Tag: instant messaging

Article

The EU will be using two new tools to regulate Big Tech significantly

EU names six tech giant ‘gatekeepers’ under DMA guidelines | Mashable

From the horse’s mouth

European Union

Digital Markets Act: Commission designates six gatekeepers (europa.eu)

My Comments

The European Union is taking serious steps towards controlling Big Tech further and enforcing a competitive market within its territory.

They recently passed the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act laws which apply to companies that have a significant market presence in the EU. The former one is about assuring real competition by doing things like pry open app stores to competition, require a service to accept advertising for its competitors or assure end-users have access to the data they generate through their services. As well, the latter one regulates online services to assure a user experience with these services that is safe and in harmony with European values as well as supporting innovation and competitiveness.

Initially, six powerful Big Tech companies have been designated as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act. These are Alphabet (Google, Jigsaw, Nest), Amazon, Meta (Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp), Apple, ByteDance (TikTok) and Microsoft.

The European laws will also be about prying open the app-store marketplace for mobile platform devices

Most of the products like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Amazon’s marketplaces, the familiar Google search engine, and the mobile app stores ran by Apple and Google are listed services or platforms subject to scrutiny as “gateways”. Even the iOS, Android and Microsoft Windows desktop operating systems are also deemed “gateways” under this law. But I am surprised that the Apple MacOS operating system wasn’t even deemed as a “gateway” under that law.

There is further investigation about Microsoft’s Bing search platform, Edge browser and Advertising platform and Apple’s iMessage messaging service regarding deeming them as “gateways”.

The latter one has attracted intense scrutiny from the computing press due to it not being fully interoperable with Android users who use first-party messaging clients compliant with the standards-based RCS advanced-messaging platform put forward by the GSM Association. This causes a significantly-reduced messaging experience if iPhone users want to message Android users, such as not being able to share higher-resolution images.

What happens is that “Gatekeeper” IT companies will be under strict compliance measures with requirement to report to the European Commission. These include requirements to:

• accept competitors on their platform, which will apply to app stores, operating systems and online advertising platforms
• ensure that end-users have access to data they generate on the platform
• allow end-users and merchants to complete transactions away from app-store and similar platforms owned by the gatekeeper company
• assure independent verification by advertisers of ad impressions that occur on their ad-tech platform

At the moment, an online service or similar IT company is considered a “gatekeeper” if they have:

• EUR€7.5bn turnover
• EUR€75 billion market capitalisation
• 45 million or more active users in the 27 European-Union member countries

Personally, I would like to see the geographic realm for active users based on a larger area in Europe because of non-EU countries like Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and the UK and EU-candidate countries also contributing to the user base. For example, this could be based on the European Economic Area or membership of the Council of Europe which standardises fundamental human-rights expectations in Europe.

Failure to comply will see the company face fines of 10% of its global turnover, even the ability for the European Union bureaucrats to subject a company to a Standard Oil / AT&T style forced breakup.

At the moment, it is about EU setting an example on reining in Big Tech with DMA being considered a gold standard by the consumer IT press just as GDPR was considered a gold standard for user privacy. But the United Kingdom is putting a similar recommendation in place by introducing the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer Bill before Parliament. This is while the USA are trying to pry open app stores with various anti-trust (competitive-trade) and similar legislation.

A question that will also arise is whether the European Union bureaucrats can effectively have control over corporations anywhere in the world such as to force the breakup of a dominant corporation that is chartered in the USA for example. This is although they could exert this power over a company’s local affiliate offices that exist within Europe for example.

There is still a very serious risk of Big Tech “dumping” non-compliant software and services in to jurisdictions that aren’t covered by these regulations. This will typically manifest in software or services that have the features desired by customers like sideloading or competitive app-store access for mobile operating systems or ad-free subscription versions of social networks being only available in Europe for example. This was a practice that happened with Microsoft when the EU forced them to allow the end-user to install an alternative Web browser when they install Windows as part of commissioning a new computer for example, with this feature only occurring within Europe.

A previous analogy I used is what has been happening with the vehicle market in Australia where vehicles that aren’t fuel-efficient to current international expectations appear in this country whereas other countries benefit from those vehicles that are fuel-efficient. This is due to Australia not implementing the fleet-wide fuel-efficiency standards being used in many countries around the world.

Who knows how long it will take to push similar legislation or regulation aimed at curbing Big Tech’s marketplace powers around the world. Only time will tell.

Most of us who have used Facebook have found ourselves seeing a friend request for someone who is already our Facebook Friend. This is a form of account compromise where someone creates a doppleganger of our account as a way to impersonate our online personality.

Such “clone” accounts of our online presence can be used as a way to facilitate a “man-in-the-middle” attack especially when dealing with an encrypted communication setup. It is an issue that is becoming more real with state-sponsored cybercrime where authoritarian states are hacking computer and communications equipment belonging to journalists, human-rights activists or a democracy’s government officials and contractors.

Mutually-verified contacts

In most implementations, each contact has a code that is generated by the messaging or social media platform as a human-readable or machine-readable form. The former approach would be a series of letters and numbers while the latter would be a barcode or QR code that you scan with your computing device’s camera.

