Encrypted messaging is a godsend for mobile communications, whether you’re sending texts to your friends that you want kept private, or engaging in interactions that are better kept secret for safety reasons. Apps like Signal and Telegram offer users the ability to trade messages that can be read by only …
Read More »Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong
ten years ago, WIRED published a news story about how two little-known, slightly ramshackle encryption apps called RedPhone and TextSecure were merging to form something called Signal. Since that July in 2014, Signal has transformed from a cypherpunk curiosity—created by an anarchist coder, run by a scrappy team working in …
Read More »Signal Finally Rolls Out Usernames, So You Can Keep Your Phone Number Private
For nearly a decade, cybersecurity professionals and privacy advocates have recommended the end-to-end encrypted communications app Signal as the gold standard for truly private digital communications. Using it, however, has paradoxically required exposing one particular piece of private information to everyone you text or call: a phone number. Now, that's …
Read More »WhatsApp Chats Will Soon Work With Other Encrypted Messaging Apps
A frequent annoyance of contemporary life is having to shuffle through different messaging apps to reach the right person. Messenger, iMessage, WhatsApp, Signal—they all exist in their own silos of group chats and contacts. Soon, though, WhatsApp will do the previously unthinkable for its 2 billion users: allow people to …
Read More »Running Signal Will Soon Cost $50 Million a Year
The encrypted messaging and calling app Signal has become a one-of-a-kind phenomenon in the tech world: It has grown from the preferred encrypted messenger for the paranoid privacy elite into a legitimately mainstream service with hundreds of millions of installs worldwide. And it has done this entirely as a nonprofit …
Read More »The UK Is Poised to Force a Bad Law on the Internet
The UK’s ambitious and controversial proposed internet regulation started with scribblings on the back of a packet for a brie and cranberry sandwich from Pret a Manger. Those notes, from discussions between academics Lorna Woods and William Perrin about how to make tech companies responsible for online harms, became an …
Read More »Britain Admits Defeat in Controversial Fight to Break Encryption
Tech companies and privacy activists are claiming victory after an eleventh-hour concession by the British government in a long-running battle over end-to-end encryption. The so-called “spy clause” in the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which experts argued would have made end-to-end encryption all but impossible in the country, will no longer …
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