
Adversarial interoperability: reviving an old weapon to slay today's monopolies - liotier
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
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kbenson
The meat and potatoes of this are at the end. To make any headway with this
there needs to be some legislation that gives more rights to consumers.

As a simple example of there adversarial interoperability used to work well
(so much so that we had an ecosystem of interacting technologies), look at
chat. First, before there was much encryption we had AIM and ICQ (and then
AID/ICQ), and then an open standard in XMPP, and then Gchat used XMPP, and
people used aggregating chat clients to handle all their chat needs in one
application. There was no real downside to another account on another service,
you could just add it to your chat handler and you were good to go.

Then we started seeing proprietary forays into this space with enough clout
and lock-in to actually change the status quo. I might be wrong, but I've
always attributed this primarily to Apple. When Apple provided a Mac only chat
protocol and then used it to extend standard messaging but only for their
platforms (SMS/iMessage interoperability), that was the beginning of the end.
This was embrace, extend and extinguish as seen by Microsoft applied to a new
medium, and with a slightly different strategy (instead of overall market
dominance driving the change, it was vendor lock-in). Other big players
followed suit in the next few years (I assume because otherwise they would be
at a disadvantage). Gchat was superseded by Hangouts which was closed, and
Facebook closed off their XMPP support around the same time. The excuses never
held water to me. XMPP was extensible, and if it wasn't, it's not like
companies like Google and Facebook (and Apple, as iChat was XMPP based as
well) could not push forward whatever changes were needed for the advanced
features they wanted.

We had a wonderful world of interoperating competing chat networks, a protocol
that embraced this and even allowed federation, which a bunch of what are now
some of the biggest companies in the world embraced, and then once everyone
had an account, they revealed the extent of their bait-and-switch.

There's a lesson to be learned in there about commercial companies taking
advantage of open source and open standards for their own profit (which is to
be expected) but at the expense of their customers (which is unfortunate).

~~~
userbinator
It's worth noting that MSNP, the protocol Microsoft used for MSN messenger,
was actually submitted to the IETF as a draft:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-
protoc...](https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protocol-00)

From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the biggest
turn-off being its reliance on XML, whereas MSNP was a line-based textual
protocol closer to a mix of IRC and HTTP. I found MSNP simple enough that I
wrote a client and used it right up until Microsoft shut down their servers.

Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in (limited)
use today.

~~~
kbenson
> From a technical perspective, XMPP never really appealed to me --- the
> biggest turn-off being its reliance on XML

I'm not making a case it was the best, or only protocol, but it existed and
was popular, and importantly, was the protocol that Apple, Google and Facebook
all used in their initial forays into the space.

That is, not only were they originally using open standards, they they were
originally all using the same standard and could interoperate with each other
easily if desired. That's important because it shows just how far we went.
Literally from one end of the spectrum (fully open and interoperable on a
client level) to the other (closed proprietary standards and enforced
incompatibility).

> Also, don't forget that the original chat protocol, IRC, is still in
> (limited) use today.

Sure, I wasn't making a case that they died, just that we were sold an implied
bill of goods that was bogus. There was no reason at the time to not use gtalk
more than AIM as many people that had AIM eventually got a google/Gmail
account (or Apple ichat one, or Facebook one), and to focus on those more. And
new people didn't see the need to get an AIM/ICQ account because everyone they
talked to had a way to reach them on those major platforms with those accounts
they also got.

If we were back at the time people were signing up for accounts, and people
were presented with the choice of getting a dedicated IM account in addition
to their gchat or ichat or facebook one knowing that their bigcorp one would
be closed to outside networks soon, I think a lot more would have done so.

------
m463
This reminds me of a friend of mine whose dad was a state senator.

I asked how his dad dealt with all the craziness of lobbyists?

Turns out he used them a lot. If he had trouble with a school textbook issue
he would call up an unrelated lobbyist (such as oil) and ask him about it.
Very quickly, he would have a thick report from leading exports on his desk
outlining and analyzing in detail the school textbook issue.

Pit em against each other.

Steve Jobs was a master of things like this. He made the phone companies
compromise and got smartphones to market. He made the music industry
compromise and got online music jumpstarted.

~~~
whatshisface
"Hey, Joe, it's your buddy the Oil lobbyist. Yeah, the Senator is asking about
school textbooks again. I know that's your area. You got anything?"

"Sure, buddy. I'll have a thousand page report ready in a couple days. By the
way, yesterday a Congressman asked me about the safety of fracking..."

