Larry Page commenting about it at I/O 2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pmPa_KxsAM&t=2h54m20s
Strategist commenting about it: http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategie...
Microsoft's one-way integration was them not exposing presence and typing notifications to services they federated with (but they were "taking" that data from others).
(Talking about web and native APIs)
> And I think that we've really invested a lot in the open standards behind all that
> I've been personally quite sad at the industry's behavior around all these things
> If you just take something as simple as instant messaging
> We've kind of had an offer forever that we'll interoperate on instant messagoing
> I think just this week Microsoft took advantage of that by interoperating with us but not doing the reverse
> Which is really sad, right?
> And that's not the way to make progress
However, if no one else is doing that, if no one else is playing fair (like Microsoft accepting things like typing or presence notifications but not sending them in return), then it turns out you're being constrained, and possibly doing additional work to add features, and the person benefitting the most is someone else's users and not your own.
XMPP's only major downside at the time was mobile battery life due to XMPPs limitations over cellular. This could easily have been resolved by using a non-XMPP accepted handshake (as WhatsApp did) or by using a completely different protocol for mobile as Facebook did for mobile (MQTT).
Google decided to go for a walled garden approach as a competitive advantage. There's no technical reason for it.
Google got talk working almost by accident. And it was the most feature-complete chat app for years, at least. And then, they abandoned it for years. This isn't to say it had many features, it had few. But it worked well, was integrated with gmail, was compatible with XMPP and geek's IMs, ...
After that, they killed all the compatibility before making an app that was yet again a lot more feature complete : hangouts. And hangouts got the best features for quite a while.
And then Hangouts started wildly bashing it's weight around. Forcibly taking SMS was one thing. Refusing federation. Forcing Google+ account and lots of extra info. And so on, and so forth. Hangouts was a good app, but created a lot of ill will in the process.
And then it was seemingly abandoned. Feature frozen, with the excuse that all these features had resulted in an extremely difficult to maintain app that they couldn't add features to. Chatting without having a gmail being a big one (whatsapp allowing you to chat with "everyone in your phonebook"), status, reliability (and showing clearly and timely when it isn't/cannot be reliable because disconnected, not 3h after connectivity gets restored), video call quality, adding non-gmail users or just screens to video chats, not allowing bot interaction, apps in the video chat, ...). And this lasted for years.
Inside of China, some chat apps demonstrate how chat apps can be monetized in a way that users appreciate : allow chatting with companies and give those companies the ability to show interfaces for transactions. E.g. buy a coffee. Line at starbucks ? Open up whatsapp, because you're in starbucks it shows starbucks as a contact (you can add it permanently) and there's a button "order coffee". Select what kind of buvaranicpoppafrappadongieccino you want, you pay through the app, and you've just skipped the queue. Next time you do it 5 minutes before arriving. App takes cut of transaction value (just like credit card payment does).
Next, other apps turn up. Whatsapp, Lyne, ... and so forth. And they caught up with Hangouts. Surpassing it in some ways, behind in others. Mostly they're superior in letting you find the people you can chat with. And then they passed it by. And then they left it far, far behind. It's not (yet) the case that they truly dominate hangouts in features, but it's getting close.
And lo and behold : people switched to the (sorry) better apps. I'm not entirely sure why anybody is either surprised or complaining. These changes look a lot like they're making it worse, not better, but we should give them the benefit of the doubt.
Google doesn't do even that, as they don't offer anything on-site (anymore). They have seriously failed on business markets. I don't know about consumer market, because I mostly just send dick pics for the giggles to random people I don't know.
I don't get that people complain about Microsoft software being closed, and anti-competitive ... well any cloud software is more closed and anticompetitive than Microsoft ever was on it's worst days : it's not that you can't get good documentation that the application you're using uses ... you can't even get at the data at all, in most cases.
Google is the best at this out of all the cloud players, but it's still abysmal. And yes, you can download exports. And there's Google takeout. Is the data there all the data Google apps use to work ? No. Quite simply, no, it isn't. There's plenty more they won't ever give to you. And that's ignoring the fact that there's 1000s of developers making apps for Google and about 5 working on takeout. Why should Google be forced ? Well, that's the standard we're applying to microsoft, isn't it ?
