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Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

forbes.com

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Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#21

Post by SolarNet »

Deimorz wrote: post #19

This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).

Except it adds context about the child abuse on Kik and some of the issues facing it.

It's half blogspam, but it isn't entirely.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#22

Post by seph-reed »

mirimir wrote: post #20
pcunite wrote: post #2

... the FBI had taken control of a Kik user's account to run groups sharing such illegal imagery for over a year ... Think about that for moment.

That's a standard tactic. I mean, the FBI ran Playpen, a Tor onion site for sharing CP, for almost two weeks, while dropping phone-home malware on users' devices. Edit: I forgot to include a link.[0] And this was just one operation. I suspect that there are teams at the FBI that specialize in CP operations. 0) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecede...

I'm not sure if this is what OP meant, but a year is long time. It was literally some teams job to share CP on kik for a whole year. That's a long damn job.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#23

Post by Animats »

Another unregistered security disguised as an ICO. What did they expect? There was this mindset in the "crypto" community that they'd found a way to make "take the money and run" legal. They were wrong. SEC info on ICOs: [1] The SEC has been shutting down about one ICO operation a week, starting with the really sleazy ones.[1]

It's possible to have a legit token that's not a security, but it has to mostly be used for something like buying music or games, and not primarily cashed out as a speculative investment. You can ask the SEC for a "no action letter" for a legit token.

The latest thing is virtual reality world ICO tokens. See "Decentraland" and "Sominium Space". They're both frantically trying to put enough reality behind their virtual worlds that they can argue that their "blockchain based virtual land sales" are to people who want to use the VR world, not to people who want to flip virtual land.

Howeycoins: https://www.howeycoins.com

[1] https://www.sec.gov/ICO

[2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#24

Post by [deleted] »

SolarNet wrote: post #21
Deimorz wrote: post #19

This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).

Except it adds context about the child abuse on Kik and some of the issues facing it. It's half blogspam, but it isn't entirely.

[deleted]

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#25

Post by jessaustin »

soneca wrote: post #18
choward wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least they brought attention to how bad it was to rely on NPM. If anyone doesn't remember, this is how the whole left-pad issue started: https://blog.npmjs.org/post/141577284765/kik-left-pad-and-np...

> "Given two packages vying for the name kik, we believe that a substantial number of users who type npm install kik would be confused to receive code unrelated to the messaging app with over 200 million users." So apparently the former Kik package would have outlived the company Kik despite its number of users.

I think that was predicted on HN at the time...

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#27

Post by jessaustin »

seph-reed wrote: post #22
mirimir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a standard tactic. I mean, the FBI ran Playpen, a Tor onion site for sharing CP, for almost two weeks, while dropping phone-home malware on users' devices. Edit: I forgot to include a link.[0] And this was just one operation. I suspect that there are teams at the FBI that specialize in CP operations. 0) https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-unprecede...

I'm not sure if this is what OP meant, but a year is long time. It was literally some teams job to share CP on kik for a whole year. That's a long damn job.

Everyone at FBI is there voluntarily.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#28

Post by Kostchei »

dooglius wrote: post #4
edude03 wrote: post #3

Not to diminish the importance of the child abuse but the real problem seems to be "securities fraud" not child abuse, so I'm not sure why the title and the article bring up the child abuse as if it's the reason for the closure?

There's been child abuse on Facebook too, but it doesn't seem to get the moniker "app plagued by child abuse".

Unfortunately from a ex-LEO perspective, it has been very popular with children and heavily hunted by sex offenders, at least in the communities I served in. Doing digital forensics, almost every police officer in a child protection case would be asking "can we get the kik history off that phone?" Not be cause they were guessing but based on experience or admissions by the victim. Part of the seedy underbelly that 75% of the community don't get exposed to. People found it hard to believe when these sort of network-related offences occurred in churches too. Some religious groups are/were more prone to it than others, often based on opportunity or expectations.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#29

Post by swiley »

Ok so I've used kik for years (I have a pen pall in Germany, we both went through the transition to and from university together.) Their app was delay tolerant and had decent read receipts which was amazing when I lived in the country side with my parents and had a worthless internet connection. That being said...

kik never built a desktop application, if you didn't have your phone you couldn't even know if you had a message waiting. Even if you went through the trouble to run an android emulator it deleted all your messages each time you switched devices.

Kik got pretty caught up in the whole bot thing, and kept cutting the legs out from the third party developers that was stupid.

They were so weird about groups, and the 50 person limit per group made them pretty useless when combined with the reputation the app had.

discourd really kind of ate their lunch (and personally I really don't like discourd but at least I can connect to it with pidgen and join the popular groups.)

EDIT: oh its for securities fraud with their stupid crypto currency that literally no one used? That's dumb.

Re: Kik, once valued at $1B, is to be closed

#30

Post by jessaustin »

Deimorz wrote: post #19

This is just Forbes blogspam of the original blog post: https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/moving-forward-boldly-with... It was submitted to HN here, and I noted that it would be unlikely to get attention because of its title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055034 HN's strict title rules encourage submitting blogspam that writes sensationalized titles like this (and it's even been dialed back now).

Maybe my reading comprehension could improve, but somehow I didn't have the loud "SCAM!" alarm going off in my head the whole time I read the blog... unlike TFA.

[EDIT]: Also, "Moving Forward Boldly"? That seems like it would be #2, right below "Our Incredible Journey" on the list of this-must-be-irony titles for startup failure posts.

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