Can't you just save an empty bag, and then fill it with any beans you want?
My general thoughts about companies trying to implement DRM is that there's always some stupidly simple hack around it. Like this Keurig hack. I guarantee that within a week or two of this coming out someone will just find another way to hack around the DRM.
Not sure about this, but from reading the article the answer is probably no. I hope of course that there will be a workaround, as you say even very sophisticated DRM schemes eventually get cracked, it just makes me sad to see that instead of building technology that empowers the end user, these companies deliberately choose to cripple their products for the sake of higher profit.
"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 the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
And we're ways before coming up with the "be all end all" messaging app, so there's plenty of room for innovation in the area.
In general this comment reminds me of the "640K should be enough for everybody" quote...
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.
Yes. You are totally right. And the funny thing is that for many Brazilians who can't speak english WhatsApp became "ZapZap" (much easier for Portuguese speakers to say) or just "Zap".
Exactly, people don't associate the number with phones. And in my case, my "whatsapp" is a Canadian phone number. I don't even know the number on my Brazilian phone.
Not necessarily. My phone number when I go back home (if anyone wants to call me) is a different number from my whatsapp number (which is my UK number, where I live). When people want my Whatsapp number, I generally give them my UK number, but I don't expect an SMS or a phone call from them because I don't even use that SIM card back home. I have another local SIM card that I use, and I also give that out as my "phone number" in case, you know, somebody wants to call.
Apparently they partnered with the TextSecure people https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ to provide end-to-end encryption(Android non-group chat only for now). Apart from the fact that the client is still closed source and untrustable, they now seem to be in a better security situation than the other popular messaging apps.
For example, they store the message database on the shared mass storage partition (a.k.a. SD card), where it can be read by all installed applications.
Wasn't it also true that the password for every account was a simple function of the phone number? Then they changed it, only to base in the IMEI instead.
I didn't look at it again so I don't know if they fixed it for real in the end.
> so somehow all those people really DID want another messaging app and even adopted one.
Very disingenuous. In terms of ICQ, they were just early to market, had a competent client and... a deeply flawed method of identification. Messenger? Rolled out with Windows, just like certain other software that caused a bit of a stink in courtrooms at one point. Leverage. AOL did the same thing, pretty much.
As for Skype... it did voice competently, and more importantly did so easily and at a crucial point in time. Just like ICQ once did.
> Most of the Skype killers are either crap or crippled in other ways (e.g. Facetime being Apple only).
Absolutely. But Skype, according to most people I speak to and voice my concerns (ie. people to whom I whine) regarding the latest problem with Skype definitely echo my sentiment. Skype isn't good... it's merely acceptable. But there is no realistic option.
For my little niche there's definitely an opening for a new voice comm package, but "they" will have to raise the bar a lot if they want wide adoption.
In my memory, ICQ had a terrible client. But the protocol could be used with better, less bloated clients (like trillian). And it had features at the time, like offline messages, that came surprisingly late or were missing in other, later clients.
By the same standards, I would of course say Skype has a terrible client now.
ICQ went down the same path most clients seem to go, ie. it got very bloated. At first it was very bare-bones, with some really pleasant file transfer capabilities.
Skype really is history repeating itself. The client is becoming less usable by the day, and for some reason I was selected for a beta test that introduced the "new" flat style, at a huge cost to layout efficiency. It's truly terrible.
I totally agree with you. I don't want to disdain Skype, which is a great tool for its intended audience (the noobs, the moms and paps, the grandmas, etc). Also, Skype technology was almost incredible when they first appeared, so .. lots of respect for their history and accomplishments.
But I also think there is a lot of room for "Skype Killers" in different niches. I think Skype UI is getting worse for the experienced/heavy user. What is your niche? Would love to hear more.
> 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.
>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.
Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user? It's a nightmare.
I do remote tutoring. Skype is easy. Everyone has it, you add the username, and call.
Here's what happens when I try to do a hangout:
1. Log in to gmail. Student often takes a while to find gmail on computer and login, as they've been doing everything by phone.
2. Find the chat. Student often takes 2-3 minutes to look for chat.
3. Invite to chat. Your @domain address? No, my personal gmail.
4. Show in chat list.
5. "Send me a message". This takes them another 2-3 minutes to figure out.
6. Start a call. Another delay.
7. Often some kind of technical trouble where the call doesn't start, mic doesn't work, they must by mistake.
This is exacerbated because I'm giving instructions by text. Starting a hangout with a new user on a computer often takes 5-15 minutes. Every step has potential for failure.
If there's a better way than what I'm doing, the fact that I don't know about it is itself is a UI failure on Google's part.
> Have you ever tried to start a Hangout with a non-technical user?
