Comment by neves
8 hours ago
Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.
It's not a technical problem. It's a political one
8 hours ago
Man, this is just a message app. It's trivial. The law must mandate it to work.
It's not a technical problem. It's a political one
Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.
The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).
> It's not a technical problem
How do you do encryption?
A probable implementation is that you bootstrap the initial key exchange using web PKI (if you want to talk to Alice@example.com then your client makes a TLS connection to example.com and asks for Alice's public key) and thereafter you use something like the Signal ratchet thing.
That technical solution is significant and unsolved. I don’t think it would likely work without some major new standards either.
Serving 2+ billion daily users is a technical challenge at least