Ever since Orwell wrote his immortal 1984, Big Brother has become a commonplace, a right and left label. Total surveillance seemed something abominable and unacceptable in a decent society. It seemed ...
After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fears about "state surveillance" subsided - the authorities managed to inspire people with the idea that the surveillance was carried out for the benefit of the citizens themselves.
And at the same time, in the United States and in many other countries, there is a strange, at first glance, tendency: ordinary citizens are increasingly actively spying on each other.
“Next time you go outside, don't forget to smile at the camera,” - with these words begins, published in USA Today.
In the United States, there is an increased vigilance of everyone and everything, and in addition, the cost of surveillance and surveillance technologies is falling day by day. So now, not only banks and grocers can boast of the ubiquitous security cameras.
People were afraid of Big Brother, but Little Brother turns out to be no less ubiquitous.
Smile, please! Your neighbor, or rather his automatic camera, is filming you. The beloved slogan "Keep Smiling", which has acquired almost legal force in commercial companies in the West, has acquired a new "support" in the form of the ubiquitous "electronic eyes".
On a huge number of sites, there were or are still hanging animated banners advertising webcams to track their real estate, animals or women. Some banners are ambiguous, which, however, is natural (this will be discussed below) ...
The ubiquitous cameras are no longer Big, but what technology expert Howard Rheingold calls “Little Brother”. “It was believed that only the state had sufficient capacity and technology to carry out (total) surveillance. But now everything has become democratized. Both your neighbors and your relatives can do this, ”USA Today quotes Reingold.
One of X10 Wireless Technologies' popup banners promoting a surveillance camera ...
Remember, in the movie Mission: Impossible, the heroes brandish their glasses with a built-in camera? It's not fiction anymore. This, according to USA Today, is a reality purchased over the Internet for modest money - in the region of $ 100. This tiny camera can be hidden anywhere, including sunglasses, cell phones or fountain pens.
Generally speaking, it is in the United States that cell phones with cameras are still a kind of innovation. In Australia and Hong Kong, it is already outright forbidden to carry such devices to swimming pools and, in particular, changing rooms. It seems that it is unnecessary to explain the reasons for the prohibitions.
Meanwhile, separate stories of how low-end cameras saved someone, or helped arrest hijackers, appear more and more often, convincing “civilians” of the need to purchase these devices.
Consider, for example, the news that the San Jose police disseminated pictures of a certain type who kidnapped a 9-year-old girl right from her house and washed away in a car. It is not a fact that the pervert will be able to catch with the help of these particular images, but it turned out to be an excellent advertisement for surveillance cameras for parents living in the neighborhood.
The fact that a camera by itself will not be able to protect a child from persecution by a pedophile seems to be of little concern.
A fake camera is a scarecrow for bandits.
It is characteristic, by the way, that fake surveillance cameras are actively traded on the Internet. These are not cameras at all, so, plastic models - a kind of scarecrow. The developers assure that with the help of these "toys" it is possible to ward off the robbers.
And even if experts on public safety and personal information were more worried about surveillance of citizens by the special services, total supervision of everyone over everyone is, alas, already a given. And it's not even so much about the desire to protect yourself from the world around you.
The point is that irresistible attraction that for many people is fraught with spying on neighbors. Especially if their own life seems monotonous and empty to them, and this is not uncommon in our time.
Yes, in decent society this is - for now - considered indecent. Psychology considers this to be a kind of deviation, if not even a kind of sexual perversion. There is even a term "voyeurism" (from the French word "voyeur" - peeping, peeping).
Screenshot from the game Phantasmagoria 2. The camera spies on the act of seduction. Is peeping a characteristic feature of our time?
However, an incredible number of people are currently suffering from voyeurism. The moral barrier has disappeared, perhaps also because thanks to the Internet and high technology, the availability of "pornography" has increased dramatically.
Under "pornography" is meant not only a frank demonstration of nudity and copulating people, but also the very possibility of secret surveillance of other people - without their knowledge. Sometimes, however, and with their consent.
For example, in September 2002, the Spanish newspaper El Pais published an article entitled “Total Pornography” (translated into InoSMI.ru). The author of the article makes rather bold statements, but it is difficult to argue with them. For example:
“The desire for openness is becoming one of the most passionate desires of our time. In economics, politics, morality, food, sex, any event becomes modern if it meets the conditions of transparency.
