Probably good for Wickr founders, but else? Amazon is facing growing antitrust issues, why add to this with more and more acquisitions? Do they want to own the whole web?
AWS acquires Wickr
131–140 of 142 posts
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#132I remember when Wickr first started on iOS, the founder said at the time that she wanted an app her kids could use safely. I never met anyone who used Wickr though. Pretty good job on their part that it went from a niche app to an Amazon acquisition. Now that it will have a corporate implementation people should remember that corporately administered clients (e.g. Teams) save and record a copy of everything you say a…
>I never met anyone who used Wickr though. I used Wickr to order Weed once. (Illegal where I live)
Yes. In Denmark, Wickr is the chat-app of choice for dealers alongside Snapchat. My non-tor skilled friends use it for that. I don't think anyone uses it for anything else.
Why Wickr, I don't know. It's not to protect the buyers because the police does not care about them.
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#133I remember when Wickr first started on iOS, the founder said at the time that she wanted an app her kids could use safely. I never met anyone who used Wickr though. Pretty good job on their part that it went from a niche app to an Amazon acquisition. Now that it will have a corporate implementation people should remember that corporately administered clients (e.g. Teams) save and record a copy of everything you say a…
> Signal is probably at the current time the last non-corporate messenger that is secure and is easy enough to setup and use (other suggestions like Matrix have a barrier to entry that is too high because it requires both technical knowledge and the ability to find your correspondents). It can't be acquired due to it being a non-profit foundation so it's likely to be around for a long time to come.
Threema exists does e2ee, does not require a phone number (but in practice it is much easier to use it), is fairly easy to setup and has been around for 9 years now.
The only downside compared to Signal is that backups are slightly more cumbersome because the password is required to be 9 characters instead of four digits as in Signal. But I don't trust Intel SGX so that is a win in my book.
Since Signal currently seems to live off of the loan from Brian Acton, I wouldn't assume the future to be quite as rosy as you paint it to be. Group video calls and everything Intel SGX must be quite expensive.
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I never met anyone who used Wickr though. I used Wickr to order Weed once. (Illegal where I live)
Yes. In Denmark, Wickr is the chat-app of choice for dealers alongside Snapchat. My non-tor skilled friends use it for that. I don't think anyone uses it for anything else. Why Wickr, I don't know. It's not to protect the buyers because the police does not care about them.
The working study group for the International League of Criminals after conducting a comprehensive evaluation of various messengers that resisted compromise by law enforcement agencies settled upon Wickr because it had the necessary components of both privacy and anonymity. In addition, the niche appeal of it made it more likely to be spread by whispered word of mouth in the community.
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#135Anyone that has ever set foot on Reddit or 4chan knows that Wickr is heavily used to share child pornography, and revenge pornography. Entire subreddits have disappeared for this reason [1]. I wonder how AWS is going to deal with this. Unfortunately due to the nature of the app, they can probably safely say that they were "no aware of it"...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/ekefao/rjo...
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#136I remember when Wickr first started on iOS, the founder said at the time that she wanted an app her kids could use safely. I never met anyone who used Wickr though. Pretty good job on their part that it went from a niche app to an Amazon acquisition. Now that it will have a corporate implementation people should remember that corporately administered clients (e.g. Teams) save and record a copy of everything you say a…
Skype has a little known feature called private conversations. This uses the Signal protocol and even lets you delete the metadata afterwards.
I don't think many people noticed at the time, that BillG took being prosecuted by the government very hard indeed. William H Gates III "Trey"to his oldest friends, is American establishment : daddy was Nixon's attorney and mom sat on the board of IBM.
Neither do I remember many people who ostensibly cared a great deal about the Microsoft anti trust case, following the actual litigation when it was happening. I read every word and watched as much as I could of the trial. Gates was a disaster on the witness box but nothing least because the allegations - charges and basis of charges - were so universally preposterous in their formation. The New Old Thing blog basically tells you what Justice should have found out in their discovery process and consequently narrowed the case to something other than a massive spite bomb. Reportedly Gates underwent a nervous breakdown of some serious nature midway through his epic examination on the stand. Microsoft were the last I looked the only major not to have backed away from a agreement to enforce the minimum of legality requirements for LEO access to personal information and accounts and Microsoft was spending close to one billion dollars annually merely to reject ludicrous illicit and unfounded demands for access to accounts. I don't know any other cloud computing company who will let me hold the only hardware key to my infrastructure across their cloud and using the same infrastructure and integrations (Thales, a major French defence contractor is the supplier and the solutions pretty good in my experience). At least I'm not surprised that few hail Microsoft for their efforts - advertising flipping fingers at the most self righteous authority establishment for generations isn't probably the best idea.
Here's the pdf description of Skype Private Conversations:
https://az705183.vo.msecnd.net/onlinesupportmedia/onlinesupp...
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. In Denmark, Wickr is the chat-app of choice for dealers alongside Snapchat. My non-tor skilled friends use it for that. I don't think anyone uses it for anything else. Why Wickr, I don't know. It's not to protect the buyers because the police does not care about them.
The working study group for the International League of Criminals after conducting a comprehensive evaluation of various messengers that resisted compromise by law enforcement agencies settled upon Wickr because it had the necessary components of both privacy and anonymity. In addition, the niche appeal of it made it more likely to be spread by whispered word of mouth in the community.
But their bosses, being much older, are still using Skype. See my comment above
...
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#138Never 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 stil…
Zoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 actuall…
Good links, thanks
Re: AWS acquires Wickr
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I never met anyone who used Wickr though. I used Wickr to order Weed once. (Illegal where I live)
Yes. In Denmark, Wickr is the chat-app of choice for dealers alongside Snapchat. My non-tor skilled friends use it for that. I don't think anyone uses it for anything else. Why Wickr, I don't know. It's not to protect the buyers because the police does not care about them.
I can grant you other people use Wickr for normal communication - why: for lack of better alternatives