Leister

I worked with a guy.

This is back when I was like 18.

I worked with a guy.

And I built the front end.

He built the back end to where I was able to build basically just a web page based IRC client or excuse me, ICQ client because IRC at the time required resources server and ICQ, which was a different method of communication was much simpler, much lighter, largely resistant to any sort of monitoring or oversight.

But IRC was more ubiquitous.

More people used it.

It was more widespread.

It was more popular, easier to use than ICQ was, even though ICQ was the dominant for the purposes of these private communications.

So when we did this web-based ICQ application, we couldn't get any traction on it, even though it was superior for the purposes of privacy and security.

IRC ultimately won out.

And then IRC was basically superseded

by AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and so on.

And then other chat tools would dominate.

And of course, now people have ran away from these chat tools.

The point, though, is that people have done analysis to try to understand why is it that it seems like we're repeating history where we can't settle on these tools that we know are superior.

And the question is, are they really superior?

And the three for the iron triangle that I described relative to these tools has to do with decentralization, privacy and usability.

Now there's a kind of a running gag in security, any security, which is that if the more secure something is, the less convenient it must be.

Biometrics is every single provider's way of trying to be convenient, but still be secure.