Tag Archive for: Chat

Bad kitty! “Rookie mistake” in Cryptocat chat app makes cracking a snap

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Diastola

Developers of the Cryptocat application for encrypting communications of activists and journalists have apologized for a critical programming flaw that made it trivial for third parties to decipher group chats.

The precise amount of time the vulnerability was active is in dispute, with Cryptocat developers putting it at seven months and a security researcher saying it was closer to 19 months. Both sides agree that the effect of the bug was that the keys used to encrypt and decrypt conversations among groups of users were easy for outsiders to calculate. As a result, activists, journalists, or others who relied on Cryptocat to protect their group chats from government or industry snoops got little more protection than is typically available in standard chat programs. Critics said it was hard to excuse such a rudimentary error in an open-source piece of software held out as a way to protect sensitive communications.

“It was simply a matter of what I would call a fairly rookie mistake,” independent security researcher Adam Caudill told Ars. “They didn’t understand the data they were working with. Key generation code is one of the most critical parts of a crypto system because it doesn’t matter what else you get right if you get that wrong.”

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

“Pre-loaded video chat apps” will all work on AT&T’s network by year’s end

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Trying (and failing) to video chat over AT&T.
Andrew Cunningham

When Google unveiled its new Hangouts service at Google I/O last week, AT&T users quickly discovered that they couldn’t use its new video chat feature over cellular. This occurred despite the fact that the iOS version of the application works just fine on the carrier’s network.

Officially, AT&T said at the time that it makes a distinction between pre-loaded applications (like FaceTime on iOS or Hangouts on Android) and those that are downloaded manually by the user (Hangouts on iOS or Skype on either platform). Phone makers that work with AT&T can enable video chatting in their built-in apps—Apple, Samsung, and BlackBerry were all given as examples. However, the Verge reports that the company will be removing this restriction by the end of the year. From AT&T’s statement:

For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we currently give all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. Apple, Samsung, and BlackBerry have chosen to enable this for their pre-loaded video chat apps. And by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from those three manufacturers.

Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.

Today, all of our customers can use any mobile video chat app that they download from the Internet, such as Skype.

The carrier’s ban on built-in video chatting apps obviously stems from a desire to reduce bandwidth usage rather than any real technical limitation, since Hangouts works in iOS but not in Android. However, if you’re an AT&T customer who wants to get in some Hangout time with some of your loved ones, the policy change will (eventually) straighten everything out.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Learn About SMB Internet Security – Chat Recap – Small Business Trends

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Learn About SMB Internet Security – Chat Recap
Small Business Trends
To discuss specific findings from that report, Symantec recently sponsored a Twitter chat and made two experts available on Twitter to answer questions on the topic of SMB Internet security. Kevin Haley, director, Symantec security response, Symantec …

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Video Chat on Your Android Phone (Google Mobile Blog)

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Google Mobile Blog:
Video Chat on Your Android Phone  —  Sometimes, the expressions on a person’s face can mean much more than what they say.  To help you stay in touch with your friends and family, we’re launching Google Talk with video and voice chat for Android phones.  —  You can now video or voice chat …

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