Give the Windows 2 a second look and try to ignore the colorful GAME in the screenshot.
It’s actually pretty ”elegant” design with white, black, grey with two shades of primary color: dark blue and light blue/cyan. Then complementary orange for active selection. The cyan is light enough for black text and blue is dark enough for white text. Really good palette choices.
Remember this was only 16 CGA colors, of which only few are delicate enough for UI components.
The tiny resolution makes things blocky, but if it had more space with an SVGA resolution, it’d be pretty great.
I would dare say, this might be the most ”designed” UI of the bunch, considering limitations.
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Intresting aspect of the UI is the hilighting of the menu bar in each window:
These days it’s odd to hilight menus, but I think their importance must’ve been much higher due to lack of space in the UI itself. They were basiclly act as ”navigation” and action menus. We use sidepanels and tabs a lot, but those have hard time fittinh there. Also the apps were simpler.
I agree. That was the only unfair assessment in the article, IMHO. Windows 2 was based on the Presentation Manager standard which was developed by IBM and Microsoft, and also used with OS/2, and more importantly, CDE + Motif. That's why many Unix desktops used to look like 3D Microsoft Windows desktops back then. Because they all were based on the same GUI standard.
”2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right EXCEPT such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”
Are we reading the same thing?
This linked statement clearly authorizes invasion of privacy by public authorities, in the name of any of the very vaguely listed reasons – as long as there’s some law to allow it.
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". *Only targeted interception* of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
A decision by the European Court of Justice or any other court does not apply to any legislative branch like the EU commission (not parliament), when making new laws. New laws simply override old laws (to be interpreted as specializations, more or less exceptions, to the old laws)
It's weird how "rights" went from "the government can't do X to you" to "the government can force private actors to do Y (but these rules don't apply to us)."
It's perfectly sufficient to have laws against that sort of thing. As governments are above the law (in that they can just add new laws that say they can do whatever they want), you need something else. A bill of rights is such a something else.
Not under ECHR, which has twice as much signatories as EU has members and the other half is twice less chill compared to the EU.
I don't remember whether the EU top court can repeal EU laws, but general answer is no. It's politics -- if the government is full shitheads that somebody voted for and then haven't protested hard enough to boot out -- then they can ignore constitution, jail judges, behead journalists in a forest and send army to shoot at protesters of the wrong kind.
Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
It seems axiomatic that legal systems contain provisions that prevent their violation. However, democracy requires that laws are voted on by elected representatives or plebiscites, which can of course mean repealing prior laws.
However the EU institutions are not sovereign, which might be the loophole here?
Edit: I'm aware that the EU is only afforded "competences" given to it by treaties, so perhaps human rights don't fall into any of these...?
However, I also wonder if legislation such as Chat Control, etc, might fall outside its competences.
In the end, the question is whether there is a legal mechanism by which the introduction of laws such as those in question here can be prohibited?
There is no loophole really, EU can repeal it's own laws the same way it passes them -- it needs to get the commission, the parliament and enough national governments on board.
>Do EU treaties per se contain any language that might be relevant to privacy?
Doesn't matter really. No right in any treaty is absolute. Not even the right to life itself -- the police can and does shoot people and it's legal for them to do under specific conditions. And of course the chat control law says that whatever it is supposed to be doing should be done in the most privacy respecting way possible.
In theory the court (any court really) can weight whether the measures are proportionate and whether negative obligations (not invade privacy) are in a balance with positive obligations (you know -- protective children is also important) and whether the balance is appropriate of a democratic society.
The problem everybody is trying to not see - there is no right to E2E encryption under any law right now. There is no right to have a communication channel that government can't possibly listen to. It's not a thing. The same way there is no right to have your house unsearchable by police and your freedom unbound by a court that can jail you. There are strict limits when any of those things happen, but they do fact happen all the time for good reasons and for bad ones too.
Add: if I would attack it from a legal standpoint, I would not focus on privacy so much, but rather say that creating mass-scaning capability is a threat to the democracy itself.
It's not that I like chat control or think that mass surveillance can lead to any good.
What I'm saying, is -- just because the balance isn't where you want it to be, and the policy is bad, that alone doesn't mean the law is unconstitutional, against the EU treaties or ECHR or should be impossible to pass through the legislative.
That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.
It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.
In this regard, note that the EU can only propose legislation that falls under one of its "competences". For example, national militaries, income tax, education, most of foreign policy, etc, do not fall under EU control.
The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.
So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???
.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!
>So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???
Correct. EU is not a party of the convention, member states are, so EU law can be ruled on by ECJ and national law and actions of national governments by ECHR.
Then at the end of the day it's the national government that would look at your chats and "I'm just following EU law" would not be an especially great excuse for the ECHR court.
It's the same in French (obviously), though equally this does not permit mass surveillance:
>Article 8 de la Convention européenne de sauvegarde des droits de l'homme et des libertés fondamentales:
>Droit au respect de la vie privée et familiale
>1. Toute personne a droit au respect de sa vie privée et familiale, de son domicile et de sa correspondance.
