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AWS acquires Wickr

aws.amazon.com

81–90 of 142 posts

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last March c’t tested some alternatives https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2021/8/2106310351115657652 App Security #users ease Functio- Price & privacy Germany of use nality Element o - - o Free Signal + o + + Free Telegram - + ++ ++ Free Threema + o o o $3-$4 Whatsapp o ++ + + Free Wire + o - - Free ++ very good + good o good enough - bad

You should test Briar.

it’s only on one platform: android.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#82
post #3

Probably going to use it to replace Chime. Edit: For those that have never heard of it, its their own IM, that while publicly available, is mostly used internally for company communications, similar to Slack or Skype for Business. https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

Chime itself is an acquisition (which also has the dubious reputation of being the poorest execution of any AWS product) at a time when UCaaS companies like urbanconference and dialpad were going strong, and AWS wanted in on that action: https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/23/justin-biba-amazon-video/

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#83
post #24

I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure…

Having implemented HIPAA compliant software, the technical requirements arent very difficult. If you're following developments beat practices, you have 99% of technical requirements covered. The challenge with HIPAA is building process and documentation that demonstrates compliance. It's particularly challenging at the edges of your engineering org where people tend to use tools that abstract the technical details.

>If you're following developments beat practices

Yeah, that tends to be where you run into issues...

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#84
post #24

I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure…

[deleted]

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though true, this is just about entirely irrelevant given where Wickr has gone since 2016. It may surprise you to learn that Wickr was awarded a large US Airforce contract last year. [0] [0] https://wickr.com/wickr-awarded-us-air-force-contract/

Why is it irrelevant post-2016? Wickr was still a preferred choice of drug dealers well up to 2018 (and probably beyond). I know this because I was using it to communicate with them.

Why not WhatsApp or Signal or something similar?

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#87
post #3

Probably going to use it to replace Chime. Edit: For those that have never heard of it, its their own IM, that while publicly available, is mostly used internally for company communications, similar to Slack or Skype for Business. https://aws.amazon.com/chime/

Amazon internally uses Slack for chats, while Chime is mostly used for video conferencing.

My guess would be that this could augment Chime, and position it to be a useful part of GovCloud offering from Amazon.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#88
post #76
post #24

I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure…

Some data we treat we care. Other data we do not. I wonder if that creates a different culture and risk than if we treated all data with care. What do you think?

In order to treat all data with care, you have to define what you mean by "care." In security we talk about the tradeoffs between integrity, confidentiality, and availability. In terms of integrity, the most careful treatment is to place many signed copies of the data publicly on the internet. This also is the most careful treatment for availability. Of course it is the least careful treatment for confidentiality. But no scheme with any care for confidentiality can match it for integrity and availability.

Signal illustrates swinging far in the "confidentiality" direction - most messaging services don't forget anything you say, while Signal makes it rather hard for you to retain your messages, and also offers ways to delete them automatically. I find it unfortunate there are no secure, open messaging platforms that offer similar integrity/availability guarantees to services like Slack.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#89
post #24

I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure…

Having implemented HIPAA compliant software, the technical requirements arent very difficult. If you're following developments beat practices, you have 99% of technical requirements covered. The challenge with HIPAA is building process and documentation that demonstrates compliance. It's particularly challenging at the edges of your engineering org where people tend to use tools that abstract the technical details.

It also requires you to actually think about these problems. As you said, it’s not necessarily hard to do, but if you’re a small startup all these best practices are usually shortcut to get product market fit. If you’re a health care startup, it really slows you down (but for good reason). It also creates criminal/financial reinforcement behind it, something not even Equifax has to be accountable to (which is insane).

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal sold out? How so?

Metadata stuff? They still require phone numbers(unlike wickr)

Signal is moving away from phone numbers, developing the components needed to securely provide service via user IDs.

My understanding is that their intended audience is the general public, not crypto-security geeks, and as part of that they wanted integration with existing address books. With a small team, developing all the security and usability was more important than eliminating the phone number piece.

They apparently don't retain any data but the phone number, and I think the registration date and last logon date.

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