that the source doesn't have anything fishy in it.
The only app that checks all three, somewhat ironically, is TrueCrypt. PGPfone checked #1 and #3. TextSecure checks just #1 unless I am missing something, so objectively its "demonstrated security" is exactly the same as that of any another app that simply describes what it does in plain English and has a traffic to prove it.
And the article you linked points out several times that the encryption is only going to be enabled for WhatsApp's Android client for the time being.
Threema is closed sourced and thus I don't know which/how encryption are they actually using.
We have XMPP and OTR, and with chatsecure on Android or various clients on Linux it's pretty pleasant. I believe there are a few OS X clients as well, not sure about iOS.
* Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone.
* Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly)
* Viber, with a single contact.
* LINE, with a single contact.
I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps.
3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.
Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
Standard text messaging
ConnectBot (to an irssi session for IRC)
The answer is just to say no when people ask you install $appoftheday to contact them. No hangouts, no skype, no whatsapp, no facebook polluting my phone with their intrusiveness and always-on-in-background tendencies. One person occasionally asks me to install Whatsapp, but each time I say no.
Hangouts is a pain to remove if it came in your ROM, but you can still freeze it with Titanium Backup.
But I would prefer if I could just add them as an account to an app that I already have. And ideally an open-source, usable, attractive app.
Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.
Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.
Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.
As for IRC, it isn't how many people use it, but who uses it; namely a huge proportion of technical communities and people I want to communicate with.
As for Hangouts, it's in the default OEM ROMs, obviously, but also in the gapps packaged for CyanogenMod unless you remove it before flashing (as I did).
Don't need to pay extra to send an image Messages don't get lost in transit and if it did, it'd let you know. It's fast, simple and usable.
I find most everything faddish, but occasionaly things win out because they suck less than what we already have. Of course, those specific problems above might be UK specific.
* Telegram, with all my contacts (including several rather large group chats) * SMS, for telling new contacts to get Telegram
I don't mourn XMPP, it wasn't very nice and especially not very mobile friendly.
The limitations I know of are 'fixed' with decent/recent clients (Stream Management comes to mind). Care to elaborate?
What's poor about it? I'm genuinely interested - not to convince you that you're wrong but to check if I missed a gotcha in my setup here. So far .. I don't see an issue. I could complain about missing features/XEPs that I'd love to have and cannot right now, but .. chatting should work just fine.
That said, you DO want Stream Management.
Besides, I don't trust the Telegram guys with their faux security claims.
We're trying to fix this with Matrix.org - folks frustrated with yet another communication silo might want to check it out and help us tear down the walls between these gardens. (obvious disclaimer: i help run matrix.org)
Nicely played.
(edit: disclaimer: I'm also involved with matrix.org)
Storing the history on multiple servers? Not sure I understand the use case here (okay 'server goes down' I understand, but spreading my message history to multiple servers for that seems .. unexpected).
If friend 1 and 2 have a separate conversation in a different room, only their two servers will keep a copy of the conversation history. If friend 3 joins this room, his server will receive the current history from the other servers (there's a limit for efficiency but you can explicitly get all the history via pagination).
The core value prop of the internet is easy communication. Don't be surprised when people continue to iterate on it.
Then I tried to share a Pages document...
Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.
The usual negative HN top post.
I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one.
>It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging.
Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area.
In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...
I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.
But your "whatsapp" is your phone number.
I didn't look at it again so I don't know if they fixed it for real in the end.
It's scary how they took over communications over here.
It is amazing how Whatsapp rose everywhere but in the US.
Very disingenuous. In terms of ICQ, they were just early to market, had a competent client and... a deeply flawed method of identification. Messenger? Rolled out with Windows, just like certain other software that caused a bit of a stink in courtrooms at one point. Leverage. AOL did the same thing, pretty much.
As for Skype... it did voice competently, and more importantly did so easily and at a crucial point in time. Just like ICQ once did.
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
Absolutely. But Skype, according to most people I speak to and voice my concerns (ie. people to whom I whine) regarding the latest problem with Skype definitely echo my sentiment. Skype isn't good... it's merely acceptable. But there is no realistic option.
For my little niche there's definitely an opening for a new voice comm package, but "they" will have to raise the bar a lot if they want wide adoption.
By the same standards, I would of course say Skype has a terrible client now.
Skype really is history repeating itself. The client is becoming less usable by the day, and for some reason I was selected for a beta test that introduced the "new" flat style, at a huge cost to layout efficiency. It's truly terrible.
But I also think there is a lot of room for "Skype Killers" in different niches. I think Skype UI is getting worse for the experienced/heavy user. What is your niche? Would love to hear more.
You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire. Its only negative from my personal viewpoint is no Windows Phone support, but that OS is the punchline of many jokes these days.