The beef tested at the French Information Center for the Meat Industry (Center d'Information des Viandes - CIV) is 100% guaranteed to be meat cut from muscle tissue with a sharpened knife. And that's all thanks to the Opening Agreement.
But in relation to other flesh - human and sexual - the apogee of pornography (both on the Internet and outside it) is undoubtedly associated with an interest in spying, peeping, watching others. Starting from “Big Brother” (the Spanish analogue of the project “Behind the Glass” and other similar reality-shows) and ending with the Chilean “Glass House”, from Norman Foster's aerial structures in London, to the UEFA pavilion in Nyon, Switzerland, built by to the project of Patrick Berger - everything strives for openness.
Pornography is a symbol of our era, both in the moral and ideological sense of the word, pertaining to both human flesh and what it can be bought for ...
The world itself exposes its naked body to anyone who wishes, and democracy is perceived as a state flooded with light. So is the avalanche of pornography - traditional and non-traditional - to be amazed at?
On the Internet, thanks to webcams, anyone can film their yawns in front of a monitor screen and send their images to the midnight inhabitants of the Web just like him.
The webcam shows the most intimate, which is exchanged for the secret, webcam others. Sharing intimacy online is one of the most engaging ways to communicate between users.
Then why is there any wonder here? Predicted in the novel by O. Huxley "O wondrous new world"(Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, 1932) - glass floors and ceilings," the right to know everything about everyone "- became a reality. The world did not become happier from this, it is also safer - these are only illusions.
But, as you know, "the darkness of low truths is dearer to us than we are elevating deception." The ability to spy on someone without his knowledge creates the illusion of power over him.
The ability to observe the surroundings of your home and its interior design creates the illusion of security.
Skillful robbers, however, will hide before the police appear, and the camera will help to identify them at best. But she is not capable of stopping anyone.
But this is precisely an illusion, because skillful thieves will pull out everything they need from the house and wash off even before the police arrive, alerted by the owner of the house, accidentally who spotted the robbers on their computer monitor.
However, how many people understand this? Apparently not. According to X10 Wireless Technologies, an active webcam distribution company, whose "ambiguous" banners have covered the entire Internet, it claims that more than a million of its cameras are currently in use. And this is just one manufacturer.
According to the calculations of an employee of the Californian Futorological Institute (Institute for the Future) Paul Saffo, ten miles in any major city has 30-40 surveillance cameras. And that's not counting the cameras that are installed in houses or that passers-by carry with them.
“We are being spied on all the time,” Saffo says. “We not only spy on each other, but also on ourselves. And one day we all will find that we have become uninteresting 'stars' of our own boring reality-shows. "
For several days in a row, an unknown hacker puts on an Internet show, spying on people using webcams. This is not the first time that users have been monitored through their own computers and smartphones - this is what many malefactors and Western intelligence officers have done. "Lenta.ru" found out whether it is possible to protect the webcam from hacking.
Lover to spy
On Tuesday, April 26, an anonymous member of the Dvach imageboard created a forum thread where he announced an unusual internet show. He promised that he would conduct a YouTube broadcast for a couple of hours and would follow random netizens live. Moreover, they unexpectedly launch various applications on the computers of victims, turn on porn and upload their data to the network.
So that the audience does not get bored, the self-proclaimed showman announced "full interactive" - the audience will be able to send him their requests in the chat, which he will immediately fulfill. After a while, a link to the Synchtube service appeared in the recording, where, in addition to the built-in video broadcast from YouTube, a chat was organized and donations were collected. To guarantee the execution of their requests, users were asked to send the hacker a token amount of two or three rubles for the "development of the project."
At the very beginning of the broadcast, it became clear that the attacker was acting through the LuminosityLink system. It is commonly used by network administrators to manage computer networks from a distance. However, there are many pirated versions of the program on the Internet that can be configured to spy on users, infect them with viruses, and organize DDoS attacks. The instructions are easy to find on YouTube.
For more than two hours of broadcasting, the hacker managed to connect to several dozen computers. Usually he watched for a couple of minutes what the victim was doing, and then suddenly displayed various videos or photographs to the person on the screen. So, a young couple from Russia was forced to contemplate gay porn, and a Ukrainian policeman was forced to see a bloody mixed martial arts fight.
