111–120 of 132 posts
WhatsApp seems to have more problems once they switched over to Facebook’s platform rather than their good old fashion FreeBSD with big servers.
Are they still using Erlang/ BEAM?
In my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.
I was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ... https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watchin…
I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from.
Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate.
Looking at a subset of an entire system and asking "is that database resilient to x 9's" and then worrying about that as your new target is how you wind up with something so inherently complex that the effective resiliency is somewhere around a single machine circa 1999.
Instead of looking at every piece of hardware as a potential time bomb, you could start to embrace higher-quality components and arrive back at something that resembles a mainframe again.
It seems bizarre to me that Europeans have to pay for sending international SMS, it's been free/unlimited in many places for 5 years. Will carriers charge for RCS? How has Google got them to sign up without some fee?
If you think people use Whatsapp just because of international SMS pricing then you don't really understand Whatsapp.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp actually uses signal protocol for e2ee
It doesn't matter, the app is closed source so they can still access your messages regadless of what protocol they use. https://gizmodo.com/whatsapp-moderators-can-read-your-messag...
It does say that 'WhatsApp can read some of your messages if the recipient reports them'. That 'if' is doing a lot of work in this sentence. It means that the recipient has to decrypt your message.
Although there are forms etc. within the app for doing this, it's essentially no different to taking screenshots.
There is no way to ensure 100% privacy if the other party you are communicating with does not keep data they have access to private.
I'm not a big Meta fan, but as far as I am aware, they can't normally read your messages. The fact that it's closed source just means that we can't verify that for ourselves.
Seems global outage: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.ht... Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
How is Signal any better? US based, centralized, hostile towards alternate clients. Not much better IMO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ... https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watchin…
> Is software getting worse and could we reverse the trend if we tried? I think part of the problem is that we are focusing on the wrong thing in a lot of areas. Complexity is the real evil most of us suffer from. Achieving 9 9's is not something you can explicitly set out and do as your primary objective. It is a side-effect of other quality choices made in aggregate. Looking at a subset of an entire system and aski…
Complexity comes from hiring. Nobody wants to work on old reliable tech because it’s boring and uncommon.
Seems global outage: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/25/whatsapp-is-down-globally.ht... Each time this happens I try to recruit more people to use Signal.
How is Signal any better? US based, centralized, hostile towards alternate clients. Not much better IMO.
They publish the subpoenas they receive and the dump of relevant data to the authorities, and it's usually a timestamp associated with some ID and that's it.
https://signal.org/blog/looking-back-as-the-world-moves-forw...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp actually uses signal protocol for e2ee
They say they do, but you have to trust them. You don't have to trust Signal, you can audit the sources (or trust some third party to do it for you).
In my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.
I was just rewatching Jonathan Blow's talk, where he discusses the Five 9s > ... We don't use this anymore, in part because the number would be going down and we can't make it go up anymore ... https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko?t=1704 I don't have a strong opinion of an hour of downtime is bad or not, and I think the concern about five nines for everything was silly. But it's an interesting talk I think it's worth watchin…
However, he has also not worked in a tech company of the kinds we see today (games are a different business), and he hugely underestimates the necessary complexity of systems. He is right that there's a lot of unnecessary complexity, and that we should push back on complexity of all kinds, but I've always found his opinions around this to be naive, to lack nuance, and to lack experience. His arguments often boil down to criticising progress rather than acknowledging the issues progress brings and finding ways to work around or minimise those issues.
Getting to five 9s is hard, and as software does more it'll get harder, but it's not impossible, particularly if we look at five-9s from the user's perspective, as clients get smarter we have more leeway to accept minor downtime without harming the user experience.
In my experience WhatsApp has around 1 hour of (noticeable?) downtime a year, although not evenly spread out. That's about 99.99% available, which I'd consider pretty damn good for a consumer application. There's almost no person or business who will have a real problem caused by that. Let's not blow things out of proportion.