There's also Slack for businesses, non-profits, and private groups (my local Ingress group uses it), and it offers a ton of extensions.
I don't see where Wire offers anything that we don't have now, though it's nice to see that there is at least an attempt at innovation in this space.
So that would be the "what's hot now".
I didn't mention it because few people I know use it. And I wouldn't touch it a Google + Google+ affilicated messaging solution with a 10-feet pole anyway...
I just felt that it was a glaring omission, especially considering its more popular and more reliable precursor, Google Talk.
Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user? It's a nightmare.
I do remote tutoring. Skype is easy. Everyone has it, you add the username, and call.
Here's what happens when I try to do a hangout:
1. Log in to gmail. Student often takes a while to find gmail on computer and login, as they've been doing everything by phone. 2. Find the chat. Student often takes 2-3 minutes to look for chat. 3. Invite to chat. Your @domain address? No, my personal gmail. 4. Show in chat list. 5. "Send me a message". This takes them another 2-3 minutes to figure out. 6. Start a call. Another delay. 7. Often some kind of technical trouble where the call doesn't start, mic doesn't work, they must by mistake.
This is exacerbated because I'm giving instructions by text. Starting a hangout with a new user on a computer often takes 5-15 minutes. Every step has potential for failure.
If there's a better way than what I'm doing, the fact that I don't know about it is itself is a UI failure on Google's part.
1. Open https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_ to create a new Hangout
2. Copy the permanent link that is shown in the dialog, or enter mail addresses to invite.
3. Students open the link. A login is required to join the Hangout, this could be improved...
Yes, my technophobe sister in law. She got a new Android phone and was texting me via plain old SMS, which are metered on her account. I texted her back "Look for an icon that is a green circle with a double quote mark in it. Open it, follow the prompts, and send me a message". Within a minute I had a Hangout message from her, and she's been using it since.
Purely anecdotal, but then so was your example. I'll agree it's not so simple doing it on a computer, but they still make it fairly simple; do a Google search for "hangouts", the top link takes you to a page that has a button that says "Available for your computer".
I agree the phone is easier.
Google Talk had only chat, but I could trust it to work as intended and deliver my messages. With Hangouts:
- synchronization between devices is not as good. I will often not see everything I typed on my mobile when I open it on my desktop.
- Messages do not arrive in order !!! Sorry for the triple exclamation marks, but this is implemented in the most stupid way I have ever seen in an IM application. Say we are using Hangouts on my mobile. You send the messages
A
B
C
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
A
B
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
There's a truth to it. This one, like so many others, brings nothing new to the field. So why do we want it?
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
What's wrong with XMPP/Jabber?
We have a weekly post on new IM platforms, but all of seem to have features which are a subset of XMPP's. Including Skype.
Nothing, except it is a protocol, not an app. Go build an app based on it that's functionally equivalent to Skype and then we can talk.
In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.
It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.
No thanks. I already use iMessage, Hangouts, Line, and Skype at work. There's too many messengers and they all do the same thing.
Wire is not a 10x improvement. Maybe like a 0.0015 improvement which won't even convince me to download it.
The call quality with Skype and other services is decent, making it slightly better with a cleaner UI won't do much.
So I really expected this to be more secure, more portable and LESS designer-driven. Who is even narcissistic enough to use a sidebar that is a giant, high-res portrait of oneself?!
Maybe a Slack/HipChat/... killer for boutique agencies?
- profit driven
- investor money driven
skype is a profit company. wire is clearly investor money driven.
So while your example is valid, i don't think they want to displace the corporate consumer that creates the bulky of skype profit. It probably wants to go after the users that uses snapchat/wasup/etc for free, with little revenue besides what is necessary for a "revenue" round A/B/C/IPO deck, and get investor money/get acquired.
PS: while skype is a consumer product, its job is not to drive revenue, but to advertise the corporate solution: Lync. Lync gets microsoft 2bi/yr, while skype peak at 600m/yr in a good year. 600m sounds good, but not when you paid over 8bi for it.
Also, ffs, "Skype for Business".
Using FB at work is one thing, using FB to communicate with your coworkers another. FB is 'private' for me (as funny as that sounds - there's nothing really private on FB of course, but it's the social life outside of work that I refer to here). Not corporate.
Skype is slow. Ugly. And worst of all: It shoves ads in my face on multiple levels (popups, banners etc). So far I keep it for this weekly use case, but I hope that I will leave it behind 'real soon now'™.
There seem to be ways to make that go away (null listing hosts either directly in the hosts file or - on Windows - in the Internet Connection Settings). Maybe. Before I'd use that app for anything of value, outside of my Mondays .. I'd try these approaches.
I make myself available on nth number of services because they people I want to talk to are spread across them; Skype is not one of them.
When I created a second account for work with a new client, suddenly ads popped up everywhere.
