To play devil‘s advocate a bit, isn‘t my phone (or laptop) already a universal chat client? I have a bunch of apps for different services. I can see when new messages come in on all of them, I can swipe/click to respond, I can control the notification settings.
Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
421–430 of 461 posts
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
iOS applications aren't allowed to stay awake constantly talking to a bunch of different network services. For iOS IM to work, a centralized server (and corresponding developer ID) has to send a notification to you, sent first to Apple to be proxied via Apple's push notification service (APNS) to which each iOS device maintains a persistent connection. This means that some third party service has to know when you get…
>cryptographically shattered iMessage Could you expand on this? I did a quick search but I don't see anything relevant that's more recent than 2016.
See my comment from 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21425897
It's still relevant.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if he means old Ben Kenobi
These are not the IM protocols you seek. On-topic, Pidgin remains great, I still install it on every new desktop, but I haven't fired it up in years. I suppose it's been displaced by Slack, more's the pity.
Nah, these are elegant weapons from a more civilized age.
When developers talked about protocols rather than products.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t have to put an entire message text into APNS notification. Apple (and google GCM, and webpush) notifications only deliver a structured event to the application (which may or may not contain any text), and once the app is activated (if not yet), it has to connect to its own server to get a full representation of what was sent, update vv-status, etc. APNS/GCM are not instant messengers on their own, though ma…
Sure, but there still needs to be a server somewhere that has the app developer's client certificate, connected to Apple, that knows when you get a DM and can send that zero-content "wake up and check your DMs" packet to your phone via APNS, which means it needs (given current apps permissions models) access to your DMs without you.
There is no need for this “server somewhere”, and APNS can’t have your message, mainly for two reasons:
First, that “server” is Signal server itself. When a message arrives at it, it simply commands Apple to wake up your app, for it to call home, and that’s it. It is preconfigured to do that (and GCM as well).
Second, all Signal messages are end to end encrypted and neither of Apple, Signal, Google, your ISP, any server on the route of it NEVER know its content, because the only mean of decrypting it resides in a memory of your client app. There is basically no way to see the contents before your client receives the message, by design. Even if that were not the case, various IM servers don’t have to send your texts to Apple, only if they want the text to be shown on a notification itself.
The only theoretical concern here may be that Apple can somehow pick the decryption key out of the app’s memory (because ios is a supervisor, obviously). But that can’t be the main reason someone swithces to android, which is a supervisor itself, and where the same issue exists.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#425Pidgin is lagging hard in implementing new XMPP extensions (such as 0280, 0313 or 0363) making it unfortunately quite useless for Jabber.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#426Does nobody remember Pidgin? It was one of the first things a lot of people installed on their machines 15 years ago along with Firefox. We used it as an alternative client to AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It used to be called GAIM.
I haven’t used it since yesterday. We still have lync/Skype for business at work and it plugs into that.
Audio never seems to work, fortunatly in the rare occasion someone calls it also rings my phone. Most of my chat for work is on slack or WhatsApp, just some real old school people that use the Skype protocol.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you’d be surprised just how much new car owners/drivers do not know about how to work a car. The number of people I’ve seen confused by how to fill a gas tank — let alone what type of gas to use, is massive. And it’ll only get worse as we move to electric and self-driving cars. And then there is the stuff that is often different car to car, like where lights are, how to adjust certain settings. Want to pair t…
Maybe in Oregon. Everywhere I've lived people haven't panicked over filling up their gas tank? As a matter of fact I've never encountered a single person ever wandering around the gas station parking lot asking other for help on filling their tank....
I've met people who didn't know that cars need oil until they caught their engine on fire...
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it's terrifying. A computer is something you can use to consume content or produce content. A tablet is something you can only really use to consume content. (Regular tablet, not artist tablet obviously, and those generally have to talk to a computer)
I'm not sure what's terrifying about that. Books can only be used to consume content too.
Books aren't rapidly replacing something similar that can be used to produce, though.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of my friends are on stovepiped chat systems now. It's really annoying because chat providers have pretty much stopped providing third party APIs anymore so you have friends spread across Signal, Telegram, Whatsapp, Tencent, WeChat, iMessage, and whichever chat system Google is using this month. I seriously miss the days when all of them would be in the same app no matter what service they were connected through…
So, aside from Jabber, IRC, and the AIM TOC protocol (which was the weaker version — we used OSCAR, which was not open), we had to reverse-engineer most of the protocols, and keep up-to-date with changes. Often these services actively tried to block us, and we would spend weeks or months working around their changes. Yahoo was notorious for this. It's not entirely different than the current situation, in that regard,…
https://spectrum.im/ seems to have references to the various attempts to maintain XMPP transports for other protocols.
Re: Pidgin – A Universal Chat Client
#430All protocol plugins together will let you cover 5% of the user base.
When people will switch away from WhatsApp we will still need support for signal and telegram...