And this is by far the most flexible cloud provider exporting data. They're not being jerks. I don't even think they're trying to be anticompetitive. Nevertheless, they're far more anticompetitive than Microsoft.
And of course, conveniently, the DRM-breaking is now a crime on things like iTunes and Hulu and ... because it involves actually creating access into someone else's computer system or at least changing their code (even though you're paying for it to do things and only getting it to let you exercise rights granted to you by law, like copying a movie). And the result is the same. iTunes, Hulu, even Play are ridiculously expensive, idiotically restrictive (buy movie on iTunes for a trip, go to Europe, log in to hotel wifi ... no movies. But no worries ! I copied that movie onto my device first. Nope, it won't play. WTF).
Same thing goes for app stores. There Apple is the big instigator of forced-incompatibility (or otherwise: your app won't run without Apple's permission hardware). Remember the flood of articles scaring people that microsoft might do this ? They're still at it, with the BIOSes that supposedly won't run anything but windows.
The dreaded "the right to read" scenario ( https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html ) is far, far closer on the cloud and mobile than it is on your own machines.
Aside:
>It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers.
I have a shared account on a small ISP, Microsoft won't receive our emails, even when replying to an email from a Microsoft user, even when user whitelisted. [It's probably the same with some other suppliers?] The only way to reply to people using Outlook/Hotmail/Live (I'm a user of hotmail for something like 16 years) is now to send via MS servers - basically had to make an account for this purpose.
The sending IPs aren't blacklisted with Senderscore (or other blacklists, I mention senderscore because they apparently provide domain reputation services for MS); some "related IPs" have medium reputation scores (senderscore 72).
http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...
If I send a new person an e-mail, I have to contact them on Facebook and tell them to check their spam folder. Fuck Google and Microsoft and their terrible e-mail filtering. Just because people are so dumb they will open any ransomware sent to them doesn't mean you drop all e-mail you don't trust with no way to account for it.
I run some websites that have their own mail servers. One thing you didn't mention which can help is to be sure to use an email signature. Basically short emails are more likely to be flagged as spam, especially if there's an attachment.
Had problems with hotmail before, it's just associated IPs being factored in too strongly. Same ISP has an IP address that spam has been sent from; support responds with won't fix. In their favour at least they responded.
Domain has SPF but not DKIM.
Thankfully no other mailbox provider blocks us. We could pay to be added to the third-party "friendly" domains list of course ...
I'm surprised they wouldn't whitelist our domain but leave it on a tight leash.
In short, legislating a solution is a workaround that can turn out to be a huge detriment not too long down the road. I'm no libertarian, but it seems like a bad idea to me.
The first link I got: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/02/south_korea_to_depo...
That is just for voice, now imagine you are a phone company and want to send a call to another phone company. There must be so many different things you need to cooperate on to make it happen - billing, switching, physical connections, numbering, codecs, etc. Yes the actual protocols may be standardised, but the main part is cooperation.
It's not standards we need, it's companies that are willing to cooperate and work together. None of the big tech companies want to do that now though. Everyone wants their own walled garden so they can say they have more users that X competitor.
(I'd argue that XMPP is good enough, or with a few extensions could be made good enough, for a company who really wants to push open IM)
Spectrum is owned by the public, and regulated as spectrum is a limited resource. IP messaging isn't by any practical means a limited resource.
> As far as I know, as long as I have the right to use the frequencies, I could start my own cellular telco that transmits whatever format I want.
No. Spectrum is regulated in terms of what technology you can use, and kind of usage is supported. You can't buy LTE spectrum and broadcast radio on top of it, and vice versa. You can't (in most cases) take 2G spectrum and deploy LTE on top of it.
Interesting! I was not aware of that. Thanks!
For example:
If a carrier "owns" the block between 1900MHz and 1940MHz, and let's say LTE supports 2 bits/Hz using Frequency Division Duplexing (each direction, up and down, gets a chunk of spectrum), with 3 sectors per cellular tower, the carrier can support a total of 40x2x3 = 240Mbps per tower, or 120Mbps each way.
