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Wire – Modern Communications Network

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Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#281

Post by darklajid »

hellbanner wrote: post #259
darklajid wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single data point: I open Skype for one occasion: Monday night, gaming with friends that - for the lack of a better term - "don't know better" (I'd prefer TeamSpeak or Mumble for Gaming - or any other voice chat that doesn't require a G+ account really). Skype is slow. Ugly. And worst of all: It shoves ads in my face on multiple levels (popups, banners etc). So far I keep it for this weekly use case, but I hope that…

Your Skype shows ads? I've never seen ads on Skype.

See my sibling. Yes it does.

There seem to be ways to make that go away (null listing hosts either directly in the hosts file or - on Windows - in the Internet Connection Settings). Maybe. Before I'd use that app for anything of value, outside of my Mondays .. I'd try these approaches.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#282

Post by super_mario »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #72

Skype is the most resource hungry app on my Mac. It deserves to die. Unfortunately I am forced to resort using it whenever FaceTime fails. And that happens approx. every 15nth call.

Really? I use it on variety of Macs (2008 Mac Pro, 2011 27'' iMac, 2007 24'' iMac, 2008 Aluminum Macbook, 2011 17'' Macbook Pro) and it runs smoothly and doesn't use much CPU at all on any of them. During video calls it will use more CPU but that's somewhat expected (Factime video calls do too).

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#283

Post by pretz »

When showing off a brand new app with no existing userbase, please show or tell what your app does before waxing poetic about its beauty. If it hadn't been for the HN headline, I wouldn't have stayed on this page long enough to see what the app did.

CORRECTION: I missed the intro animation when I opened the link in a background tab, and somehow got left with a masthead image with just three icons on a blank phone, not even the download link it showed after I refreshed.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#284

Post by balabaster »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154
lmedinas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem with abiding by European privacy laws is that if you're not European, you don't count. So if you're not European, there may as well be no privacy at all. You're more or less on your own - just the same as with American privacy laws.

If they can prove one end of the conversation is not American or not in the U.S. you're recorded... but because it's so hard to do that on the fly, you're recorded anyway and they'll figure out the legal repercussions later... by hiding it, diverting the question or flat out lying about it.

It's a shame, this looks on the surface like a great product. But I agree with the point made earlier: In the age of Snowden, statements as vague as "Wire interactions are secure and we comply with European privacy laws and regulations." aren't enough for anyone to stake their security on.

The fact is, when it comes to communication security, the Government has proven themselves untrustworthy too many times for us to believe them anymore. Once could be written off as a mistake, twice, perhaps oversight wasn't good enough. But three, four, five times... the fact is, Governments have torpedoed any reasonable person's ability to trust them when it comes to looking after their privacy. So saying that you "comply with privacy laws and regulations" is no comfort. In today's political climate, if you want the trust of the people, you need to go above and beyond in the name of the people.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#285

Post by darklajid »

oddvar wrote: post #249
darklajid wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the 'federated message history' in this list?

The capability to get conversation history over several servers. In Matrix the conversation history is stored by all servers involved in the discussion, and thus it can be retrieved if your own server temporarily goes down. It will also be accessible from all your Matrix-compliant clients, whether they are web or mobile clients. (edit: disclaimer: I'm also involved with matrix.org)

Hey. Thanks for the explanation. I ignore the 'will be accessible from all your clients' part - that should be the case for XMPP as well, or will be with MAM [1].

Storing the history on multiple servers? Not sure I understand the use case here (okay 'server goes down' I understand, but spreading my message history to multiple servers for that seems .. unexpected).

1: http://www.zash.se/mam.html

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#286

Post by thisisandyok »

anirudhan wrote: post #279
FreezerburnV wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, even if they DID specifically list out all the security measures that they used, someone would still complain because it isn't completely open source. The previous company I worked for not only had legitimate encryption for anything private we received from the user (e.g.: email passwords) so that nobody at the company could ever read them, but also had some (if I remember correctly) good documentation…

>> the previous HN post about the guy who shut down his business and was debating open sourcing his entire codebase, and all the problems he would have had to tackle to do so link please?

I think the poster may be referencing this submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8641867

Specifically, the replies of the submitter in the comments

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#287

Post by melvinmt »

hellbanner wrote: post #259
darklajid wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single data point: I open Skype for one occasion: Monday night, gaming with friends that - for the lack of a better term - "don't know better" (I'd prefer TeamSpeak or Mumble for Gaming - or any other voice chat that doesn't require a G+ account really). Skype is slow. Ugly. And worst of all: It shoves ads in my face on multiple levels (popups, banners etc). So far I keep it for this weekly use case, but I hope that…

Your Skype shows ads? I've never seen ads on Skype.

Not on Mac but it does on Windows.

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#288

Post by JohnBooty »

BoppreH wrote: post #261
graeme wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been in Brazil for the past five weeks. EVERYONE uses whatsapp, because SMS is expensive. And this all happened in the past couple of years or so, because that's when smartphones became widespread. I have never been asked my phone number. I've only been asked my "whatsapp". Make a good enough messaging app, and you can win an entire country. Or the world.

I'm from Brazil. You see small local businesses, with hand painted signs, where the phone number is followed by the whatsapp logo. Not even the name "whatsapp", just the logo. It's scary how they took over communications over here.

"Whatsapp: The Orkut Killer"

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#289

Post by untog »

jeremyswank wrote: post #211
ClashTheBunny wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processing foreign data is just as dangerous as processing foreign code. Don't lull yourself into complacency just because you have NoScript when your JPEG library is probably less sandboxed and audited than your JavaScript virtual machine. The whole idea of the Von Neumann architecture is that code is data and data is code. It is advantageous when you trust everyone, but now that you can trust noöne? What to do?

noöne? really? when did 'no one' become insufficiently clear?

It indicates a new syllable. Very rarely seen this days, but it used to be used a lot. So the answer to your "when" is "a very long time ago, then people changed their minds"

Re: Wire – Modern Communications Network

#290

Post by wmeredith »

Ridley wrote: post #266
FreezerburnV wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, even if they DID specifically list out all the security measures that they used, someone would still complain because it isn't completely open source. The previous company I worked for not only had legitimate encryption for anything private we received from the user (e.g.: email passwords) so that nobody at the company could ever read them, but also had some (if I remember correctly) good documentation…

There are already FOSS replacements for Skype, such as Tox. The fact is that if every line of code can't be inspected then the software can't be considered secure, and we're forced to put blind faith in a faceless corporation, which is understandably not acceptable for many people. I don't really care if you think this is "practical" or not. That's simply the reality of the situation. Proprietary == insecure. If a co…

I don't think it's as black and white as all that. This reads like the equivalent claim the NSA makes along the lines of, "if you have nothing to hide, why can't we record every facet of every communication and store it forever?" Business relationships run on trust. Claiming your software is secure when it is to the best of your knowledge is not dishonest.
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