Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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The EUâs Digital Markets Act (DMA) is set to become law; it will require the biggest tech companies in the world (Apple, Google and Facebook, and maybe a few others) to open up their instant messaging services (iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and maybe a few others) so that smaller messaging services can plug into them. These smaller services might be run by startups, nonprofits, co-ops, or even individual tinkerers.
The logic behind this is sound. IM tools are the ultimate ânetwork effectsâ products: once they have a critical mass of users, other users feel they have to join to talk to the people who are already there. The more users who sign up, the more users feel they must sign up.
Continue reading "End-To-End Encryption is Too Important to Be Proprietary"
I was wrong about Snapchat, but I was also kinda right.
When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I was both skeptical and alarmed.
Skeptical because disappearing messages have an obvious defect as a security measure: If I send you a message (or a photo) that I donât want you to have, I lose. You can remember the contents of the message, or take a screenshot, or use a separate device to photograph your screen. If I donât trust you with some information, I shouldnât send you that information.
I was wrong.
âThe rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterdayâââbut never jam to-day.â
-The Red Queen, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll)
The new, surging antitrust movement has given hope to many who yearn to throw off the yoke of Big Tech. After all, the tech giantsâ dominance was attained through solidly illegal conduct, such as anti-competitive mergers and acquisitions, predatory pricing, and price-fixing. This produced conditions in which the companies were able to engage in more flagrant illegal conduct, including unambiguous, multi-billion-dollar acts of fraud.
