31–40 of 106 posts
Ah the famously friendly UX of PGP combined with the solid reliability of email. This is trying to get two drunks to stand up straight by leaning them against each other.
Thank you for painting this beautiful picture.
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
Hell, Jabber can still do this. I'm not convinced of the other modern alternatives that don't have half the functional capabilities that Jabber do.
The only "downside" of Jabber is that it's XML based, but really if you think about it, that's a strength. Anyone here could probably parse the protocol effortlessly. There's also lots of fully functional clients out today, and servers that scale like nobody's business.
I'm more ashamed we don't invest more into XMPP: Google Talk, Facebook Chat and WhatsApp were built around it. These are companies with insane to scale userbases, tried and tested.
Here's a 2008 article from Facebook on using their chat with a Jabber client:
Ah the famously friendly UX of PGP combined with the solid reliability of email. This is trying to get two drunks to stand up straight by leaning them against each other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the website: > Reliable instant messaging If it's based on e-mail, it's just not. (if we assume generally close-to-realtime delivery and not being blocked by random recipients)
Email is a communication system with a lot of moving parts. You can't have reliable IM through existing MX servers but you may have it if for example SMTPs are running on your machine and you poll their data more (it's just an example, I know that with an SMTP running on your phone you'd have more problems).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Signal and WhatsApp are likely a step ahead in terms of privacy WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven. And remember that both WhatsApp and Signal are legally required not to disclose to you whether they are spying on you or not.
> WhatsApp is closed source, so whatever they claim to can't be proven E2E only requires a correctly-designed client, not a correctly-designed server. Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers. Not to mention that OpenWhi…
It's called punching upwards.
>Since any binary can always be deobfuscated, deliberately putting in a backdoor in the client would be an extremely risky PR move, especially in an app as big as WhatsApp, and one surely receiving lots of attention from security researchers
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't a proprietary delivery mechanism such as the App or Play stores deliver a backdoored build to an individual device, then later autoupdate it to a clean one?
For those unaware, this was created by Holger Krekel, the brain behind pypy and pytest! Another great product.
Even though I am part of this secure messaging group chat on matrix thing and I had even created a whole tierlist of security of protocols etc. and saw delta chat & have it running and fiddled with it.
The fact that it is written by creator of pypy is wholesome!!
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
This reminds me on this nice comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19217818
In a sensible world, we would be using this, instead of whatsapp. It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI".
>It is amazing that even really a vast majority of, even technical people, not once stopped and looked at whatsapp, and said "Wait, e-mail can do this, we just need a pretty UI". WhatsApp lets people find each other with phone numbers instead email addresses. This has a profound difference in real-world usability because it decreases friction . Before WhatsApp, people texted each other using cell companies' SMS servi…
On the same note, isn't phone numbers being more sensitive information than email nowadays, hence you might not want to share it.
Ah the famously friendly UX of PGP combined with the solid reliability of email. This is trying to get two drunks to stand up straight by leaning them against each other.
Ah the famously friendly UX of PGP combined with the solid reliability of email. This is trying to get two drunks to stand up straight by leaning them against each other.
They've actually cracked PGP, and email is fine, especially between self hosters and anyone using chatmail. I've been using it for years: Delta really, really works.