The next day, the hacker mastered another amusement: playing music on VKontakte. Managed to wake up one of the users with it. The attacker tried in every possible way to anger people, because this was what the audience of the show was expecting. Usually, the victims immediately began to scan their computer for viruses, but the showman simply added antiviruses to the list of prohibited programs.
The audience reacted especially violently to several users who turned off the Internet out of fear, and to a young man who decided to call the police. They also laughed at the one who entered into correspondence with the hacker, thinking that he was in dialogue with the support service of the Internet provider. Prior to that, the author of the broadcast for ten minutes displayed information about skin diseases on his screen.
The most curious thing is that the attacker is extremely difficult to track down. "Dvach" has long been famous for guaranteed anonymity for all users, and the hacker himself probably uses VPN and other services to mask his IP address. The network, however, suggested that the broadcasts are organized by the well-known YouTube-observer of various hacker programs Dmitry Shalashov, since the voice is similar.
Website for cameras
The Dvacha hacker is far from the only attacker spying on people through webcams. In 2014, the BBC reported on a Russian site that allowed monitoring webcam broadcasts around the world. More than two and a half thousand channels from the United States, two thousand from France and one and a half thousand from the Netherlands were available on the resource.
Came to this portal and webcams of Russian users. Threat Post found about 70 working cameras from Moscow, Korolev, Krasnodar and other cities.
The BBC journalists then contacted the owner of the resource. He stated that he had nothing to do with Russia and refused to recognize himself as a hacker. According to him, he received access to all broadcasts after entering a simple password for the cameras, which the users themselves did not change from the standard one. At the same time, the Networkworld website calculated that about 73 thousand webcams in 256 countries were protected with a password by default.
No hacking really happened. Users who did not change the factory settings and passwords, in fact, gave the attackers access to their webcams themselves.
The emergence of an aggregator of unsecured webcams was only a matter of time. The portal creators did not need to search for software vulnerabilities or launch a phishing site to steal passwords. Unprotected cameras were found using a simple search query.
Following widespread publicity, the site was taken down. Wireless camera makers Foscam then said they had changed after the incident. software, and their cameras now force users to set complex passwords, preventing them from operating in factory default security settings.
Snowden's Truth
Edward Snowden, a former employee of the US National Security Agency, also spoke about the fact that webcams are used for surveillance. In his exposing materials, he said that the American and British special services were listening to phones, tracking correspondence in social networks and messengers, money transactions and ticket purchases. In addition, the NSA has access to millions of webcams and can monitor users through them. It became clear that absolutely non-hackable technologies did not exist.
Details of how the secret services monitored the video chats were provided by Snowden in February 2014. According to published materials, a special program Optic Nerve was used for this, capable of recognizing human faces. Initially, it was created to fight crime, and with its help it was planned to search for terrorists, but in the end it turned into a tool of mass surveillance.
Optic Nerve was developed by British intelligence. According to Snowden, every five seconds, the program automatically took screenshots from randomly selected video chats and saved them in a special database. Among these images, shots of an erotic nature often came across. Optic Nerve launched in 2008, and in six months, intelligence captured images of 1.8 million netizens.
For surveillance, British intelligence only used video chats from Yahoo! Inc, and shared the data exclusively with their American counterparts. Yahoo! Inc. did not know anything about it.
To each according to work
However, hackers do not always manage to evade responsibility. For example, in 2013, a case was filed in the United States against 19-year-old Jared James Abrahams. The young man obtained illegal access to the girls' computers and took candid pictures of them using webcams. He then threatened his victims to publish these materials if they did not send him more erotic photos.
Abrahams also tried his former classmate Cassidy Wolf, 2013 Miss Teen USA title holder. The girl refused to comply with Abrahams' demands. He fulfilled his threat and posted images taken from a webcam on the network. As a result, his
(advertising)
Voyeur Dreams: Peeping Tools
Peeping has never been easier. It is not known whether voyeurism is considered a bad thing, but the fact that the store shelves are full of all kinds of gadgets for this activity is an undeniable fact. Maybe this is a worldwide conspiracy?
Well, first of all, the wide angle lens. You shoot as if one plan, in fact - you follow the others.
In lens advertising Omax not even hiding what they are really needed for.
For lovers of female forms, of course.