Also, I never faced any ads with Skype (not sure if that was due to $1.20 balance in my Skype Credit account). The aforementioned calls were over wifi on my side and 2G(?) connections on recipients side, so free.
Despite of that, I don't think Wire is it. I downloaded the app and it is quite awful to use. We need a "Skype Killer" with better usability for business, not only a pretty screen and a good marketing landing page.
Of course it's not fully cross-platform but afaik you can do connections between Firefox and other browsers using WebRTC.
iOS, OS X and Android is far from everywhere.
But perhaps someone comes up with a free app, you never know...
Let's call it a Skype killer if it kills Skype. Not yet.
Second, as of right now, there is no mentioning of a "Wire Swiss GmbH" in the Swiss commercial registry. That's quite severe because under Swiss law, you are not allowed to represent to the outside a juristic person as long as it is not in the official registry.
Here is the link to the registry:
http://zefix.ch/zfx-cgi/hrform.cgi/hraPage?alle_eintr=on&per...
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/app/wire/id931134707?mt=12
[2] http://www.hrazg.ch/webservices/inet/HRG/HRG.asmx/getHRGHTML...
Still not sure what's up with the two governing laws.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pub/pierrine-auberson/5a/70a/537 [2] https://www.linkedin.com/company/4836762
Which basically means as soon as a warrant is sent from pretty much any European government they'll hand over all your conversations. The support article doesn't give any detail whatsoever on how they encrypt your conversations: https://support.wire.com/hc/en-us/articles/203122500-Are-mes...
It's a shame companies can't be held accountable for advertising their services as secure, for false advertising.
PS: Of course companies can be held accountable for false advertising. You can take them to court yourself.
Marketing double-speak.
I'm not sure that them having my messages unencrypted on their servers makes that feature any more desirable than Skype, WhatsApp and the like. Encrypted voice call is good, but in the case they don't say how they do that encryption, it'll remain less-than-trustworthy.
I know how long it takes to make things pretty, I'm wondering if this was a right decision vs. investing their time on something else that is more core to their value (communication).
I think there is a lot of room to innovate around ease of communication, texting, chatting, etc. on the mobile space and we'll see more apps and probably another $Billon exit.
edit: typo
I'm sure lots of development time has gone in to the product with many difficult problems to solve, so to all the developers of Wire: Good work!
It probably feels a bit defeating to spend all that time developing something only to have people slating it.
That said: I do not think this app is for me. I wish it had a more compact interface (like old Skype for OSX), before Skype became this large take-over-the-screen app, and reading that it might not have video chat kind of kills it for me.
Locking an app to a version of OS is still a bad practice, particularly for an app aiming to network effect. I have Viber and it works on my Lion! Btw, I think that Viber blows away the competition by having everything: VoIP, Pic,Video, Message all for free!
Please see https://otr.cypherpunks.ca/software.php for suggestions which might be reliable as of today.
Everyone else who feels good about keeping their messages safely stored for later inspection, use Wire or any other chat client that "looks beautiful", "is pure" and blends yt videos nicely into your feed.
EDIT: Do not take my comment as a critique or sarcasm against Wire. There are different audiences for messaging apps and it's important to understand if you are the one before being negative about privacy policy and encryption.
But in all seriousness I recall having great IM with MSN Messenger about 15 years ago, and despite the incessant barrage of replacement apps, there is still no one leader. Sure, we now have Facetime so I can irritate my mum at all times of the day but that's no good for my brother on Windows. And I find Skype to be a massive battery hog on my laptop, and an advert-infested mess on Windows.
Is anyone else like me, and just sticking to SMS and emails? The other day on a BBC News article it mentioned "if you're a bit old fashioned and use email"... but I think email is great because you can archive it offline (I have useful emails from years ago) and it can also be used in court I think.
IM logs - are they evidence in court? All the old chat logs get tidied up from all the IM systems I come across, so there is no referring back to old messages, or a paper trail.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, not sure why? In all seriousness is email really broken that we need another IM system? Obviously the lack of video calling is a big problem....
Also "everwhere" not means "ios, osx, android". where is windows and linux desktop clients, even skype supports linux desktops today.
How did you overclock it?
- No windows phone client :P
* Skype
* XMPP
* Hangouts
* AIM
* YIM
* SMS
* IRC
* Viber (which I don't use, because yet another client was too much when all these people had other clients anyway).
Another client is just a no go at this stage. I'm still annoyed at Skype blocking both multiple network IM clients I used (imo first, then when they dropped the whole "multiple network" part, IM+).
On a related note, is there any multi network app that supports video?
Yes, both Pidgin and Empathy support voice and video calling via XMPP. I suspect you'd need to use a "standard" XMPP server though - it wouldn't work over gtalk or facebook chat for instance.
BTW: If you have XMPP anyway, you can use that for chat.facebook.com. Shame with Hangouts. But everyone wants their golden silo, I guess.
