Bullwinkle J. Moose announces “This time for sure!”, promises rabbit will be pulled from hat.
Sometimes eat your dogfood can be taken too far.
What was the first slack clone? Did I miss it entirely?
It says in the article. I think a business-not-consumer version of Hangouts.
“Hangouts Chat”, and yes I did miss it. Possibly because Hangouts by 2018 was a cursed app with terrible notifications preferences. What a terrible name.
Google had a chance with Hangouts but fucked around with it too much. Now they’ve lost the bottom of the market to Discord, and the top of it to Slack/Skype/Fuze. At this point, they’re just throwing grist into the mill.
This.
If they had this level of google service integration 5-10 years ago they couldve dominated, but from a work/enterprise level theres no reason to switch over to another application base if it only offers moderate incremental changes and from a normal user perspective you have all the same network effects that made google+ a failure. Hangouts with roll20 plugin was my defacto RPG setup, but discord is world better for me as a casual user.
I know that my teams that already use gmail would easily adopt to a Google chat system, while getting them to adpot Discord, remember to login, keep the app going, and so-on never reached critical mass for any useful discussion to happen.
In tech world, whatever. But Im dealing with engineers and dads.
The mere hint that hopefully there can be a group chat system that those who are already plugged into Google can use with no friction whatsoever… Fills me with sum o dat dag 'ol hope.
I feel like the article is a bit overblown. Like, sure, it could be used maliciously like that. But their example is pretty strange.
Consider a situation where I can view DNS traffic (e.g. company network), and I send a link to the company health portal, with [the anchor] #:~:text=cancer. On certain page layouts, I might be able [to] tell if the employee has cancer by looking for lower-on-the-page resources being requested.
Like, sure, IF you could view the DNS traffic (aren’t we going to encrypted DNS soon enough?), you might be able to infer that an employee has cancer. Or maybe their dad does? Or Wife? Or Friend? Or their just morbidly interested? I don’t know that seems like a stretch.
I am sure if I spent a bit more time I could think of ways you really could invade someone’s privacy with it. Still, it doesn’t seem to be something to really freak out over.
No, we’re not. DNS over https has its own host of problems.
The point is that knowing what pages people go to is already a huge privacy invasion, but knowing the spot on the page the person went to is significantly more invasive.
Think of it more like this. Almost all the time that in-page text is going to match your google search query. Previously you would only be revealing your search queries to google itself, with encryption in-between. Bad enough, but now you could be revealing your search queries to all sorts of other people that currently can’t see that.
I think gmail is down.
Spoke too soon I guess:
While the article does give a nice explainer of the technical details (or a link to one) it lacks a good explanation of the criticism for the tech. So here’s that.
I was debating whether to post this here or in the Democratic Debate thread since Tulsi Gabbard is involved, but that’s closed now, so it goes here.