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Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication
An anonymous reader writes "Within a few months of launching, Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact on the culture of communication on the Internet – and we should all be grateful. They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it, while validating the market of the next generation of privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence of the Facebook and Google world, where everything you do and share is a data point to be monetized and re-sold to the highest bidder."
The link is broken. I see naked HTML. Forbes won't let me in. Oh wait, What?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
> privacy-preserving ephemeral communication. Most importantly, we may finally get a break from the forced permanence
If it's transmitted in the clear and displayed on a screen, it is neither privacy-preserving nor ephemeral.
Slashdot's lowest point?
"Snapchat has made an enormous and lasting impact..."
And this is the first I've heard of it.
How do they reconcile their claims with "Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly-Deleted Photos From Android Phones" - http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/05/09/snapchats-dont-disappear/?utm_campaign=forbestwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
"A 24-year-old forensics examiner from Utah has made a discovery that may make some Snapchat users think twice before sending a photo that they think is going to quickly disappear. Richard Hickman of Decipher Forensics found that it’s possible to pull Snapchat photos from Android phones simply by downloading data from the phone using forensics software and removing a “.NoMedia” file extension that was keeping the photos from being viewed on the device. He published his findings online and local TV station KSL has a video showing how it’s done ..."
Opps...sounds closer to fraudsters
considering the permissions the android apps is asking for, i rather stay with google hangouts.
"We should be grateful" the summary says.
Well I for one am grateful that we seem to have hit the Slashdot trifecta: (1) Obvious, blatant slashvertisement intended to showcase some product noone's ever heard of, (2) link to a site behind a paywall, and (3) Web 2.0 product that somehow involves social and tracking and profile building, something I would want no part of.
Do I win? And if so, do I get my money back?
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Is English your mother tongue, samzenpuss?
if someone can see the message they can record it.
if not with anything else then with another smartphone, duh.
this is just a snapchat advertisement.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Thanks for this slashvertisement. Not let me deconstruct it:
It's a commercial entity behind this, which means the government has easy leverage to make them snoop on all their millions of users. All the government has to do is to set them up for "inquiry into inappropriate accounting and tax evasion". See what they did to Bernie Ebbers of MCI and the boss of Qwest.
Bernie Ebbers did not comply with their demands for illegal eavesdropping, he did not take their bribe in the form of "NSA telecommunications contracts" and then Mr Ebbers was thrown into jail to rot until he will probably die or have dementia.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/05/13/210046/-Bush-Retaliates-Against-Qwest-For-Saying-No-To-Spying
The REAL finance criminals of New York, those who destroyed the world economy in 1929 and tried the same in 2008/9, they collect their bonuses and retire to their country castles. They certainly DO NOT go to jail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_R._Greenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_S._Fuld,_Jr.
Very soon the New York criminals will use YOU Americans for a new war, after they used you to take out Saddam Hussein. The new war will be against Iran, because that nation feels with the oppressed people in Gaza and the West Bank. The real terrorists in Saudi-Arabia and Israel won't be touched.
Let's see how corruption, decadence, sodomy, drug abuse and lies work out on the long run for the American Empire. If history is a guide, it will end very much like the Roman Empire. Just at internet speed.
The point is, the photos are already recorded without you doing anything. Imagine you are using it to send a picture which could get you in trouble for having (say, you are in some country with oppressive regime, and you share a proof of wrongdoing by the government). You expect the phone of the receiver to be searched eventually, but you also know the receiver would not willingly store the photo. You trust that the photo will be gone, because that's what Snapchat advertises. Now, it turns out the photo was stored anyway on his phone. Big trouble ahead.
in the actual fuck is ..
