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India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

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Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#11
post #7
post #2

Hopefully they rather use something like http://matrix.org

Or maybe something like… the existing IETF standard for IM: XMPP. With plenty of implementations, support across the globe, servers that can scale up to millions of sessions.

Matrix already does those things and a lot more.

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#12
post #7
post #2

Hopefully they rather use something like http://matrix.org

Or maybe something like… the existing IETF standard for IM: XMPP. With plenty of implementations, support across the globe, servers that can scale up to millions of sessions.

Conversations is the only decent XMPP client, and server XEP support is a mess. Its unusable for normal people if you want to use any kind of advanced features.

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#14
post #8

An interesting aside: In 1998, India tested its nuclear weapons (Pokhran-II [1]). Almost immediately, US imposed sanctions. One of the terms of the sanction? "Bar the export of certain defense and technology material" [2]. I can't find a source but I do remember that IE used to ship with reduced encryption. Perhaps we have learnt some lessons since then :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II [2] http://edit…

Indeed, encryption algorithms and implementation are subject to restrictions on export similar to munitions. It used to be very strict https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe something like… the existing IETF standard for IM: XMPP. With plenty of implementations, support across the globe, servers that can scale up to millions of sessions.

Conversations is the only decent XMPP client, and server XEP support is a mess. Its unusable for normal people if you want to use any kind of advanced features.

I concur, tried to adopt it at dayjob when HipChat closed, but it was impossible. Conversations IM client is alright, but we couldn't find a client for IOS that just worked. It's mission impossible.

I hope they go for Matrix, like France did, but I get a feeling they'll be hit hard by NIH.

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#17
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe something like… the existing IETF standard for IM: XMPP. With plenty of implementations, support across the globe, servers that can scale up to millions of sessions.

Matrix already does those things and a lot more.

Matrix has shown in the past that it has had issues scaling to the demand. XMPP has shown in real life cases that it can scale to millions of simultaneously connected users.

I'm not saying that Matrix is bad, or that XMPP is definitely better, but the facts are there and we'd better stick to that than hold on how we feel about each piece of technology.

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