Dropping WhatsApp? Despite Privacy Concerns, Nostalgia Drives Users to ICQ (wsj.com) 59
Here's an interesting tidbit from The Wall Street Journal:
ICQ was a pioneering, mid-1990s internet messaging service then used on bulky PCs on dial-up. It was a precursor to AOL Instant Messenger, and was last in vogue when the TV show "Friends" was in its prime and PalmPilots were cutting edge.
It's been modernized over the years, and now is an app for smartphones. Lately it has skyrocketed up Hong Kong's app charts, with downloads jumping 35-fold in the week ending Jan. 12.
"It recalls my childhood memories," said 30-year-old risk consultant Anthony Wong, who used ICQ when he was in grade school. He has since connected with more than two dozen friends on the platform after some bristled this month at a privacy policy update by WhatsApp that would allow some data to be stored on parent Facebook Inc.'s servers.
Back in 1998 Slashdot's CmdrTaco wrote a story about ICQ being ported to Palm Pilot, and linked to a Wired story about ICQ security flaws. In fact, you can almost tell the history of ICQ just with Slashdot headlines.
- AIM and ICQ to be Integrated (2002)
- Russian Company Buys ICQ (2010)
What's happened since? ICQ's entry on Wikipedia cites a 2018 article in a Russia newspaper.
According to a Novaya Gazeta article published in May 2018, Russian intelligence agencies have access to online reading of ICQ users' correspondence. The article examined 34 sentences of Russian courts, during the investigation of which the evidence of the defendants' guilt was obtained by reading correspondence on a PC or mobile devices. Of the fourteen cases in which ICQ was involved, in six cases the capturing of information occurred before the seizure of the device.
The reason for the article was the blocking of the Telegram service and the recommendation of the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Herman Klimenko to use ICQ instead.
It's been modernized over the years, and now is an app for smartphones. Lately it has skyrocketed up Hong Kong's app charts, with downloads jumping 35-fold in the week ending Jan. 12.
"It recalls my childhood memories," said 30-year-old risk consultant Anthony Wong, who used ICQ when he was in grade school. He has since connected with more than two dozen friends on the platform after some bristled this month at a privacy policy update by WhatsApp that would allow some data to be stored on parent Facebook Inc.'s servers.
Back in 1998 Slashdot's CmdrTaco wrote a story about ICQ being ported to Palm Pilot, and linked to a Wired story about ICQ security flaws. In fact, you can almost tell the history of ICQ just with Slashdot headlines.
- AIM and ICQ to be Integrated (2002)
- Russian Company Buys ICQ (2010)
What's happened since? ICQ's entry on Wikipedia cites a 2018 article in a Russia newspaper.
According to a Novaya Gazeta article published in May 2018, Russian intelligence agencies have access to online reading of ICQ users' correspondence. The article examined 34 sentences of Russian courts, during the investigation of which the evidence of the defendants' guilt was obtained by reading correspondence on a PC or mobile devices. Of the fourteen cases in which ICQ was involved, in six cases the capturing of information occurred before the seizure of the device.
The reason for the article was the blocking of the Telegram service and the recommendation of the Advisor to the President of the Russian Federation Herman Klimenko to use ICQ instead.
I still remember my number (Score:2)
Tried it a couple of years ago. It looked like the last msn messenger with a nice clean UI. None of my friends used it and I could not get them to try it. I would not be worried about some russian guy reading my messages, since I am not from there.
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I still remember mine from the late 1990s too. My contacts don't use ICQ anymore. :(
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I came to this thread really hoping the first post would be A/S/L
You disappointed me :(
I can't remember my number, it's been far too long.
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i still remember my 7 digit icq number
Why? (Score:5, Funny)
ICQ never was considered secure or private. I was even a bit shady. It was one of the first and benefited from network effects but what does it have now?
If your reason for switching is security, stay on WhatsApp, it is not that bad. It is still among the best actually. If you want to switch to Signal (good) or Telegram (not as good), I can understand, but why ICQ?
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for the fog horn of course
Re: Why? (Score:1)
It is absolutely not among the best!
Tell me: What use is a super-secure tunnel between the base of you and your friend, if both bases are staffed entirely with enemy soldiers with constant radio communication home, that refuse to tell you what they are even doing?!
