Tag Archives: internet

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We have to trust you

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Many times I read articles where high executives of companies swear that the information that passes through cloud services is never handed out to governmental agencies. They use technical terms as end-to-end encryption or whatever mechanism with a fancy name we come with.

The thing is that as long as information travels through one of their servers, using the provided clients on your side, anything could happen: they could read it, store it or do whatever they want with it. There is no way that we can verify that they effectively use end-to-end encryption, or check that the client on our devices works as it is claimed. Think that the client could keep a record of your communication and transfer it at some time using some clever techniques to not raise any suspicions on the activity.

Image from 1-fix.com

I know it sounds like science fiction, but it is feasible. This is independently of whether the software is open source or not. Even when you use open source software, there is no way to guarantee that the software you are running matches the source code you see posted publicly. You would have to at least compile everything from scratch and deploy it to your environment. This is something that very rarely happens. Most of the time, especially with smartphones, you will have to install proprietary software (so-called blobs) to make your device run.

The message I want to bring is that you should not buy any claims of ‘we don’t read your messages’ coming from a recognised CEO. What it should be clear in your mind is that we have no other choice than to trust in the claims of the guy. Whether he is being honest or not, we would probably never know.

Some articles about what I mean:

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Whatsapp: annoyingly limited

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Whatsapp is a really limited messaging platform. It is a plain extension of the combo SMS/MMS that runs on the internet connection on your smartphone. Here is a list of annoying features of the service:

  • You user ID is your phone number. Just as with SMS or MMS, someone can only address you if that someone has your number and it is a Whatsapp user.
  • The service can only run on any internet-enabled phone. This is probably the most clear advantage over competitor services: it can handle almost any recent and modern mobile OS. However, it misses key devices such a phone without a phone subscription, tablets (even the ones running the supported OSes) and a classic PC.
  • Single association device-user ID. A user ID can only be available on a single device and that device can only handle a single user ID. Related to the previous bullet, one would like to take a lengthy chat to a more comfortable typing device such as a PC.
  • Messages lost at a device swap. Although it is possible to backup your message history and put it into a new device, the procedure certainly requires some technical skills, and may not be always possible (forget it if you go from Android to iOS).
  • No major differences to legacy messaging services. The service allows sending text, pictures, audio and video clips, your location and a contact card. It supports group messaging, just as MMS. And that’s it. It certainly misses some key services such as voice or video calls. Any decent messaging service nowadays does this by default.
  • Does not synchronises your contact information. It’s a terrible failure of the service in my opinion. Especially when you get into a group conversation for which you do not have some of the phone numbers of the participants. You will have to engage in a awkward name request.

Popularity is certainly due to the platform ubiquity: almost anyone with a decent phone can enjoy the service. This is crucial factor especially in developing countries were feature phones are the most common ones.

You may think that mobile operators will be against a competitor of the (sometimes unexplainably expensive) SMS or MMS. However, given the fact that the service can only run on internet-enabled phones, mobile carriers have a nice handle to lure you into data subscriptions. Otherwise, you will only use the service when you are on a Wi-Fi which may be frustrating for you and your contacts.

I personally prefer cloud-based messengers which keep the whole messaging history in the cloud to access it whenever you like. Not only that, you can roam through all the devices you have and move on with the conversation.

The time will tell how the service will evolve under Facebook’s umbrella.

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Cheaper but more fragmented communication

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There are a few standard ways of communication that established for quite some time. The most popular are: telephone, SMS and e-mail. Common to these three examples is that they are quite universal in the sense that almost everyone in the world has access to one of this and that they offer you a good reachability. Another trend is that the costs to use them are just plummeting on a day-to-day basis. From a historical perspective these have been conceived more than 40 years ago at least. It is quite remarkable that we still use them.

With the rise of the Internet and the ubiquity of it, many modern ways to communicate have emerged. Think of the social networking platform of your choice which can get you in touch with almost everyone you have ever meet in person in this planet. Even those people that you barely remember. Today, it is quite feasible to make a multi-video conference from practically any point in the planet with state of art infrastructure as a pre-requisite.

The point I want to make here is the ‘of your choice’ that I put in the previous paragraph. Unfortunately the people who want to connect with each other have to explicitly agree on the social network system that they will use to carry out the interaction.

This is the main issue: these modern systems do not talk to each other. If you have a friend using system X and you use system Y, there is no way that you can talk, unless you both are on the same system. This is like if you would have a mobile phone of brand Z, you would not able to communicate with others not owning a mobile phone of the same brand. The analogy is quite blunt but illustrates clearly what is happening with the social network systems today.

The result is that everyone has to register to many services to keep in touch with people they have contact with. It is just amazing that the big titans of the Internet cannot sit down and agree on a unique platform that allows everyone to be touch with each other while having all the benefits of the now state of art communication tools.

That is why I have to use Facebook, Whatsapp, Hangouts, Viber, Google+, Skype; although I’m not fond of all of these…