Secondly, an old and proven observation device is binoculars. Once again, we are told where to look for the best species.
The ad for Bynolyt binoculars is of course made with a sense of humor. But I would not like to think that every owner of "far-sighted" optics is looking at naked neighbors.
Another class of devices designed for prying is DVRs. They appear to have appeared with a specific purpose - to help drivers defend their rights on the road. For a diversion, even models have been invented that can protect the owner's wallet from fines. So, the Highscreen Black Box Radar Plus recorder not only shoots video in Full HD resolution, but is also capable of capturing signals from speed cameras and traffic police radars.
The built-in radar detector “sees” even a thunderstorm of all reckless drivers - the newest “Strelka-ST” crime detection complex - from a distance of 500-700 meters. What can we say about conventional radars and traffic police cameras.
Then came the compact Highscreen Black Box Outdoor with a removable display. This thing with an almost limitless scope: you can hang it in the car (to divert your eyes), attach it to a motorcycle or bicycle (shoot girls-athletes), or even dive with it.
Black Box Outdoor is almost an extreme camera, you can swim with it at a depth of 5 meters (hello, girls in bikinis!).
But the video recorder was really revealed as a spy camera with the release of the Highscreen Black Box Connect model. This small box shoots a video and transmits it via Wi-Fi directly to smartphone (OS supported Android and iOS ) or uploads to a "cloud" server on the Web. Leaving the recorder somewhere in the Wi-Fi reception area, you can watch what is happening from any device connected to the Internet, even from a thousand kilometers away.
It is very cool. Especially for those who like to sneak a peep.
But of course, you shouldn't consider everything written as exposing a worldwide conspiracy of voyeurs. It's just that there are a lot of tracking techniques, but as they say, it all depends on the purpose for which it is used.
Results of a survey conducted by the head of the Sibiriks studio
The head of the Sibiriks studio, Vladimir Zavertaylov, interviewed his colleagues and collected a number of resources where designers can find ideas and inspiration for creating their own products.
Every artist (and web designer as well) is a bit of a thief: in one place he pulled an idea, in another - a plot, digested with his creative bowler and got a masterpiece.
If you are insolently circling the sites of the day with Awwwards, inspired by the quote “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal,” be careful not to cut yourself on shards of shattered illusions. Because nobody said that, guys. This is as dubious a product of the Internet as the Stethem quotes.
The original said that mediocrities steal, and creative guys only copy and improve. So stop being lazy, it's time to make original layouts.
We shocked the designers of Sibiriks and found out where they look for ideas and are generally inspired (legally). We found links worn to holes (Awwwards - who would doubt it), and something more original. Scattered by targets:
- Collect ideas for the site.
- Find a specific item.
- Grab some visual inspiration.
- See everything in one place.
- Tighten up the materiel.
It turned out to be such a good store of inspiration. Enough to assemble a mood board, come up with a project chip, and even find a couple of pieces of code to make life easier for the layout designer.
Collect ideas for the site
On these resources, you can see how good-quality sites look in general - in case the customer's references have completely erased your ideas about bad and good design. We study, absorb, tune in to the right wave.
- Awwwards. Not a button accordion, but a classic. Collections on Awwwards is a relatively recent feature though.
- The FWA, CSS Design Awards, Website Design Award. A bunch of site contests where the work happens to be repeated. But the original nominees also slip by.
- Designer News. A resource where you can find cool examples and read the opinions of colleagues from all over the world. Usually all designs that go to Awwwards will appear here first.
- Site Inspire. Nice sites that rarely overlap with Awwwards & Co. Not always competitive, but still original and interesting.
- Cargo Сollective. A selection of minimalist sites with some hidden zest.
- The Best Designs. Here, the sites are simpler - the creative slider is twisted by no more than 20%.
- The Perfect Grid. A selection of sites with a non-standard grid is the trend of 2017, by the way.
- Sibirix 's Pinterest. When our designers don't paint the suitability, they add the sites they like here.
- Minimal gallery. Gallery of radical minimalism. Gorgeous inserts. What is worth at least this exhibit, where on the main page there is only text and a cursor in the form of a banana.
- Hover States. A selection of unusual sites with a convenient filter by tags.
- Siiimple. Here, one good minimalistic site is added in portions once a day.
