WhatsApp works so well because it is tied into the same contacts that you already have on your phone. Without access to your phone’s contacts you would need to set up and manage an entirely separate set of contacts. Right now, Grandma could download WhatsApp and instantly start chatting with her granddaughter without having to remember what her phone number is because it’s already there. That’s a major selling point of WhatsApp.
I revoked Contacts access in WhatsApp a year ago. It works just fine. Problem is: WhatsApp only shows the phone numbers in the list and NOT the usernames of people. This is rather annoying, because I don't know any phone numbers by heart. Profile pics help a bit, but people change them and often don't have pictures of themselves.
Signal shows the nicknames next to the numbers which is a really nice feature and makes it pretty much perfectly usable without contacts permission, except that it constantly nags to grant the permission.
I understand that. I'm just saying that there should be a middle ground between "give Facebook full access to my entire contact list" and "cannot use the app at all". For example, WhatsApp should be able to trigger a contacts picker, without needing to have access to the full list of contacts. And it could even be able to show a styled view for "the contact name for this phone number" without needing to know what the name is.
WhatsApp does work if you revoke Contacts permission after setting it up, but IIRC you can't onboard when you first install the app if you don't grant it. Forcing the granting of the permission should be against App Store rules.
I use WhatsApp after revoking its contacts permission and it's pretty much fine. As an aside, same with Signal, and I really don't understand why a supposedly privacy-focused app like Signal nags hard to get contacts permission when it works perfectly fine without; it even shows people's chosen nicknames next to their numbers.
You can easily solve this with UX. Select new message, show the picker, select one or more contacts and then you have the identifier you need and you don’t need blanket permissions.
Then you need to realize that you are a special case and not representative of the general public.
Most people who meet each other in real life and want to exchange contact information exchange… you guessed it… a phone number. Maybe you exchange email or twitter handle, but again you are an exception here. So imagine we meet for the first time and we exchange phone numbers. Now I can WhatsApp you, just like that no other account info needed.
What about just “apping” is that a word? On a business trip earlier this year my colleague told me (in English) “I’ll meet you down at the bar after apping with my daughter.”
Now that I think about it I’m not sure if “apping” implies texting, voice call, or video call. Lol
When WhatsApp first came around sending SMS in many places like in Europe was not free. It wasn’t free to send SMS to other people from the same country, and Europeans, especially European Students going to university will typically have friends or contacts with different country codes because they didn’t get a new SIM card for various reasons. It wasn’t free to SMS people in the same country, and it was not free to SMS people from other countries.
WhatsApp changed that, without needing you to sign up for an account somewhere and telling people “my AIM is this” or “my email is that.” You were already giving people your phone number when you met them, and WhatsApp was compatible with that. So it requires no extra steps. Just download the app and go and now you can SMS people for free using the contact information you already have, using the contact information you were most likely to give to people you just met.
In 2011 I was a student in university and I had friends in my circle from Erasmus so they kept their phone number from their own country. In 2011 it wasn’t even free for me to send a sms to people from my own country so I couldn’t even imagine sending sms to people internationally even though they were physically in the same city as me.
Well one day a friend told me to download WhatsApp. So I did. All it wanted me to do was verify my phone number and that’s it.
Now suddenly all of my friends with smart phones could just sms me for free. And I could sms them back too. For free.
That was the value of WhatsApp. The fact that all you needed was a phone number, which you already had saved in your phone. Now instead of opening your phones messages app, you just open whatsapp.
There was no extra step of signing up for a new account or telling people “search for my name on Facebook my profile picture is blah blah.”
It's interesting. Whatsapp didn't start out to be a messanger app for the world. It didn't start out to be a replacement for SMS, it started as a tool for frequent flyers to be able to set a status on their iphone in the same way you could on Yahoo messenger.
Frequent flyers weren't particularly enthusiastic
"It appears that this requires the other party to also have the app installed, right?"
In my experience as a researcher in computational numerics, the “standard library” is going to be defined by the in-house code that I use. That code is going to use other scientific libraries like for example PETSc, Atlas/blas/mkl, MPI in the background, but the typically researcher isn’t going to be exposed to that because their focus is on setting up the equation Ax = b and writing the algorithm to solve it for x.
I’m not sure if that holds. Every university I’ve ever done research in has no issues paying for software like MATLAB, ANSYS, Mathematica, Intel MKL, Intel Compiler Suite, and the like. The people I know that still use Fortran (including myself) are all heavily focused on computational numerics and the fact that ifortran is closed source vs gfortran being open just does not even factor into the equation. If it’s available to me, and I can show that a program compiled by ifortran and MKL is faster than one compiled by gfortran and BLAS then I will use the faster one.
