Posted: 10 Jun 2020 07:20 PM PDT

Using an encrypted messaging app ensures only those with whom you are exchanging messages can actually decipher them, but not every messaging app contains this useful feature. If you want to keep your chats secret, you need a messaging app with powerful encryption software designed to prevent a range of third-parties from invading your privacy.

While there are quite a number of good encrypted apps out there, many have flaws associated with their operations, their owners, or both. For example, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are both encrypted and work quite well by themselves, but they are also owned by Facebook, which has a problematic historical relationship with privacy. Apple owns the highly regarded encrypted iMessage, but that app does not encrypt data like mobile numbers, metadata, or data stored in the cloud. While no encrypted messaging app is perfect, we round up the best ones available.

If you are considering encrypted messaging, the best way to achieve the utmost privacy is to also use a private VPN connection. Sure, using an encrypted messaging app is way better than nothing — which is to say, better than Skype, Windows Messenger, or AIM — but if you're concerned anyone could listen in to your conversations or read your messages, then a VPN is an extra added layer of reassurance.

Signal Private Messenger (free)

Signal offers advanced privacy tech that millions of people already trust for everyday sending and receiving messages and HD voice and video calls. Powered by the open-source Signal Protocol, the app secures your conversations end to end. For Signal users, privacy is part of the app's DNA, and it works the same way with every communication, even on slow networks. Signal is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit with development supported by users — no ads or trackers. You can use your existing phone number and address book to securely communicate. You can choose custom alerts for each contact, or completely disable sound. The app's built-in image editing features let you sketch, crop, and flip outgoing photos.

iOS Android

Threema (free)

You can use Threema anonymously to make end-to-end encrypted voice calls, send texts and voice messages, share videos, and even conduct polls. Using the open-source NaCl cryptography library, the app encrypts all communication. It generates very little server-based data, and group memberships and contact lists are stored directly on your device, not in the cloud. Messages are deleted after delivery, and local files from conversations are also encrypted. Encryption keys generated are stored on your device to prevent backdoor access or copies. You can reply with the app's agree/disagree feature and verify the identity of a contact by scanning their personal QR code. Each Threema user also receives a random Threema ID — which means no phone number or email address is required. This allows you to use the app anonymously without revealing private information.

iOS Android

Telegram (free)

Telegram connects people via a unique distributed network of worldwide data centers. A syncing feature lets you send and access messages from all your devices at once with the ability to start a communication on your phone and finish it on your tablet or laptop. You can create group chats for up to 200,000 members, share large videos and documents, and even set up bots for specific tasks. Your entire chat history, groups, and media are securely stored in the Telegram cloud via a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange. Telegram has powerful photo and video editing tools and an open sticker and GIF platform. A Secret Chats feature allows messages to self-destruct automatically from both participating devices.

iOS Android

Dust (free)

Want to send secret texts? Dust offers you total control over your digital communications free from prying eyes, data mining, and hackers. For everyday texting and sharing photos with friends and family, or handing over private information like credit cards, or social security numbers — Dust will protect your data. It notifies you if a screenshot is taken of your messages and erases message history after 24 hours. Dust conversations are heavily encrypted and not accessible by anyone. You can even remove messages from your companion's phone in real time.

iOS Android

Viber Messenger (free)

More than one billion people rely on Viber as their fast, secure messaging and calling app. With your data plan or Wi-Fi connection in place, you can make free international calls; send text messages, photos, videos, GIFs, and stickers; open a group chat; and more. It is fully synced between desktop and tablet for both audio and video calls. An adjunct service called Viber Out lets you connect to landlines as well. All communications are protected with end-to-end encryption with encryption keys only on user devices. Secret Chats let you destroy every message so that after your message is read, it's automatically deleted from your recipient's phone. Viber supports communities with unlimited members, complete with Chat extensions to favorite links, Viber stickers, GIFs and videos, Yelp, YouTube, Spotify, and more. Optional Viber Out subscriptions consist of a bundle of minutes to call a specific destination, which are purchased in-app and renew at various intervals.

iOS Android

Wickr Me (free)

With Wickr Me, messages, voice calls, voice memos, files, images, and videos are encrypted and shared via a new key using advanced end-to-end encryption for connecting one-on-one or in groups. You can communicate in private groups of up to 10 users. Wickr does not store any metadata associated with your communications and never accesses your messages or your contact list. No phone number or email address is required to register on Wickr Me. Your address book remains private and is not stored on Wickr servers. You can set the expiration time on all your messaging content, and a shredder function overwrites all deleted Wickr content on your device.

