This is insane that Meta has been sharing all WhatsApp metadata with the Israeli Occupation Force, but neither am I surprised. Im sure the US government is likely also using this to conduct a witchhunt of anti-Genocide voices.
Technically yes. However, this quote from Wikipedia "the Council has resolved more resolutions condemning Israel than the rest of the world combined" should probably tell you everything you need to know.
It's so weird that the title has only 3 companies from that entire list. And none of them are companies under Booking Holdings. Almost feels conspiratorial in some way.
Adobe refused to make the flash player work reliable on OSX back in the day. It was Adobe's fault, and anyone that used the web on a Mac in the 2000's can confirm that.
Flash could have survived if Adobe open-sourced the codebase. But they kept it in-house and didn't have enough resources to mutate it in light of rapidly-evolving demands placed on web technologies by mobile architectures. I suspect there'd have been plenty of volunteers stepping up (including, possibly, from Apple itself) if Adobe hadn't decided to dragon-hoard its IP.
But in the web era, IP isn't king; communications is.
iPhone apps were fast and responsive on low end hardware precisely because apps were natively compiled and didn’t run in a VM. Did you ever try running Flash on early high end Android phones?
I 'm sure they were slow. but i m talking about the authoring tool and scripting language. I presume apple could optimize that to be fast natively. Judging from how HTML UI frameworks evolved over time, it's as if we ended up reinventing Actionscript
So what was Apple going to do during the first 4 or 5 years? Every single mobile platform that tried using HTML frameworks for their apps failed and were slow.
Blackberry, Palm, and Microsoft all tried it. Android itself was slow as molasses for years because of its dependence on a VM instead of a completely native stack.
I didn't know that place closed down. :-( I left the Valley a few years ago now for the DFW area. We have Fry's, MicroCenter, and still a few tech recycling places. Dallas reminds me of what the Valley used to be in many ways.
Wow that's impressive. But I would imagine WhatsApp/Facebook can just change their protocol at any time since it is easy to redeploy a new version of the WhatsApp Web client, thus breaking any 3p clients built on the original protocol. That would require yet another reverse engineering effort that can take a while. And by the time its reverse engineered again, they can yet again change the protocol. So the only reliable way to create 3p clients would be if WhatsApp itself publicly publishes its protocol.
On really? In that case they definitely would not want to allow this project to cannibalize their revenue. On the other hand, it makes it harder for them to change their APIs then as it impacts clients not directly under their control.
They also have native apps on most mobile platforms (including Windows Phone, Blackberry and even Nokia Series 40). It isn't as easy to update all of them as one would think.
But those are the apps themselves. This is about the WhatsApp Web protocol which allows you to use WhatsApp from a browser window by pairing it with a live session on your phone. Since the API endpoint are their own servers and the client is literally just a website, they can update whenever they want however much they want.
One of the things that has repeatedly pushed me off WhatsApp has been their very aggressive stance on this: I've several times stopped using it because "you need to update your app or this will all stop working in 7 days" and I've not been in the mood for jiggling the apps round on my tiny phone to be able to perform that update: the 7 days has passed, and I'm off WhatsApp again until such time as I "need" it.
I've wanted to create my own WhatsApp client that's and actual native desktop application. If this reverse-engineering process continues, it might now be possible. It's irritating when people say "Signal/WhatsApp has a desktop app!" because technically, they're right, but I have enough web browsers on my system already, thank you very much
