

Snapchat’s Non-Vanishing Message: You Can Trust Us - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/snapchat-s-non-vanishing-message-you-can-trust-us-6606e6774b8b

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rudolf0
>Snapchat also benefits from a close relationship with Google, which hosts
Snapchat’s operations on its cloud. Snapchat is now the biggest customer of
Google App Engine, and will be for the foreseeable future.

That's interesting, I wasn't aware of that.

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jessaustin
TFA seemed to have a particularly obsequious and credulous tone, so I clicked
the next thing by Levy, which is about a new Steve Jobs book, and also seemed
to have that tone. Is this just a way for companies to have Levy write their
press releases and post them at a non-company location? Who pays for these
pieces?

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skybrian
Levy apparently has lots of connections and tends to write sympathetic
accounts relying on inside access to companies. Explaining how insiders think
is a useful form of reporting. If you want an outside view, go with someone
else.

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xkcd-sucks
The Xposed Framework ([http://repo.xposed.info/](http://repo.xposed.info/))
allows you to hook arbitrary Android functions. And APKs are pretty trivial to
modify, though they can't be re-signed. Not sure if it's possible for Snapchat
to prevent TOS violations, seeing as they need to put the pixels on your
screen somehow.

I used Snapchat only briefly because it's horrible, but people enjoy continued
success in saving dick pics etc. with the Keepchat Xposed module in current
Snapchat versions.

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nly
What bothers me more is there is no encryption from end-to-end. If i snap
someone they're always going to be able to photograph their phone, if nothing
else, but Snapchat aren't even trying to build trust wrt snaps in transit. If
you look at the crypto they have deployed, it's nothing more obfuscation to
prevent reverse-engineering. They treat the whole thing as a joke.

~~~
iaw
In the end, they have a 15 billion dollar valuation. Until the concept of
encryption enters the mass consumer consciousness or a horrifically damaging
event occurs, they don't need to improve their encryption model to accomplish
their company agenda.

~~~
themeek
Wait. Hasn't the concept of encryption entered mass consumer consciousness (my
grandparents have asked me about it) and have not horrifically damaging events
occurred?

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iaw
Consumers know what encryption is but they don't demand it in their products
and it does not drive their decision making on consumption preferences.

Horrifically damaging events have occurred in isolation. The celebrity photo
leaks a little while back is a good example. The blame for those leaks wasn't
pushed onto Apple and the celebrities security practices, it was placed on the
individuals who obtained the pictures. We need more widespread damage with a
clear link to lack of encryption. The target breach last year(?) is a good
example of a similar event for data security and has led to some political
talk about laws with stricter requirements.

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dshefchik
This non-story is missing the point of Snapchat completely.

Actual snapchat users don't care if their snaps are securely vaporized for all
time. This isn't top-secret data that's being sent over the wire, it's selfies
and food and drunken antics and bad jokes. They just don't want to deal with
the social baggage of having them all easily viewed by Grandma and that weird
kid from high school.

