To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol
To comply with DMA, WhatsApp and Messenger will become interoperable via Signal protocol
Meta today is offering more details about how it plans to make its messaging apps, WhatsApp and Messenger, interoperable with third-party messaging
Meta ... can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”
I'm more concerned with what the first-party provider is doing with my sent or received messages when that first-party is Facebook!
Meta ... can’t guarantee “what a third-party provider does with sent or received messages.”
We (Meta) can guarantee that we do all the bad stuffs to your data!
Please Signal, use this opportunity. I really want to be on Signal AAAAH
They have already announced that they will not be interoperable with insecure messaging apps unfortunately.
Why not convince people to use Signal as well? Even my family has a group chat on Signal. Of course, it's a slow move with most people sticking to non-open chats. But it's worth the effort I would say.
I really don't expect anyone would listen to me.
I remember the days when I spent time convincing people to use chat apps. The last one that stuck was WhatsApp.
I've since stopped installing new chat apps because people won't use them.
WhatsApp just works. Wanna video call my Mum? Push a button. Wanna send a Lemmy meme to my mates? Yeah it's 3 taps.
I open up Facebook on me birthday and press the ❤️ on the birthday messages then shut it down and don't use it for another year.
But if I do that with WhatsApp then I don't hear from people I actually care about.
I actually have a friend that refuses to use WhatsApp like I do with FaceFuck. "How does she do it then?" I hear you ask.
She uses Facebook Messenger.
That's the hold Meta has on our communications
Eh, my missus insisted we use Signal, but it's just flat out not as reliable. It misses messages very occasionally and it's always at the worst possible time.
Like I get that it's a tiny bit more private than Whatsapp, but I'm not running a terror cell or a paedo ring over here. I just want to know if she wants anything from the shop.
It's private and you can verify that, not to mention it's non-profit. WhatsApp claims to be private but Meta has broken promises before and doesn't let us look at source code. It's not a "tiny bit"
Classic "No thing to hide, nothing to fear."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument#Criticism
It depends on whether they get a fair offer, or a bullshit one that has to work through the courts and be officially ruled bullshit before they'll offer anything better.
I dislike when they say in news clips that Signal represents the “current gold standard” for E2EE chats, it doesn't, Signal is a helluva lot better than the commercial stuff that mines user data but there's stuff like SimpleX Chat that doesn't leak even metadata because it doesn't have it.
Still, this is a good thing, these megacorps have their iron grip on people because they have raised walls around their services making it painful for people to move to a different service, tearing down those walls can only help us all.
A standard is also about broad adoption though, so I don't think you can call SimpleX a standard yet.
The standard is about the protocol, not every bit of the implementation. 3DH / X3DH and double ratchet, etc, are among the best for E2EE.
Thanks for the tip about SimpleX, that looks interesting! I could never use Signal due to the way they operate and force you to rely on their and Google's servers, actively blocking forks from their network. So much for FOSS...
They do provide an apk outside of the Play Store, that uses a Web Socket for push notifications. Not he best way of going about it, but hey, it exists.
SimpleX is very neat. But it cannot do multiple devices unless you count shutting down, exporting database to new device replacing existing database as a sensible workflow. Using the database on two devices at once will break encryption and cause all sorts of weird problems.
Signal encryption can be taken out of the app and applied elsewhere, because it has been already done. SimpleX is nice but this is single app single implementation thing.
It appears SimpleX is not even available for me (Android 8).
Does this mean third party apps will be able to interact with whatsapp?
only when the service specifically requests it and agrees to Whatsapp's terms.
So I [in theory, I don't know how to start with this on a technical level] could make a third-party Signal-compatible app, but allow it to connect to Whatsapp instead of Signal? Even if I can't use my Signal account to contact Whatsapp people, that's still potentially useful. Although I imagine the terms I'd have to agree to to do so would be full of nonsense that stops this being remotely feasible.
Meta says that it will only allow third-party developers to use another protocol besides Signal, “if they are able to demonstrate it offers the same security guarantees as Signal.”
If matrix finally finishes implementing MLS, maybe they could convince meta to use it.
Last time they touched an open chat protocol, they hung it out to dry. That was XMPP. That's why more than half of the fediverse is reluctant or outright hostile to federate with anything meta.
What is the advantage of this over olm/megolm?
Why MLS?
In most cases, MLS has better performance in large groups than Olm/Megolm.
@Mysteriarch I deeply hope that there will be some connection to Matrix in the future.
Wake up Neo. Follow the white rabbit
At least we know that this won't be open federation. But still maybe some company could bridge them or at least could become a JMP.chat like service for WhatsApp.
Element wrote a first look summary on this: https://element.io/blog/the-eu-digital-markets-act-is-here/