11 ms·

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messen

> Parliament also succeeded in convincing the Council of interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms. For group chats, this requirement will be rolled out over a period of four years. This would be great. I remember using pidgin back in the day and it was really convenient to have every messaging app in one interface.

kuboble 5y ago
I wish so much for that to happen. I still remember jabber being popular in Poland 15 years ago. One of the reasons I switched to gtalk at the time was the fact that it allowed me to keep my jabber contacts. Little did I know they would kill it in a couple of years.
pabs3 5y ago
Pidgin is still there, still works and supports modern chat platforms too, via plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ Of course, some platforms ban you for using alternate clients.
- chockchocschoir 5y ago
  > Pidgin is still there, still works and supports modern chat platforms too, via plugins Nice! > Of course, some platforms ban you for using alternate clients. Less nice... Doesn't seem like that list outlines which platforms will/could ban you either, which makes the entire list a no-go for me, and I'm sure others.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Hard to even say on some of them. Discord for instance will only really ban you if they think you are spamming even though they say you can't use them at all
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Also with offTheRecord Messaging for encryption. I am really loving this news, i was able to convince some of my old icq contacts back then to switch to jabber this way. And why wouldnt they if its all the same interface?
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Please note that OTRv3 has laughably insecure encryption these days (1024-bit keys etc). There is OTRv4 in progress but it isn't ready for use yet. https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 The interface for Pidgin is exactly the same as it was back then (it still uses GTK2), modern users have much different interface tastes in 2022, so you might find it difficult to convince people to use Pidgin.
    - cf141q5325 5y ago
      Damn, DH 1536 (and AES128), thanks for the heads up
2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago
Yeah, saw this and immediately thought of Pidgin. This is also great for smaller platforms -- If I could use something like Pidgin again then I'd probably log into ICQ again for the first time in... a very long time.
8fingerlouie 5y ago
> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progress has been made in 25+ years, despite the platform being hopelessly insecure. There has been some unsuccesful attempts at security, like PGP and Protonmail/Tutanota, but as they're addons they haven't seen widespread adoption. Feel free to replace email for TCPv4/v6. The only successful open standard i can think of would be HTTP. Open standards, once they mature, usually mean "lowest common denominator".
- kuboble 5y ago
  Yes. That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more. It's a big thing. And it's a great thing. Already in email you have some cool features that only work Gmail to Gmail but you can still send basic emails to people outside of Gmail. Businesses will not need business accounts on 6 different platforms just so thay can have a simple chat with all their customers.
  - 8fingerlouie 5y ago
    > That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more. It was my understanding that we already have a (fairly old) standard that does just that, which also currently works as a lowest common denominator for texting between at least android and iOS.
    - andyferris 5y ago
      There’s a telecom protocol tied to your carrier and phone number that predates both android and iOS, but not a (free to use, free to implement) internet protocol. (EDIT: unless you are talking about email)
dureuill 5y ago
good news. we also need interoperability requirements for social networks. like twitter and facebook must be mandated by law to provide access to their networks to smaller networks. only then would people be free to leave these networks without suffering from "network effect"
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
  So, you mean "Fediverse" ;) https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fediverse?lang=en https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fediverse?lang=en
  - account42 5y ago
    Fediverse is one possibe technology that can be used to implement this, but the core problem is not a technological one. Even in the Fediverse instances will refuse to peer with other instances - something that I don't think should be allowed for massive social networks that use their network effects to capture users.
  - dureuill 5y ago
    i mean forcing the dominant networks to interoperate with the fediverse. i can open as many diaspora and mastodon accounts as i want, i will still be alone because everyone i know is on twitter and facebook. make it mandatory that facebook and twitter lets me connect my fediverse accounts and i can connect with my friends regardless of their network of choice
- kmlx 5y ago
  > like twitter and facebook must be mandated by law to provide access to their networks to smaller networks. makes no sense. you can already pull all your data out of those services and import it into whatever other service you want.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    Are you suggesting that someone who wants to publish their latest Facebook post to their Twitter followers needs to export all their Facebook data, select just one specific post from the dumped data, and then import that dumped post into Twitter? I mean, that's theoretically possible, but it's not the most convenient workflow, and you run the risk that any tooling designed to automate it is frequently broken by deliberately incompatible changes made by Facebook or Twitter (or whichever other services you are using, in the general case). Fundamentally the data belongs to the users, not to the platforms, so it is right that governments mandate that the data be able to flow according to the users' wishes. All property rights are legal fictions, especially "intellectual property" rights, but at least in this case the property right being defined is a socially beneficial one.