Re:Why? (Score:4, Interesting)
If your reason for switching is security, stay on WhatsApp,
What if I think that Mark Zuckerberg is a threat to our security, and that supporting his business supports that threat?
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What if I think that Mark Zuckerberg is a threat to our security, and that supporting his business supports that threat?
Then switch to Signal, the OP already said that.
Here is why (Score:5, Informative)
I installed WhatsApp on my phone under pressure from my employers. Suddenly, my phone went from 5 days on a charge (mostly on stand-by) to half a day on a charge.
I therefore decided to unistall WhatsApp, and guess what ? During the uninstall process it popped up a message informing me that WhatsApp took ownership of my contact list and therefore will wipe it out, which it did. No "Cancel" button to be able to back up the contact list.
I guess these two reasons are enough to never look at WhatsApp ever again.
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Was this on Android?
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Yes, it was on Android
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I mean good for you for not using any data apps I guess. That's not a WhatsApp problem, that's a use problem. Apps which rely on push notification need to use data, so you can't expect 5 days on a modern smartphone while still getting push notifications.
For the majority of us WhatsApp doesn't even feature in the top 10 battery drainers even when we do actively use it.
Mind you you said "half a day" so I either call bullshit, or you legitimately had a bug. My 5 year old phone with a degraded battery happily g
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When I said "half a day" I had in mind 12 hours. I was thinking of of 24 hours as "a day".
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Definitely a common problem with Facebook related apps. I recently installed the Facebook Messenger app on my phone because I was trying to sell something on their marketplace, and immediately remembered why I got rid of it so many years ago. My phone easily eats up an extra 30% battery a day, and I only sent/received about 10 messages. I'm uninstalling as soon as I'm done selling the item.
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Is that an iPhone? Or very long ago?
In any case if you need to use WhatsApp for some reason there is a great open source app called Shelter that lets you isolate apps using an Android feature designed to separate personal and work stuff. Then it can't access things like your contacts at all, and you can control how it is allowed to run etc.
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Remember the first facebook app? I never installed it but it was in the news big time. It also took over your contacts list, send it to facebook, and then wiped it. Very classy.
One is left with the takeaway that one should never install an app from facebook on their phone. But you knew that before, right?
BYOD is an abomination which should never, ever happen. EVER. If your employer wants you to have an app on a phone, they should give you the phone. Any employer which is unwilling to do that is a shitheel.
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WhatsApp took ownership of my contact list and therefore will wipe it out, which it did.
I would rather blame the OS than the app
Old UIN still works but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: Old UIN still works but... (Score:2)
The contact list was not srored on the server, afaik!
I think that wasn't a thing until later.
You need to find an old backup and restore it!
(I've got, like, five UINs... and the pasword for none of them. :/ I keep them until I manage to look up the file format and hope the password is stored in there so I can use a a rainbow table. Thougg technically, one could graft the backup to work for a newly created UIN. But I guess that will take even more work.)
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I've still got my UIN and password, but I'm not going to download and run random binary from dodgy company with a horribly bad security record. So I tried the web app. Stopped when it wanted my phone number for no good reason. Bye forever ICQ. Was fun back in the day.
Make sense, for Russians (Score:3)
Putting politics and ideology aside, unless you are planning to subvert your own country, it make sense to use a service that is hosted locally. (If you planned to go against a nation state, your own or otherwise, you better consult experts rather than relying on what you read on the web.)
Not only would a foreign company unlikely to respect your privacy or your country's data privacy laws (if any), they could be forced to terminate your service if things get ugly between your country and theirs. The latter used to be quite farfetched and unlikely, until the last two years.
For people in countries without any local companies offering these services, I can only offer my consolation.
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However, their own public ended up being MUCH MORE PRIVACY CONSCIOUS than ours. They refused to budge.
As a result of the conflict, Telegram bomproofed itself to a point where it is virtually impossible to exterminate. One year later, on the QT, they made it an essential communication service. We will never know if there was an agreement of some sorts behind the ceas
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Eventually the only people in Russia using Twitter will be disinformation bots and the IRA agents that run them...
To be precise - the 77th brigade contractors that run them. I have yet to run into a Russian speaking IRA agent on Russian speaking media. Plenty of 77th Brigade staff working for an English speaking handler though. They are very easy to discern - the backend software was probably written by Capita in the same sweatshop as the UK army HR system.
