With this vulnerability, what you see on WhatsApp and Telegram might not be what was sent. Despite the secure messaging apps’ end-to-end encryption protecting people from government surveillance, researchers from Symantec disclosed flaws that could allow potential hackers to alter images and audio files. While the sender might have sent, say, a photo of a …
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Some of the computing industry’s biggest innovations have come from research labs. The transistor was created at AT&T’s Bell Labs, the hard drive by IBM Research and the graphical user interface at Xerox’s PARC. NTT, one of Japan’s telecommunications giants, wants similar success. It’s already got thousands of researchers in Japan working on projects with near-term potential, but now it’s …
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As tech companies double down on promises to better protect users’ privacy, the US government may have other ideas. Senior Trump officials reportedly met Wednesday to discuss asking Congress to pass legislation that would stop tech companies from using encryption that law enforcement can’t break, according to a report from Politico. The National Security Council meeting to deliberate the encryption issue …
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Quantum computing can be baffling, but one effect of this evolving technology is pretty easy to grasp: It threatens to blow up the encryption that protects internet communications and lets you do things like shop online without thieves stealing your credit card number. Now internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has joined an effort to come up with new “post-quantum” algorithms that’ll …
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It’s official: BlackBerry Messenger is no more. The beloved messaging platform was officially shut down on May 31, following an announcement earlier this year. BBM was one of the first messaging apps to use read receipts and typing indicators, but it long held up security as a key selling point. While you may be feeling nostalgic about the demise of BBM, …
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In January, Microsoft began testing end-to-end encryption for Skype conversations. That feature has finally been enabled for customers, MSPoweruser pointed out last week. The feature, called Private Conversations, is available to users on Windows desktops, Android, iOS, Mac and Linux. When Microsoft began rolling out the feature to testers in January, the company said the encryption would work for audio calls …
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The US government has reportedly asked Facebook to help wiretap its Messenger chat app to listen to a suspect’s conversations in a criminal investigation, according to a report Friday by Reuters. That would involve breaking the encryption on the app, which is used by more than a billion people a month. The probe is related to the MS-13 gang in …
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You’ve likely heard by now that encrypted messaging apps are a good way to keep your communications private. But there’s a good chance you’re not totally sure what makes them so safe. It’s OK. You have company. New research from experts in computer science has found that even though many people are using secure messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal and …
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The encryption that protects your browser’s connection to websites is getting a notch faster and a notch safer to use. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on Friday finished a years-long process of modernizing the technology used to secure website communications. You may never have heard of Transport Layer Security — TLS for short — but version 1.3 …
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Telegram is a messaging app that, like WhatsApp, encrypts user messages. The Russian government wasn’t having that, and in April banned the app. Backlash came in the form of protests in Moscow on Sunday. Crowds of people were led by Mikhail Kasyanov, Russia’s former prime minister and outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin. “The authorities want to take away our secret …
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