Study Shows Which Messengers Leak Your Data, Drain Your Battery, and More (arstechnica.com) 25
AmiMoJo writes: Link previews are a ubiquitous feature found in just about every chat and messaging app, and with good reason. They make online conversations easier by providing images and text associated with the file that's being linked. Unfortunately, they can also leak our sensitive data, consume our limited bandwidth, drain our batteries, and, in one case, expose links in chats that are supposed to be end-to-end encrypted. Among the worst offenders, according to research published on Monday, were messengers from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Line. [...] Facebook Messenger and Instagram both downloaded a 2.6GB test file, as well as executing arbitrary Javascript code on their servers. When informed of this Facebook (which owns Instagram) said that was the intended behaviour, even though it could be used to e.g. hijack their servers for cryptocurrency mining. The three best messaging platforms were Signal, WhatsApp, Threema and iMessage, at least in terms of properly protecting your personal data.
A Dupe, 3 articles apart (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: fuck you amijojo (Score:2)
Between Trump and covid, most people I know are quite happy to be non-American.
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I'll take Donald Trump and the ability to impeach him over any of the royal asshats you lot swear fealty to. As far as Covid goes, lets hear that un-American sentiment when you need ventilators, vaccine doses, or supplies. Its not like America hasn't saved Europeans from themselves a few times last century anyway... Oh wait...
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the ability to impeach him
Actually, it's the ability to press a big red button labeled "impeach". However, the code it activates is totally broken, the original programmers long since dead, and any attempt to fix the software is met with objections from the current I.T. staff that the code is supposed to be broken.
Do they show... (Score:2)
Which articles are most likely to be duped?
Messaging is still crap (Score:5, Interesting)
It's been over 30 years since the specifications for IRC and Zephyr. And still nobody can seem to settle on a standard or make something that isn't complete marketing horseshit, impossible to use, or subtly insecure.
There have been amazing strides in other areas, computer graphics, networking, parallel processing, neural networks, and even word processing during the same time frame. Messaging is a trivial problem technically, but nobody can quite figure out how to make money with it. (an XMPP account bundled with your ISP provided email account would have been the obvious solution. Making it a baseline services. Greed closed the door in that option)
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Microsoft has mostly replaced SMTP in corporate IT world with proprietary protocols for Exchange. And Google (and Hotmail and Yahoo) have at least partially replaced POP3 and IMAP with web-based clients. I think time will slowly erode SMTP and replace it with something technically worse. (I'd be happy if it was replaced with something better, but I'm too much of a pessimist to really believe that)
DUUUUUPE! (Score:1)
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Way to go!
Slashdot Messenger! (Score:2)
We've been waiting for this for *years*.
At last, though, its very own app, which leaks stories.
Effects on your batteries are currently unknown. :)
hawk
I Love Dupes (Score:1)
To the Editor(s) (Score:2)