Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end Encryption for Allo

Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by dave2000 on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @04:41PM (#11725744)

I don't use chrome for a number of reasons, the main one being I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't support the blocking of ads, and on Android there are no plugins at all, and given that I use firefox on multiple desktops, all syncing passwords, tabs etc, I'm not about to make an exception for this or that chrome-only feature. I have no idea why chrome doesn't support plugins on Android; they said they'd do it years ago.

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Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by colemickens on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @10:19PM (#11727493)

>the main one being I can't imagine using a browser which doesn't support the blocking of ads

This hasn't been true for... ~6 years? And even then, it could block them, it just couldn't block their network download until... like 6 years ago or longer.

>I have no idea why chrome doesn't support plugins on Android; they said they'd do it years ago.

Chrome is removing all support for all plugins [see the deprecation policy they're about to introduce for Flash], but I suspect you're talking about extensions. I suspect they're coming very, very soon. They've been changing the desktop extension UI slightly and slowly and I suspect it's about enabling extensions on other form factors.

Not to mention this discussion is about using an app written for Chrome, not about somehow being forced to use Chrome for day-to-day browsing. I could (and do) use Chrome apps at times without actually using Chrome. I flip flop between Chrome and Firefox for months sometimes.

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Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by newjersey on Wednesday May 18, 2016 @05:58PM (#11726328)

Why would you have to use Chrome? You just need Chrome as a platform to launch your chrome app...

I don't get it

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Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by dave2000 on Thursday May 19, 2016 @02:48AM (#11728502)

Why would I want to use a browser to do non broswery things? It's bad enough that we have to use browsers in the first place. Wouldn't we be better starting from scratch and developing a secure, standards-friendly way of deploying text, images and video rather than taking something which was designed to display just text and try and make it useful?

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Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by egjerlow on Thursday May 19, 2016 @07:34AM (#11729387)

Any ideas?

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Re:Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end E... by newjersey on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:39AM (#11730554)

I don't really have any ideas. Software distribution should be a solved problem by now but even if we limit ourselves to GNU/Linux on x86-64 computers, we can't agree on a distribution mechanism. We are all over the place from the blessed apt and yum to oh just curl this url and pipe it to sh (I am a n00b so I may have said it incorrectly). There is no good way to make sure everyone gets updated. It is a mess.

I am typing this on Mozilla Firefox but I can see the draws of Chrome as a platform. I personally love the distraction that working on the plumbing on different platform involves but I would rather the people who work on secure communications -- that journalists, politicians, and policy makers, and social influencers in general can trust with their lives -- not be distracted by the fun plumbing.

The way I see it, we have to abstract it at some level. If systems folks can't agree on a standard, then applications will standardize on apps that live on top of them.

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