Telegram vs WhatsApp, WeWork martyr and Turing Award

Release theme - Telegram vs WhatsApp

The vulnerability found in November in WhatsApp, which is used by over 1.5 billion people, gave Pavel Durov a pretext for another attack on a competitor.

Durov accused Facebook of cooperating with the authorities. He consistently calls vulnerabilities backdoors, hinting that such holes were left on purpose. There is logic in his words, since both large holes turned out to be quite convenient - in May, you could access the device using a call to WhatsApp, and in November, just by sending a video file.

Experts interviewed by The Bell do not share Durov's confidence, considering the discovery of such holes as a common consequence of the product's great popularity. Telegram is five times smaller than WhatsApp in terms of audience and almost an order of magnitude smaller than the technological messaging platform that combines Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Security experts also point out that if the holes found were left on purpose to cooperate with the authorities, they would not have to resort to the services of cyberweapons dealers - like the Israeli NSO Group, which Facebook is now suing.

The demand for the services of NSO Group, which works only with government customers, is so great that the company earned $250 million in 2018, and the last deal valued it at $1 billion. large material .

It is worth noting that the balance in the confrontation between WhatsApp and Telegram is broken:

• For the first time in many years, WhatsApp is becoming more innovative than Telegram. He found his business model, linking it to payments and e-commerce, and may even become profitable;
• a single technological platform reduces the number of potential errors and makes all Facebook messengers more reliable;
• Facebook's news initiatives, launching the News tab, claiming to be the entry point for news consumers, and willing to pay publishers, put Telegram in a catch-up position. Telegram's news aggregator and recommender system is still not ready, although work on them has apparently been going on for several months;
• at the same time, Telegram's business model is in trouble. In a number of key markets, its legal position is in question, and the planned launch of the TON blockchain is being postponed due to SEC claims;
• in the current situation, the reliability of the messenger is not a key advantage - after all, more than a billion people in China use WeChat, which is openly read by the authorities. The place of the game of images is occupied by the race of products and their convenience - and here Telegram is still in the lead.

+100 Productivity

Game designer Nick Bentley many years ago to create and describe game concepts in three steps. invented the 100 to 10 to 1 system

In the beginning, a game designer must put together a hundred game concepts in a week, and sometimes a day, and not pay attention to quality. It's especially important to keep generating ideas after you feel like nothing else comes to mind.

In the second step, ten concepts are selected from a hundred. They are trying to turn them into working versions. This stage takes from six months to a year. The best game idea survives and is taken for revision.

The same system is not just for game designers. It can be used, for example, when selecting ideas for implementation in software projects - especially those that involve high quality code. For a dozen "lucky" ideas, minimal products are created - and the most attractive of them wins the attention of the programmer.

Read later

• E-commerce has transformed the economy and our lives. 30% of solid waste produced in the US comes from home delivered goods. annually for cardboard packaging alone Over a billion trees are cut down , Forbes specifies. But it’s not all about trash—the idea of ​​delivering anything to your door completely changes how we behave as consumers. This change is not as noticeable as, for example, the impact of smartphones on offline communication of people, but it is much stronger.
• We wrote about fiasco the WeWork and the failure of the Vision Fund and the specifics of the company's culture . But Vanity Fair tells an equally interesting version of events in "You Don't Bring Bad News to a Cult Leader." The former head of the company, Adam Neumann, now considers himself a martyr.
• Quantamagazine publishes an article about Barbara Liskov, an American researcher who received the 2008 Turing Award. Liskov was one of the first to apply a modern approach to writing software code and introduced data abstraction, a technique that allows you to manage the complexity of systems. However, she says that modern computer science faces problems that simply better systems design cannot solve.