- One Page Love. Collection of one-page sites. Cheerful, and sometimes not very decent. Faint of heart and sissies, walk carefully.
Find a specific item
Resources in case the general concept has settled down, and it remains to come up with catchy little things: fonts, icons, interactions.
- Dribbble. A well-worn resource - here are gigabytes of ideas for icons and microinteractions. The most difficult thing is to find something useful among them.
- Motion UI. Subjective extract from Dribbble - for those who do not want to stir up its rubble on their own.
- Codepen Codrops. Resources where ready-made work items are stored: insert them into the site even now. Find something cool, play with it in your design and bring the necessary piece of code to the layout designer - profit.
- Web Design Freebies. A selection of icons, fonts, sometimes mockups slip through - a gold mine for a mood board. Not updated anymore, so use it before it goes bad.
- Color Supplyyy App. A simple and enjoyable color matching application.
- Google fonts. Fonts that Google approves.
- Uimovement. A collection of cute microinteractions.
Grabbing visual inspiration
Just a selection of pictures to help our designers catch inspiration.
- Design Collector. Photos, videos, pictures and other tinsel that helps you find the vector in which you need to create.
- Ffffound. Slightly more hipster stock of images: more glitch and acid GIFs.
- Designspiration. Composite hodgepodge of design work and photos from Instagram.
See everything in one place
If you need to look at layouts, icons, and fonts at once, but you value your work in progress too much to switch between sites, check out the resources below. Everything is there, just specify the search query.
Igor Magazinnik, one of the founders of Viber, the technical director of the company. Born in Nizhny Novgorod, at the age of 16 he emigrated to Israel. In the early 2000s, together with his army friend Talmon, Marco created the service for the exchange of music files iMesh, the Israeli counterpart of Napster. In 2010, with the money brought by iMesh, as well as with the money of friends and relatives, Igor Magazinik and Talmon Marko launched the Viber application for iPhone, designed primarily for free calls over the Internet. It immediately became a popular alternative to Skype. Reasons: fast and clear mobile application, simple registration, for which a phone number is enough. According to the creators, three days after the international launch, a million people downloaded the Viber app store. At first, the press saw in it mainly a VoIP service, a program for calls, although very soon most of the users used it mainly for messaging. Now, according to Igor Magazinnik, “it is a platform for communication on phones and desktops, covering all the communication needs of the user. Text chats, voice and video calls, calls to regular phones at low prices, games, stickers and more. " The application is one of the five most popular mobile messengers: 250 million active users in the world (in Russia - 20 million), according to the company's data for May. By comparison, WhatsApp had 800 million active users this spring, and Facebook Messenger had 600 million. Viber has the most users in Brazil, UK, India, Asia-Pacific countries. A year ago, Viber was bought by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten for $ 900 million. Viber is legally a Luxembourg-based company. Development centers are located in Bnei Brak (part of Greater Tel Aviv), Minsk, Brest and Amsterdam.
- The first time I realized what a powerful thing this is when I met one employee of Rakuten (a Japanese company that bought Viber for $ 900 million a year ago - Ed.), A European married to a Japanese woman. He either boasted or complained that his wife was talking to him exclusively with stickers, and he was not very sure for a long time whether he understood her correctly. Maybe this is the influence of hieroglyphs, or maybe just a common human compensation for the facial expressions and gestures that are missing in the text chat. In general, we saw the idea of stickers in Asia, in messengers like Line and KakaoTalk. We realized that they were becoming popular in the West, and simply responded to the demand. Now stickers are well bought from us, including in Russia, and in the total volume of income they are second only to paid calls via Viber Out.
- Rakuten bought you because of stickers?
- No, of course, for them this is a story for the future. Initially, Rakuten is the most successful Japanese e-commerce company, such as a local Amazon. Over time, they started to enter other industries, and now Rakuten is doing a billion different things. Beginning with e-books and Kobo readers, ending with some golf courses. They have their own bank, telephone company, travel agency. They strive to create an international company and therefore buy a lot abroad, hoping that new assets will help this mission. They need Viber as a global platform to distribute their services. I cannot say yet how it will look on a planetary scale. Although in Japan itself, Viber is already integrated with Rakuten: there, for example, you can link your Viber account with a local loyalty program and receive some points for this.
- How does it even happen - such deals worth a billion?