In a lot of cases, this code changes if the user installs the social-media app on a new device or reinstalls it on the same device. The latter situation can occur if your phone is playing up and you have to reinstall all of your apps from scratch.

Users are encouraged to verify each other using this authentication code either in person or through another, preferably secure, means of communication. In-person verification may take place in the form of one user scanning the other user’s machine-readable code with their phone.

This allows each user of the platform to be sure they are communicating with the user they intend to communicate with and there isn’t anything that is between each party of the conversation. It is similar to a classic contact-authentication approach of asking someone a question that both you and the contact know the answer to mutually like a common fact or simply using a nickname for example.

The feature is part of Signal but is being baked in to Apple iMessage as part of iOS/iPadOS 16.3 and MacOS Ventura 13.1. But I see this as a feature that will become part of various instant-messaging, social media and similar products as the market demands more secure conversation.

Zoom also implements this as part of its end-to-end encryption feature for videoconferences. Here, users can verify that they are in a secure videoconference by comparing a number sequence read out by the meeting host after they click on a “shield” icon that appears during an encrypted videoconference. Here, this feature could come in to play with Signal and similar apps that are used for group conversations.

Relevance

Primarily this feature is being pitched towards users who stand to lose a lot, including their lives because they engage in “high-stakes” activities. Such users are government officials, public servants and military in democratic states, vendors who sell goods and services to government or military in these states, journalists and media workers in states that value a free press along with human-rights activists and NGSs.

Here, these users become highly vulnerable due to them being of interest to authoritarian states and organisations or individuals that aid and abet these states.  It is also being applied to countries that have undergone a significant amount of democratic backsliding or are considered to be socially unstable.

Personally, I see this as being important for everyday use so you can be sure that whom you want as part of your social-media or online messaging circle is whom you actually want. Here, it can avoid you dealing with scams based on others impersonating you or others in your social circle such as the “relative in distress” scam. As well, it can also be seen as a way to be sure you are linking with the right person when you add a new person to your social-media list.

Conclusion

I would see an increasing number of communications, social media and similar platforms acquiring the “mutual contact verification” function as a security feature. This would be more so where the platform supports end-to-end encryption in any way or there is a reliance on some form of personal safety or business confidentiality.

Article

Facebook finally brings Messenger and Instagram apps to Windows 10 | CNet

Facebook Messenger for Windows 10 PC now live in the Windows Store | Windows Central

From the horse’s mouth

Facebook

Press Release

Windows Store link

My Comments

Facebook Messenger – now native on Windows 10

Previously, I wrote about why desktop operating systems need to be supported with native-client apps for messaging platforms. Here I highlighted how the likes of ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger and Skype started off in the “regular-computer” / desktop operating system sphere and when the smartphones came on the scene, newer messaging platforms ended up being based on iOS and Android mobile platforms first.

Facebook Messenger live tile – now a message waiting indicator

The advantages that I highlighted included a stable client program that works tightly with the operating system; and the ability to work tightly with the operating system’s file-system. security and user-experience features extracting the maximum benefit from the user experience.

Now Facebook have answered this goal by providing a native client for Microsoft Windows 10 users, especially those of us using regular computers running this operating system.

Facebook Messenger Live Tile – Tablet mode

This program ticks the boxes for a native client app by using its Notification Center to show incoming messages and chats; along with the ability to show messages as a Live Tile on your Start Menu. There is the ability to upload photos, videos and GIFs from your computer’s file system, which can be a bonus when you have downloaded your pictures from your good digital camera and worked on them using a good image-editing tool.

Of course, you have the features associated with your iOS-based or Android-based Facebook Messenger experience such as knowing when your correspondents are “up-to-date” with the conversation. As well, you have that similarly uncluttered experience which makes it easy to navigate your chats while it doesn’t take up much room on your screen when it is in the default windowed state.

Article

Deregister iMessage from your number without your iPhone

Apple finally offers an easy solution to its missing text message problem | Engadget

From the horse’s mouth

Apple

Deregister iMessage site

My Comments

If you are moving towards another non-Apple platform for your smartphone or have decided to change your mobile phone number, you may run into issues with Apple’s iMessage “over-the-top” message service which you used as your enhanced messaging service with iOS.

The default setup for iMessage is to route all your regular inbound and outbound SMS and MMS traffic via this service. This can cause problems with you or your contacts not receiving messages if you are moving off the iPhone platform or phantom messages coming through from your old number when you are changing phone numbers.

To deal with this problem, you would typically use the iPhone’s Settings control panel to deactivate iMessage and is something you may have to do before you move off to the other platform or arrange to have your mobile number changed by your carrier.

On the other hand, Apple has provided an answer for those of us who have done the switchover without deactivating iMessage on the iPhone. This can happen when you are in a hurry to switch over or have your mobile service immediately provisioned on your new non-Apple phone.

Here, you visit a page on their Website and key in your mobile phone number to deregister it from iMessage. You will receive a “confirmation number” on your new phone as an SMS, which you then subsequently key in to the Website to set this deregistration in stone. If this doesn’t work, you may have to contact Apple’s technical support to make sure this happens. You may also have to contact Apple’s technical support if you are not receiving SMS or MMS messages on your iPhone after a number change.

