Tag: Whatsapp

Posted on by Tim Worstall

How Does Anyone Think Political News Used To Work?

Having actually worked in politics, in the dissemination of political news even, there’s an important question to ask The Guardian here. How do you think this worked before online political news?

Now, in a first-of-its-kind election monitoring project conducted by the Guardian and research agency Revealing Reality, a group of voters have allowed their phone use to be recorded for three days – and the results from each individual’s phone show how the traditional media ecosystem is changing and disintegrating.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Why End To End Encryption? WhatsApp’s Vulnerability To Israeli Spyware, That’s Why

As we know governments around the place have been very unhappy with WhatsApp and others – Telegram say – using end to end encryption. For this means that not only can’t the bad guys gain access to our data and messages but nor can the good guys. Who they are – good and bad – depending of course on your own evaluations of Mossad, the FSB, FBI, NSA and so on. It’s entirely possible for the same organisation to be both even to the same group of people even as it’s obvious that they will be to different groups.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Parents Beware – Google Docs Is The New WhatsApp For Your Children

Inventive little people, human children. It’s become common knowledge among the kiddies that Google Docs has a chat function. Therefore it’s not necessary to smuggle the mobile phone into the classroom and suffer this fate:

Or, as the Mirror put it:

The politely worded message gives away the teacher’s trusted method of knowing who is paying more attention to their handset than his lecture. It reads: “Dear students, I know when you’re texting in class.

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Facebook’s Profit On WhatsApp Ads Should Be Around The 99% Or More Level

To no one’s surprise at all WhatsApp has let loose the news that it will indeed be placing ads on the app, in the Status section. The interesting part of this to us around here is, well, what’s the margin on those going to be? Sure, such estimations are rather like guessing the length of a piece of string but a little bit of background knowledge will tell us that the margin should be up at the 99% sort of level.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

WhatsApp Turns Down India’s Demand For Message Traceability – Rightly So

It’s clearly true that untraceable messages create problems for law enforcement and even the suppression of incitement to violence. However, the ability to send untraceable messages is now here, along with end to end encryption. Trying to make any one supplier – like WhatsApp for example – not offer such features doesn’t do any good. The code is out there, it’s easy enough to download versions of it, it’s all something that just isn’t going to go away.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

Why Facebook’s Latest Fake News Campaign Won’t Work In The Slightest

So Facebook has decided that it really should be doing something about fake news. They’ve even managed to get the underlying basic point correct too. Just as with restrictions upon free speech in general, where we’ve incitement to immediate violence going on then sure, it’s just fine to make people shut up. On the fairly obvious grounds that we don’t know how to bring people back to life but peeps can delay their speech for an hour or 36 without too much damage to their civil liberty.…

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Posted on by Tim Worstall

WhatsApp Is In GDP As A Reduction In Productivity

AEI is asking where’s the next productivity revolution going to come from? The answer being that it’s already here.

So when will the next productivity boom happen?

If the US economy is going to generate sustained 3% annual growth, or anything close to that, it will require much faster productivity growth.

As I say, the answer being that this is already here. We’re measuring the digital economy wrongly. Hal Varian says that GP doesn’t deal well with free.…

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