6 ms·

No, it wasn't a "service" - it was a program. Unlike this thing. The main difference between this and Pidgin seems to be that you pay a monthly fee for someone

• dtonon 5y ago
  It is a service, because the bridge is a software that need to be keep operational 24/24h and sometimes this is not so trivial (if I don't get wrong WA need an Android emulator running).
  • saurik 5y ago
    Pidgin doesn't use a "bridge"... it is just a generic local client that supports plugins for various protocols that are implemented via adversarial interoperability.
    • Spivak 5y ago
      And because of that Pidgin is horribly unreliable. Don’t get me wrong, I used it for years, but over time all the plug-ins broke for one reason or another.
      • capableweb 5y ago
        Law makers are required here to solve the situation, as platforms themselves refuse to work with each other. If Facebook and Google had to operate a common protocol (just like IMAP), Pidgin would work much better or wouldn't even be needed. But no, they want to prevent people from talking with each other via other platforms because "we're best" or whatever.
        • hellojesus 5y ago
          It's probably because they don't want to lose users. If you have FB, and I have Twitter, and we can chat, why would I ever make a FB profile or you a Twitter profile? The mutual exclusivity is the competitive advantage. All these companies are competing with one another for your eyes. It wouldn't make sense for them to give that up for no return value.
          • capableweb 5y ago
            Exactly! Providing a walled garden just for the sake of keeping users should not be legal, just like abusing any other market position wouldn't be legal. I get that they want their "network effect" and keep it to themselves, but this is no good for users and the industry doesn't "regulate itself" as we've heard so many times, so time for law makers to step up finally.
            • hellojesus 5y ago
              My point is that the walled garden is the competitive advantage. A law like this could regulate businesses out of existence. Which websites fall under it? Only social? What about forums, etc. What if the companies just rebase to non-US jurisdictions? Even if you make this law, it's unlikely it would actually compel anyone to comply.
              • TeMPOraL 5y ago
                > A law like this could regulate businesses out of existence. Only if they didn't change their business model to something less incredibly antisocial than walling people in and serving them ads. There are many ways to operate a communications business on-line. That only the bad one is used in practice is a consequence of it being the most profitable of available options. If it weren't available (say, because of being regulated away), companies would pick the next most profitable one.
                • acdha 5y ago
                  Yes — this line of argument sounds exactly like the people who very confidently said that the economy couldn’t survive ditching asbestos or CFCs, emissions laws would destroy California, etc. The key part is having regulations apply the rules evenly so everyone prices it into their decisions. Trying to limit specific companies makes that feedback cycle less effective.
                • hellojesus 5y ago
                  Yes, but what if this is the only way to have a profitable business such as these? Are you okay losing them entirely? More generally, my view of regulation is that it should only exist if there is some quantifiable harm to an involuntary third party (negative externality). Where is the demonstrative harm here, and who is it impacting? Having one friend on FB and another on MySpace, requiring the user to log into each platform separately isn't harm. The effect is the same as having one friend call you on a phone to communicate and the other only use text. Every single person using these platforms makes a conscious decision to use them given their limitations. Nobody is forcing anyone to use these platforms. The government still runs a post office. You could use that to communicate with people if you wanted. Instead of passing legislation to fix your problem, how about you just talk to your friends and get them to agree on using a single platform?
  • josteink 5y ago
    WA works with a pure go-based bridge. No Android required. The rest of your comment is true though. Keeping these bridges up 24/7 is quite a bit of work. Most people (even technical ones) probably won’t bother with that.
    • lvass 5y ago
      Which bridge is it? Mautrix/whatsapp does require an Android instance of whatsapp.
      • josteink 5y ago
        Nah. You can pair it up to an real WhatsApp-account using your phone and from there on, it’s go-code only.
    • your_challenger 5y ago
      You need WhatsApp to be installed on a real device or a VM for mautrix-whatapp [1] (the bridge) to work. You also need to connect to that real device using WhatsApp web [2]. I know because I've used the bridge. [1] https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp [2] https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/authentication.html https://docs.mau.fi/bridges/go/whatsapp/authentication.html
  • RNCTX 5y ago
    It is not a service, if it's a link to a download and a bunch of community-developed plugins. When you take away the motivation to mitm all of the users' chats, there's nothing left.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    And FB will probably not like running WA in an emulator, and will kill that option as soon as it reaches ~100k users.
    • pi7h3n 5y ago
      how can they kill it?
      • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
        They have so much money and influence, I trust them to find a way :)
        • pi7h3n 5y ago
          With enough motivation, competitors can reverse their efforts. Reversing (competitors' job) is finding just only one flaw in a system. Hardening (WhatsApp's job) is thinking about all the possible ways it could be flawed. It can be an endless cat and mouse game though I guess.
• briffle 5y ago
  Can you run Pidgin on your phone and tablet and laptop and move between them?
  • lostmsu 5y ago
    Depends on the services you connect to.
• Vinnl 5y ago
  Of course the protocols Pidgin bridged were only used for real-time communication, rather than for leaving messages which could be attended to (or delivered) later.
  • oblio 5y ago
    No, it wasn't. Yahoo had offline messages. So did many of its other protocols.
    • Vinnl 5y ago
      Ah you're right, I think I indeed had that for MSN as well. Must've gotten confused.
• h0nd 5y ago
  Why would I want a man in the middle of my communications?
  • realce 5y ago
    Because the A-Series round of financiers think that's a great idea.
  • noahtallen 5y ago
    The real answer is because you want all your conversations to happen in the same app/protocol. You never have to download a shiny new messenger again
    • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      I'ved heard that pitch before. It's always true only for some length of time. Protocols change, services evolve, companies transform, products are deprecated and people are fickle. I've used all-in-one messengers before. They come and go like the wind. You'll be downloading a shiny new all-in-one messenger periodically anyway. Just trading one kind of inconvenience for another.
      • TeMPOraL 5y ago
        Perhaps if we normalized messenger interoperabiltiy, there would be less churn in "all-in-one" clients. That churn exists mostly because platforms actively fight their users on this. And still, periodically changing an all-in-one messenger is still better than keeping and changing half a dozen messengers.
        • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
          Unless those official clients have features not available in the all-in-one client. Like encryption, which this one apparently lacks.
          • 5y ago
• unicornporn 5y ago
  Thank you. Let us not forget what general purpose computing was like.
  • unicornporn 5y ago
    Following up on this... I was Miranda user. With it I was able to run ICQ, MSN Messenger and other instant messengers with an encrypted layer slapped on top (as long as I was able to talk my friends out of using the official client). Today it's called Miranda NG[1] and it seems alive and kicking[2]. [1] https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/ https://www.miranda-ng.org/en/ [2] https://github.com/miranda-ng/miranda-ng https://github.com/miranda-ng/miranda-ng
    • stavros 5y ago
      uhoh.wav
• IceWreck 5y ago
  > you pay a monthly fee for someone to man-in-the-middle all your communications. All Matrix homeservers and bridges are open source. I self host some of them myself. Have been doing that long before Element One was a thing.
  • tiagod 5y ago
    How can I verify you're running unmodified, unhooked source in your server if I'm a user?
    • cyborgx7 5y ago
      You can't. You can find a provider you trust or set them up yourself.
    • dunefox 5y ago
      How can anyone verify that?
      • Diti 5y ago
        Reproducible builds. https://reproducible-builds.org/ https://reproducible-builds.org/
        • efreak 5y ago
          Reproducible builds allow verifying that your build is correct by rebuilding it It doesn't help you verify that the server you're connected to is running the binary you've been given.
    • IggleSniggle 5y ago
      You don't, you self-host your own server. My problem with the self-hosted model is that I don't trust myself to get it right and/or keep it updated. My problem with the 3rd-party model is that I don't trust them, either. So, lacking trust in either myself or the third-party, I'm just one of those people you can get only via secure e-mail, clear-text SMS, or whatever well-supported encrypted service happens to be the one with a plurality of users in my friend/family group. Clear-text sucks, but it can be used to negotiate a secure channel. Unfortunately, the levels of spam in my traditional telephony services have dramatically increased in recent years, and as a tradeoff, I've just gotten harder and harder to get in touch with directly as I increasingly default to ignoring more and more methods of communication. I don't even think I'm someone with anything to hide or anything to fear my communications being in the public, there's just too much information to manage.
• ufmace 5y ago
  It's worth remembering again why we don't do this. Even if you fully trust whoever is running the MITM server, being that it's MITMing all of your comms, and it's on a server so it's actually a lot of people's comms, it's a massively tempting target for all sorts of bad actors. Plenty of governments and criminal gangs would just love to compromise that for all sorts of reasons. Odds are one of them will eventually. For all you know, someone else on the server is a high-value target for somebody, and if they compromise the server to get their comms, they may not be very picky about what happens to the private communications of everyone else on that server.
• surajrmal 5y ago
  Meebo was a service that did roughly the same thing as pidgin (leveraging libpurple to do so iirc). It's a shame it was turned down.