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New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

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Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#101

Post by vhanda »

teekert wrote: post #64
stingraycharles wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same can be said about WhatsApp et al. I’m going to bet that Meta also indicated they don’t want other third party clients. From my point of view, the advantages of opening up these platforms outweigh the disadvantages for those who don’t like that. The whole idea of this type of regulation is that it tries to do what’s best for the consumer, and the market as a whole, not not necessarily for the businesses behin…

And then we keep Moxie as a slave forcing him to get motivated to implement all this? Or will the government cease control of the code? Stop Moxie from Forking, then tell people to stay on the government branch? And the arguments hold for Meta too if you ask me. WhatsApp is not a public service. It was not build (or in this case bought later on) with our interests at the top of the priority list. If we want public se…

No one is forcing anyone to do anything.

Countries (and citizens by proxy) have a right to decide how they want services to function in their respective countries. Any company can choose to follow those regulations or voluntarily stop services within that country.

The great part about the EU is that it's a big enough market for companies to want to target it. One doesn't object about food health standards or what standards electronics parts are required to follow, it's the same for internet services.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#102

Post by zaik »

ryukafalz wrote: post #72
lotsofpulp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy is it to send full quality videos and pictures via XMPP? I feel like the main difference from my Pidgin days and today is that these days there is a metric ton of large media files being sent around.

Easy, on some clients/with some servers. These days they do it the same way as most other platforms, by uploading the media to a web server. It took the ecosystem a while to catch up to that though, and there are plenty of clients out there that still don’t support it.

> there are plenty of clients out there that still don’t support it

Which ones don't?

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#103

Post by teekert »

antris wrote: post #99
teekert wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, "just force everyone". This is not freedom. I mean it doesn't feel that wrong because we ware talking about a big corporation, and sure I hate that WhatsApp replaced SMS here here claiming "privacy first, never any ads" but then gets bought by a big anti-privacy, ads-everywhere company. But still, imagine WhatsApp was written and maintained by an individual? Would we be so keen to use terms like "force"? This is…

Limiting freedoms of megacorporations is a good thing.

They should be limited (blocked entirely) in their attempts to influence politics, I agree (sadly that is not the case). They should be limited in their attempts to create addictive products. Instead, we are now proposing to limit them in creating solutions according to viable business models that do no real harm.

There is no forcing necessary in other, imo preferred, scenarios. Like pushing Matrix. The solution, which uses the law to force a company will just block new attempts at creating similar but better products.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#104

Post by zaarn »

elliekelly wrote: post #49
Retric wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond privacy concerns, it’s also going to open these and many other services up to an unending wave of SPAM. So, I wouldn’t assume it’s great for end users without digging into the details. Don’t forget the last time they did privacy regulations they created an unending wave of click yes to accept cookies. PS: Looking at rapid downvotes I see people disagree, but mandatory interoperability would presumably force th…

And this removes agency for those of us who try to keep as much of our data out of Google’s hands as possible. If they’re going to force interoperability it needs to come with restrictions about what they can collect about people who haven’t consented.

DMA has that (Google can't use Data obtained from Interop in anything but the market they sourced it from, ie E-Mail Data stays in the E-Mail sector) and the GDPR covers the rest (without consent, they are restricted to only processing necessary data to begin with).

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#105

Post by tluyben2 »

teekert wrote: post #77
tluyben2 wrote: post #19

Just force monopolistic/abusive/anti-competitive companies to expose API's ; it's not a stretch; they did it for banks (psd2) and it's great for consumers and companies alike. Do it for everything; open systems make the world better. And they can still be monetized; it's not like forcing everyone to open source everything. Edit: more subtle choice of words to indicate what I meant

Wow, "just force everyone". This is not freedom. I mean it doesn't feel that wrong because we ware talking about a big corporation, and sure I hate that WhatsApp replaced SMS here here claiming "privacy first, never any ads" but then gets bought by a big anti-privacy, ads-everywhere company. But still, imagine WhatsApp was written and maintained by an individual? Would we be so keen to use terms like "force"? This is…

You are right, I fixed my words to say what I actually meant with 'everyone'; I meant (more or less - it could be a applied to a bit smaller imho; a few billion Euros seems enough to ask for some type of openness, but yeah it should not apply to small companies anyway) what the EU is planning, not actually 'everyone'.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#106

Post by xoa »

sneak wrote: post #80
dm319 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't aware of this, do you have a link for me to read more?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv... iCloud Backup was introduced in iOS 5, released in 2011. It escrows either message plaintext or device secret keys (depending on OS version and configuration) to Apple, encrypted with Apple keys (non-e2e) and readable to Apple (and the FBI and others, some of whom access the data without probable cause or a warrant under FAA Section 702). WhatsApp backup…

>iCloud Backup

OK so that doesn't support what you said at all. That's an optional feature (that I do not use), and it's not in any way a "backdoor". Unencrypted backups are a front door. Yes, that iCloud Backups aren't E2EE is bad. Arguably worse (and this would be a more productive area for the EU and others to focus on) is that they're the only general wireless option, that's MUCH more of a nasty tie than messaging. iOS should have a standard API for backing up that any service at all (including a server one runs themselves) can implement and then get pointed at. But none of that is a backdoor in the encryption of iMessage and you do the whole space a real disservice by conflating them.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#107

Post by zaik »

sonicggg wrote: post #20

Why did we as consumers accept this? I remember back when MSN/Windows Live Messenger used to be one of the most popular options out there. Even though I used Ubuntu, I could still chat with my friends through the Pidgin messenger. This was all possible through the XMPP interface, which still exists by the way. It's not just that these new messaging platforms are adding no extra value, they are creating worse experien…

> Why did we as consumers accept this?

You don't have to. If you say you're only reachable with apps that support XMPP then generally people who care about chatting with you will use that. That's what I have been doing since January last year when WhatsApp changed its ToS.

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#108

Post by nashadelic »

RenThraysk wrote: post #29
Barrin92 wrote: post #5

This is almost too good to actually go through. Protocol transparency, that is to say forcing companies to open up their APIs would be one of the simplest and effective ways to break platform effects and walled gardens. It shouldn't just be limited to messaging. An internet where everyone can built a client against Facebook's API, or Youtube or what have you and users get actual choice and control about how they cons…

Er, WhatsApp is based on Noise for client server protocol, and Signal protocol for peer to peer encryption. Both were open standards before WhatsApp implemented them.

Doesn't WhatsApp do a bunch of customizations applied to the base protocol? Its not the vanilla standard

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#109

Post by [deleted] »

Jcowell wrote: post #67
parkingrift wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete control of the presentation of content, editorializing said content, and arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t allowed. And they also still don’t want to be treated as publishers. It’s hard for me to muster up even the smallest amount of sympathy for these vampires. I expect this will take a decade to shake out as US tech firms work tirelessly to protect their spyware walled garden models.

Since we’re talking about the messaging component of services , what messaging service “[editorize] said content? [arbitrarily deciding what is and isn’t allowed] Everything so arbitrary. Either allowing everything or nothing is not sustainable for anything on the internet so you need arbitrary rules to stop arbitrary things.

[deleted]

Re: New EU law could require iMessage and WhatsApp to work with other platforms

#110

Post by macinjosh »

Step 1: Your encrypted chat service used by activists must work with other platforms by law.

Step 2: So... the encryption your application uses doesn't work well with other platforms.

Step 3: Everyone must use this one kind of encryption for interoperability with our tracking ser... I mean other platforms.

Step 4. Hey, look at all the stuff these activists are talking about.

Step 5. Gulag for the activists

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