iOS Android

Wire (free)

Wire is a secure collaboration platform that teams can use to communicate and share messages, files, conference calls, or private conversations. You can communicate through private or group conversations and share and collaborate with files, documents, and links. A one-click conference call button for voice or video meetings let you invite others through private guest rooms or use ephemeral messages and device fingerprinting. Wire is available on any device and operating system so your team can collaborate both in the office and on the road.

iOS Android

Editors' Recommendations

Is Google finally managing its messaging mess? - The Verge

Posted: 27 May 2020 04:14 AM PDT

Sadly, the time has come for me to write about Rich Communication Services again. There have been a few pieces of news about it in the past week or so and I find myself vaguely optimistic that by this time next year Google will be offering properly encrypted messaging to Android users with a relatively simple, seamless experience that's well on its way to being universally available.

Plus, Google is finally starting to transition users from Hangouts to Google Chat in a real way under new management that is motivated to finally get it right because everybody is paying way more attention during the pandemic.

But let's stick with RCS for the moment. Google has me at the spot where Charlie Brown is at his most tragically hopeful and Sisyphean: right before he resolves to run at the football and really kick it this time despite knowing in his heart Lucy will pull it away again. Except the football in this case is the easy answer I'd like to give to Android users about how text messaging works on their phones.

Instead, the answer is as it ever was. (Deep breath.) RCS is the more advanced replacement for SMS and if the carriers and phones of all texters in a thread support it then you'll get chat-like features like typing indicators and bigger attachments. But there's no real way to know whether or not you'll be getting RCS or plain old SMS until you open up a chat window with one or several people and then wait to see what you get.

If your carrier doesn't support RCS, you can still get it via Android Messages and let Google handle RCS for you, but it will still fall back gracefully to SMS or MMS. In any case, none of these solutions offer truly end-to-end encryption and there's no indication Apple is even faintly interested in supporting it on the iPhone.

Good grief.

And yet, I'm going to take a run at that football. Because while I don't think there's going to be a simple answer, I do see signs that Google is making tangible progress towards better answers.

The most recent news is that T-Mobile will finally begin supporting proper cross-carrier RCS messaging via the "Universal Profile." Until now, T-Mobile could technically say it supported RCS but in reality it only worked between certain T-Mobile phones.

If you're reading this and are an Android user, chances you think this whole thing is moot because Google is already providing RCS services to anybody who wants them via its Android Messages app. But the most common Android phones are Samsung phones and Samsung ships its own texting app by default. And most people just use the default.

So T-Mobile figuring out how to get its RCS to talk to Google's RCS via the globally accepted default is meaningful progress. That doesn't mean we don't have more confusion in store. Last year the major US carriers signed on to a joint agreement called the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative that was designed to do the thing Google had been asking them to do all along: support RCS Universal Profile. What does T-Mobile's announcement mean for the CCMI? Stay tuned I guess!

All of this RCS interconnect confusion and politicking would just be a morbid fascination of mine if it weren't for the fact that it all has direct and tangible effects on Android users' real lived experiences with text messaging.

So while I apologize for belaboring the minutiae, I am doing so to make a point: even though you're paying a monthly bill, your needs are not the priority for your mobile carrier. It's much more important in the boardrooms of these carriers to make sure they're not accidentally giving up anything to another major tech company than it is to move more quickly towards the correct solution.

That's not to absolve Google, but as its CEO Sundar Pichai told me in our interview earlier this month, "RCS is where we are like United Nations. We try to herd a bunch of people." Google is committed to keeping Android at least somewhat neutral in the tug of war between carriers and Google itself. That's why progress is so slow.

But all of this is just a new version of the SMS status quo, honestly, because RCS by default is not end-to-end encrypted. Unlike iMessage and Signal, your texts are not as private as they could be.

Apparently that might change, as an internal dogfooding build of Android messages has a bunch of strings and settings for end-to-end encryption. As it promised last July, Google is clearly working on some kind of solution.

What will that solution look like? We're still a little too early to say, but if I had to guess I'd say it will be something that's available for people who use Google's Android Messages app, but if anybody in the texting chain doesn't it'll fall back to regular RCS or even SMS.

See, the way RCS works is your app sends a ping to the other phones to ask whether it too can do RCS in a process called "capability exchange." If both apps support RCS, then you're off to the races. There's no technical reason that capability exchange couldn't also include a "hey do you support end-to-end encryption?" message, too.