~~~
BLanen
Yep, his example was pretty shady.

~~~
m463
(note: my example of "textbooks" and "oil" was arbitrary, and this was also in
a _completely_ different era, maybe 50s?)

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drtillberg
Why stop at _adversarial_ interoperability? When we're talking about
monopolistic participants, why not compel them to open the network and
standards that are serving as a barrier to entry. We take for granted that a
Verizon phone can call a T-Mobile user; the situation in social media in
particular, as well as .doc/.docx, is archaic.

~~~
sokoloff
I was under the impression that the docx format is a published standard, first
under ECMA-376 then ISO/IEC 29500:2008. Microsoft has also promised to not
enforce any patent claims they have that are necessary for someone to adopt
those standards.

~~~
anoncake
AFAIK docx as produced by Word doesn't even comply with the standard.

~~~
tzs
It's a superset of the standard. Word uses some features that were in the
standard that was first proposed but did not pass, like OLE serialization.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Strange that they can call it a standard yet continue to include non-agreed-
upon extensions. At some point it becomes false advertising, unless they fork
it under a new MIME type

~~~
sokoloff
I believe a company has a right to support backwards compatibility for file
formats. If they propose a standard and the outcome of the standards work
prevents their supporting backwards compatibility (in both directions), I’d
rather they support their customers (and their data/files), document their
extension use, even at the expense of pure standards implementations not being
able to read those files.

------
GeekyBear
The EU came fairly close to forcing Microsoft to open up the Office document
formats as part of their string of antitrust actions against Microsoft.

In the end they did force Microsoft to open up the protocols used by Windows
clients to communicate with Microsoft's own servers (to allow third party
interoperability with server products like Samba), but did not do the same
thing with the various Office document formats.

After an additional $1.3 billion fine, Microsoft stopped dragging it's feet
and complied with the ruling.

[https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-
micro...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2537525/eu-fines-microsoft-
another--1-3b.html)

------
sprafa
It’s absolutely obvious that FB needs to be forced through legislation to
allow for interopability of its basic features. This has been obvious since it
achieved its hegemony. When this happens FB will be dead.

------
starmole
The elephant in the room here is strong cryptography. We now have the
technology that makes this kind of interop pretty much impossible.

~~~
Too
Not cryptography by itself, it's more the sprawling reliance on SaaS. Compare
to the .doc-case. It's just a static file format where the shrinkwrap software
reading it would only be updated once every 3 years. It's possible to reverse
engineer the format and catch up long before they have a chance to release a
new format, and even when they do they can't drop support for the old format
because millions of users have files stored on disk that way.

When everything is in the cloud all you need to do is block API access, or
make your API crippled to begin with, and it's instant game over.

~~~
mntmoss
That's giving up way too early. This cat and mouse game is played on the
regular between makers of online games and makers of online game cheating
tools.

If you invest a sizable amount of engineering resources, you can stay a little
bit ahead of cheaters and ban the ones that slip through. But your adversaries
will never give up, and even if you limit their encroachment, it will slowly
but surely impact your product; the tricky part of dealing with this software
is that using harsh measures to defeat it will harm goodwill and incite the
cheating users to campaign against you.

The same basic principles are true of adversarial compatibility: users may be
ambivalent about having choices, but they will rarely have a reason to dislike
it; they just don't want to be caught in the crossfire if war gets waged.

What stops this from being applied across all internet-available software is
more about the legal reprisal threat: Although leveraging Facebook's own
frontend code to start interacting with their systems is within the reach of
any keen-minded and hard-working CS student, a company built on that principle
would be vulnerable to burial by lawsuit. Companies selling cheats tend to be
overseas fly-by-nights, safely out of reach from the long arm of the law.

Perhaps all we have to do is wait for WeChat or Weibo to announce Facebook
compatibility.

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HillaryBriss
the link included in the article to "Usenet's alt.* hierarchy" actually points
to an article about the Hayes Modem. I hope the author changes it to something
that explains the adversarial nature of the alt.* hierarchy.

------
HillaryBriss
The article uses it as an example, but I don't quite see how a search engine's
web crawler user agent string (or whatever Doctorow is talking about) is an
example of adversarial interoperability.

------
dmos62
Yes, yes, yes. Legislation and regulation towards proper competition in the IT
space is the only way forward. For all of its history, high-tech has been the
wild-wild-west: good for the powerful few, not good for others. GDPR or the-
right-to-repair are baby steps. The monopolies we have now are like your
grandma putting sleeping pills in your food so you don't leave. It's a rigor
mortis hold on tech.

