Because there’s nothing wrong with suggesting an alternative?
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Certainly a useful way to participate in the Boing Boing BBS.
Another word: prejudice
OK, so 70% of your contacts aren’t. Your choices are 1) Don’t talk to them, 2) Use whatsapp, our 3) use email, facebook messenger, voice calls, or other communication service. Whatsapp is more secure than almost all of your options.
[quote]No. I simply don’t expect Facebook to not gather all information it can on its users and their use of the “free” services Facebook offers. If you think Facebook isn’t spying on you…
[/quote]
Obliviously facebook collects tons of information on users (and plenty of non-users). I don’t believe that they deliberately put vulnerabilities in and end-to-end secure communication system and exploit those vulnerabilities to collect and sell that data to third parties, and if you think they do that, you are pretty much in the same boat as people who believe in chemtrails. They don’t need to read your whatsapp messages to make a ton of money off of your data.
Well, except none of my contacts use Whatsapp. You have an unexamined assumption there. Folks I know, if they are going to install a secure messaging app, aren’t going to install one owned by Facebook. With this new news, they’re even less likely to do so.
So people who don’t trust Facebook and think they are in the business of spying on their users for profit are the same as chemtrails nutcases?
What has “need” to do with it? If they can, they will, sooner or later. It is their business model. Why give them the opportunity at all? Encourage your friends to use a real app and service, not spyware.
Have a nice life.
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A company like Facebook whose history is all about respecting user privacy introducing such a flaw deliberately? Preposterous!
(/s)
Are you kidding? How are they supposed to do things like sentiment analysis and sell the results if they don’t have a backdoor into encrypted messages – especially if encryption becomes more widely used.* This is a company that grabs at whatever data they can to make more money (because for the shareholders “a ton of money” is never enough). This isn’t conspiracy mongering, it’s recognising how Facebook operates as a business.
[* also, how are they supposed to cave quickly and cravenly to government demands for individual users’ data?]
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…
soooooo…
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How d’y’all sharpen your knives?
…
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With 1024 bits of sandpaper used in a rot13 pattern.
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Here’s Moxie Marlinspike’s answer about the “flaw”. Some notes: Moxie is the creator of Signal, probably the best secure messaging app out there, and WhatsApp uses their system. I personally think he’s also one of the best cryptographers out there as well, with some very insightful thoughts about the balance between cryptography and usability (hint: the best crypto is a one-time-pad hand-distributed among your users. That’s a pain in the ass to use, which is why no-one does).
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I just came here to post this too. Moxie would know best here so I believe him.
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Whatsapp. I’lll tell you what’s up. Zuck owns whatsapp and you’ve been Zucked.
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Any better suggestions?
The idea that this vulnerability has been used for mass data collection for advertising or surveillance purposes is absurd.
No it isn’t. It might be highly unlikely if it is as you say, but we passed absurd surveillance methods /levels a long time ago.
I certainly don’t have any reason to believe a surveillance avenue like this would be passed up because “they may get caught”.
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They’ve updated rot13 to 1024 bit?
I’ll have to update my software; it only uses 512-bit rot13.
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No need. Just rot13 it twice and you’ll get 1024-bit.
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