If the tower serves 1000 users (they serve far more in dense urban areas), each user will have 120kbps of capacity, and if they all use it at the same time, that's the speed they'll get. If there's a single user, the maximum down speed for that user would be 120/3 = 40Mbps.
Point I ("I have the right to use the frequencies") directly depends on point II ("whatever format I want"). When applying for using a certain frequency band, you have to specify usage and purpose, and you can't just change your mind, i.e. you can't apply for GSM frequencies and say you will be running a GSM network, but then run the PavelLishinOverAir protocol.
While this is mostly true, in practice (at least on the 450-470 MHz band I work with), you can give fairly vague purposes, like "telemetry" or "SCADA", and it doesn't matter what vendor or what protocol you use. In fact, there is no section of the licence that says "I am going to use protocol X on equipment Y manufactured by vendor Z" or any part thereof (emissions designators are a different story).
I don't have any experience will cellular licences, though. Given that carriers frequently repurpose spectrum as technology changes, I can't imagine their licences say "GSM only" or anything like that. The band that used to be 3G GSM is being used for 4G LTE on my phone right now.
The same regulatory body (BNetzA) is also responsible for licensing telecommunications providers in general. This is probably the crunchpoint - if you're not a licensed telecommunication provider, it's simply illegal to offer telecommunication services.
I feel another such example is IPv6. It could move much faster if it would have been mandatory already.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERNET
- https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...
- https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/CN vs https://stats.labs.apnic.net/ipv6/US
Everyone moans about AGPL. Fine. Make something better that says if you're going to interoperate with a service, you better damn well actually interoperate. Make the license viral like GPL and hopefully when we all push in that direction, everyone needs to join up.
This is totally crazy to me. It would be like the government legislating when and where people have spoken conversations with each other.
I think a more achievable version would be that any online service which maintains user data must provide a method for a user to retrieve that data in an open-source format. Some companies would deliberately obfuscate formats, such as calendar appointments as JSON rather than iCAL or another existing standard, but I think it would give users more control than they currently have.
Oh, I agree. You're describing the effect of a corrupt government allowed to prevent or eliminate laws meant to protect its voters. I was talking about what law would be necessary if voters cared enough to push one.
The result of open-sourcing all data formats and protocols would obviously be all the data formats and protocols released as open-source. OOXML is not the only one in existence.
The company itself has to use the format for live message exchange, have to publish a full working protocol document.
With OOXML Microsoft aren't required to be able to read & write a files correctly when it's written to the protocol. As I envisage it the requirement would be to open the protocol actually used "on the wire"; again with Word Microsoft don't use OOXML as primary.
I think it's workable except perhaps in requiring political will. It's an internet age equivalent of allowing third-party car parts manufacture.
Microsoft don't use OOXML as primary.
Sure they do, that's what .docx files are. They've been the default since Office 2007.
Microsoft was compelled to create and implement the standard so that governments can comply with their requirements to use "open standards". And they followed all the steps, including getting it past ISO, despite the mess that the format is. And so governments can now tick the "open formats" box when purchasing Office. It's all a sham, and I don't see how it'd be otherwise with this proposed law.
Then why do you need open standards? Every major proprietary IM protocol has been re-implemented by open source software, including Hangouts: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts
It might also be handled in the courts if the law includes language that specifically instructs to attempt simple, readable protocols to "facilitate interoperability.
XMPP, the thing Google is being roasted for dropping support for, is often decried as being very complex and hard to implement correctly. If genuinely open protocols often end up like this, how can you possibly punish companies for writing complex, hard to implement protocols?
"This is to prevent or reduce lockin, walled gardens, etc."
What I said. I'll add that it's hard to copyright API's to sue over compatibility when the API's and their implementation are released as open-source software.
