Yep down for me too.

They want to show off what would happen if someone else would be hosting them? /s...

Mark Zuckerberg Outside "Senators see how many lives and business depends on Messenger" ?

Mark Zuckerberg Inside "Fak how many advertisement money and user data we lost due to this outage."

When did FB geoblock users in the US?

isn't signal better?

End of next week Lol

+1 for Matrix. Just needs some more polished clients

Applies to every messenger

It was edited.

why wire and not lockdown? why lockdown and not matrix? why matrix and not IRC on a self-hosted server? why IRC and not HF packet radio why HF packet radio and not OTP notes on flashpaper delivered by carrier pigeon?

this is the current problem i have with chat. there are too many options.

I've been using Wire for a few years and the experience is solid. No need for phone numbers anymore, just @handle, and it does multi-device encryption and backup. Its search is very fast, even for large number of messages. Good support for attachments and superb audio and video.

On the flip side, it's not very customizable and doesn't have a lot of the more "modern" UX goodies like emoji reactions or threads. But it's overall very good and I see no reason to change.

Oh, don't worry the Windows client is still crap as well. A few months ago I couldn't even launch from the Start menu and install was hanging until I found some obscure reference to deleting registry keys, a process which I haven't had to do for years.

Back in the old days I was in the registry daily.

A quick check didn't lead me to a single reproducible iOS app. What are you currently using?

This, unfortunately. Matrix (Element) is ever so sloowly getting there, it's slightly better than Signal now in some areas and worse in others, but neither (nor whatsapp or any other messenger) come close to Telegram.

Wire is also a good contender but they seem to have found that if you don't sell user data, there is little money to be made from personal accounts and are focusing more on business accounts. You can still register and use it as an individual, though (and I continue to do so). It has more features than Signal and isn't funded by Facebook so that's a plus, but the UX is slightly worse than Signal.

Makes you wonder what Telegram is going to make money with though. It's a huge liability for me, just so damn convenient... Need to find a better alternative.

I like the UX of whatsapp / messenger.

Also, telegram isn’t private either afaik.

In terms of contact info.. I kind of like knowing who I’m talking with

My bad, sorry

I think he is referring to the Justice Department

Every social network application expands until it has the features of Facebook, or is replaced by ones which can.

I wish they didn't discard the encryption on SMS, at least there's still Silence.

I sincerely hope that AS3356 hasn't broken a big chunk of the Internet again.

https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/CenturyLink+Outage+Causing...

https://www.zdnet.com/article/centurylink-outage-led-to-a-3-...

I stand corrected :)

Any info on what network/operator/operator/etc is suffering the issue? (just so people know about it if it's public, i don't see anything on HN at least)

Thanks, and good luck!

I wish Telegram secret conversations carried over to multiple devices. This is a thing I don't have to worry about with Signal or WhatsApp.

Yup. I used Signal for several years but moved away from it. It just was not a great product.

Is Signal's desktop experience still an electron app?

That's the role of staffers, though the rise of the lobbying industry has perverted this somewhat.

Some folks in congress are savvy about technology however, such as Wyden.

This isn’t new. Telephone infrastructure, power grid, roads and railways in some countries are using this exact pattern with some success.

Telegram doesn't use any encryption for groups. It uses encryption only in 1:1 chats when you specifically request it.

> there's a time frame within which you're expected to be promoted to a certain level

What happens if you don’t? You get fired or put on a PIP?

I can share to Signal or contacts-via-Signal, and have been for years... I think this is a you problem.

Signal is honestly fantastic as a SMS-replacement app. It sends Signal messages to contacts with Signal and normal SMS to contacts without (Telegram might do the same thing, being able to set it as your default SMS app, I'm not sure).

On android, I see signal right next to all of the other messaging apps when sharing a photo or some other type of supported file.

> Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.

So, I get you here and what you're saying. But companies at this scale argue they're "independently managed" or whatever.

With that context, for Facebook, there's really no way of saying that these 3 different brands are independent when it comes down to it.

It'd be much like Procter & Gamble saying their 100s of brands were all really different institutional entities.

> convincing the European Commission in 2014 that there is no technical way to integrate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp user accounts.

What was the argument there? It's not like that's solving the halting problem.

I am not sure why a shared messaging infrastructure implies merging accounts is easy/possible. It's fully possible to have messages pass on a common infrastructure between different entities that correspond to messenger/whatsapp accounts.

I'm not saying I necessarily believe facebook here, but I don't understand how they are contradicting themselves here.

Yes

> > Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.

> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.

Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.

