650 karma · joined July 26, 2020
Unfortunate that the author didn’t mention this.
Obviously this doesn’t excuse the bug, but it’s important to contextualize if we hope to compare relative impact and have frank discussions.
If I have received a message I can report that message.
Communicating with a business will not be e2e, per their new TOS.
Simple “Privacy nutrition labels”, like apple recently introduced in the App Store are a neat idea, but because they are self reported and not standardized they can do more harm than good. Eg it’s not clear from the labels that WhatsApp is e2e for personal comms while telegram isn’t by default and never for groups.
WhatsApp confirms they keep some of your personal data including phone numbers from your address book but doesn’t currently share that with Facebook.
Wow - so quaint!
Gentoo as well and Alpine back in 2019.
So it’s not really an option if you’re targeting ios.
added lots of novel paradigms and rarely trodden code paths to the compiler and then peaced out.
I hope the inherent complexity added doesn’t impede future Swift development much, or is expeditiously deleted.
Here’s my entry into the annals of KDE 4.0 Plasma Desktop Release circa 2008:
It basically worked for me. I was a sysadmin, so abused my authority at work to sudo apt install kde-desktop on my mandated Ubuntu work machine. My personal machine was a Gentoo thinkpad running fvwm2, but I did use the excellent Kate editor and AmaroK media player. I was a glutton for punishment at the time.
I think more than anything, seeing how salty people were about the transition taught me the psychology of the downstream user, and how a classic “politics of power” narrative can be applied to almost any situation for rhetorical effect, appropriately or not.
It’s kind of an impossible quagmire. The developers were mostly volunteers working on what they thought was interesting and worthwhile, most users were probably fine and silent, and a percentage of very loud users felt very personally wronged, as if something immoral had occurred. They’re not wrong to give feedback, but the situation is that they basically have to beg volunteer strangers. And, broadly speaking, most of the people complaining didn’t come from a background prone to begging or being told no.
Another thing I chuckle to reflect on, is that iOS has been shifting towards a “KDE 4 AIR” look and feel since 2015. The latest iOS innovation: KDE4 style “Widgets” ;)
If you have children, and they have children, I hope that those grandchildren of yours grow up hearing stories about what a travesty the roll out of KDE 4.0 PLASMA Desktop was.
I have to assume it’s a very deliberate effort based on some business metric that the risk of losing people from the site is less than the profit gained from people on the app.
But I wonder sometimes if it’s more a cultural difference than simply some kind of “failure” on the authors part.
Have you seen those videos where old communist leaders gave speeches, they declare some good news, some achievement, and the crowd claps and cheers, and so does the leader. Watch Stalin, watch Mao.
To a westerner it looks like they are clapping for themself - taking credit for the victory.
But in communism, the results are not that of a “brilliant leader”, but rather the results of history unfolding. They aren’t clapping for themselves, but for society’s progression.
I think, similarly in this way, 3bp doesn’t have the “hero narrative” that western authors favor, because the protagonist of 3bp is society as a whole, while the characters themselves are just minor witnesses.
How do you copy text out of your virtual terminal?
The Fn key placement on the other hand... I’m with you.
All this stuff is only stored in an encrypted form that signal never has the keys for.
And all this stuff is only applicable if you choose to set it.
Yes, for Alice to see Bobs profile Alice has to download some bytes. Those bytes live somewhere.
The difference is that, unlike every other app, signal spent a ton of time making this work in a way that The signal service can’t read your data, even if they wanted to.
Because WhatsApp (and other messengers) offer a far superior messaging experience to SMS: higher fidelity media, on time delivery, delivery status, e2e, and many more. Better experience means that people actually use it.
As you say, for “extra security”. But not everyone arrived at the decision of “how much security” they need at the same moment in time. People come to and leave the WA platform, and it’s desirable for me to know where people are at now so I can use e2e in new places as opposed to only with the subset of my social graph that I manually copied and pasted in which had installed WA before me.
I don’t deny that you like your setup, but it sounds pretty painful and pretty unlikely to appeal to a broad swathe of people, which is essential when trying to combat mass surveillance.
(is mass surveillance why you jump through these hoops?)
How do you know who you can message with it if the app can’t check who has it?
Do you, every time you want to message someone, manually copy in their number? For every person you communicate with?
What if they previously didn’t have WhatsApp installed, but have since installed, so you also need to check again every time you want to message someone who formerly didn’t have WhatsApp.
That’s not going to work for people.