"If genuinely open protocols often end up like this"
What are you talking about? There's all kinds of results from protocol design. You chose one of the worst ones. I was a PSYC fan over that if I had to choose an IRC replacement or open chat standard. A test for new ones might be trying to run it through LANGSEC's Nail, Cap n Proto or ZeroMQ to see if they handle it easily. Anyway, it's easier to do compatible implementations if you have source and can't be sued/imprisoned for imitating it.
it's wild to me how quickly "we should find a market-external pressure source for forcing interoperability given the profit motive seemingly guarantees lack of federation because it relies on competition as its motive force" becomes "we must frogmarch innovators to the death pits"
Any emails they send to Gmail automatically go into the spam folder.
Why? I reckon it is because there is no SPF configured, no DKIM configured, etc.
We could try to get that small web hosting company to configure all that.
Instead, the plan is to move to G Suite for Nonprofits.
Even if we assume they are American companies, and we can sue them if they violate the rule; how on EARTH would we define an IM protocol broadly enough to avoid an easy avoidance of the law, but narrowly enough to not basically block all proprietary protocols?
If a company doesn't publish the protocol in use within, let's say 3 months of a valid request by a third-party then they'd be liable to a fine, perhaps something like $1 per day per registered user, plus costs of government and registered third parties in pursuing the interoperability request.
Small companies might escape, but if Facebook tried it they can't really run away. You'd need to be able to issue notices to ISPs to block those convicted of breaking the law, such orders are already part of UK law (against torrent discovery websites for example). Again you'd get some leakage but big providers like Microsoft couldn't feasibly expect enough customers to move to VPNs to bypass such a block.
IM client definition could be hard but in practice you'd have clauses requiring a judge to decide if the traffic exchange amounted to an IM communication. I see no problem with having a broad definition, if the definition were narrow then it would just get worked around. The definition would probably include email as a subset.
Were there other person-to-person communications protocols you are concerned would fall in the scope that definitely shouldn't be open?
And most of us in the US hope we never lose the right to open access in the way citizens of the UK have. I can't think of a worse thing to happen to the internet. The UK has proven that once you allow a government to censor the content of the internet they will aggressively and rapidly expand that power to censor and control.
(I was a Google SRE, sitting near the talk team. Everyone wanted XMPP to succeed, but the numbers didn't even come close to working out)
And your alternative @ google was yet another closed source protocol that doesn't work with any other closed source protocol(obviously, because they are closed source). Now imagine if the internet worked that way, Google wouldn't be where it is today.
The only difference between email and federated IM is email started out (mostly) federated and IM systems started out (mostly) not.
Only inertia is what drives this skepticism of federation in IM.
Just as there is no technical reason GateKeeper couldn't succeed on iOS just as it does on macOS, there is no technical reason federation couldn't succeed in IM as it does with email.
Just perceptions have to change.
Ultimately most users just don't care about federation. Them's the facts. That's why everyone takes PayPal and only nerds use bitcoin.
Slack vs IRC, too. Twitter vs GNU Social. I'm sure there are more.
> Ultimately most users just don't care about federation. Them's the facts.
Not really. Everyone is annoyed by this issue. But there isn't much they can do. People need to register on N different services and use N different clients to communicate with users of those networks when they need to. Do you think they appreciate this mess or find it highly convenient? But they don't have any other option (except may be not communicating with some of them at all).
Slack if you don't like that example.
It's technically and functionally identical to non-federated email.
It's not fragmentation if there is a single one that the whole planet uses.
Google's the blame party for a lot of things, but not the loss of email freedom.
It absolutely did. Everyone decrying how XMPP federation was killed conveniently forgets how useful it was to spammers.
I have been on the federated XMPP network pretty much as long as it has existed and I have not gotten a single spam attempt. I guess I could post my jabber ID somewhere to make it more sporting (they need that to even try) but I really don't want to add random people to my roster. Email is intrinsically different that way.
Here is today' world work flow: 1. Buy a domain
2. Have to use Google because your mail will end up in spam with any provider (unless it's outlook or some special provider).
Another intereting one is Tox.
Imagine if they thought like that about email?
