Comment by drnick1
4 months ago
It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.
4 months ago
It would have been more effective to require Meta (and all other messaging companies) to implement an open protocol or open source theirs, so that people can freely write alternative clients free of malware.
A custom API is the only way for a platform to extend its native E2EE sessions and features to other platforms. Making those APIs completely open would become a major spam problem, which would likely end them up in the same situation as SMTP, where small servers are blocked-by-default by big providers.
Interoperability by agreement between legitimate messaging services, using custom APIs is the only realistic and secure way to accomplish this.
But WhatsApp is already completely open for spammers. They can use the secret API or screen-scrape WhatsApp itself.
WhatsApp bans spam pretty quickly. Unfiltered spam is much, much worse.
The sky might as well rains toads before this happens.
No, this is BS. Why? You want users for your chat app? Go get them the old fashioned way, not by anti US companies legislation.
Doesn't Whatsapp already use an open source protocol? https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
AFAIK it's Signal with proprietary extensions, so it's effectively closed.