WhatsApp confirmed that ads are coming to the status part of the app!

Fucking finally.

What? Do I like ads? Oh no, I quit WhatsApp when Facebook bought it.

I just know some people who'll leave (mostly for Signal, some for telegram or wire) it the second the ads show up for the first time and I'd love to see people leaving WhatsApp (especially in my country).

Hurry the fuck up with those ads, Facebook!

Whatsapp is shit and was shit long before FB bought it. Never understood how people can use that atrocious app

Best news today after hearing my whole team being fired because of restructuring the company.

(I still have work since I was there as external person)

I switched to Telegram and signal too. Whatsapp is gone, but most of my friends still use it :/

They'll camouflage it so it "blends in" I hate WhatsCrap. I use it because my University programme group is on it.

@git-fuckyou Oh no I left telegram as well, just a few years later haha :)

@sid-sun I use it on my company-issued phone, except for that in my private life, hell no haha

@linuxxx well I use Telegram, because of the bot api ^^

And signal for private chats for sure

@git-fuckyou Haha, fair enough. I use signal for bots as well (although those are self hosted)

@sid-sun next plan : move class groups to telegram?

@yashovardhan99 I wish I could but they don't wish to leave WhatsCrap :(

@sid-sun Well, as for encryption/security, WhatsApp is better than telegram.

People will sure move towards telegram

@elonmusk Yo Elon, long time no see.. what do you say we catch up tomorrow at breakfast?

@sid-sun sure thing. I was busy with paying fines. :)

@elonmusk Ah; yeah. If you need any help with that, lemme know. I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a gal. 👍😁

@sid-sun nah! I already confronted those bastards. :)

@elonmusk Great! Kudos. See ya tomorrow!

People leaving for different platforms will still suck.

As much as I hate people contacting me on what’s app or obsessing over WhatsApp, at least it was a universal platform.

Trying to get people to stick to one platform can be a bitch.

Telegram is one of my favourite apps. It does have issues on occasion but its features are really good.

Maybe eventually we will end up with WhatsApp inserting ads into conversations...

Uninstalled, thanks for the info!

I am trying to get people to move to Telegram and Threema for ages now.

Thanks to Facebook, I have a whole sack full of fresh arguments now.

I was right 😊

@Yamakuzure same here

@Yamakuzure Tbh I'd treat threema the same as WhatsApp 😬

@makmm it has to ask for the phone number, otherwise your contacts couldn’t find you. If you want to go full anonymously try Briar

@linuxxx why? I always thought that Threema was for the real tinfoil hat wearers.

@Yamakuzure Rule number one for trusting a messaging app in the slightest: it's got to be open source (otherwise you can't verify anything). Threema is closed so you can't verify shit about what they claim. (telegram is open but horrible as for security/privacy)

@makmm you can always create a fork 😛

@linuxxx well, if it is open source, everybody can get a good close look at the encryption algorithms they use. I guess every medal has two sides.

@Yamakuzure you need the keys to decrypt the message. You might cut down on the time to crack the message if you know the algorithm but still it would take time in the magnitude of years. So knowing the algorithm poses no threat to the security of the app.

@HarleyQuinn or you fork and create a fake that stores everything on your server before it gets encrypted and send to the peer, or after it got decrypted after receiving from the peer.
Not that this didn't happen before...
You only need to bring one fake into somebodies network to get it all.

@Yamakuzure And that's the entire point. There have been backdoors in proprietary algorithms and with some of those, we still don't know who holds the key to decrypt everything that's been encrypted by them.

Problem is that at least in some country's, intelligence agencies can lawfully demand backdoors in messaging apps.

There's no way to know if they in there if the code isn't open.
Plus: if the code is open, it can be peer reviewed (independently)!

@linuxxx So at the end of the day, it doesn't matter...
Peer code review is a null argument. Truecrypt has proven that.

However, just to get this straight: I prefer open source myself. 😉

@Yamakuzure Oh so let's ban all cars, they're so dangerous you could die in them while having an accident, the first deadly car accident proved that a long time ago!

This is definitely not a null argument. The UK has shown this with their backdoor law and Australia is coming soon with their decryption law.

How could I trust a piece of software which is focused on security and privacy while one can't even verify it's doing what it says it does?

Perfect example appeared on a Dutch news site today: Samsung sells harddrives (or ssd's...?) with built in hardware encryption which quite some business use to keep their data secure and they trust the technology (although its proprietary).

Students from a Dutch university reverse engineered the firmware: horribly insecure, not even close to a secure solution (hell, the crypto key is stored in plain text on the damn chip at delivery time) and more bullshit like that.

But, Samsung is a big brand and the code is not reviewable/public so they trusted the company.

@linuxxx you gotta love tweakers :D

@Codex404 Haha you found the article as well I see :D

@linuxxx You are avoiding the truth. Just because the source is open, there is no guarantee for qualified reviews. You can understand the inner workings? Fine! Like about 0.001% of all the apps users.
What about the other 99.999%?
They have to do the same as ever: trust the developers.

However, that was not my point, and I apologize for unintentionally upsetting you.

My point was that I planned to substitute WhatsApp with Telegram/Threema.
Obviously that wasn't a sound plan at all.
I never wanted to start a flame war. (*) I am too old for such childish rubbish.

So a suggestion for an alternative would be nice.
"Signal" was mentioned. Never heard of that, so I'll check it out.

(*) If something I write sounds like flame bait, it was meant as a joke or an honest question. I never flame bait, at least intentionally.

@davenall a world where no one is reading the source code of a widely used application is non existent. Both security specialist as hobbyists as hackers will go through the code.

@davenall trusting 10 independent people is better than trusting one profit oriented company.

And 10 people looking at it is so little compared to the real numbers.

@Yamakuzure Oh don't worry, you need much more to upset me by now haha.

I'm just saying that its hard to trust an application when the code can't publicly be reviewed.

Use whatever you like! It just might be useful to know the motivation/arguments behind peoples opinions on those :)

@davenall But unless you're a crypto expert, what does it help you, isn't the security theoretically? This "all bugs are shallow for many eyeballs" is a nice idea, but even critically important projects like OpenSSL are underfunded and now even community dispersed to Libre-/boring/whatever-SSL... And then in the end you also need to trust that the apps' binaries are actually build from the code supplied online (or do you want to reverse it yourself?)

@linuxxx After reading up a lot about Telegram and Signal, I have decided to go with the latter.
Signal *has* been audited several times, and the security in Telegram is a hacked together joke.

Thanks alot for making me question my initial plan! 👍

@Yamakuzure Much welcomes!