But actually they replaced email with gmail. Now you can't send email from your own server because it will be blacklisted on gmail by default and noone on gmail will receive these emails. So you have to use "cloud email providers". On Android they changed "Email" client to "Gmail" client.
I've been running my own email server for a year without delivery issues to Gmail or Outlook/Office 365.
Just make sure your VPS IP is not blacklisted, and play the DKIM/etc game. You'll be fine.
I’ve had proper DKIM, proper SPF, my IP wasn’t blacklisted anywhere.
But I still ended up in Spam.
So I had to send for about a year emails to friends every few days, replicating our discussions on WhatsApp etc (so they’d have organic content), and I’d ask them to mark them as "not spam".
Now I end up in their normal Inbox.
EDIT: Why the downvotes? Please comment instead what you think is wrong – or how else do you think I should get my personal domain trusted?
I don't understand the downvotes either. So I upvoted your comment to counteract them.
I've found myself doing that more and more lately. I'll upvote a comment I disagree with if it was made politely and in good faith, and it appears to be getting downvoted unfairly.
If you want a new domain and have little traffic (e.g. personal domain), you're fucked.
http://i.imgur.com/9zqILRk.png
https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=blacklist%3akusc...
I even have one of them in my HN profile if I recall correctly.
Random blacklisting maybe is less of an issue if you run your own server with a unique ip only you use, but for most people it's getting harder and harder not to use gmail/outlook/lycos.
So ya fuck spammers.
My server worked better after adding a TXT record with google-site-verification + all the normal DKIM stuff.
EDIT: here's a better link https://support.google.com/a/answer/183895?hl=en
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35179?hl=en
I plan to roll my own email server in the near future, due to legal and privacy concerns. As I understand it, in the US email archives aren't protected under the Fourth Amendment because they're asking for data from a third party, and the Fourth Amendment only applies to self-incrimination.
Currently, as I understand they are not. But, there is legislation [1] which proposes extending Fourth Amendment protection to e-mails and communication stored on your behalf on third party servers. I've already written to my Congressperson in support of that bill.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/387/
5th amendment is self-incrimination, 4th is unwarranted search and seizure.
I don't know the current law, but it used to be that e-mails left on a server for more than 6 months were treated like abandoned property, which has a lower-bar to clear for the 4th amendment. I seem to recall hearing that this was changed a while back though.
How the 4th amendment applies to any case is complicated though because it's very much a sliding scale of intrusiveness, with higher levels of intrusiveness requiring more cause for searching.
That's not correct. I tried sending e-mails using my own local SMTP server, and it comes to Gmail just fine. Not that it's a good idea in general.
At least Wave was an open protocol including federation, even based on XMPP in fact. It maybe was the last thing before Google transitioned into a mostly walled garden.
> Now you can't send email from your own server because it will be blacklisted on gmail by default and noone on gmail will receive these emails.
I run a small mail server for some years now, no issues sending to gmail.
No, they didn't. Those are two separate apps. The Email one is part of AOSP. The Gmail one is part of Google Apps. Although many OEMs roll their own email client, as part of their custom skin.
How do I get to the plain email client?
Exactly :) I updated my comment above.
Open federated protocols with no obligation for providers to upgrade as the security landscape changes are a betrayal of user security and privacy of the highest order.
HTTPS is only becoming reasonable because Google can use its monopoly power and forced upgrade mechanism to bully website owners into adopting better practices. If we had a fragmented ecosystem of many open source browsers with user-consent upgrades and similar market share like the open web people wanted, certificate transparency would remain academic.
Personally, I consider the median advocate of open federated protocols to be more culpable for the wholesale violation of user privacy than the median NSA staffer.
It's a wonder we can send e-mails between many servers. Imagine someone like Eric Schmidt driving it. We'd be stuck with incompatible AOL and Compuserve forever.
And about XMPP shortcomings - sure, it's not perfect. And if Google thought they can do better, why didn't they propose some IM-next as an open federated or P2P protocol? Because "don't be evil" is off the table I suppose.
People tried proposing to use Discord for me, but I'm really not interested in another walled garden closed protocol, without FOSS clients and servers.