91–100 of 140 posts
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WhatsApp claims to keep your texts secret, and this is a big selling point. They make privacy claims that go beyond normal SMS messages, and that's why this is a big deal.
I've been using WhatsApp for years and seen many selling points, but security has never been one. A link would help because I've never gotten the impression that they were trying to sell security.
wait a second...my SD card folder contains a folder called DCIM which includes all my camera photos... are you suggesting that all my images are available to any app that includes SD card permissions?
Yes. There is no way on Android to give fine-grained directory-based access permissions (unfortunately). So all SD card permitted apps can read the SD card globally.
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Em, no - that can only be done in internal store "data" directories which are usually formatted with UNIX filesystems and are by default secure (and cannot be accessed by other apps at all). WhatsApp is storing to external (on most devices FAT) storage (which was SD card on older devices, it's usually a separate directory/partition on newer ones) which does not have any ACL-like system due to FAT backwards compatibil…
Honestly, the more I tinker with Android, the more I'm terribly disappointed in Google. I mean, around Android 2 we were all excited by the potential of a first-class big-money supported open-source OS to really shake up the industry. It had so much potential. Now? Well, it still has a lot of potential. Even Google seems kind of embarrassed by it, compared to the Chrome brand.
On the side note, from old news I remember Google is indeed pushing forward with Chrome-brand, specifically Chrome OS.
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Yes. There is no way on Android to give fine-grained directory-based access permissions (unfortunately). So all SD card permitted apps can read the SD card globally.
So why isn't HN up-in-arms about Google allowing Android apps access to all your phone's un-encrypted images?!? That seems like a much bigger issue!
I would have to think this would be something EVERYONE would be upset by.
I remember writing a rooted script for Tasker to get the actual messages to my pebble, since WhatsApp still doesn't expose them through their notifications.
I fired an SQL query to their sqlite database everytime a notification from WhatsApp came in to see what the new message actually contained.
"webserver" is a hyperlink, but it just links back to the blog. Anyone know what he's referring to here?
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One might think Facebook did their due diligence and said, "DANG, you got all these users with this big of a hole just laying right out there? Here, have some money."
Haha! But seriously given the leaked chat messages from when Zuckerberg was still not the polished CEO and less mature [1], your argument seems plausible. > ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard > ZUCK: just ask > ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns > FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? > ZUCK: people just submitted it > ZUCK: i don’t know why > ZUCK: they “trust me” > Z…
19bn $. No way anyone else at FB could have built this app and given it away for free for years for that price. No way. Totally worth it. 19bn $. Sequoia's deck on the amazing sclaing of 32 devs supporting that many users? well, guess what, they did it through taking shortcuts. Who would have guessed. Totally flabbergasted.
So much jelly in this comment. They obviously made good product decisions to get to this point. A few blips along the way will happen, when you are focusing on much more important things. Your entire SMS history is available to any app with permissions. Most people don't even know that, or are not bothered by it. This is literally feature parity with default SMS. WhatsApp is about messaging that is simple and functio…
Which is the problem with this kind of "market". It's basically theft, yes, stolen merch does sell well. Join the game, this is how the rules are played, take a page from the CIA's book. Have fun!
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You are absolutely right. Still, I think Google is taking the wrong approach: the insecure /sdcard partition is the place where most of the storage is in nearly all Android phones. If your app needs to store larger amounts of data, that is the place to do it. Now, there are methods to use that storage a lot more securely than this, but the way Android works really leaves developers no other option than storing this s…
> the insecure /sdcard partition is the place where most of the storage is in nearly all Android phones. /sdcard and /data are on the same partition these days, you should just be using the app's private folder if the data is sensitive in the slightest. Which in this case it clearly is, and it's not even large data.