They have simplified a security process enough to the point that anybody can use it
Yeah, and look what's happened to Slashdot now it's so simple that anyone can use it:
the market of the next generation of a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarunwadhwa/2013/05/22/why-we-should-
Please, submitters, check your summaries (I say "your", though this is just another copy-and-paste job) for things like borked HTML, because the editors clearly aren't interested in editing anything.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Nope, they used data forensics to recovery files, the same techniques used to recover deleted files from desktop computers by criminal investigators, it is not something most developers would consider likely and (until very recently thanks to snapchat and the media attention) something that most users would not have the technical ability to do, especially on a phone.
That being said snapchat developers probably should have fixed it by now (by overriding it before deletion like secure deletion tools do)
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If you have to tell me I should celebrate it then it obviously isn't very good on it's own or I'd already know why I should celebrate it. I hate these need paid articles on /.
Keeping chat history in the cloud with Google Talk / Hangouts is one of the features I love about the service the most. I can not even count the number of times that the ability to look at old chat logs has saved my butt.
The very "feature" SnapChat is promoting is also the reason I would never use their service... I want and need a cloud-based shared history for my chat logs, thanks. To me, they are just as important and ephemeral as emails.
This "stories" has all the hallmarks of some marketing dribble written by Snapchat. It has the right buzzwords, is full of itself, and touts some silly app as the future of the Internet.
When did Slashdot sell its soul and start accepting stories from companies?
... But I like Wickr. Self destructing messages and pictures, strong end-to-end encryption, Wickr has no idea what traverses the system, etc. https://www.mywickr.com/
Trolling is a art,
Ooooohhhhh, data forensics? That sound compli-muh-cated. Not like anyone could do it I'm sure.
As soon as I saw this I laughed my ass off. The reality is that if you send something to someone, they can have it forever. A friend of mine has written apps for both iOS and Android using Cydia Substrate to hook the API calls used to display images and video in snapchat and automatically save them out to your SD card.
It's not possible by definition of how computers work to do something like this securely.
Unless you have an actual agreement between two parties (that may be enforced in the software, I don't know) both parties to a conversation have every right to make it public.
That is why NDAs exist.
lolwut?
http://pastebin.com/YCMHb9Vw
Psh. They do that shit on every other episode of CSI. And clearly if the under-funded police can do that, then anyone can do that.
Wake up and smell the erosion of rights!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I think website like 4chan are a better example of ephemeral communication, since unlike this they've already stood the test of time
The snapchat blog and FAQ detail how they store data and when and how that data is deleted. They are completely upfront about this,
I'd never heard of snapchat until today, but I found this information with about 2 minutes worth of effort.
Why are you people making a big deal about something they are completely open about?
I would be much more willing to trust Google with my data than any new company showing up. Regardless of what the Internets are claiming, Google does not sell users' data.
Google earned my trust through their actual actions. If a new company want to earn my trust, they have to do the same. It is not hard to create a system, that I would rather trust with my data, than any of Google's systems. All it requires is a system, where it is technically impossible for the company behind to snoop my data. And the system has to be open enough, that those security properties can be independently verified by any third party, who wishes to do so.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
No, but most developers just assume that the OS's delete function works, and both accessing the deleted files and deleting them properly requires root access.
Until people started publishing step by step guides for the purpose of retriveing these files, the tools available where quite difficult to use and required a reasonably high level of technical knowledge.
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It is not available for my nexus 7 tablet.
Do the editors read the news? I first saw this yesterday morning:
http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-privacy-watchdog-epic-files-complaint-against-snapchat-with-ftc-20130517,0,3618395.story
and if they weren't monitoring/storing snap chat, I would think the FBI would be bitching like they do about Skype...
Unless you have an actual agreement between two parties
One party uses Snapchat. The other party uses Snapchat. Therefore both parties have an agreement with a third party, and obligations to this third party may include non-disclosure unless otherwise specified, though I myself haven't read the Snapchat TOS because I lack a smartphone with a data plan.
The 'disable advertising' option appears to no longer be working.
You have a lot to learn. There's no reason to sell data to only one paying customer, is there?