Yes, my technophobe sister in law. She got a new Android phone and was texting me via plain old SMS, which are metered on her account. I texted her back "Look for an icon that is a green circle with a double quote mark in it. Open it, follow the prompts, and send me a message". Within a minute I had a Hangout message from her, and she's been using it since.
Purely anecdotal, but then so was your example. I'll agree it's not so simple doing it on a computer, but they still make it fairly simple; do a Google search for "hangouts", the top link takes you to a page that has a button that says "Available for your computer".
Bingo. My 80-year-old grandmother who is terrified of computers and doesn't speak english recently started having video skype sessions with me. As far as I'm concerned, that's a design and ease-of-use litmus test.
Hangouts is getting worse as far as I'm concerned.
Google Talk had only chat, but I could trust it to work as intended and deliver my messages. With Hangouts:
- synchronization between devices is not as good. I will often not see everything I typed on my mobile when I open it on my desktop.
- Messages do not arrive in order !!! Sorry for the triple exclamation marks, but this is implemented in the most stupid way I have ever seen in an IM application. Say we are using Hangouts on my mobile. You send the messages
A
B
C
Occasionally, I will receive C first, then A, then B. Fine. I receive C and read it.
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
Then I receive A and B. And this happens :
A
B
C
<--- I've read until this point and will ignore anything above
Messages A and B, having been sent before, will appear above the last message I have read and I will probably miss them.
I preferred Google Talk as well, especially since it was built upon an open platform and was easily implemented on unsupported OSes (Windows Phone via IM+ for example). Personally I haven't seen the out-of-order issue in one on one conversations, but it's prevalent in the group chats I'm in. When it happens to my messages, it's almost always when I'm being handed off between towers on the go; it hasn't happened to me on WLAN yet. Since there are no message size limitations like SMS has, I rarely send multi part messages anyway.
>You forgot Hangouts, which works on Android, iOS, and the desktop. It supports text, voice, and video, just like Wire.
So that would be the "what's hot now".
I didn't mention it because few people I know use it. And I wouldn't touch it a Google + Google+ affilicated messaging solution with a 10-feet pole anyway...
I wouldn't say that it's "hot". It's recently become more popular since Google started forcing it on Android 4.4+ users as the only SMS option on their phones. Personally, I wouldn't use it at all if not for easy group communication with my Ingress mates (most Ingress communities use Hangouts, Slack, or both; ours uses both but mostly Hangouts).
I just felt that it was a glaring omission, especially considering its more popular and more reliable precursor, Google Talk.
* Standard text messaging app, for almost everyone.
* Google Hangouts, which is a pain to remove and always logs in behind my back. I don't want to chat on my phone, it's just a nuisance. (I wish people would stop talking to me through Hangouts, honestly)
* Viber, with a single contact.
* LINE, with a single contact.
I don't have WhatsApp or Snapchat or whatever, but most people will likely have 3 or more messaging apps.
3 years ago, everything was fine. Google used XMPP. Facebook used XMPP. Companies used XMPP. I used XMPP. I may have needed multiple accounts, but I needed only a single app. Now look where we are.
It's a shame that XMPP didn't save us from this situation. My hunch is that the baseline featureset over federation was too low: no federated medsage history; MUCs are single point of failures.
We're trying to fix this with Matrix.org - folks frustrated with yet another communication silo might want to check it out and help us tear down the walls between these gardens. (obvious disclaimer: i help run matrix.org)
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).
OK let me try to explain it better: let's say we have a conversation between 3 friends who are all running their own homeservers to connect to matrix. All three servers will keep a copy of the conversation, and if one server goes down and reconnects, the two other servers can update it with the messages that went on while it was down.
If friend 1 and 2 have a separate conversation in a different room, only their two servers will keep a copy of the conversation history. If friend 3 joins this room, his server will receive the current history from the other servers (there's a limit for efficiency but you can explicitly get all the history via pagination).
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 in your ROM, but you can still freeze it with Titanium Backup.
Which is fine as long as you're happy to be "that guy". If I need to install RandomNewChatApp to talk to a client that's paying me $$$, I'm going to install it. Similarly, if a close friend or relative uses a new service, stubbornly saying "no, that's too awkward for me" is not the kind of person I want to be.
But I would prefer if I could just add them as an account to an app that I already have. And ideally an open-source, usable, attractive app.
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 those same 10 people if they've ever heard of Skype and all 10 would say yes and likely 8 of them have used it.
Obviously this isn't scientific, but the point is that most people don't use IRC. I'm a software dev and I don't use IRC and I've never had a real-world non-dev even mention it. But Skype? I'm forced to use that every day. Text messages? With iMessage, it's great, but you also need to have the person's phone number -- or, you're like me and you're moving around a lot and change numbers fairly frequently, but Skype/iMessage/etc stays pretty consistent year after year.
