491–500 of 517 posts
Why would I use this closed source program instead of another closed source program. I don't trust some random company from Latvia any more than I trust Meta. We need this interop to be available for free software clients. I want something like Pidgin.
Well you can have it now... https://github.com/hoehermann/purple-gowhatsapp/
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The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks. They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free. SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card…
SEPA was a pain for us citizens anyway because now we have to use huge long account numbers even locally within the same country. I never understood why that had to be the case, just leave that for international transfers.
Also, how much longer are they really than legacy national standard ones? In the countries I'm familiar with, they've added exactly four characters: The country code in positions 1-2 and the robust, standardized check digits in position 3 and 4.
Both are extremely worth it, in my opinion. Take a look at ACH in the US if you want to see a great example for how not to do it: No checksums, two fields instead of one (ABA routing number and account number), separate routing numbers per domain (some banks have different numbers for wires, and some even for checks and ACH) etc.
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> whataspp discloses name, picture, status Only to who you choose to make it available to. And if you choose “everybody”, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect this to mean “everybody not using third-party software”?
Because I don't chose everybody? I don't want everyone to see my information, why would I?
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Do you also wish you could only get telephone calls from people using American made handsets, and that your email client asked you before receiving emails from other email clients, and that you couldn’t get SMS’s from other smartphone manufacturers without opting in one at a time? Being able to reject spam , regions, specific people, specific topics, all makes sense. Wanting to approve/reject the program used to make…
I actually would love a mode on my phone that blocks all calls not coming from iPhones just like I have a mode to ignore all messages not coming from iPhones. It has blocked so much spam that it is worth it.
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How do you think they would offer a messaging service if they didn't store the messages and attachments? The content has to live somewhere.
it lives on the user’s phone?
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The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks. They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free. SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card…
SEPA was a pain for us citizens anyway because now we have to use huge long account numbers even locally within the same country. I never understood why that had to be the case, just leave that for international transfers.
So you do need SEPA normalization; otherwise that can't work. It's hardly a problem, and the fact that it required a regulation just shows how ineffective governments are in practice.
Fintech banks came up with an easier-to-use, more efficient, and more convenient system in less time than it took them to do this. And they manage to be cheaper.
The problem with banks is entirely regulation related; they are established players, working with/for the government, and basically get rewarded for stealing. Once I had a problem with my legacy bank, who robbed me of over 1k euros because they were generating 150-euro letters to tell me they refused a government tax debit for a lack of provision (mind you, the rejected amount was 50 euros, less than a third of their fee for rejecting it).
As far as I'm concerned, banks are legal criminals, enabled by the even bigger criminals running governments.
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In countries where SMS isn't as widespread as it is in the US, the use of WhatsApp is much more common. I live in one of those countries, and I don't think I've ever had to use it to communicate with someone on another continent. I think most of its use is simply local, for your community or friend group. The downside for me is basically the lack of appeal for a non-tech user (like my parents) to voluntarily want to…
> SMS Here in EU you pay for that. Soon as you send an image, you get charged extra. Completely useless compared to Whatsapp
I still only use WhatsApp because it’s a lot better than sms.
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Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam. The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
Email has solved that problem already.