AWS acquires Wickr • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#101

Post by thebeardisred » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 8:58 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #64

I'm surprised that there have been so few mentions on HN over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... This is a bit interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jwsec

Knowing a bit about their history and having met some of the principals, I'm not.

Wickr's focus was never on the HN audience. Their "bullseye" was the audience of DEF CON attendees who have some ties to capital "e" Enterprise and/or US public sector.

Where there were overlapping users, great, but traction on HN was unlikely to lead to organization wide enterprise license agreements.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#102

Post by dingusthemingus » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:15 PM UTC

txru wrote: post #11

p0rkbelly wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS uses Slack Internally.

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.

I feel like every company is like this, keep slack and gchat open at my work...

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#103

Post by rainonmoon » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

counternotions wrote: post #4

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).

Oh if only stolen credit cards and drugs were the darkest underbelly of the web! Note that it's also popular with former Australian Prime Ministers and plenty of other people for ethical and legitimate reasons (some of them also legal), not just "nefarious communications."

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#104

Post by rainonmoon » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:03 PM UTC

arpinum wrote: post #66

colmmacc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AWS hired the architect behind the NSA's attempt at breaking commercial crypto, according the Matthew Green [0]. I can't trust AWS will be truthful about their crypto systems and lack of backdoors. [0] - https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/13571435600055091...

Green's conviction about this is tantalizing but it's also melodramatic in a way that makes it easy to believe something not quite true (or provable, anyway.) In fact if you look down the thread, you'll see Green admitting that correlating Salter is basically speculation and other people providing plausible alternatives to Green's claims for Salter's motives at AWS. tptacek has a more measured history of what actually happened and it is very different than what you'd glean from Green's tweets.[0] Personally in this case I'd be more worried about touting Ring's end-to-end encryption with one hand while the other hand points one of those ends to your police department[1].

[0] https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/08/04/is-extended-random-ma...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/18/amazon...

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#105

Post by sibane » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:05 PM UTC

wolverine876 wrote: post #85

wkrthrow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You don't need a phone number to register on Wickr. That's probably a big one.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#106

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:21 PM UTC

nijave wrote: post #83

SkyPuncher wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

[deleted]

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#107

Post by twoodfin » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

malchow wrote: post #35

Increasingly clear that, at Amazon, the most passionate path to getting bigger is obtaining access to tax dollars. ... but Amazon's stock would be 1/4 the price if it were valued like Lockheed Martin.

Perhaps the strategy is to pull more conservative, bureaucracy-bound organizations into AWS. Lots of IT dollars in banking, healthcare, …

Focusing on the US Government, they’re jumping right in to the deep end of the pool.

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#108

Post by ablekh » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:30 PM UTC

Never heard about this company before. Took a quick look at their website and noticed that in the table on front page (located in the section "Vetted by the NSA") Zoom is listed as a product lacking "Full E2E Encrypted Functionality". I'm wondering about whether this isn't true (considering Zoom's E2E being GA: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t...) - and the table should be fixed - or still true (due to aspects that I might be missing).

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#109

Post by iaml » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #65

drenvuk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why build your own? just use element and matrix.

So they can sell it for easy money, is how I read their comment.

Wouldn't making a tinder clone and selling it to match be even easier money?

Re: AWS acquires Wickr

#110

Post by zoover2020 » Fri, Jun 25, 2021, 10:56 PM UTC

mataug wrote: post #87

surge wrote: 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.

Slack is not used by operations as much unfortunately, running in hybrid mode since last August...