A quick howto on how to spot the Troll
1. Use of an account by multiple people in shifts and cross-post of identical content on multiple channels without marking
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IRC is still a thing. (Score:2)
It's real nice for things like Linux distribution support or programming language chats. Because you know that a certain kind of people will never get there. The kind that are the reason why we otherwise can't have nice things.
Of course, real cool people use write/wall. ;)
Of course, (Score:2)
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May I point out that Chrome itself is just a Khtml skin.
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Everything is an "app" these days. Even when you go to the website of something, it's often only there to serve as a way for people who carry around surveillance devices (called "mobile phones", "mobiles" or "phones" in newspeak) to click (sorry -- tap) on special links which open up their centralized "app stores" and download the malware/spyware for them, which then have unfettered access to their entire system. No "website interface" is available to use with a "real" computer.
I wanted to highlight this as it's a somewhat separate issue from the web browser/server issues.
While I also don't like many things about the modern web, it does provide a kind of platform-independent way of running things that we've been promised since the 1990s. It's just that we no longer use separate Java applets, because the browser itself now does much more. The downside is that browsers are now the heaviest thing running on most computers; remember when the web was all about thin clients? We used
sad (Score:1)
Something that's become more and more obvious lately is that human beings follow the path of least resistance. They join whatever network is most convenient to them, regardless of any consequences outside of convenience.
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All those fools trying to save a few cents on mailing a post card when a proper envelope gives you more privacy.
Kind of wanted ICQ back too, but element.io works (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't use whatsapp anyway, but I really just got sick of the fact that chat wasn't all end to end, and that they required identifying information, and that they lacked configuration that I remembered having on ICQ clients.
Then I found element.io on the matrix.org network. No identification, end to end encryption, distributed network, ability to set different notifications per chat (a big plus for me to know if I need to look at my phone/application right away), etc.
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Did somebody say ICQ? (Score:1)
If somebody is going to bring up that dinosaur I guess I should show my head, being a dinosaur myself.
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Just because you aren't worth compromising doesn't mean nobody else is. Hell if nothing else they can exploit your gear.
Uh-Oh! (Score:2)
That is all.
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Mod up. Nuff said.
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I got this sound clip and put it on my phone as my text message notification sound.
Its fun when you are out in public and it goes off and you see someone's head snap up and look around. Its like "they know".
ICQ privacy? today? lol (Score:3)
1999 (Score:3)
I had icq on palm dialling out to freeserve over IR on my nokia 8210.
It was hard work.
Don't social graph my private conversations (Score:2)
I use Whatsapp with European friends and also to chat with relatives overseas. Though for my own family, since we all got iPhones we use iMessage a lot, that and WhatsApp. Actually being on the family iMessage and iPhotos were the two main reasons to switch from Galaxy to iPhone. That, and Samsung's refusal to support repair on an old model. My main issue now is I do not want Facebook to social graph me based on my WhatsApp and exploit what I consider private messaging. I haven't been using Signal or Telegr
Pfft (Score:2)
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If you still need one, then it's like YOU who doesn't understand the appeal that most people see in instant messengers.
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There was a time where I used multi-protocol instant messengers like Miranda IM. There I had IRC, ICQ, XMPP, and others.
Some people I knew would only use XMPP because of its encryption features. Some people could be reached via ICQ, and others had their BNCs on various IRC networks (QuakeNet mostly). Around the time where facebook came up and everyone had to go there, I told myself to screw it and stood away from anything new. And as the contacts on those old platforms went inactiv
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Around the time where facebook came up and everyone had to go there, I told myself to screw it and stood away from anything new. And as the contacts on those old platforms went inactive as well I stopped using those as well.
However as a result I'm left out of a couple of things that are exclusively organized on platforms like facebook.
I got a Facebook account when my amateur theatre groups moved their communications from mailing lists to FB. It works fine for such limited "work" uses, I don't have to live my whole life there.
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It became popular enough to be used as an example in a data protection & data privacy class that I took. Being from Romania and having seen what mass surveillance can do if it is combined with a state that does not respect human rights (see Securitate in Socialist Romania [wikipedia.org]) I have a certain bias against anyone who collects a lot of data about people. As I went to school in Germany, I've also learned extensively about Germany's hist