Aral Balkan, a designer and developer, writes about privacy, surveillance business models, and ethical technology.
HN commenters cite his posts equating ad analytics with spyware, the Camera Panopticon, and the Ello VC funding story.
I agree with everyone that this should be open-source, but at least this has one benefit over the other proprietary solutions out there: This is not just a secure messenger, but also a beautiful one. If you want to convince - and I do - those who use Facebook Messenger and iMessage and don't necessarily consider their privacy, it needs to have a great user experience on top of the technical foundation. On the other hand, if it gets that and ends up being open-sourced, it would be a great fit for Aral Balkan's Codename Prometheus: http://aralbalkan.com/notes/codename-prometheus/
What about the other 473 issues?
http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list
Shouldn't we vote for them too?
Not that distributed transactions wouldn't be yummy but having worked on App Engine myself (as recently as yesterday in fact), I can say very confidently that they have much bigger fish to fry at the moment than distributed transactions. If people don't take my word on this, and why should they, please read Aral Balkan, who is one of the early victims/adopters:
"Why Google App Engine is broken and what Google must do to fix it."
http://aralbalkan.com/1504
The limitations are well known, just Google around. A relatively good overview can be found here:
http://aralbalkan.com/1504
It was discussed in this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/83a692fecb6c5b12
It definitely depends on the kind of app you are doing. From my experience GAE is great for websites with high ratio of reads to writes. If you have a lot of writes or any non-trivial background processing, it becomes harder to develop for appengine.
Along the same vein, I highly recommend this read from Aral Balkan[0] on how advertising and analytics data is now really just a fancy word for what we considered spyware back in the older (freer) days of the Internet.
[0]: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/spyware-2.0/
Isn't this sys-con.com site catching a lot of crap for rebranding content form other sites?
http://aralbalkan.com/2067
I can't find the original link for this post but I'm sure there is one.
I'm afraid this is the Silicon Valley way of doing business. I believe it's what you get when dealing with VCs. Read more about that here: https://aralbalkan.com/notes/the-camera-panopticon/