That's not going to kill Skype.
But I just tried it and it sounded more or less the same as a normal cell voice call. Also the UI is pretty but slow-feeling on Android. I have a feeling it's smoother on iOS. Disappointing.
I'd like to try voice calling since some of the Android reviews say the same thing about the quality, but I've yet the chance to do so..
That aside, It has spent most of it's life being parked with ads. https://web.archive.org/web/*/wire.com
To me, ignoring the opportunity cost of the cash itself, it was a ~10k risk. Worth it.
It is a big challenge to move any of these people to new technology, even if it would offer a real advantage for them, which no real newcomer does at the moment.
One argument is that is doesn't matter. Messaging is such an attractive market that people just continue to invest in it. Telecos certainly didn't have any problems making money back in their hay-day, and there is the "get all the eyeballs and monetize later" argument that is still popular. Perhaps as consumers we're just doomed to switch platforms every 5-10 yrs as companies rise and then fizzle out. Perhaps churn is the price we pay for free messaging?
FWIW I did pay for Skype for a short while, as I needed some features, but then their billing structure changed and other free products became popular so I stopped.
If you want to make this thing really everywhere, then imho priority numbero 1 should be to rely on libraries that work everywhere - not just the latest version of a select few OSes. It'll be easier to maintain in the future as well.
I really don't get why people would pay for Skype when there are better alternatives around.
"Thank you for the good feedback on Wire. For Windows users — a full featured version will be available soon."
But it seems everyone here hates it. Are there some "power user" features that don't work well or something?
That said, Wire looks like a complete non-starter to me.
- They use Scala on Android[1]
- They plan on a full-browser version[2]; I assume it'll rely on WebRTC. The fact that they don't indicate plans on a specific browser makes me happy.
[1]: http://jobdb.softgarden.de/jobdb/public/jobdb/posting/126982...
"It’s pure. With Wire you can easily move from messages and pictures to HD voice. Wire’s pristine audio quality makes it feel as if the people you are speaking to are right there with you."
I don't even know what this means? I mean, will quality still be "right there with you" if the latency on the network is large? or if you phone is loaded doing some task in the background?
So much of this kind of stuff is hard to guarantee because it is outside of your control.
CORRECTION: I missed the intro animation when I opened the link in a background tab, and somehow got left with a masthead image with just three icons on a blank phone, not even the download link it showed after I refreshed.
The app who can actually solve _this_ problem will be the next big thing. And if doesn't work, we have yet another messaging app.
Unfortunately I am forced to resort using it whenever FaceTime fails. And that happens approx. every 15nth call.
Also, will it work with Linphone?
Where is the revenue model and where are the open APIs into the service? Messaging is becoming really saturated now. User experience might get you some of the way there but interoperability with things outside your walled garden is also important for success IMHO.
The app page says "Wire interactions are secure and we comply with European privacy laws and regulations." That's just not enough.
But Skype also has the private keys for every user which renders end-to-end encryption "less useful". Sadly they have always had the keys, from the beginning. Tom skype just made content more accessible to the "interested parties".
"It’s on. Wire is perfect for staying connected with any group. Create a conversation, name it as you wish, and add people — your groups will be taking off whether they’re about work, family or fun. Oh, and Wire groups are full democracy."
1. The App uses different non-standard patterns. It's really a pain to use and navigate. 2. The design is cool and I like it. 3. I should be able to find users by ID or similar.
Who wants to test this thing can add me (contact -at- omarabid.com )
Notably, all videochat apps makes desktops super hot while their mobile equivalent works fine. My humble guess is because on iOS/Android they are using the hardware accelerated codecs (due to the lack of other options), while on desktop they just assume the CPU can do everything. I will be interested to see how Wire performs in that regard.
I am doing a lot telecommuting and have a frequently remote relationship, so I try a bunch of these apps. Here is the thing: I don't care about beautiful interfaces when it comes to full screen videochat.
So far the best experience I had was with oovoo, which was simultaneously the ugliest software at the time. Perhaps Wire will be successful for the same reason Slack is: it just works (I have yet to see).
http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2014/11/13/0830#the-insta...
Maybe I'm not the majority of Skype users, but I use Skype as a replacement for a second phone in my office. I'm not using it as a messager, picture/video uploader or whatever else this thing does, again, I'm using it as a low cost phone line.
From what I see on the website, I can see this competing with SnapChat, Instagram or whatever other messaging client, but not Skype.
Well, then.
Oh Hacker News, you do realize that very few people actually use Macs in the business world, right?
Its selling aesthetics rather than function, which may not be important to you, but it may be important to the customer they think they want to target.
Privacy policy is predictably gritty though.
Honestly, if whatsapp did a browser/desktop client I'd be on that before this even got a second look