An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook Messenger is launching its own split-screen group video chat feature. Six users can appear in split-screen at the time and don Snapchat-style selfie masks, while 50 total can listen and talk over voice while sending text, stickers, emojis, and GIFs. Group video chat starts rolling out worldwide on iOS, Android, and web, today, though Android will have to wait for the MSQRD-powered selfie masks that might not ever come to desktop. It's free on wi-fi but standard data charges will apply on cellular connections. The launch makes Messenger the first popular western messaging app with group video chat. It's managed to beat FaceTime/iMessage, Google Duo, and Snapchat to the punch. U.S. teens might be most familiar with the format from the recent rise of Houseparty, the new app from the makers of Meerkat. Messenger group video chat works a little differently, but with a similar design. Instead of simply logging into an ever-present video chat room that notifies friends like on Houseparty, you deliberately select friends or a group text thread to invite to a video call. Once in, up to 4 Messenger users can share big slices of the screen, while Houseparty accommodates 8. Between 4 and 6 callers, the Messenger screen switches to a gallery format, with whoever is speaking taking up the bulk of the screen with little thumbnails of everyone else at the bottom. And everyone beyond the first 6 up to 50 callers will only be able to listen, speak, and send content but won't appear in the video gallery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Facebook Messenger is launching its own split-screen group video chat feature. Six users can appear in split-screen at the time and don Snapchat-style selfie masks, while 50 total can listen and talk over voice while sending text, stickers, emojis, and GIFs. Group video chat starts rolling out worldwide on iOS, Android, and web, today, though Android will have to wait for the MSQRD-powered selfie masks that might not ever come to desktop. It's free on wi-fi but standard data charges will apply on cellular connections. The launch makes Messenger the first popular western messaging app with group video chat. It's managed to beat FaceTime/iMessage, Google Duo, and Snapchat to the punch. U.S. teens might be most familiar with the format from the recent rise of Houseparty, the new app from the makers of Meerkat. Messenger group video chat works a little differently, but with a similar design. Instead of simply logging into an ever-present video chat room that notifies friends like on Houseparty, you deliberately select friends or a group text thread to invite to a video call. Once in, up to 4 Messenger users can share big slices of the screen, while Houseparty accommodates 8. Between 4 and 6 callers, the Messenger screen switches to a gallery format, with whoever is speaking taking up the bulk of the screen with little thumbnails of everyone else at the bottom. And everyone beyond the first 6 up to 50 callers will only be able to listen, speak, and send content but won't appear in the video gallery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I just posted Vesper’s API server up on GitHub.

Again: this is provided as historical artifact, not as living software. It no longer runs anywhere. And I don’t make claims about quality — it’s just that it may be interesting. (And may not be.) It gives me something to write about, at least.

For possibly-helpful background, see the Vesper Sync Diary, which was written while I was working on this code.

Azure Mobile Services

It’s a Node.js server — but it ran on top of Mobile Services, which means you couldn’t just plop it down on a machine and run it unless you added the exact features that Mobile Services provides.

Nevertheless, I think the code is somewhat readable, even if it would be difficult to run it. (You’d also have to set up a database with the exact same schema, which you could figure out from the code. I don’t recommend actually trying to get this running.)

Where the code is

See the api and shared directories. You can ignore the extensions and table directories. The scheduler directory has just one simple script in it.

Things I Liked

The Azure folks provided a ton of help. They were great, and I enjoyed using the service.

Once the code was written and tested, I made almost no changes. It just worked. And keeping it running wasn’t a problem until near the end (I think I had to upgrade the database plan, and that fixed it).

Things I Didn’t Like

It’s JavaScript. Because I’ve spent the last 15 years writing Objective-C, I would have been far more comfortable writing in Ruby. It would have been more readable and better-organized. Hopefully I could have better avoided callback-hell (where callbacks are nested inside callbacks which are nested inside callbacks, etc.).

But, hey, JavaScript gets the job done.

The other thing I didn’t like was that there wasn’t a way to run a Mobile Services Node site locally, since the online version takes care of a bunch of things. In practice this wasn’t as bad as it sounds, but being able to run it locally would have been nice.

The Heart of Vesper Syncing

See api/notes.js. Syncing was done per-property: each property of a note had an associated modification date. When notes come into the server, and there are existing versions, those properties are merged. See the mergeOneNote and mergeOneProperty functions.