I left that world a long time ago, but what held is there was no problem buying site licenses for big software, not as much "I'm a research assistant and I'd like to buy X for $Y,000 for my project" The difference being buying something with broad appeal used by lots of people within the university, and buying something that I'd like to try for my project. Especially when there's already an established method which doesn't involve spending your PI's grant money.
You must have done research at well funded universities :)
My experience is quite different. Although after some hassles I was able to get license but it’s online only.
Overall I’m trying to move away from commercial software (I don’t teach any, only use foss) but yeah Mathematica, MKL + ifort are unbeatable in some respects (Matlab is slowly going to be replaced except some specialised toolboxes, don’t use ansys)
Anyway, proprietary and closed source software is in my opinion harmful for academia. Sometimes a lot, sometimes a little but in general it’s no good, although I understand that it funds some development that wouldn’t be done otherwise.
Not sure how I could proprietary/closed software being 'harmful'. If the product is superior and allows researchers/students to do a better or more efficient job then why not (absent severe budget constraints)? It is highly unlikely that those end users would ever modify the code or even need to view the source.
The fact that universities splurge money on these proprietary tools rather than spending it on long-term improvements isn't a good thing, even without the pain of actually supporting them.
The typical differences between stuff using ifort/MKL and gfortran/OpenBLAS/BLIS are at least similar, and probably smaller, than the sorts of variation you see anyhow on HPC systems, even without the important large-scale optimizations.
I moved to Germany in 2010 and experienced a winter for the very first time. I remember having to wear “pants under my pants” (thermal layer), I bought a thick wool coat, I wore scarves for the first time in my life. (I grew up in Southern California.) I remember one day looking out my window and seeing it start to snow and I could see the snow build up higher and higher on all the bicycle seats outside my window. I remember coming back indoors and how everyone just knew to instinctively stomp their feet outside the door and again inside on the mats, to knock out whatever bits of snow was stuck on shoes. I remember thinking how every time I walked out the door I had to suit up properly like I was gearing up for battle in a video game. This happened again the next year and I slowly got used to it and none of that routine stood out to me anymore.
What stood out though was a few years back I remember thinking one day “where’s the winter?” because the weather was just cool but not cold, and snow amounted to just a few mm if it even stuck around.
Two years ago I finally couldn’t deal with it anymore and bought a portable AC unit. It made living in my flat bearable and was something for me to look forward to at the end of the day since my office wasn’t air conditioned.
My energy bill is higher now in the summers and I feel bad for contributing to climate change, but without the AC I just can not live, merely survive.
And yet last year in July Germany observed record-setting cold. The summer in Eastern Europe had been very cold from July on.
The moderate climate of Western Europe is changing probably due to changing jetstream (which is probably result of cooling patch in Atlantic Ocean which is probably the result of melting glaciers in Greenland). But paradoxically what makes West Europe summers hotter makes Eastern Europe cooler in summer.
Moving from London to Minsk and from Paris to Smolensk might seem like a cool idea for summer.
I think the attackers had Mitch’s bank card and PIN and was making those fraudulent charges to see if Mitch would notice. If he did, the attackers would have been shut out then and there.
Mitch didn’t notice, so the attackers called Mitch pretending to be the bank. They didn’t ask him for any details so no red flags were raised, they just said “we noticed fraudulent charges and rest assured we are fixing it.”
Next day, attackers call the bank and Mitch at the same time. They needed the code the bank would send to the # on the account, so the attacker requested it from the bank, the bank sent it to Mitch, Mitch read it to the attacker, and the attacker repeated it to the bank.
At some point, Mitch got suspicious and called the bank to ask if they were on another call with him. The bank was on a call with the attacker pretending to be Mitch, so they said yes. Mitch thought the other Mitch was himself.
This is exactly what I meant. If the attackers already could make fraudulent discharges, then why should they put up such a complicated and risky attack? Could they not simply have gotten the money via the debit card?
Probably not anything like $9,800 dollars in one go - there's usually a daily limit. And the scammers may know (e.g. from doing it before) that after a few small transfers, the victim's bank will call him if he had not already noticed, in which case they preempted that call and effectively subverted it for their purpose.
The risk of the scheme not working might be high, but I am not sure that the risk of being caught is much increased.
Mitch was satisfied thinking that the bank was already looking into it, since the attacker pretending to be the bank didn’t ask for any details
/raise any flags.
For the point I am making, it does not really matter what Mich was thinking, but his behaviour over the weekend suggests that he was not entirely comfortable with the outcome. What do you suppose he was checking for? I would guess that he did not need to see his balance more than once.
He says that his suspicions were tweaked, near the end of the call, by the scammer giving an old address for him, and apparently his girlfriend was a good deal more suspicious: "Anyway, the whole time my girlfriend is sitting next to me listening to this conversation and she’s like, ‘This sounds like bullshit.'”