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BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

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Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#141

Post by TeMPOraL »

dfxm12 wrote: post #83
ncruces wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of supermarket products say made in Europe, particularly (but not only) white label products.

The words aren't important. The regulated meaning is. Does it have a legal meaning? If so, what is it? Who enforces it? Consider made in Italy vs made in Germany are different in meaningful aspects.

Is there even a regulated meaning to "made in X"?

The way I see it, "made in Europe" may be dubious, but "made in EU" should be just as okay to write as "made in USA". And if it's not a thing, well, nothing is a thing until people make it a thing.

EDIT: also we're talking about a software product here, where most things written on the product is legally meaningless - otherwise we'd have special customs regimes for those major software exporter places like "love" and "♡".

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#142

Post by Bender »

maqp wrote: post #122
aduwah wrote: post #69

I was a big fan of pidgin, but this premise makes me feel iffy. Why would I ever want my work to intrude on my personal messaging? My private time is my own. Slack/Teams is perfect because I can mute it on a schedule when I stop for the day. Anything that is urgent can be managed via Pagerduty or similar on a controlled fashion

The unfortunate problem with Pidgin is you don't have proper cross-platform E2EE chats, especially for groups. OTR is terribly outdated with its 1536-bit FFDH. These days the security margin sits at 2048-bit minimum, 3072-bit recommended. OMEMO might work but it's just not a standard. Good thing Signal made the whole thing just work.

Surely there must be someone capable of and willing to update OTR to support the latest PQC encryption protocols and ciphers. OTR is the only semi-trustable model of E2EE I have ever seen. Anything managed by the same platform managing the communication is dead in the water for me.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#143

Post by palata »

zenmac wrote: post #60
Nextgrid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matrix is a lost cause. The protocol is too complex/ambitious and the company behind it doesn't have the resources to actually produce a good server nor client implementation. I was hopeful for it at first but at some point you have to be realistic.

While I agree with you, and there should more diverse members than just the people from Element. What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking on their clients which makes migration a pain in the butt, but that is what one would expect from a true e2ee chat app. And now they have two stable servers in rust. The French and German government including military are using the protocol to make t…

> What I do like about them is the zero server trust stand they are taking

Last time I checked, the Matrix servers had access to a lot of metadata. Did they fundamentally change it?

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#144

Post by palata »

pipo234 wrote: post #64
john61 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WhatsApp uses the open Signal Protocol.

Pedantic: I think you meant to say open whisper protocol, the end to end protocol which is Whatsapp copied from Signal.

The name of the protocol is "Signal".

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

irishcoffee wrote: post #71
echelon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This is fucking malicious compliance. Meta knows what they're doing. Wait, you mean passing feel-good legislation has knock-on effects? Who would have thought?

It's not a case of "feel-good legislation", but yeah, this reaction was to be expected. Meta and most other SaaS companies are user-hostile on purpose, not by accident, so it's predictable they'll try to fight it.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#146

Post by palata »

ivm wrote: post #125
vpShane wrote: post #88

This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S. People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available. No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

Signal's UX is years behind even modern WhatsApp, let alone Telegram, which is closer to a blogging or social platform. We can't expect mass adoption of such a clunky app simply because it's more private – it has never worked that way.

Maybe I'm old, but there is nothing I use in WhatsApp that does not exist in Signal. What are you missing there?

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#147

Post by palata »

p1anecrazy wrote: post #115
vpShane wrote: post #88

This means nothing good, Meta and its products are a privacy nightmare, with WhatsApp having major market share outside of the U.S. People need signal. It's not perfect, but it's the best available. No source code, wait list, special compatibility with a for-profit ad based company. No thanks.

Just use Telegram, at least it’s not U.S. made

I think Signal is a better alternative, even though it's US made. It's open source.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#148

Post by nottorp »

poisonborz wrote: post #31

Even the first announcement about this included BirdyChat and Haiket. Two completely unknown and yet unreleased closed source chat apps with a waitlist. Can't help but think they are maintained by people close to Meta dev teams and were hand-picked for a malicious compliance, where they can just point to them as examples, and they make onboarding as complicated and expensive as possible for others.

Well they lost me at waitlist.

Re: BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp

#149

Post by nottorp »

TZubiri wrote: post #40
thisislife2 wrote: post #5

Exciting news! Can't wait for iMessage to open up too. Any idea if this (or other future messengers) will work outside of Europe too or does WhatsApp use some kind of geofencing, like Apple, to prevent non-EU citizens from enjoying the same rights too?

But iMessage is already open? You can send an SMS to any number and it shows in iMessage, completely interoperable through that standard protocol. Whatsapp on the other hand does not show SMS messages (Which is a design choice that makes sense from a security perspective I guess, not saying it's wrong.)

> You can send an SMS to any number

Can you send a photo?

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