It should be no surprise that almost the exact same code — only in Objective-C — runs on the client side. It also merges property-by-property as notes come from the server, since there may be local changes that are newer.

Also see, in api/tags.js, mergeTags and mergeTag.

Encryption

The text of notes was stored in the database encrypted, with a key that was stored in the config for the site but not in the source code or in the repository. In shared/vespernotes.js, see encryptedTextForNote and decryptedNoteText.

One of the features of this was that I could change the encryption key without re-encrypting the entire database. The keys were stored with names of the form VESPER_TEXT_KEY_0, VESPER_TEXT_KEY_1, etc. And there was another config item that specified the current key. When the current key failed to decrypt note text, it would try the previous key, and so on back to the very first (zeroth) key. See the loop in decryptedNoteText.

This is different from providing end-to-end encryption, of course. These days that’s probably the way to go. But at the time we wrote this it was reasonable not to do that. Times change.

(Note that nobody ever asked for any data from our system, and we would have to create a mechanism for that, which we never did.)

Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted. From a report: At least 23 cities issued red alerts for a swath of pollution that has hovered over much of the nation since Friday, China's Xinhua news agency reported. Alerts are expected to remain in effect through Wednesday. Hospitals set emergency procedures in motion to deal with an influx of breathing-related illnesses. Large hospitals in the port city of Tianjin, less than 100 miles southeast of Beijing, saw a surge in asthma and other respiratory issues, China's People's Daily reported. The pollution forced the city to close the highways and caused delays and cancellations for dozens of flights, Xinhua said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Major cities across northern China choked Monday under a blanket of smog so thick that industries were ordered shut down and air and ground traffic was disrupted. From a report: At least 23 cities issued red alerts for a swath of pollution that has hovered over much of the nation since Friday, China's Xinhua news agency reported. Alerts are expected to remain in effect through Wednesday. Hospitals set emergency procedures in motion to deal with an influx of breathing-related illnesses. Large hospitals in the port city of Tianjin, less than 100 miles southeast of Beijing, saw a surge in asthma and other respiratory issues, China's People's Daily reported. The pollution forced the city to close the highways and caused delays and cancellations for dozens of flights, Xinhua said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ruling party official says probe into killing of Russian envoy Andrey Karlov is focusing on Gulen movement links.

Reader Presto Vivace shares a report on The Intercept: IBM employees are taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company's initial refusal to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry. In November, Rometty wrote Trump directly, congratulating him on his electoral victory and detailing various services the company could sell his administration. The letter was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from Rometty to her enormous global staff. "As IBMers, we believe that innovation improves the human condition. ... We support, tolerance, diversity, the development of expertise, and the open exchange of ideas," she wrote in the context of lending material support to a man who won the election by rejecting all of those values. Employee comments were a mix of support and horror. Now, some of those who were horrified are going public, denouncing Rometty's letter and asserting "our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties." The IBMPetition.org effort has been spearheaded in part by IBM cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley, who told The Intercept he started organizing with his coworkers after reading Rometty's letter. "I was shocked, of course," Hanley said, "because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here's Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader Presto Vivace shares a report on The Intercept: IBM employees are taking a public stand following a personal pitch to Donald Trump from CEO Ginni Rometty and the company's initial refusal to rule out participating in the creation of a national Muslim registry. In November, Rometty wrote Trump directly, congratulating him on his electoral victory and detailing various services the company could sell his administration. The letter was published on an internal IBM blog along with a personal note from Rometty to her enormous global staff. "As IBMers, we believe that innovation improves the human condition. ... We support, tolerance, diversity, the development of expertise, and the open exchange of ideas," she wrote in the context of lending material support to a man who won the election by rejecting all of those values. Employee comments were a mix of support and horror. Now, some of those who were horrified are going public, denouncing Rometty's letter and asserting "our right to refuse participation in any U.S. government contracts that violate constitutionally protected civil liberties." The IBMPetition.org effort has been spearheaded in part by IBM cybersecurity engineer Daniel Hanley, who told The Intercept he started organizing with his coworkers after reading Rometty's letter. "I was shocked, of course," Hanley said, "because IBM has purported to espouse diversity and inclusion, and yet here's Ginni Rometty in an unqualified way reaching out to an admin whose electoral success was based on racist programs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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