As much as I love IRC, it is fundamentally incompatible with the way people use
IM these days. Even if you gloss over the lack of "modern" features, you're
still going to have a very hard time with vanilla IRC on mobile where keeping a
persistent background socket open is frowned upon (if not outright illegal).
Don't get me wrong - I love IRC, and have used it as my primary social network
for years. And after spending a full decade trying to switch people over to open
protocols, I've found the hard way that the network effect trumps all.
I just don't see the average Whatsapp user ever switching to IRC.
It's amazing that technology is empowering these protestors, but I'm not sure a vulnerable group of people such as this should be leaving identifying information on these servers.
- You cannot sign up for Telegram without your phone number (even if it isn't public).
- End to End encryption exists but is limited to 1-1 chats.
- Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.
The kind of risk this puts them in cannot be overstated.
That basically hits the nail on the head, but it's not the full extent of it. We have ["Jugaad" culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugaad), where we actually take pride in doing things that would be labeled outright fraud in a lot of places.
I also can't see how its changing, I've become rather cynical from having to deal with it constantly. I sure hope you're right, though.
Users who care about privacy are, quite literally, the only demographic that cares about Firefox at this point. The numbers clearly say that. I'm not even remotely versed in how to run a business, but in what twisted universe does it make sense to alienate us?
I put up with Firefox's single threaded nonsense for years, with their outright refusal to properly implement hardware acceleration for Linux, and with their clearly inferior performance. And now I find out they've got Google Analytics on a page where uBlock Origin can't even block it (at least not post FF 56), and that doesn't even respect my telemetry settings (which I've obviously disabled). Every decision they've made lately seems to be targeted at gaining the attention of people who clearly couldn't be arsed to get off Chrome if they proved it gives you cancer, instead of making it better for people who are keeping it afloat.
Congratulations, Mozilla. You've put a whole bunch of us out on the lookout for a replacement. Enjoy your descent into obscurity.
While this is nothing new, more sites like these are always welcome. If you plan on keeping this alive long term, please consider making an API so I can use it from the command line. Also, these services tend to get misused a lot, so you might want to log everything. Maybe encourage people to encrypt before uploading, too.
Take a look at a few existing services as well, to figure out what else you can add.
I wouldn't mind doing homework that is related to what they need me to do on the job. Make me code. On a real computer. With a compiler. With an internet connection. On real problems, even if they're conventionally hard to solve. I wouldn't mind rejection if I can't produce something satisfactory in a real life setting. Sometimes, they ask things that are too far removed from what they need from you, and I just don't get it.
It's not about learning algorithms. If you do the Stanford MOOC on algorithms on Coursera, which is one of the best MOOCs I've ever come across, you'll find that the instructor emphasizes understanding over rote learning and implementation details. If you understand what data structures and algorithms fit where, you can look them up and apply them as and when you need to. Memorizing every nook and cranny of CLRS so you can reproduce it quickly in an interview is a terrible waste of time, imho.
I'm tired of these "assessments". Solving contrived algorithm puzzles is not an indication of programming skills, which mostly require organizational skill. I don't know how this sort of thing became so pervasive, but as someone who has recently been burned at a few job interviews because of it, it really grinds my gears. My ability to recall and produce a correct implementation of an RB tree on a piece of paper with no compiler feedback is NOT an indication of my ability to code your ReactJS website. Just because I can't solve in five minutes some brilliant logic puzzle that the interviewer read online and made it their go-to thing to prove how smart they are does not negate years of experience writing in the Language / Framework they said they were originally looking for. I have PTSD.
I wish more companies would hire based on code that you've written, than a bunch of contrived puzzles you're supposed to know by heart so you can solve it on a whiteboard without blinking. But, since that's how the fucking system works, I'm forced to spend time committing these things to memory than writing actual code.
Glad to see this under scrutiny. A lot of websites are eager to recommend any application that claims to be secure, and it is often the case that neither the author nor the audience is equipped to make that judgment. Hopefully we'll see full fledged security audits for less popular secure messaging apps in the future.
Orkut was our go-to social network as teens, before we all moved to Facebook in 2009. I'm was going to join this out of sheer nostalgia, but it appears to be lacking a web app.
I'm curious as to why they went with ONLY native Android / iOS apps. That will not only drive away people like me, who prefer to use things from a desktop web browser, but also people in developing countries who might not have access to a smartphone. That sounds like straying away from "I want to help connect people" to something more like "I want to help connect people who own an Android / iOS device".
I know, right? They've been working on their v3 release for centuries now, but it looks like it's another few centuries away. It's a shame, because it's a really good client. I just wish development was faster.
As someone who has been using OTR/DuckDuckGo as my primary chat server since early 2014, I would recommend against it.
When it goes down, it goes down for multiple days, even a week. Prolonged outages have happened twice or thrice in the last two years, with no helpful messages from the staff. Heck, they didn't even bother announcing the outage before I posted on their community forums.
Their server stopped pushing offline messages to clients a long time ago. People complained, it still doesn't work on my end.
They said they would look into creating a status page, but we still can't tell during an outage if they know about it or not.
The bottom line is that maintaining their XMPP server is simply not a priority for them.
You should look into other providers that use better servers, and are also interested in maintaining their node.
EDIT: I'm basically asking you people to recommend a better XMPP node, somewhere you've personally had a good experience over a long period of time.
I wonder if there's going to be any noise over this outside the developer community. There was when Twitter pulled this nonsense, but their third party clients had massive followings. I, personally, have never heard of a third party Instagram client.
This has happened with so many services over the years, that one would think developers would be more enthusiastic about educating the end user with libre software. I do that aggressively with people I know. Too much to ask?
I've been following OwnCloud for years, and the one thing that has kept me from using it is the lack of delta sync. This fork has piqued my curiosity again. Is delta sync going to be a priority for NextCloud?
Does this work on localhost? Apart from the increased privacy, it sounds like this would also improve offline web development. I could be offline, and still have all the CDNJS libraries on the page load correctly.
I came here for this exact thing. They said they were going to go open source in 2014 IIRC, and failed to deliver. I have stopped using SpiderOak - how am I supposed to trust them with my most private files when I can't verify that they're not doing anything shady on my machine?
The opening line of this post is amusing. They ought to give thought to fixing their core product first.
If I were to list all the great bands/music I discovered on Grooveshark, and all the music from my childhood that I rediscovered, I would surely run into some kind of comment length limit here.
"In truth, the man was an oathbreaker, a deserter from the Night’s Watch. No man is more dangerous. The deserter knows his life is forfeit if he is taken, so he will not flinch from any crime, no matter how vile."
~ Ned Stark, A Game of Thrones.
I think that pathetic blog post where they tried to justify their actions made one thing clear - SourceForge knows how dead they are. No amount of internet outrage is going to help, they don't think they've got anything to lose at this point.
The best thing to do at this point would be to speed up their demise. If you're a developer that still hosts with them, delete your project and move to Github or Bitbucket.
Don't get me wrong - I love IRC, and have used it as my primary social network for years. And after spending a full decade trying to switch people over to open protocols, I've found the hard way that the network effect trumps all.
I just don't see the average Whatsapp user ever switching to IRC.