Any time they get asked questions like “Are my messages visible only to me?”, they answer with a very canned response like “Your messages are encrypted from end-to-end and can’t be read by anyone while in transit” … or words to that effect. I have never seen them state that no analytics or telemetry is happening on the unencrypted side by the client. Which has always bothered me.

Back at the start WhatsApp wasn’t free, although it was pretty cheap. Then Meta bought it and made it free. Some time after that, the founders left and started Signal.

The E2E encrypted protocol WhatsApp used to use was the Signal protocol. When the OG founders left and created Signal they revamped it, calling it the Signal V2 protocol. Whether WhatsApp still uses that original Signal protocol or not is probably not known to many people outside of Meta, but WhatsApp definitely used to be E2E encrypted prior to Meta’s purchase.

I deleted my WhatsApp account around the time Meta announced they were merging all of their messaging stuff together, e.g. Facebook Messenger, Instagram etc.

I’m holding out hope that discounts wont work this time, because the motivation is different. It used to be about cost, now it’s about digital sovereignty. I won’t bet anything of value, but I can hope.

Interesting. I knew the stuff about Munich, and I knew Gates was still a shareholder, but didn’t know he was still so actively involved. Based on that last link, it sounds more like he’ll be telling Nadella to get on a plane and what to say on arrival rather than get on it himself though.

Nadella you mean? It’s been a while since Gates was CEO of Microsoft.

The “do more with less” philosophy doesn’t make sense here either. Why not “do loads more with same”?

Imagine the current workforce, with all the experience and domain knowledge, paired with AI instead of replaced by it. Humans can do such awesome things when we work together.

These billionaires can be so short-sighted sometimes. All profit and no vision.

Maybe they should have listened to him instead of correcting him.

But, AI can do the work of 10 of you humans, so it can write 10 times the bugs and deploy them to production 10 times faster. Especially if pesky testers stay out the way instead of finding some of the bugs.

They’re laying off testers because they think AI can do it all now.

I had a Honda with a CVT and it was pretty bulletproof. Never skipped a beat.

I’ve been boycotting Amazon (UK) for a few years now. It’s not easy! Sometimes it doesn’t take much longer to source items, but other times it takes way longer. I have limits though, and occasionally I end up caving-in and just using Amazon, but it’s getting rarer all the time. Now I use them once or twice per year. I tried using onbuy for a while, but we got a couple of faulty items from them and their support completely ignored me, so I stopped using them. Generally, here are some of my most common alternatives:

general stuff and gifts: Argos, ebay, etsy
tech: overclockers, ebuyer, scan.co.uk
electronics: John Lewis, AO, Richer Sounds
books/dvds: hive.co.uk, Waterstones, WH Smith
pharma: boots, simpleonlinepharmacy, well
household: Robert Dyas, Dunelm, John Lewis
pets: zooplus
spare parts: buyspares.co.uk

And for a wishlist alternative I use wishlist.com. (edited to fix formatting)

I recently started getting spam to my dailymotion account.