Just my 2 cents. In terms of "always on intrusiveness" isn't SMS always on? Unless you're using a burner phone, you're being tracked, SMS is always logged, there's no illusion of security.
Besides, who the heck buys a phone is Hangouts imbedded in ROM? If you're interested in security, then I'd suggest getting something other than Android.
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).
I'm mostly with you, but I actually quite like whatsapp.
Don't need to pay extra to send an image
Messages don't get lost in transit and if it did, it'd let you know.
It's fast, simple and usable.
I find most everything faddish, but occasionaly things win out because they suck less than what we already have. Of course, those specific problems above might be UK specific.
I know this will probably cause dissent, but I think the time of Google (now Apache) Wave may have arrived :-) XMPP based (but hideously complicated) and can still do more than any other "chat" system out there that I've seen.
I immediately thought "oh, this looks like wave". The problem is that still don't think that this (or Apache Wave) is a whole quanta better than the good enough solutions that are out there.
What's poor about it? I'm genuinely interested - not to convince you that you're wrong but to check if I missed a gotcha in my setup here. So far .. I don't see an issue. I could complain about missing features/XEPs that I'd love to have and cannot right now, but .. chatting should work just fine.
Skype doesn't work for me. I regularly have video failing or voice failing or Skype refusing to log in on some random subset of combinations of devices on my end and the other end. It's gotten steadily worse over the last decade.
I don't think users really want the wheel to be reinvented. More like companies try to lock you in on their tech and make money with you. Fragmentation? CEO gives a shit.
Good tip. I tried this for several apps. Too bad it seems this doesn't work for the Play apps: Books, Films, Kiosk. But several apps are gone (Hangouts, search, Plus etc) and I hope they stay where they are.
I disagree. The current situation with voice and text is insane; telephone companies still try to own that space and charge for things like SMS/receiving calls, even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that it makes far more sense to send messaging over the internet rather than via custom infrastructure. No-one wants cell phone/telephone operators to be anything more than a dumb pipe apart from them.
Apps like this are the future, but nobody has quite hit the perfect spot yet in terms of features and adoption (adoption probably being most important, or some method of piggy-backing on existing services like email/SMS/mobile nos). I had a look at this and it looks pretty good but the first-run experience just isn't there yet. I don't trust some random company with my address book, certainly not on first-run, so I'm not in an empty app wondering what to do. That's far from ideal and will probably be their biggest problem.
Everyone thinks we don't need another one until they see one that does something they like but hadn't realised would be useful. WhatsApp with its free messages, Twitter with its enforced terseness, Snapchat with its take on ephemerality - they were all adopted by millions of users who, before seeing the app, would probably have declared they didn't need a new messaging app. Yet they installed it, tried it, and continued to use it.
People will always want to try new ways to message one another. Consequently we'll always get new messaging apps.
Twitter's success wasn't due to "enforced terseness", it was due to the fact that it supported posting to it from SMS messages back when the majority of the population still had dumbphones. Once smartphones became ubiquitous, Twitter kept riding that wave due to network effects. In fact, the entire reason for the 140-character limit was so that it could interoperate with SMS cleanly.
I do somewhat agree with your overall point though. And it's worth noting that sometimes that "new feature" can be things like "my parents don't use it yet", in the case of teenagers and the like.
I agree. But what's the feature here? I lament the audio quality of cell phone calls, but audio quality depends on bandwidth, and this requires an internet connection, which is going to be spotty depending on location and when transitioning from data to wifi. Every feature here seems a marginal improvement on what already exists (audio quality, UI, sync, security, battery use). No new concepts. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to use it, but I don't see an impetus for mass adoption.
My understanding is that it has inline content like Whatsapp and desktop support & sync features like Skype (Skype took a lot to make the sync at least tolerable - but I guess they already know what they're doing). The supposedly high quality of the calls and inline 3rd party content support (soundcloud and youtube for now, I suppose) are the bonus features.
Slack does support IRC and XMPP transports, though? So even if $management wants Slack, I can use a single client across several networks. AFAIK Slack doesn't do federation, but one out of two, is better than none out of two.
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.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "cross-platform app". Sounds like a contradiction in terms, to me.
We have XMPP and OTR, and with chatsecure on Android or various clients on Linux it's pretty pleasant. I believe there are a few OS X clients as well, not sure about iOS.
Also, messages are not encrypted by default, and there is afaik no way to encrypt group chats. You have to create a special "secret" chat for the messages to be encrypted.