Maybe it will be more broad-based than that and become part of the official GSMA Universal Profile spec, such that apps like Samsung Messages will also work with it. But if I had to guess, I'd say Google's going with the minimum viable product. Or maybe that's just what I hope Google is doing, because the fastest way to create pressure is to show real consumer demand.

Right now, iMessage users have the option for secure, end-to-end encrypted messages when they text other iPhone users, built right into the default experience. If Google comes through with encrypted messaging in Android Messages, it'll have the same option for Android users when they text other Android Message users — again, built right into the default.

It would be nice if I didn't need to add so many provisos to those sentences. It would be really nice if, as they have done with exposure tracing, Apple and Google could work together to create a system that protects user privacy in messaging as well.

If Google actually enables end-to-end encryption, who will be holding the secure messaging football? Google? The carriers? Apple? All I know is I'm standing here under a leafless tree, a determined glint in my eye, getting ready to take another run at it again. Knowing full well that one of them is definitely going to yank it away.

Rats.

SpaceX's first crewed launch

┏ SpaceX's first crewed launch: all the updates on the company's historic mission for NASA. Here are all of our SpaceX stories on the launch in one place.

┏ Here's what to expect as SpaceX launches its first human crew to space. Loren Grush provides the rundown of what to watch for.

The Crew Dragon is designed to require minimal input from its passengers, but since this is a test, Hurley and Behnken will do some manual flying before they reach the space station. "It's obviously something that we want to make sure we understand completely for future crews in case they ever have to fly the vehicle manually," Hurley said during a press conference. The plan is for Hurley to take control right after Crew Dragon reaches orbit as well as when they approach the space station.

Gadget news

┏ Sony's Xperia 1 II ships in the US on July 24th for $1,199. For that price, those cameras better finally deliver. Sony's rap for years has been that it makes the best sensors but somehow whiffs on its own smartphone cameras. Twelve hundred bucks is definitely put up or shut up money.

I will say that as a Sony camera user, I'm weirdly excited for the pro camera options here because Sony is using the same interface I'm already used to for it.

┏ The Sony ZV-1 is a tiny vlogging powerhouse.

┏ Lenovo made two new tablets with detachable Bluetooth keyboards. Putting Bluetooth in the keyboard on a Surface clone (which is not a knock, just the easiest way to describe this form factor) is maybe clever. Honestly, is there a Windows computer Lenovo wouldn't try out?

┏ The Oppo Watch isn't bad, but it does look like an Apple Watch. Sam Byford:

The most interesting thing about the Oppo Watch software is its selection of built-in apps, which are accessible through a scrolling grid that's halfway between the Apple Watch's weird honeycomb and list views. There are the usual apps for phone calls, fitness tracking, timers, and weather, as well as an on-watch app store and China-specific services like Alipay. It's a pretty robust feature set, including things like sleep tracking that haven't come to the Apple Watch yet.

┏ Microsoft Surface Headphones 2 review: perfect for work-from-home life. Chris Welch says they're competent in lots of categories even if they're not class-leading. Sometimes nailing the basics is exactly what you want.

As you may have realized by now, the Surface Headphones 2 don't best Sony and Bose in every category. But since Microsoft decided on a much smarter, more affordable price this time around, they don't necessarily have to.

┏ Carqon electric cargo bike review: urban transport, solved. Thomas Ricker:

I just spent a week riding Carqon's first production bicycle here in Amsterdam. It's an 88-pound (40 kg) electric cargo bike designed to transport an adult and up to four kids a distance of up 75 miles (120 km) before needing a recharge. I came away a believer in the transformative power of the electric cargo bike to replace both diesel-gulping delivery vans and family cars in the world's cities.

More from The Verge

┏ The human cost of Instacart's grocery delivery. Russell Brandom talked to eight Instacart workers who got sick, yet despite promises from the company only three of them got sick pay. Just incredibly terrible treatment of workers here.

Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that customers would get frustrated. The app made it seem as though shoppers had access to a special warehouse where all of the goods were kept, like Amazon. Why would the app list a product for sale if you couldn't actually buy it? Instacart would recoup the cost of a particular grocery order if buyers refused to pay, but there were lots of other ways angry customers could make life hard for shoppers, like clawing back tips or leaving a zero-star rating. And most of the time, customers didn't get mad at stores; they got mad at shoppers. Instacart had arbitraged customer anger onto the most vulnerable people in the system.

┏ Nilay Patel interviewed Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield for the Vergecast, wherein Butterfield said that Microsoft is 'unhealthily preoccupied with killing us.'