The biggest challenge for the antitrust lawyers in this case will be to outline consumer harm. In more traditional cases harm is measured in dollars. Here it will have to be measured in privacy, free speech, etc. And that’s a much harder case to make. I even wonder if it’s possible to argue that services for which you don’t pay (Fb, Insta, and Whatsapp) and that are not essential can be considered monopolistic.

Root Cause Analysis has determined that solar flares, which come from the Sun, are the reason any life exists on Earth. Without the sun, no technical evolution would have occurred and no outage in Facebook's infrastructure would have happened.

> causing minor shortwave blackouts

Yeah I see the statement a lot on international forums like HN and Reddit of "SMS is still a thing? No one uses it!" But it's highly cultural. I only use WhatApp for two friends in Europe. Most of my friends here in the US use Facebook Messenger for our group chats. My iPhone-using friends use iMessage, but if I'm communicating with an Android-using friend, it's just plain SMS. I prefer more robust platforms but I also send hundreds of plain SMS messages each month. It's just easier than trying to figure out if they're on WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, Discord, Telegraph, Hello/Allo/Duo/etc... everyone has SMS and everyone has a phone number so it's the lowest friction way to communicate.

That's what I love about these forums, is getting the cultural experiences of other people and finding out they're not always the same as your experiences. Very eye-opening.

The Chicago School has a bad case of thinking with their assumptions, instead of thinking to check their assumptions.

> Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years

>Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook

Then why did Facebook buy Instagram, instead whipping up some python code on their own if it's so easy?

I would conclude they bought them to be anti-competitive.

Parts of IG in the early days involved filters on iOS, which at the time there was no library for. My understanding. The web version was Django, yes.

There are technical limits to how much sarcasm can be understood as such on the Internet.

Narrator: It was not

nope. proper and full implementation of BCP38, MANRS, full RPKI validation of all IP ranges and such is a long distance away.

within trusted groups of ISPs where the admins all know each other, in certain specific geographic regions, it's better than others.. I would say that the number of ISPs I could call "fully compliant" with current best practices, in the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver area, is higher than in many other parts of the world.

To be fair, BGP only runs between large network operators. The security / trust of routing agreements is mostly solved through business deals and contracts.

Right, I understand. It's still encrypted, though, just not in a way that you like.

Yes that was a defense. Explorer.exe and IE were intimately tied together. Remember “active desktop”? You could make your Windows desktop background a web page. Crazy times...

I don't think MS said it was bundled in the kernel, but it is true that parts of IE are tied into the OS (or at least used to be) in the form of mshtml and jscript.

To be fair IE crashing would take out the whole OS.

It's a lame excuse anyway. They could have just hidden the IE symbol, deactivating auto-open with IE and it would have been fine.

I acknowledge that it is not the standard tech definition. From a user perspective, 'Encryption' ought to mean only me and the person/people whom I communicate with can read the message.

Exactly. Sadly they didn't hold their promises

No, Instagram had a thriving mobile user base. Facebook was getting demolished by Twitter in this area at the time. FB knew the future was mobile

Hmmm? Telegram founder is a sharholder in VK from what heard from people from Russia and Ukraine.

Please say more!

> How many people can you reach with WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger?

99% of all the ones I care about to be honest.

Maybe it's a function of me being an eastern-european expat living in London, but almost every here (Europe) uses WhatsApp.

In Europe, Whatsapp is ubiquitous. FB Messenger and iMessage are pretty rare here.

Edit: looks like I was wrong. I'm in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands and our neighbouring countries, Whatsapp is ubiquitous, so I presumed the rest of Europe was the same. I guess this proves that assumption is the mother of all failures.

Well my mom knows how to use WhatsApp. All the women in her knitting club are using it to stay in touch with their grandkids.

She probably doesn't know what an SMS is (those are those things her bank sends her, right?).

In India, WhatsApp is the gateway to Internet for millions as many of its users wouldn't have ever opened a browser or received an email.

WhatsApp new version updates gets prime time News spot in even prominent, respected News channel.

Social structures are being built on WhatsApp here, Relatives get offended when you don't join their WhatsApp groups, people don't believe when you say that you don't use WhatsApp, Package disptach details from eCommerce arrive through WhatsApp(no permissions asked) and of course spam arrives through WhatsApp(Local shops wish for your birthday because you signed up for that damn discount card 10 years ago).

A lot more than with SMS. You can send someone an SMS but they are not going to respond because either they cost money or they have some tiny allowance of them.

> How many people can you reach with SMS?

Essentially no-one as we've all stopped trading actual phone numbers years ago.

I agree completely. My mom still doesn't really understand the difference between phone calls, calls over Facebook Messenger, and calls over FaceTime