Well, that tech really progressed fucking fast. We went from calculators being a huge industry of mechanical and electro-mechanical monsters to wristwatch calculators sold for 20 bucks in like a couple decades.
Go look at asianometry for some interesting videos on the matter
They profit through the 30% cut on any software sale. The cost equation for online subscriptions is as follows:
“Can we get away with it?” “Yes we can” The end.
On PC they can’t get away with it because there’s no single company controlling everything, so you either get every single company asking for an online subscription, you find other ways to monetize. Closest so far is Microsoft’s game subscription thingy and others like that. It’s not the same, but I’m pretty sure that’s the only way they’ve managed to convince enough people to pay a subscription on PC for now.
You are right, we don’t and can’t know if any of what Meta says is true, but at least on the surface it seems to check out. If they are stealing your private key and unlocking all your chats in secret, then they are doing a bloody good job, since no one has leaked anything yet.
Just to clear things a bit, in your analogy you don’t hand the courier both the chest and the key. The chest has a special keypad that accepts two keys, one is your key, the other is the recipient’s key. What you do is you lock the chest with your key and then give it to the courier, which will deliver the chest to the other party, which will then open the chest with his key. In theory the courier never had access to the key.
Now the issues are that you are indeed writing your message from within the Whatsapp building and you can never know if there cameras watching you or not. You also cannot know if Whatsapp has made a copy of your key, or the recipient’s key without your knowledge.
As for how can you recover all your chat history even after you destroy your phone, it’s quite easy and Whatsapp doesn’t need to know anything in particular. The functionality allows you to make a backup and store it on Google Drive. That backup gets encrypted with your password and it’s probably the most secure thing of all, if nothing else because Meta would gain nothing from the backup having poor security (as it would already have all the data if they wanted it) while it would only make them loose face, plus would allow anyone else to gain access to all ~~your ~~their data. After you restore the backup on a new device a new key+padlock pair gets created and the lock gets shared to all your contacts (which will see the yellow box telling them your padlock has changed).
I’m not claiming it doesn’t have privacy issues mind you, I’m just saying that you can’t be sure either way, unfortunately. Still, better than Telegram that doesn’t even encrypt most of your chats.
Initially you could only log in from one device, as it created a new private key every time you switched device. Then they implemented Whatsapp Web, which essentially required the primary device to be connected to the internet, the chats would then be transferred from the primary device to the secondary devices (I assume through an encrypted tunnel of some sorts). Then as of late they have implemented a new technology that allows you to share your private key among multiple devices, making them all the “primary device”. The chat history and all the messages can be shared from one device to another while encrypted. The weak spot at one point was the chat backup, which was unencrypted and stored in your Google Drive, so technically Google could have had access to all your chats. Today though, you can encrypt the backup through a password.
In theory Whatsapp has never needed to read your chats to have the functionality it has. That’s in theory because it’s closed source and we cannot know anything for certain. All this is just what Meta/Whatsapp said or pure speculation.
Yeah, proper documentation is not done with comments in code, but it’s a project in and of itself. Proper documentation is also fucking hard and I have no idea how people (in open source projects) can do it. It’s so fucking boring and tedious, especially when there are a million interesting problems you could tackle instead. Mad respect for people writing documentation, seriously.
I also hate writing comments and prefer to just write out everything in code.
I’m one of the ten men, I’m just a worker like anyone else here, I can just use the little grey matter I have to try and understand the world and look at it with more objective eyes, instead of killing anyone who disagrees with me.
Fucking fascist pos. If you want to kill families go to Russia or Israel and look at how fun it is.
That’s called a cooperative, they exist. You share both the profits and the risks of the enterprise. Not all enterprises succeed. Also, some of the men need to be the managers, accountants, sales etc. It’s not just about the factory workers.
Otherwise, more indirectly, they could be the shareholders of the company. Some companies even use shares as payment for their managers and top employees in order to encourage them to improve the profits of the company.
Otherwise they could just be both the owners and the only people working at a company. If the machine ends up generating lots of profits, they could all ten decide to retire and live off those profits while hiring an eleventh person to operate the machine, or they could reinvest in the company, buy even more machines, hire more people and bring in even more profits, like a complex game of cookie clicker.
Choose the one you prefer and try making it a reality if you want that.
“I’ve made bought a machine that does the labor of 10 men!”
“You’re going to still pay the other nine, right?”
“Why? I bought it to get more of the money to myself. Why would I pay for something and get nothing in return? Why would I just lose money for no reason?”
Seriously though, the dynamics are pretty clear, there’s no investment without the expectation for extra profit (even for a state. Invest in a new railroad with the expectation of higher economic activity and therefore more taxes). Otherwise it’s just charity
Yup, and, aside from the fact that humans were never made to do or be anything by anyone, but just evolved by chance, I still can’t recall a moment in our shared collective history when most people alive were bohemian artists, traveling all the time and having lots of creative hobbies and aspirations.
Afaik we went from barely surviving on what we could hunt and gather to barely surviving in the farms of the nobles, to barely surviving in the factories of the masters, to at least having some level of food security (at least in the developed world). I don’t remember a time when we were better off than now, with more free time and more security.
Not even in Stalin’s Russia or Castro’s Cuba were most people living the idyllic bohemian life everyone here seems to be clamoring for.
I do care about wrongdoings of any country. The issues with police violence, racial discrimination and gun violence in the US are not a secret. You are not the first one talking about that. Everyone in the west talks about that, it’s now the first thing most people think of when talking about the US in the west.
That being said, I don’t understand why, when anyone even tries to say “China bad” the answer is always “but America is also bad”. Why does that make it right?