Tag: apps

Wie, Du bist nicht bei Whatsapp?

“Wer Whatsapp liebt, sollte besser nicht weiterlesen, oder vielleicht gerade dann, denn Liebe macht ja bekanntlich oft blind.” Boris Pohler, selbst Lehrer und Vater von zwei Kindern, bennent den Preis für die Verwendung des weit verbreiteten Dienstes und erklärt, warum jeder Nutzer gegen deutsches Recht verstößt.
blog.pohlers-web.de

How not to get phished

“Most humans can tell the difference most of the time, but if they are tired, or stressed, or in a rush, or have any number of other common obstacles to computer use, there’s a good chance they won’t notice the difference, will type their password into the wrong site, and will have their account taken over by bad guys.” Jacob Hoffman-Andrews identifies password managers as the average human’s best defence against phishing attacks.
jacob.hoffman-andrews.com

Conversations

“Welcome to this introduction to Conversations. It is gonna be a great introduction. It’s gonna be fabulous. Other instant messengers have fought Conversations for many years, but they couldn’t beat it. Just couldn’t do it. Total loosers. They’re all dead now. All the other messengers have failed. Forget WhatsApp, okay? Signal …total disaster. Threema is so bad, it’s not even a real messenger. It’s fake. Threema is a fake messenger. Converstations has got to be the best messenger in the world. It’s huge. OMEMO. You’ll love it. Best protocol. Tremendous. Absolutely fantastic. Nobody has messengers better than Conversations. This messenger is so big, you can even see it from the moon. And I am going to make you pay for it. It’s true. Important people tell me that Conversations is so great, it’s unbelievable. So great, it’s beautiful. Conversations is the best instant messenger that God ever created.”
conversations.im

WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages

​“(Tobias) Boelter reported the backdoor vulnerability to Facebook in April 2016, but was told that Facebook was aware of the issue, that it was ‘expected behaviour’ and wasn’t being actively worked on.”
www.theguardian.com”

Earlier, I posted two messages for my friends on Facebook. One with my Threema address, the other with the above quote and link to the article critical of Facebook’s conduct. Within hours, the latter had mysteriously disappeared from view. I don’t routinely use Facebook and now I know why: on this evidence, nobody gets to see much of what I post there, anyway…

“Corporate censorship is the process by which editors in corporate media outlets intervene to disrupt the publishing of information that portrays their business or business partners in a negative light.”
wikipedia.org

Why I won’t recommend Signal anymore

​“We need to remember that we’re fighting not only against government surveillance, but also against corporate surveillance as well. We need ways to defend against this, and using corporate solutions that create a dependency on these solutions, even if the communications themselves are not readable to them, there’s still the issue of metadata, and of course general availability of Google’s services to Signal.” Sander Venema disagrees on strategy, not cryptography.
sandervenema.ch

Business Calendar 2

“The professional and versatile app for reliable, complex calendar management. Highly customizable and in perfect sync with Google.” No doubt about it, Business Calendar 2 is a great app for Android that I would not want to be without. Which, for me at least, makes it even more disappointing that time zone management still does not meet my expectations. Will we ever see a reliable implementation of multi-time zone events?
www.businesscalendar.de

Syncronisation of your calendar and contacts with services other than Google is easy using CalDAV-Sync and CardDAV-Sync, respectively.

Signal

“I am regularly impressed with the thought and care put into both the security and the usability of this app. It’s my first choice for an encrypted conversation.”
Bruce Schneier

Signal offers private messaging and calling in one simple app. It is both free and open source. Development is supported by community donations and grants. This means that there are no hidden strings attached. Use Signal as an alternative to WhatsApp or, better still, its replacement.
whispersystems.org

Threema

“Threema is a mobile messaging app that puts security first. With true end-to-end encryption, you can rest assured that only you and the intended recipient can read your messages.” Threema is my favourite instant messaging application and has been described as “a much flasher version of WhatsApp”. Its source code has recently undergone an external security audit and was found to provide a ”security level which compares favourably with the state of the art in similar messaging services“.
threema.ch