agilob 5y ago
>interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger Who will be decrypting WA and Signal message to pass them to Facebook Messanger?
- kmlx 5y ago
  yeah, i don't think this was thought out, or at least i haven't read anything on this subject. how does the draft text deal with cryptography?
  - upofadown 5y ago
    Something like this can't really make end to end encryption interoperable. There will be no encryption at the transitions between systems. Clients would have to use something that can work over arbitrary textual channels like OTR or PGP.
    - cf141q5325 5y ago
      No idea why this was downvoted. OTR is the correct answer here.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - lucianbr 5y ago
      HTTPS works encrypted between multiple clients, servers and proxies without issues (mostly). There is nothing impossible about encrypted communication. It's just that all servers and clients need to work together to achieve this.
      - upofadown 5y ago
        HTTPS is not end to end. End to end encryption does not require a server and could not use one anyway. Effective end to end encryption has to entirely happen on the ends.
  - 5y ago
Bancakes 5y ago
At the end of the day, chat apps are nothing more than a bunch of text, some compressed pictures, and maaaybe a voice recording. It's very simple data to be transmitted, and any problems with interop are self-made bloat and proprietorship.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bongoman37 5y ago
GuB-42 5y ago
What about Signal? Moxie is strongly against it. Although the app and protocols are open, he doesn't tolerate third party clients on Signal official servers and he doesn't want federation. Even though I disagree, he has some good arguments. And if WhatsApp has to interoperate, why not Signal?
- MezzoDelCammin 5y ago
  To quote the original article : "platforms with a market capitalization of €75 billion or turnover in the European Economic Area equal to or above €7.5 billion" I'm not sure what the current market cap for Signal is, but I'm fairly sure they don't have a turnover of 7+bn in the EU.
  - GuB-42 5y ago
    Ok, I didn't realize that. Signal may not even have a financial presence in the EU. In the US, according the Wikipedia, they have ~$20M in revenue, many orders of magnitude off... It is also one of these weird non-profit + for-profit company mix, to which I don't know the effect it has. Anyways, the numbers are simply not there. Ironically, if the law works as intended, making all major messaging platforms interoperable, if can make smaller players who don't want to join the club (like Signal) less attractive.
  - gorgoiler 5y ago
    It doesn’t seem moral to do this on revenue. The only thing that should matter to regulators is the active-users metric, as a percentage of the population. Doing it by money seems like sour grapes. You succeeded in the free market so we’re going to hamper your progress.
    - piaste 5y ago
      "Active users" is a metric that is: (a) somewhat tricky to define with legislative-grade rigour, and much more importantly: (b) only measurable by the very same entities who would be subject to this regulation Were it not for the problem of measurement, I would agree that it would be a better proxy for "needs regulation" than market cap. EDIT: On second thought, I don't even think that's true. Imagine a networking app that absolutely dominates a small but highly profitable and societally / strategically important sector, such as medicine or law. That company could have relatively few users as a % of the population, but still have enough of a warchest to hobble most potential competitors, and to have undue influence in wider society thanks to its control of critical sectors. Going by market cap doesn't measure a company's pervasiveness, but it measures its sheer economic power.
merrywhether 5y ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if the response was a Chrome-esque “drown the competition in feature velocity” approach. iMessage could add new features (with totally necessary payload shape updates) fast enough to prevent any integrations from working well and competing effectively. Throw in some EME-style approval-requiring binary blobs to enable decryption and a dash of CSAM-style regulation compliance and open vs closed won’t really matter (like we’ve seen on the web so far).
- soperj 5y ago
  Hopefully regulators catch on to that crap.
- pmontra 5y ago
  They can do that as long as they keep the interoperability. Text with UTF8 emojis should be enough to start with. Actually I expect the usual outrage about limiting innovation or threats to leave the EU but consider that this interoperability is also a moat especially if they agree on some complicated protocol with no previous implementation.
- paxys 5y ago
  I'd say that's a feature not a bug. Let iMessage roll out exploding balloons and whatever else they want in every update. I want to use my own client which should just stay compatible with the core functionality – sending lines of text back and forth. And if they are deliberately breaking existing third-party apps for no reason, well I'm sure EU courts would like to have a word.
Throwaway197401 5y ago
cabalamat 5y ago
Should mandate interoperability for all social media.
- tyrfing 5y ago
  Seems like it does, but the size restrictions are crafted so it only applies to Facebook/Meta and not any of the smaller platforms.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Interoperability is great but how is this going to affect end-to-end encryption? Will every app be required to support it?

kuboble 5y ago

I wish so much for that to happen. I still remember jabber being popular in Poland 15 years ago. One of the reasons I switched to gtalk at the time was the fact that it allowed me to keep my jabber contacts. Little did I know they would kill it in a couple of years.

