<story><title>Whatsapp: Video Calling</title><url>https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000629/WhatsApp-Video-Calling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sschueller</author><text>Same day we have this article &amp;quot;Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps (npr.org)&amp;quot; in the front page of HN.&lt;p&gt;I know Facebook claims to use Whisper systems encryption but how can we blindly trust that this is actually implemented in a closed source system?&lt;p&gt;Stallman and others have been warning us for many years and we have been brushing it off. Now Snowden pretty much confirmed most of it but we keep going and entangling our wold more into these services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cyph0n</author><text>There are two things that make me trust WhatsApp more than the competition:&lt;p&gt;1. In the UAE, where VoIP is illegal, the government was not able to selectively block voice traffic since it is indistinguishable from text traffic. So they had to ask WhatsApp to block voice functionality whenever a user is in the UAE.&lt;p&gt;2. If you lose your phone, you cannot recover your messages. Now, you may claim that they&amp;#x27;re just not providing a frontend option to do this, but would that make financial sense? You are potentially losing users who want their messages backed up so you can... falsely claim that you don&amp;#x27;t store messages?&lt;p&gt;3. Similar to 2), WhatsApp desktop cannot work without your phone being connected, again because that&amp;#x27;s the only way to access your messages.</text></comment>
<story><title>Whatsapp: Video Calling</title><url>https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000629/WhatsApp-Video-Calling</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sschueller</author><text>Same day we have this article &amp;quot;Internet Freedom Wanes as Governments Target Messaging, Social Apps (npr.org)&amp;quot; in the front page of HN.&lt;p&gt;I know Facebook claims to use Whisper systems encryption but how can we blindly trust that this is actually implemented in a closed source system?&lt;p&gt;Stallman and others have been warning us for many years and we have been brushing it off. Now Snowden pretty much confirmed most of it but we keep going and entangling our wold more into these services.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Nux</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s simple. People are oblivious or just don&amp;#x27;t give a shit.
As long as they can share their cat pictures and so on, it&amp;#x27;s all fucking dandy.&lt;p&gt;Something really bad needs to happen to move things in the right direction. Snowden was not enough, clearly.</text></comment>