Instant messaging is more complicated than you'd think. Sending a message from one device to another seems simple, but it's hard; especially on mobile. NAT, Firewalls, smartphone battery optimisation are all technical challenges, but then you also got user expectations. Users expect to see the same messages in the same order on every device. They want to be able to send photos, files, locations, voice messages and much more. On top of all that, full end to end encryption is a must have nowadays. Especially if you let average people run their own servers.
Matrix seems overly complex, but once you attempt to reinvent it, you end up with the same level of complexity.
#Cybersecurity#Telegram#Messaging#Geolocation: "A recently launched tool allows anyone to search a specific set of coordinates for Telegram users that have a certain setting enabled, and then plot their approximate physical location on a map, according to 404 Media’s own tests. The tool, dubbed “Close-Circuit Telegram Vision” or CCTV, piggybacks off an intended feature of Telegram called “Find People Nearby” which is disabled by default. The typical purpose of that feature is to find other Telegram users nearby to the current user’s physical location. The new tool, meanwhile, lets anyone search globally for people who have the setting turned on.
The news presents a recontextualization of data which users may consent to being available in one context, but which is now being presented in another.
“They have a protection mechanism but it's not enough to protect,” Ivan Glinkin, a cybersecurity professional and creator of CCTV, said in an online chat."
#SocialMedia#SocialNetworks#ContentModeration#Algorithms#RecommendationEngines#Messaging: "So you joined a social network without ranking algorithms—is everything good now? Jonathan Stray, a senior scientist at the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI, has doubts. “There is now a bunch of research showing that chronological is not necessarily better,” he says, adding that simpler feeds can promote recency bias and enable spam.
Stray doesn’t think social harm is an inevitable outcome of complex algorithmic curation. But he agrees with Rogers that the tech industry’s practice of trying to maximize engagement doesn’t necessarily select for socially desirable results.
Stray suspects the solution to the problem of social media algorithms may in fact be … more algorithms. “The fundamental problem is you've got way too much information for anybody to consume, so you have to reduce it somehow,” he says."
#CyberSecurity#Surveillance#Encryption#Messaging: "The current crop of suggestions seem to concede that governments shouldn’t have direct access. Instead, they want services to backdoor themselves and act as gatekeepers to law enforcement. That’s not an improvement; it’s still centralized, and it makes these companies responsible for any misuse of the data that they have access to, requiring everyone on the planet to trust a few big tech companies with our private and most intimate conversations – hardly a direction that society wants to go in in 2024. ‘Trust me, I’m in charge’ is a poor model of governance or security.
These ‘solutions’ also ignore the reality that the ‘bad guys’ will just use other tools to communicate; information is information. That will leave law abiding people giving up their privacy and security for little societal gain." https://www.mnot.net/blog/2024/04/29/power