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
It doesn't require data forensics. It just requires a basic understanding of storing files. If I have a file that is 2 GB large, the best way to store it is in contiguous space. There are also methods of using non-contiguous space that are just as simple - the first piece of information points to the next piece and so on, until you reach the end. Most operating systems will do that for you.
When you 'delete' a file, all the operating system does is go to the beginning of that file and sets a flag that states 'all of this allocated space can now be used'. You're writing something on the order of bytes or bits to the disk in order to 'delete' the file, but all of the data that was there is still there.
The alternative would be to go through every bit in the file and set it to '0' or to '1', whichever you chose would be completely arbitrary. For a file as large as 2 GB this will require 17,179,869,184 bits to be overwritten.
For most files that aren't really all that important, this method works extremely well. If you want to delete a 10 GB video game, it takes you seconds. Not minutes or hours like it did when you were installing it. If you mess up, it's as simple as undeleting the file you want, and you can find un-delete programs for any operating system, they don't cost $$$ and they don't require intense knowledge of computers - just knowledge that undeleting is possible.
The correct thing to do is to 'shred' the file, which is standard practice on all systems where sensitive information is handled. Simply encrypting data is not enough. File shredding will write random 1s and 0s over every bit in the file, and most file shredders will do it multiple times so that no part of the original file is readable. Missing this small step in security makes me question everything about snapchat and their ability to handle these pictures.
Slashdot should be grateful people continue to visit this site.
Why do you post nonsense?!
More and more stories are shite.
Ephemeral communications would be nice. Snapchat, however, seems broken and doesn't serve this purpose.
Or not. Snapchat artificially restricts capabilities of my own smartphone. Perhaps the problem with fac ebook is not permanence per se, but the fact that its a free service and makes money by selling your data. If people were wise enough to pay even a couple of bucks per month for a similar service, it would be far more respectful towards their privacy.
(Disclosure: I'm am old bastard myself but I work in the mobile dev world so it's my job to know when things are making waves in the industry.)
The demographic that they appeal to is very, very young. As in teens and college-aged adults. The app itself is extremely popular in the iTunes store and on Android. So much so, in fact, that Facebook, after not being able to buy it quickly (after explosive... truly explosive growth) decided to rip it off and build a clone called, wait for it, Poke.
People declared the end of Snapchat as big bad Facebook was going to eat their lunch, digest their user base and excrete them out into a paper bag to be lit aflame and left on Snapchat's front step. Poke hit around #14 on iTunes, then slide down fairly rapidly and is now an afterthought.
This was a victory for small dev shops that demonstrated that big companies can clone a product but that user loyalty is a very, very real thing.
The enemy of my enemy is quite possibly also my enemy. I've made a lot of enemies.
It's not secure - it doesnt delete the pictures!
Reference: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/thiswayup/audio/2555460/tech-news.asx (about half way through).
4chan threads self-destruct after a (short) period of inactivity, and has done so for a long time - I don't see how this ephemeral communication thing is either new or newsworthy.
I'm pretty sure we shouln't go and celebrate the existance of 4chan, either.
"Why We Should Celebrate Snapchat and Encourage Ephemeral Communication"
Reminds me of The Simpsons (of course) -- "Mr. Burns: your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular?"
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
it is not something most developers would consider likely
WTF? It something any developer of a self-deleting app should consider. Of course, an honest developer would tell you such an app is impossible. As dishonest one might not care as long as the app makes him money. I suspect Snapchat belongs to the second group.
It doesn't matter, the 3-letter agencies have data backups waiting for me. All I have to do is send over a FOIA letter, and in principle, I should get a copy.
Um, that is what I said only in more detail? However, recovering files that have been 'deleted' in that the OS sets the space available flag you where describing is called data forensics, Foremost a tools thats main function is to recover such files is widely described as a "forensic" tool.
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eÂphemÂerÂal /É(TM)Ëfem(É(TM))rÉ(TM)l/
Adjective
Lasting for a very short time: "fashions are ephemeral".
Noun
An ephemeral plant.
Synonyms
transitory - transient - momentary - short-lived