True, but Tox requires a password for that. Telegram tries to be an alternative to WhatsApp so forcing people to sign up with an account isn't an option.
One doesn't demonstrate security by releasing the source.
One needs to have source released, audited and verified to match prebuilt binaries that are actually used by the unwashed gray masses. Without all three checked for each public build you have zero assurance that you are running a binary built from the released source and that the source doesn't have anything fishy in it.
The only app that checks all three, somewhat ironically, is TrueCrypt. PGPfone checked #1 and #3. TextSecure checks just #1 unless I am missing something, so objectively its "demonstrated security" is exactly the same as that of any another app that simply describes what it does in plain English and has a traffic to prove it.
I usually dislike introducing yet another standard, but Tox has some features that XMPP won't provide. VoIP support out of the box, without the need for an extension that may not be supported by the client. Also, afaik it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication.
True, but do you think it's easier to deploy an extension that already exists and just lacks implementations, or to create a whole new protocol from scratch ?
If you look at other successful protocols, you'll also see that some features we rely on were bolted-on as extensions to protocols that were defined before, such as DNS, IMAP, HTTP... Not that it's an excuse to do the same, but it's expected.
> it's truly decentralized, without the need for a server for the actual communication
I don't think that's not something you actually want.
- How do you send a message to someone who's offline ? You don't, you have to wait for you and your contact to be online at the same time.
- How do you traverse NATs ? You have to craft all that messy code, and it's not even guaranteed that it works... you're going to need a "known anchor" for everyone to connect, just like what we see with WebRTC. If you're aiming for a one single protocol, there's no way around that. By the way XMPP can do signaling over XMPP and actual communications over direct, P2P links (such as SOCKS5: http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0260.html)
The sad state today is that many clients still haven't implemented Jingle, but at least there's something to start from.
Your points are well taken, but this is unfortunately a sacrifice that needs to be made in the name of security. While partial centralization would solve a few problems, it would also introduce weak points in its security model that three letter agencies would be quick to exploit.
Tox actually does NAT traversal quite well I've found, and it does support SOCKS5 connections out of the box, albeit through TCP relay nodes rather than direct P2P.
XMPP/Jingle worked, although the quality wasn't very good. You could make video calls between Google Talk (also on Android) and Empathy, the standard GNOME XMPP Client.
Distributed as in peer to peer? No.
Distributed as in federated, everyone can run a server and talk/interact with people on other servers, transparently? Yes.
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...
Thanks, we've started with XMPP, like many others, but it was not fitting our purpose, like for others, so instead of building our proprietary protocol (like others did) we tried to build on what we learnt and provide something others would like to use. The beta is almost feature complete now and we need enlighten feedbacks to make it fit most purposes and something everyone would find useful!
I feel that sentiment. It's not that I mind people doing new apps in already crowded market segments - it's that messaging apps, like social networking sites, work on network effect. I don't want a new messaging app for the same reason I don't want a new Facebook - the existing one is awesome enough, new ones don't offer anything interesting, and I definitely don't feel like rebuilding my contact lists every other year.
In this way, a new app is a danger not only to the maker of an old app, it's a danger to the client as well.
It's gone from a messaging app that I couldn't believe worked so well on a low-speed connection, to a messaging app that that I can't believe works so shitty on a high-speed connection. I literally tried for 20 minutes just to get a call to connect last Saturday before giving up and using FaceTime instead.
There is no properly working cross platform mobile video chat yet, because it's a hard problem. All innovation in this space is welcome. Wire started without video, but I'm pretty sure that it is in their long-term plans.
I guess I am wondering more: what sort of work would make you say "hey, I want to go work there!"
I guess I'm trying to figure this out in reverse. I know I'd leave whatever I'm doing to work for, say, Google because Google (really: I needn't say more, right?).
But what makes Google so attractive? Some of it is the bragging rights but a lot of is that they work on cool things and give you free reign to do cool things.
I'm working on custom integrations tailored to specific project so for me each project is like a new job where I'm picking up tools and technologies that will deliver stable and maintainable outcome. New job, new people and new challenges - that keeps me sorta away from burning out. So I guess the main question is how much influence do you want to have? Do you want to craft specific algorithm that is somebody else idea? Or do you want to come up with your own ideas and bring them alive? I'm in second group.
I am in the same industry and am looking for a change. But I have to define what would make me happy in a day job. My hobby is programming. My job is programming. But there's something soul-crushing about programming at a bank.
My general thoughts about companies trying to implement DRM is that there's always some stupidly simple hack around it. Like this Keurig hack. I guarantee that within a week or two of this coming out someone will just find another way to hack around the DRM.
Better mousetraps just breed cleverer mice.