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Wire – Modern Communications Network

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Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#151

Post by blueskin_ »

briandear wrote: post #132
blueskin_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have on my phone: Standard text messaging ConnectBot (to an irssi session for IRC) The answer is just to say no when people ask you install $appoftheday to contact them. No hangouts, no skype, no whatsapp, no facebook polluting my phone with their intrusiveness and always-on-in-background tendencies. One person occasionally asks me to install Whatsapp, but each time I say no. Hangouts is a pain to remove if it came…

I'm curious how many people in the real world actually use IRC. Find 10 people on the streets of New York and statistically zero use IRC and maybe, maybe 1 has even heard of it. Ask those same 10 people if they've heard of WhatsApp and likely 3 or 4 would have heard of it and probably 2 would have it on their device. If they're from outside the US, that number would go up to likely 7 would have it installed. Ask thos…

Sure, SMS is always on, but it doesn't have access to my camera or mic. I have Skype on my desktops (although I haven't used it in over a year) where I can tell when it's running and where it doesn't bind itself to autostart whenever someone breathes. The main problem with apps is what they request access to and, barring modding your phone with XPrivacy (I've done it, but not an option for the average user), there's no way to deny those permissions.

As for IRC, it isn't how many people use it, but who uses it; namely a huge proportion of technical communities and people I want to communicate with.

As for Hangouts, it's in the default OEM ROMs, obviously, but also in the gapps packaged for CyanogenMod unless you remove it before flashing (as I did).

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#152

Post by aw3c2 »

lewispb wrote: post #25
kristofferR wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really disagree. There's simply no good secure cross-platform messaging app available. Telegram has fantastic clients on all the platforms, but isn't secure. TextSecure is secure, but has only a mediocre app on a single platform (Android). The other alternatives are even worse. Tox is looking really promising though: https://wiki.tox.im/FAQ

WhatsApp is starting to implement TextSecure technology in it's cross-platform apps and has 600m users. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30114346

It is still a closed source application that I do not trust.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#153

Post by lmedinas »

joeyspn wrote: post #141

No, the Skype killer has another name: WebRTC. And Wire seems like yet another closed-source GUI making use of the WebRTC stack. I honestly prefer FOSS solutions: Tox, oTalk, Jitsi, etc... oTalk looks really promising

I'm surprised nobody here mentioned Firefox Hello, which seems also to be using WebRTC.

Of course it's not fully cross-platform but afaik you can do connections between Firefox and other browsers using WebRTC.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

lmedinas wrote: post #144
secfirstmd wrote: post #114

So in the age of Edward Snowden this is all they say about encryption... "Are Messages And Calls Encrypted? Yes. Wire uses industry-standard encryption on all of your Wire messages and calls." "WHAT SECURITY MEASURES DO WE TAKE TO SAFEGUARD YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION? We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect infor…

Did they also mention their business model anywhere ? Also how the European laws protects us about anything ?

> Also how the European laws protects us about anything ?

Probably more than US laws anyway.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#155

Post by blueskin_ »

Maarten88 wrote: post #90
rakoo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what XMPP is already doing.

And SIP before that (XMPP being 'superior' because XML)

SIP always seems much nicer to me; meaning I can actually understand it in close to realtime if necessary.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#156

Post by gurkendoktor »

Am I such an outlier if I use Skype for business, not for leisure? I have clients on three continents and every single one used Skype to communicate about the project. Skype was generally running on every machine as a "watercooler chat"/IRC replacement. Just open groups, give them names and pin them to the sidebar. Done.

So I really expected this to be more secure, more portable and LESS designer-driven. Who is even narcissistic enough to use a sidebar that is a giant, high-res portrait of oneself?!

Maybe a Slack/HipChat/... killer for boutique agencies?

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#157

Post by lmedinas »

LukaD wrote: post #108
ponyous wrote: post #32

Oh its everywhere! Except... Windows, Linux, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, Web... iOS, OS X and Android is far from everywhere.

I can understand why they wouldn't support Linux/Blackberry/WP. As a Linux user I'm used to that. But not having windows support? Really?

For Windows probably will be the Browser extension/addon which according to other comments will be using WebRTC.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#158

Post by blueskin_ »

secfirstmd wrote: post #114

So in the age of Edward Snowden this is all they say about encryption... "Are Messages And Calls Encrypted? Yes. Wire uses industry-standard encryption on all of your Wire messages and calls." "WHAT SECURITY MEASURES DO WE TAKE TO SAFEGUARD YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION? We are concerned about safeguarding the confidentiality of your information. We provide physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards to protect infor…

Agree - I wonder if Adobe's block mode 3DES was 'industry standard'.

Saying "we use encryption" isn't any good; this isn't 1996. People need to have the details available if they want them (a little "More Information" link going to a page showing their actual security model, list of ciphers and modes of operation, etc. would do).

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#159

Post by morganvachon »

coldtea wrote: post #103
NullReference wrote: post #4

"What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. It seems like it's the default goto for anyone that can't think of something more interesting these days.

> "What we need is another messaging app" said nobody, ever. The usual negative HN top post. I have to disagree. We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now), so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one. > It looks pretty, but this is yet another app in the long list of "Skype killers" or "Voice/video/text" messaging. Most of th…

> We've moved from irc, to ICQ, to Microsoft Messenger, to ..., to Skype, to (what's hot now)

You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire. Its only negative from my personal viewpoint is no Windows Phone support, but that OS is the punchline of many jokes these days.

There's also Slack for businesses, non-profits, and private groups (my local Ingress group uses it), and it offers a ton of extensions.

I don't see where Wire offers anything that we don't have now, though it's nice to see that there is at least an attempt at innovation in this space.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#160

Post by amandine »

neokrish wrote: post #121
blueskin_ wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. What we need is a protocol people can make clients for. With end to end encryption and PFS, of course.

I think Layer ( https://layer.com/ ) is what you're looking for. The Verge ran an article about Layer ( http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/4/5173726/you-have-too-many-... ), on how they're attempting to stop the fragmentation on mobile messaging. Last but not the least, it's being built by Jeremie Miller, who invented XMPP.

But Layer will host it for you: you give them your data. That's more what the open standard http://matrix.org is trying to do: basically learn on what is missing from XMPP to be a better fit to today's communication: no single point of control, synced history, groupd chat as first class citizen... It aims to be pragmatic, with a distributed architecture and end to end encryption. Anyone can build a client or server (and host it) or use the open APIs to connect to the Matrix ecosystem. SAme disclaimer as ara4n: I work with MAtrix, but we're non-profit and just trying to fix this mess...
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