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WhatsApp Founder Plans To Leave After Broad Clashes With Parent Facebook (washingtonpost.com)
Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporting for Washington Post: The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service's strategy and Facebook's attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions. Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, also plans to step down from Facebook's board of directors, according to these people. The date of his departure isn't known. He has been informing senior executives at Facebook and WhatsApp of his decision, and in recent months has been showing up less frequently to WhatsApp's offices on Facebook's campus in Silicon Valley, according to the people. The independence and protection of its users' data is a core tenet of WhatsApp that Koum and his co-founder, Brian Acton, promised to preserve when they sold their tiny startup to Facebook. It doubled down on its pledge by adding encryption in 2016. The data clash took on additional significance in the wake of revelations in March that Facebook had allowed third parties to mishandle its users' personal information. The move comes weeks after Brian Acton, the other co-founder of WhatsApp, urged people to delete their Facebook accounts.
Only apps can app apps, and Appbook apps AppsApp to app apps while apping other apps!
Apps!
Jan Koum is a broad? Or some other broad clashed with their parent which is causing Jan Koum to leave? Also, why are we telling Facebook about this in a Slashdot story headline?!
One of them got a job.
I would have taken the money and ran. If you're now a billionaire, take the money and run. There is no sense on being under the thumb of a careless and feckless company like FB. Time to go and pursue something else.
If this is true, then I know you have already documented the protocol (so that an alternative client can be made, which interoperate with today's version of WhatsApp) with the intent of releasing it to the public, but something unexpected has happened that is preventing you from releasing it. What happened?
It is possible to have secure chat only if people can inspect and audit and openly attack the protocol and discuss its weaknesses. If people can't do that, then they have no reason to trust it.
How strange that he only decided to stand on principle *after* becoming a billionaire by selling his users to the biggest surveillance engine on the planet.
It's so sad that Slashdot would stoop so low as to use derogatory slang terms referring to women. Shame on you.
WhatsApp is ubiquitous in my part of the world, but after Facebook bought them I knew that some day it would be not just a closed-source walled garden but also a panopticon. I just hoped it wouldn't be so soon.
Well I've installed Signal on my phone, now I just have to convince all of my contacts who are already comfortable with total privacy nightmares like Facebook Messenger to do the same. Let's see how many use Signal already. Start new conversation...oh it's just me :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't like how Signal and others require mobile phones. Not everyone has or wants one.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
what I find myself owndering is, is there something internally known that they can't talk about that is causing this exodus? or is it based all on what's already publicly known?
Really? Just try to print out or save a chat history more than a couple days old and you'll see just how much independence a user has with their data on Whatsapp.
We have a family group where family members have chatted, shared stories, pictures, etc. around one of the growing children in our family. Wouldn't it be great, I thought, to print all of that to a PDF (especially since some of those family members are no longer with us) so this little girl, when she's grown up, can see what her family were saying about her in their own voices.
It's almost impossible to do anything usable. They have an "email chat" but if you can only get the chats if you exclude media - but this won't include any text included in captions of pictures and videos. If you include media, it only goes a day or two back. Try Whatsapp Web and you can see the stuff there, but you have to keep scrolling back to the beginning, page by page, clicking on every picture to download it as you go... only to find you can't print that part of the window.
I've resorted to spending a couple hours clicking on every picture, then slowing scrolling through with a video screen-capture with the hope that some future AI will be able to pull it back apart and make a single printable document of it.
I'm desperately looking for an alternative.
It does not matter if he got his pal to "independently" review the code. It is not trustworthy
It needs to be both open and easily readable, like Signal, to have a chance at becoming trustworthy.
And I'm talking about the client and the server!
Otherwhice
no dice.
This calls for automation!
An extremely simple script, that a school child could write, would do it.
Of course, using a proper messenger that is open source, instead of making your children Facebook's livestock, would have been the actual solution.
Btw, maybe you can look up the database file(s) on your phone, and find that they are in a well-known format (like sqlite). Then you could open and process them directly. Of course you should have access to *your own* key. lol
Your spreading of that mindset is the actual main hindrance to Signal!
Just install *both*.
Everybody here did that (because we deal with abused children and things like that). This made it easy for the families of our employees and for our clients to join in.
And now we find ourself texting and often even calling everybody via Signal more often than not.
So stop backing the herd that is your own enemy, please.
WhatsApp never had any special protocol.
What made them "special" is the usage of a wrapper that actively and deliberately blocked anyone from interfacing with it. Before the Signal encryprtion was added, they even had an "encryption" that was utterly useless except for the convenient fact that it stopped 3rd party access.
Of course someone broke it and did it anyway. There were multipe libraries on Github. But then they deliberately changed the protocol to prevent that. And had their lawyers send them letters too. All long before the Signal security layer got added.
WhatsApp was just a bog standard XMPP client, likely made by ripping off some existing open source project, processed by the minds of dog-eat-dog-society psychopaths typical for Sillicon Valley.
So fuck them.
All this says is "Help, we're losing users! Let's *act* like we are social actual human beings!".