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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

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Erlang engineers hard to find in India? They have a small but solid base in the UK, but the UK also hosts a few tech companies and I think a couple of the inventors and major contributors to the language, so it might just be an outlier.

From what I remember, Java engineers were everywhere in India.

Let people know that erlang has demand, you will find a lot of Indian erlang engineers.

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

#42
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was an issue with Python's email parser. Relevant issue : https://bugs.python.org/issue34155

If WhatsApp had a similar issue because of some 3rd party software they rely on I'm sure nobody would give them a free pass.

WhatsApp probably has bugs like these discovered on a monthly basis, that we never even hear about.

The only time we hear about bugs with non OS software is when there is a masssive breach, FB initially reveals it only affects a small number of people, a few weeks later quietly revised that to a few 10s of million, and then a couple of months later buried somewhere that it was actually hundreds of millions of users affected.

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

#43
post #19

What do they have to hide? Internal communication is usually great source for historians and posterity. Not to mention parliamentary investigative bodies.

"The rationale behind the move is to cut reliance on foreign entities, the report said, a concern that has somehow manifested amid U.S.’s ongoing tussle with Huawei and China."

These are the kinds of damage that the US is facing that has gonna have severe adverse effects, that will not show up before the next elections, so the current US administration doesn’t care. Other stuff would be that it’s likely that US companies will not even be considered in the future by governments and companies for products, where in the past, the likes of an IBM or Oracle would be the front runner.

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

#44
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.

It would be perfectly fine for the Indian gov to fork Conversations and deploy their own XMPP servers, thereby not having to worry about sever XEP support.

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

#45
post #21
post #18

I think Telegram is open source, so they could just fork it

The server part isn't. There are several alternatives where both sides are, though.

They are better off forking Wire which I think isnt perfect either but seems to be properly open sourced frontend and backend.

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

#46
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, iOS XMPP client support does seem to be the issue. Riot gets cross platform support from electron. Perhaps the world needs an electron based XMPP client... One relatively low effort path for a government might be to simply adopt something like Chatsecure and fix it.

I found Monal (monal.im) to be a better maintained iOS client than Chatsecure, very responsive developer, too.

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

#48
post #9

What are the chances they're going to use Java instead of Erlang?

Does it matter? Routing text is a solved problem and not particularly hard at any scale.

The interesting parts for any potential implementation only pertain to things like workflow, integrations to existing applications and services and regulatory requirements (export, backup etc) - from that end, Erlang is not a great option.

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