┏ Emergency COVID-19 vaccines will have to convince a skeptical public. You've already learned a lot of medical terminology in the past couple months. As Nicole Wetsman writes, you're going to need to learn yet more:

The challenge is, Quinn's research shows that most people don't have a good sense of the difference between drug approval and emergency authorization. She found that Americans have a limited understanding of FDA terminology around experimental products. "People don't understand that kind of language," she says. In one survey, she found people were unfamiliar with terms like "emergency use authorization," "off-label" (which is when a drug is used for different disease than the one it was approved for), and "investigational new drug" (a drug that's being tested in clinical trials).

┏ HBO Max is full of potential, but its biggest hurdle remains AT&T's messy execution. It's launching today. Julia Alexander on all the ways AT&T is own-goaling itself on this launch strategy:

In the middle of it all is a confusing, nearly comedic branding struggle that has HBO diehards concerned and WarnerMedia executives on the defense. (I cover this industry daily, and even I scratch my head over the differences between HBO Go, HBO Now, and HBO Max.) That's the question at the heart of HBO Max's launch: what is it? Leveraging prestigious programming from HBO, tentpole franchise movies from the DC and Harry Potter universes, kids content in the form of Sesame Street, and new original programming, HBO Max wants to give anyone and everyone something they can watch.

Android 11 may be the best texting platform if you use multiple chat apps - The Verge

Posted: 11 Jun 2020 04:14 AM PDT

The official beta for the next version of Android is out now, and if you have a spare Pixel phone, I really do recommend you check it out. If you don't, my recommendation is not to install it — betas are never a great idea on something you truly depend on, and your main phone is likely near the top of that list. I've been using a build close to what Google released today for a week and I haven't had any catastrophic crashes, but there have been some bugs.

I wrote up a lot of observations and made a video detailing the new features yesterday, but something I struggled to get across then and I think I'm going to struggle to get across now is how much better the texting experience really is. I say that even though essentially no apps fully support Google's new pop-out "bubble" feature yet.

It's a struggle to describe because fundamentally what Google has done seems so small. It has taken boxes that used to appear in one place and make them appear in another place. While I wouldn't go so far as to call the experience transformative, I do think that it's hard to understand how good it is without using it for some time.

We'll see how I feel after a few more months, but right now I find that Android 11 offers a a more enjoyable and more coherent overall messaging experience than iOS.

That is a sentence I never thought I would write. In fact, if you simply Google the phrase "messaging mess" on The Verge, you will find that it's nearly synonymous with Google and the article with the phrase is often written by yours truly. Can Android 11 really fix all of that?

Well, no, of course not. But what it has done is make a fundamental problem on smartphones more manageable. Android 11 can't fix Google's messaging mess, but it has made the overall texting experience on smartphones better.

The difference between Google's messaging mess and the overall mess on smartphones is simply that Google blew several opportunities to win at mobile messaging. Now, it's going for something more "open" by trying to get all carriers worldwide (and maybe Apple) to upgrade from SMS to RCS in a consistent and universally compatible way — and also make it possible to layer strong encryption on top of it. It's taking longer than hoped.

RCS aside, the problem is that there are too many texting apps and you can't really convince all your friends and loved ones to just choose one. In some parts of the world, that statement doesn't obtain because everybody uses WhatsApp, but at least here in the US, messaging is fragmented across iMessage, SMS/RCS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Telegram, and any number of other apps I could list here.

That's a problem for both Android and iOS users, but it feels more acute on Android because the default option is a bad, broken experience: SMS. Or, if you're lucky, it's RCS — but even then your encryption options are substandard. There may be messaging fragmentation on the iPhone, but at least the default experience when you're texting other iPhone users is pretty good.

You talk to different people on different apps and it's a hassle to remember who is in which app. Additionally, your notifications from these different apps get intermixed with everything else in your notifications. Sure, all your messages from WhatsApp might be grouped, but then it's a news alert and then it's Signal and so on.

It's a first-world problem, but a modern smartphone is supposed to help you with these hassles. It's also an old problem, and smartphones have tried to tackle it in the past with decidedly mixed results.

I could wax ecstatic about the solution Palm tried with webOS: Synergy. Essentially webOS tried to just give you one messaging app and within it you had threads with all your contacts. Inside each thread you could switch between whatever texting method you preferred. It was beautiful and, like webOS itself, doomed.

Similarly, Windows Phone tried to abstract away apps entirely into its People Hub, which combined lots of different contact, communication, and social features into one place. Another doomed idea on another doomed smartphone platform.

Those efforts failed not just because those platforms failed, but because fundamentally no chat service is interested in having its users in another app. In the same way streaming services balk at being included in another company's smart TV interface, there's no reason for Facebook Messenger or Google Chat or Skype to let you use a more generic interface. The days of XMPP are (sadly) behind us.