>2. Il ne peut y avoir ingérence d'une autorité publique dans l'exercice de ce droit que pour autant que cette ingérence est prévue par la loi et qu'elle constitue une mesure qui, dans une société démocratique, est nécessaire à la sécurité nationale, à la sûreté publique, au bien-être économique du pays, à la défense de l'ordre et à la prévention des infractions pénales, à la protection de la santé ou de la morale, ou à la protection des droits et libertés d'autrui.
I'm talking about the 1948 version which has the following:
> Article 12
> Nul ne sera l'objet d'immixtions arbitraires dans sa vie privée, sa famille, son domicile ou sa correspondance, ni d'atteintes à son honneur et à sa réputation. Toute personne a droit à la protection de la loi contre de telles immixtions ou de telles atteintes.
ECHR is a convention with a court hearing the cases, as opposed to declarations which is just good vibes PR. Of course the actual working instrument has loopholes.
Wow. Looking at the schema for gif, it’s so readable, I can’t help to wonder why something like this hasn’t become the standard way to work with binary formats over the decades already!
Seems like eveything has to be JSON and text based these days, because binary is more difficult DX.
When reading articles discussing binary formats, I usually see them using box diagrams of packets, description tables or hexdumps.
This neatly describes nested structure, names and ”types” - just enough.
I wonder if there’s a hexdump like viewer in IDEs that can present binary files like this? I can also imagine a simple UI to make the files editable using this.
If it works for you, happy the help you setup a private instance or something. And for in-office use, maybe optimize for quality rather than minimal updates it is now.
After certain age, all school students up to university use/have a computer.
If they end up in an office job, they very likely will have/keep one around.
And even when not, people with higher education tend to like use the home computer for certain things. For example ”official stuff” like doing taxes, using government services. Maybe throw in some more detailed trip planning, hobbies, spreadsheets…
To be as user friendly as possible, always ask if user wants automatic background updates or not. If you can’t update without user noticing it, please implement manual updates as two mechanisms:
1) Emergency update for remote exploit fixes only
2) Regular updates
The emergency update can show a popup, but only once. It should explain the security risk. But allow user to decline, as you should never interrupt work in progress. After decline leave an always visible small warning banner in the app until approved.
The regular update should never popup, only show a very mild update reminder that is NOT always visible, instead behind a menu that is frequently used. Do not show notification badges, they frustrate people with inbox type 0 condition.
This is the most user friendly way of suggesting manual updates.
You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.
> You have to understand, if user has 30 pieces of software, they have to update every day of the month. That is not a good overall user experience.
That's not an user issue tho, it's a "packaging and distribution of updates" issue which coincidentally has been solved for other OS:es using a package manager.
As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.
I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.
It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.
Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.
YouTube, X, and Tiktok compete with Meta's products in different verticals so
it's not really a fair comparison. But at the same time WhatsApp is drowning in competition from a thousand different messengers so I'm
not sure if this point really matters.
Like X isn't competing with FB Marketplace but Craigslist sure is. TikTok isn't competing with FB Events but Apple Events and Eventbrite are.
As long as WhatsApp have a strong backer like Meta, then using the term competition is meaningless. In many countries, WA is the de facto IM platform, but I can bet that it hasn't received a dim from those users. So how do they pay their developers, infrastructure, and surrounding resources?
Yeah, 100% agree - calling all these platforms "competitors" just because they exist on the same internet feels like tech company lawyer logic, not reality.
Use email. Everyone has an email address and it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond. Also has all the benefits of being an open protocol rather than a corporate garden.
>[…] it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond
Out of corporate contexts, email is only used to register for services, newsletters, and recover passwords. It's a shame, I prefer email over messaging for anything non-urgent.
> What's wrong with Signal? Or, worst-case scenario, Telegram?
IMO from a technical perspective nothing but more of how do you get your entire network to migrate from one chat app to another. Everyone here says just get your parents, siblings, friends to switch but it's far more complicated than that.
My wife is from Brazil and uses WA all the time. Getting her to switch would mean getting her entire network of family and friends to switch and you would have to make that pitch to everyone in the "network". All of a sudden it goes from getting a few people to switch to getting literally thousands to switch which is next to impossible.
Plus, all carriers in Brazil exempts WhatsApp from data caps (zero-rating). They are working on remove other apps from zero-rating, but WhatsApp is harder to since it's synonymous to “messages” here and alternatives are expensive (SMS) or not as near widespread (Telegram is a far runner-up mostly used for its semi-public, huge groups).
It’s hard to overstate the pervasiveness of WhatsApp in some some countries. Where I’m from work, service hiring, costumer service, etc are all conducted through (and specially for small businesses only though) WhatsApp.
That's very true, in the same way that some countries seem to prefer using Facebook as "websites" for small businesses.
But this doesn't stop people from migrating their private interactions away from WhatsApp/Meta, by using using -as an example- Signal as their replacement app of choice where they can. The frictional cost of keeping WhatsApp for business interaction, and Signal for private interaction is fairly close to zero.
Note: The last buttons slide below the browser chrome on iPhone Safari, when the there’s nothing to scroll.
Sometimes 100dvh helps instead of 100vh, if the document vertical size is used to define layout.
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