- We were looking for investments in order to afford all sorts of expensive things, in the field of marketing, for example. Quite by accident we entered the Rakuten investment fund. The founder of the company, Hiroshi Mikitani, came to us in Israel. And all this almost instantly and completely unexpectedly moved from talking about investing to talking about buying. We, of course, sat in restaurants a lot, drank a lot, ate a lot. They are open-minded and fun, very easy with them. These are not those silent Japanese who bow to each other and work for 40 years in one place. I would call Rakuten the most non-Japanese Japanese company. They even have an internal language of English, everyone in the company speaks it, all the documentation is in it. This englishization, as they call it, is one way to go global.
Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO
- Is Rakuten interfering with your work? How have they influenced you?
- Rather, nothing. They do not interfere with the work. Me and Talmon (Talmon Marco is the second founder of Viber. - Ed.) Remain at the helm, although a little later, perhaps, we will move away from direct control of Viber: we are now launching new project, but this is a completely different story, not related to social media, which I can not tell about yet. The Viber team retains complete freedom within the development strategy that was before the transaction, while we have more money. Our strategy is simple - to cover all the communication needs of the user. People want something new - we find out about it and do it for them.
- For example? What do people want from messengers now?
- Well, take encryption. I personally have no problems with this, I have nothing to hide. But what to do, Snowden started this tantrum. Now it is customary to protect your data, this is a normal desire of the user, and we cannot ignore this. Some messengers, like Telegram, generally use this fear of users as a marketing driver. We have never tried to position encryption as an important side of our messenger, although we have always had it, and now we are making our messenger even safer. In one of the next versions, Viber will switch to end-to-end encryption of all its services: text messages, calls, and video conferencing. This means that even we in the company will not have access to these messages and broadcasts, they will be decrypted directly on the user's device.
Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO
- Well, okay, why did I start talking about stickers at the beginning. There are no stickers in the WhatsApp messenger, and it looks somehow more compact, and this is the most popular messenger in the world.
- We are not in the same position as WhatsApp, which is usually slow to expand its functionality. That is, they promised voice communication, God knows when, and added it only a month ago. WhatsApp can afford it because it is the world leader, and he is the leader because they launched earlier. A year earlier than Viber is a big advantage. After that, it is impossible to make another minimalistic product. Therefore, we have to compete, offering users new functionality as soon as possible.
- What can you say about the popular predictions about the death of social networks and the fact that even the news will soon be read in messengers?
- Social media is likely to evolve. Some of their functions, mainly communication, are likely to be transferred to messengers. And a significant part of the people too. This is already happening all over the world. In America, as you know, the average young man does not just stop using Facebook - he does not use WhatsApp either, preferring some strange things like Snapchat. But the Facebook feed for many will remain the main source of news for a long time to come. A separate question is whether this average young man will need news in the form we are used to. Messengers can provide media formats that we cannot yet imagine.
Photo: Natalia Kogan / DVISION STUDIO
- You seem to have tried to invent such a new format - I mean Viber Publics. Only, I'm afraid, not everyone understands how to approach these publics, how they can be read at all. Tell us about them.
- Our publics are the result of the evolution of chat groups. A person or several are discussing something, and the rest follow them and quietly like. When we came up with all this, we asked ourselves if it would be interesting for people to follow the correspondence of artists, football players and others on the phone. famous people... That is, this is the kind of thing where you can spy on others through the keyhole. With their consent, of course. It turned out to be interesting: many publics have millions of subscribers. In Russia alone, three million people read public pages - chats about fashion, weight loss and humor are mostly popular. I follow some myself a little. In Russia, they read the channel "2 x 2" and "Vesti.net". And in Israel, before the recent elections, there was a public where members of the Knesset arranged, excuse me, wild shit on the air. The most interesting thing is that these were not their PR people. A messenger is such a simple and direct thing that politicians began to write there themselves. Now we are conducting an experiment: in Israel, for the first time, we gave everyone the opportunity to start their own public. Where this will lead - God knows.
- Each messenger has its own unique things, but the aggregator will not have them. For the sake of standardization, you will have to sacrifice calls, video calls, stickers and other pleasures of the platform. The aggregator signifies a return to the era of SMS. Obviously, it is important for the creators of instant messengers that the services they have been working and struggling for for years are available to users in their entirety. So no, alas, the aggregator will never appear.