Which is why Android 11's solution is actually genius. It doesn't try to replace those apps, it simply collates their alerts into a single place. You get benefits that are similar to the way apps like Trillian or Adium combined IM services back in the day, but it's just in your notifications instead of in an app.

That's also, in theory, the genius of the bubble system — I'll have to use it more to see how it pans out. To the user, it'll just feel like any other app icon (albeit floating over your other apps). You tap it to open your texts, with icons for each of your conversation threads. The fact that tapping on one of those icons happens to open a distinct app doesn't really matter, because at least it's all in one place.

Even without those bubbles, the Conversation system in Android 11 is great because of its distinct priority system. I am able to set my wife and boss as priorities in the apps I use to talk to them (and can optionally allow them to break through Do Not Disturb.).

But some of the group chats I'm in are very chatty (Hey Bohn clan: love you!), so I want to turn off all notifications for them. Until Android 11's conversation section, silencing those alerts was a recipe for ignoring my family — not what I want, especially now. But now, those alerts are still promoted up above random news alerts — I see them, but I'm not interrupted by them.

Earlier I called the disparate chat apps a kind of fragmentation, but another word for that is competition. It's not the worst thing in the world to have to deal with multiple chat apps, because at least that means there's not one dominant, global chat service.

Solving these problems at the notification layer is probably the best possible solution right now. Switching back to an iPhone or even an earlier version of Android today after my piece was published, I immediately felt a sense of friction and annoyance.

Now all I have to do is get some more of my friends off iMessage.

More on Android 11

┏ Android 11 beta: all the announcements. Here's all the Android 11 news since it was first announced.

┏ How to install the Android 11 public beta.

┏ Five new features Android 11 borrows from the iPhone.

I'll also direct you straight to one of my tweets. When I originally looked over the improvement to Android's Voice Access accessibility feature, I thought it was just iterative — and since Voice Access was already great before, it didn't seem worth including in my original feature. But trying it more, I became more impressed. The feature does a better job understanding what's on the screen and why, so you can control it with your voice using much more natural language than before. I should have included it from the jump — not just because it's good, but because even iterative improvements to accessibility merit attention.

One thing I left out of my Android 11 beta hands on was the improved Voice Access, which now understand screen context and content. That was a mistake - it's actually incredible.
You don't have to use a grid or button numbers, you can just say what's on the screen. Watch: pic.twitter.com/wXidxZGVjt
— Dieter Bohn (@backlon) June 10, 2020

More from The Verge

┏ Reddit names Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel as Alexis Ohanian's replacement.

┏ Intel's 3D-stacked Lakefield chips are here to take on ARM in laptops, tablets, and foldables. Chaim Gartenberg explains what's up with these new chips. With the impending ARM announcement for Macs, the stakes for Lakefield are suddenly much higher than before.

The hybrid core setup works by combining a more powerful Core-class Sunny Cove core (the same 10nm architecture the 10th Gen Ice Lake chips are based on) with four low-power Atom-class Tremont cores (for a total of five cores and five threads) on a single die. That arrangement allows for a balance of power, efficiency, and battery life that a purely Core or purely Atom setup could achieve. ... If that sort of chipset arrangement sounds familiar, that's because it's strikingly similar to ARM's Big.Little architecture,

┏ Grubhub spurns Uber and will merge with Europe's Just Eat Takeaway.

┏ Amazon bans police from using its facial recognition technology for the next year. As with IBM's facial recognition announcement, there are questions about whether this is an empty PR gesture.

┏ Verizon's Samsung Galaxy S20 has mmWave 5G but less RAM. I have yet to be convinced that mmWave is a good idea for phones.

┏ Twitter would like you to actually read stories before you retweet them. ...Same.

Search This Blog

Android Full Encryption

The best encrypted messaging apps for iOS and Android - Digital Trends

The best encrypted messaging apps for iOS and Android - Digital Trends

Signal Private Messenger (free)

Threema (free)

Telegram (free)

Dust (free)

Viber Messenger (free)

Wickr Me (free)

Wire (free)

Editors' Recommendations

SpaceX's first crewed launch

Gadget news

More from The Verge

More on Android 11

More from The Verge

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

6 Anti-forensic techniques that every cyber investigator dreads | EC-Council Official Blog - EC-Council Blog

How to Encrypt Your iPhone or iPad Backup - MUO - MakeUseOf

A Look At Blockchain Smartphones Available Now - I4U News