51–60 of 142 posts
Certainly one unexpected way for the government to scare off and shut down nefarious communications happening on Wickr. Note this platform has been popular amongst the darkest underbelly of the web (e.g. carders, drug dealers).
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Amazon allows people to use Slack internally. Chime is still at least the back end for all meetings. And in practice, because Chime chat is still supported, many managers tell their teams to always keep Chime open in case someone messages them there. There’s no way to tell who is on Slack vs on Chime.
In other words, Chime is to Amazon as Sametime is to IBM.
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I work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick... , and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-t…
As an american company, customers should absolutely be distrustful of any claims of security. There is very little in the way of the feds giving you a gag order and ordering you to provide a backdoor. Amazon has zero recourse in this situation, neither would they risk their gov contracts fighting it.
Amazon has plenty of recourse, and they've been fighting gag orders for years now. Ex: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/microsoft-amazon...
The company leading that charge: Microsoft. The company that got the huge JEDI DoD cloud contract: Microsoft. Weird, huh?
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I work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick... , and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-t…
End 2 end cryptography, to what end does Ring need e2ee? To Amazon? Who is on the other end? Also, metadata.
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It's right there in the announcement. > With Wickr, customers and partners benefit from advanced security features not available with traditional communications services – across messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, and collaboration. This gives security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance req…
The devil is in the details, and I’m mighty curious as to what those details end up looking like.
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As an american company, customers should absolutely be distrustful of any claims of security. There is very little in the way of the feds giving you a gag order and ordering you to provide a backdoor. Amazon has zero recourse in this situation, neither would they risk their gov contracts fighting it.
Yeah, they definitely just invested $xxx millions in a product that they know they won't be able to keep alive. Amazon has plenty of recourse, and they've been fighting gag orders for years now. Ex: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/microsoft-amazon... The company leading that charge: Microsoft. The company that got the huge JEDI DoD cloud contract: Microsoft. Weird, huh?
You can be sure there is already a team working on the architectural changes needed to implement lawful intercept and passive surveillance on Wickr. This is what happens when a secure platform gets too big. The same thing happened to Skype.
I work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick... , and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-t…
You can make it weaker without getting rid of it. Whatsapp also has E2EE on the message contents, does it stop Facebook from sharing all your contacts, call metadata, message times etc with the authorities? Very unlikely.
Certainly one unexpected way for the government to scare off and shut down nefarious communications happening on Wickr. Note this platform has been popular amongst the darkest underbelly of the web (e.g. carders, drug dealers).
What's a "carder"? Never heard the term and a google search turns up a bunch of benign things.
You can be sure there is already a team working on the architectural changes needed to implement lawful intercept and passive surveillance on Wickr. This is what happens when a secure platform gets too big. The same thing happened to Skype.
I work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick... , and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-t…
The beauty of Wickr is it provided disposable identities and relatively strong anonymity, and fended off bulk interception using an end to end security protocol. The market for it was smaller because while everyone says they want security, I found that the risk/reward of anonymity is too risky for most people. The people I knew who did use Wickr were political staffers and operatives/activists on campaigns, law enforcement, and other fields where they had official recourse to protection.
The reason for AMZN to buy Wickr is that it is a trustworthy secure messenger product with a valuable and influential user base, and an evolution of the product without anonymity is probably the case for growth.
I don't see it being backdoored so much as just adapted to leverage its existing user base to fill out a feature need in a suite of AWS collaboration tools that will compete against Teams/Github, Zoom, Atlassian, etc.
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I work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick... , and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-t…
> I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon To be fair, this is the fairy-tale that's told on every acquisition. I'm pretty certain this same narrative was spun even when facebook acquired occulus. Not saying this will be similar, but just hearing those words is not assuring by itself.