pabs3 5y ago

Pidgin is still there, still works and supports modern chat platforms too, via plugins: https://pidgin.im/plugins/ https://pidgin.im/plugins/ Of course, some platforms ban you for using alternate clients.

chockchocschoir 5y ago
> Pidgin is still there, still works and supports modern chat platforms too, via plugins Nice! > Of course, some platforms ban you for using alternate clients. Less nice... Doesn't seem like that list outlines which platforms will/could ban you either, which makes the entire list a no-go for me, and I'm sure others.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Hard to even say on some of them. Discord for instance will only really ban you if they think you are spamming even though they say you can't use them at all
cf141q5325 5y ago
Also with offTheRecord Messaging for encryption. I am really loving this news, i was able to convince some of my old icq contacts back then to switch to jabber this way. And why wouldnt they if its all the same interface?
- pabs3 5y ago
  Please note that OTRv3 has laughably insecure encryption these days (1024-bit keys etc). There is OTRv4 in progress but it isn't ready for use yet. https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 https://bugs.otr.im/otrv4/otrv4 The interface for Pidgin is exactly the same as it was back then (it still uses GTK2), modern users have much different interface tastes in 2022, so you might find it difficult to convince people to use Pidgin.
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    Damn, DH 1536 (and AES128), thanks for the heads up

2000UltraDeluxe 5y ago

Yeah, saw this and immediately thought of Pidgin. This is also great for smaller platforms -- If I could use something like Pidgin again then I'd probably log into ICQ again for the first time in... a very long time.

8fingerlouie 5y ago

> meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or iMessage will have to open up and interoperate with smaller messaging platforms The way i read it, they're calling for open standards, which can be a good thing. Sadly, open standards also slow down the development of new features, as everybody needs to be "on board" for new features to roll out. Take email (SMTP, IMAP, etc) as an example, where no major progress has been made in 25+ years, despite the platform being hopelessly insecure. There has been some unsuccesful attempts at security, like PGP and Protonmail/Tutanota, but as they're addons they haven't seen widespread adoption. Feel free to replace email for TCPv4/v6. The only successful open standard i can think of would be HTTP. Open standards, once they mature, usually mean "lowest common denominator".

kuboble 5y ago
Yes. That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more. It's a big thing. And it's a great thing. Already in email you have some cool features that only work Gmail to Gmail but you can still send basic emails to people outside of Gmail. Businesses will not need business accounts on 6 different platforms just so thay can have a simple chat with all their customers.
- 8fingerlouie 5y ago
  > That lowest common denominator will be probably being able to send text messages. Maybe a little more. It was my understanding that we already have a (fairly old) standard that does just that, which also currently works as a lowest common denominator for texting between at least android and iOS.
  - andyferris 5y ago
    There’s a telecom protocol tied to your carrier and phone number that predates both android and iOS, but not a (free to use, free to implement) internet protocol. (EDIT: unless you are talking about email)

dureuill 5y ago

good news. we also need interoperability requirements for social networks. like twitter and facebook must be mandated by law to provide access to their networks to smaller networks. only then would people be free to leave these networks without suffering from "network effect"

scim-knox-twox 5y ago
So, you mean "Fediverse" ;) https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fediverse?lang=en https://wikiless.org/wiki/Fediverse?lang=en
- account42 5y ago
  Fediverse is one possibe technology that can be used to implement this, but the core problem is not a technological one. Even in the Fediverse instances will refuse to peer with other instances - something that I don't think should be allowed for massive social networks that use their network effects to capture users.
- dureuill 5y ago
  i mean forcing the dominant networks to interoperate with the fediverse. i can open as many diaspora and mastodon accounts as i want, i will still be alone because everyone i know is on twitter and facebook. make it mandatory that facebook and twitter lets me connect my fediverse accounts and i can connect with my friends regardless of their network of choice
kmlx 5y ago
> like twitter and facebook must be mandated by law to provide access to their networks to smaller networks. makes no sense. you can already pull all your data out of those services and import it into whatever other service you want.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  Are you suggesting that someone who wants to publish their latest Facebook post to their Twitter followers needs to export all their Facebook data, select just one specific post from the dumped data, and then import that dumped post into Twitter? I mean, that's theoretically possible, but it's not the most convenient workflow, and you run the risk that any tooling designed to automate it is frequently broken by deliberately incompatible changes made by Facebook or Twitter (or whichever other services you are using, in the general case). Fundamentally the data belongs to the users, not to the platforms, so it is right that governments mandate that the data be able to flow according to the users' wishes. All property rights are legal fictions, especially "intellectual property" rights, but at least in this case the property right being defined is a socially beneficial one.