This doesn’t affect other iOS or Mac OS X devices that use iMessage because these work on your Apple ID (email address) as being your iMessage address. It primarily detaches your existing mobile number from your Apple ID as an iMessage address.

It could be improved by providing iMessage management through an Apple-hosted Web dashboard that allows you to do things like deregister your phone number or manually add, change or delete phone numbers associated with your iMessage service. This can be of importance with situations like travellers and expats who use SIM cards from providers local to where they are travelling in order to dodge roaming fees or have local-mobile-number presence.

Article

Skype Just Fixed the Single Most Annoying Thing About Notifications | Gizmodo

From the horse’s mouth

Skype

Blog Post

My Comments

If you work with Skype on your Windows tablet, your Android smartphone doesn’t beep when your Skype correspondent replies

A common annoyance with instant messaging or social-networking usage is all your devices beeping and lighting up when your correspondent replies to you while you are chatting with them. This is typically because most of us want to install native client-side applications for our favourite instant-messaging services and social networks on each of our devices and have them logged in to the services at the same time.

Skype are tackling this in an application-wide manner by determine which actual Skype client you are actually interacting with at a particular time during a conversation. This then allows the service to mute all other Skype apps that are currently logged in to reduce this problem when it comes to your text messages.

The behaviour will return to normal when you aren’t interacting with Skype or when a call notification comes in so you don’t miss conversation opportunities. A question that can be raised with this functionality is what if you want to “jump” from one device to another such as to instigate your text conversation on your laptop but want to continue it on your tablet which you use while lying on the couch. Here, if you are starting a reply on the second device such as the tablet in the above situation, the app  on the second device should detect the activity and enable its audio prompts.

It may be easy to think of having platform-wide methods of detecting actual interaction so as to, for example, squelch other devices’ alert sounds when you are chatting. But this would have to be achieved on an application level with the application’s server or host knowing which device you are interacting with when you operating that device due to the requirement to work in a cross-platform environment.

At least Skype have answered a situation that ICQ and other instant-messaging systems haven’t anticipated – one owning many different devices for surfing the Internet and having them monitor instant-messaging services.

Windows users have been able to use the Facebook Messenger as a desktop option for gaining access to Facebook’s chat and messaging features. Similarly, users of the iOS and Android mobile platforms have benefited from having access to the Facebook Messenger app as a dedicated path to this same service.

But how can you gain full-time access to the Facebook chat and messaging functionality on your Apple Macintosh without the need to open your Web browser? You can when you use the iChat software that is integrated with the Mac OS X operating system.

Here, the Mac has to be equipped with iChat AV 3 or later which is part of the operating system from 10.4 Tiger to 10.7 Lion. It will provide an “always-live” messaging and “green-dot” presence feature that you would expect with the Web-driven Facebook messaging interface.

1. To set this up, you click on the “Preferences” item in the iChat menu.
2. Click on the “Accounts” option in this window, then click the + icon at the bottom of this window as if you are adding a new iChat account.
3. Select “Jabber” as the account type.
4. Supply the credentials as:
   Screen Name: <Your_Facebook_User_Name>@chat.facebook.com
   Password:<Your_Facebook_Password>
5. For the Server Options, make sure that “Automatically find server name and port” option is checked. If this doesn’t work, you may have to fill in “chat.facebook.com” in the Name and 5222 in the Port for the Server details
6. Then click Done to add the account.

For this acoount to work automatically, you have to select the “Enable this account” and “Log in Automatically” options for it to log in and show you as online when you use your Mac. Here, you will see the list of all the Facebook Friends who are currently online with that green dot.

Articles

Facebook unveils video chatting, thanks to Skype | The Digital Home – CNET News

Facebook intros group chats, new chat tool design | The Digital Home – CNET News

Facebook Reveals Video Chat Powered By Skype | Mashable

My Comments

Facebook’s chat functionality has now become a mature adult now that it offers group chatting and is about to offer Skype-powered videocall functionality.

What I do like about this is that rather than reinventing the wheel as Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger did to develop their video-chat services, Facebook have taken a sensible path. Here they have implemented Skype technology to power their video chat functionality.

The main reason I see this is going on is because Google are encroaching on Facebook’s territory with their Google+ social network service and Facebook have to provide a reason to keep their userbase loyal to their social network. It may also affect Skype’s native userbase who may use Facebook as a static notification tool while using the Skype client for text, audio and video chatting.

Native support

It may require Facebook to provide native support for this new level of chat functionality in their client-side applications. This is especially important for people who have used desktop instant-messaging services like ICQ or Windows Live Messenger and like the ability of these programs to operate in the background while they undertake their main activities.

Similarly, it could support the mobile, VoIP and “big-screen” platforms and take advantage of what each of these platforms can offer, such as “big-screen” video conferencing on larger TV sets for example.

This goal can be achieved more easily through the use of Skype code with Facebook interlinking and could be implemented in devices and platforms that have either of these functions written in to their base, such as the “smart-TV” platforms.