4 ms·

The elephant in the room here is strong cryptography. We now have the technology that makes this kind of interop pretty much impossible.

Too 7y ago
Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format because millions of users have files stored on disk that way. When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating tools. If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the cheating users to campaign against you. The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged. What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law. Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook compatibility.

Too 7y ago

Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format because millions of users have files stored on disk that way. When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.

mntmoss 7y ago
That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating tools. If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the cheating users to campaign against you. The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged. What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law. Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook compatibility.