agilob 5y ago

>interoperability requirements for messaging services, meaning outfits such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger Who will be decrypting WA and Signal message to pass them to Facebook Messanger?

kmlx 5y ago
yeah, i don't think this was thought out, or at least i haven't read anything on this subject. how does the draft text deal with cryptography?
- upofadown 5y ago
  Something like this can't really make end to end encryption interoperable. There will be no encryption at the transitions between systems. Clients would have to use something that can work over arbitrary textual channels like OTR or PGP.
  - cf141q5325 5y ago
    No idea why this was downvoted. OTR is the correct answer here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - lucianbr 5y ago
    HTTPS works encrypted between multiple clients, servers and proxies without issues (mostly). There is nothing impossible about encrypted communication. It's just that all servers and clients need to work together to achieve this.
    - upofadown 5y ago
      HTTPS is not end to end. End to end encryption does not require a server and could not use one anyway. Effective end to end encryption has to entirely happen on the ends.
- 5y ago

Bancakes 5y ago

At the end of the day, chat apps are nothing more than a bunch of text, some compressed pictures, and maaaybe a voice recording. It's very simple data to be transmitted, and any problems with interop are self-made bloat and proprietorship.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bongoman37 5y ago

GuB-42 5y ago

What about Signal? Moxie is strongly against it. Although the app and protocols are open, he doesn't tolerate third party clients on Signal official servers and he doesn't want federation. Even though I disagree, he has some good arguments. And if WhatsApp has to interoperate, why not Signal?

MezzoDelCammin 5y ago
To quote the original article : "platforms with a market capitalization of €75 billion or turnover in the European Economic Area equal to or above €7.5 billion" I'm not sure what the current market cap for Signal is, but I'm fairly sure they don't have a turnover of 7+bn in the EU.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  Ok, I didn't realize that. Signal may not even have a financial presence in the EU. In the US, according the Wikipedia, they have ~$20M in revenue, many orders of magnitude off... It is also one of these weird non-profit + for-profit company mix, to which I don't know the effect it has. Anyways, the numbers are simply not there. Ironically, if the law works as intended, making all major messaging platforms interoperable, if can make smaller players who don't want to join the club (like Signal) less attractive.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  It doesn’t seem moral to do this on revenue. The only thing that should matter to regulators is the active-users metric, as a percentage of the population. Doing it by money seems like sour grapes. You succeeded in the free market so we’re going to hamper your progress.
  - piaste 5y ago
    "Active users" is a metric that is: (a) somewhat tricky to define with legislative-grade rigour, and much more importantly: (b) only measurable by the very same entities who would be subject to this regulation Were it not for the problem of measurement, I would agree that it would be a better proxy for "needs regulation" than market cap. EDIT: On second thought, I don't even think that's true. Imagine a networking app that absolutely dominates a small but highly profitable and societally / strategically important sector, such as medicine or law. That company could have relatively few users as a % of the population, but still have enough of a warchest to hobble most potential competitors, and to have undue influence in wider society thanks to its control of critical sectors. Going by market cap doesn't measure a company's pervasiveness, but it measures its sheer economic power.

merrywhether 5y ago

I wouldn’t be surprised if the response was a Chrome-esque “drown the competition in feature velocity” approach. iMessage could add new features (with totally necessary payload shape updates) fast enough to prevent any integrations from working well and competing effectively. Throw in some EME-style approval-requiring binary blobs to enable decryption and a dash of CSAM-style regulation compliance and open vs closed won’t really matter (like we’ve seen on the web so far).

soperj 5y ago
Hopefully regulators catch on to that crap.
pmontra 5y ago
They can do that as long as they keep the interoperability. Text with UTF8 emojis should be enough to start with. Actually I expect the usual outrage about limiting innovation or threats to leave the EU but consider that this interoperability is also a moat especially if they agree on some complicated protocol with no previous implementation.
paxys 5y ago
I'd say that's a feature not a bug. Let iMessage roll out exploding balloons and whatever else they want in every update. I want to use my own client which should just stay compatible with the core functionality – sending lines of text back and forth. And if they are deliberately breaking existing third-party apps for no reason, well I'm sure EU courts would like to have a word.

Throwaway197401 5y ago

cabalamat 5y ago

Should mandate interoperability for all social media.

tyrfing 5y ago
Seems like it does, but the size restrictions are crafted so it only applies to Facebook/Meta and not any of the smaller platforms.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Interoperability is great but how is this going to affect end-to-end encryption? Will every app be required to support it?