Notes

We all Take it for Granted
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What if the world’s multitude of telephone networks weren’t compatible with one another - if the average Canadian household needed to have three telephone lines, one to talk to Telus customers in Western Canada, another to connect with Bell customers in the east and a third to chat with family members in the U.S.?

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Luckily, the international community got its act together pretty quickly and began creating standards in the late 1800s, which formed the basis for the modern Public Switched Telephone Network that allows most telephones around the world to communicate with one another. We all take it for granted, but the fact that someone can pick up a phone anywhere in the world and use a standard number to reach a business in China or send a text message to a friend in Australia is really quite amazing. Zohomail

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Jesse Kline: Google gives the world another video conferencing app that won't let you talk to all your friends Back to video

It could have turned out much differently. Email is another technology most of us have come to rely upon to stay in touch with our friends and family, communicate with business associates and send messages to everyone from the prime minister to the editor of a newspaper. We assume that if we send a message from a BlackBerry connected to the Rogers network, someone with an iPad connected to the Shaw network will receive it without a problem.

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But when the commercial Internet was still in its infancy, there were multiple bulletin board systems and online services competing for dominance. And most of them had their own, proprietary email systems that didn’t operate with one another. It wasn’t until some of the bigger online services, like AOL and CompuServe, connected their email systems to the Internet, that it really took off as a viable global communication medium.

Instant messengers (IM), on the other hand, were never widely adopted by businesses because they traditionally lacked the ability to communicate with each other. People using AOL Instant Messenger, for example, could not talk to those using MSN Messenger, thereby segregating users in walled gardens, forcing them to only talk with people on the same network, or to run multiple pieces of software at the same time.

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In an effort to remedy the situation, a group of open source software developers created a protocol called Jabber (now known as XMPP) in 1999. This was designed to be a standard protocol for IM software, meaning that anyone could create a Jabber network, and those networks could communicate with one another.

For a while, it looked like Jabber might catch on: Google and Facebook used it as the basis for their instant messaging services, and even established IM clients developed by AOL and Microsoft came out with experimental XMPP support. But in recent years, communications platforms have been reverting to the walled gardens of yore. Facebook dropped XMPP support when it launched its new messaging service in 2010, and although people can still connect to Google Hangouts with an XMPP client, more and more features, such as video and group chats, can now only be accessed with Google’s proprietary software.

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The moral of the story is that for a technology to become widely adopted as a method of communication, it needs to be based on open standards. So you can forgive me for being less than optimistic about the recent news that Google is releasing two new communications apps - Allo for instant messaging and Duo for video conferencing.

The technology giant has received praise for releasing the apps for both Android and iOS. In the past, iPhone users have video-conferenced using FaceTime and Android users have used Hangouts, neither of which can ring up someone using the competing platform. They have also earned kudos for offering end-to-end encryption - something that should be expected of any new communications tool after Edward Snowden’s revelations of how governments, both foreign and domestic, are monitoring all Internet traffic.

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Although the new apps do provide a way for people with iOS and Android devices to communicate with one another, they are not compatible with Google’s existing instant messaging and video chat services, nor do they allow communication between smartphones and computers. All this means is that people will be further segregated, based on the software those in their social networks choose to adopt.

It’s not as id there aren’t already standard protocols to facilitate instant messaging and video calls with end-to-end encryption: Linphone, for example, is a free software application that runs on Android, iOS, Windows Phone and desktop computers, and offers video and voice communication with optional end-to-end encryption using standard protocols; there are also dozens of free Jabber clients and servers.

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Moreover, in the surveillance state in which we all now live, it is more important than ever to ensure that our communication tools are secure and trustworthy. While it’s a good thing that apps such as Duo and WhatsApp are now using end-to-end encryption - meaning third parties, including the company providing the service, should not be able to read, or listen to, what users are saying - using proprietary software and protocols means that we have to place a certain degree of trust in companies such as Google and Facebook.

Given that we know many of these companies have co-operated with government agencies - such as the National Security Agency - the recent news that WhatsApp will be cross-referencing users’ phone numbers with Facebook accounts and the fact that the proprietary nature of these applications means they are often less likely to undergo thorough security audits, it’s hard to blindly trust these companies to keep our best interests and privacy in mind.

My solution to the problem of people being segregated on, often insecure, communications platforms is to buck the trend whenever possible and refuse to correspond using anything that isn’t open and secure. But this will only work if other people follow my lead.

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