
Twitter Aquires Whisper Systems - mike-cardwell
http://www.whispersys.com/updates.html
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tptacek
Maybe Twitter is doing something involving payments? But if they were, I
wonder if they'd telegraph it so blatantly.

The words "talent acquisition" are so cynical, so I'm embarrassed that they'd
be my first reaction to this.

Maybe another interesting question is: why is it so hard to get a successful
device security product off the ground for Android? Is the market need not
there?

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marshray
Another possibility is that they want Moxie to work on Convergence full-time.

This could represent Twitter and Google ganging up on the CAB Forum to clean
up their act for the good of the internet. Alternatively, it may be that
Twitter plans to match Google's scheme to be an end user identity provider by
moving some of the publishing directly onto the handset, and for this they
might want a more decentralized server authentication environment.

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tptacek
Yeah, I had forgotten to put "Whisper" together with "Moxie". This makes a lot
more sense now.

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mike-cardwell
I can understand the talent acquisition, but it's strange to see Whisper
Systems products owned by Twitter, considering their purpose...

I could imagine Whisper Systems developing an app to encrypt tweets. I can't
imagine Twitter doing that.

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nuclearsandwich
One of the things Whisper had was a method of encrypting SMS messages so they
still fit in an SMS message, perhaps Twitter is hoping to take advantage of
that?

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mike-cardwell
I can't imagine Twitter developing a product that prevents them from being
able to look at Tweets going through their system.

This is why I think this is such a strange move on Whisper Systems part. Their
products are all about privacy. Twitter wouldn't have a business model if they
gave their users proper privacy.

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stbullard
Think Egypt, Syria, China: countries where large-scale keyword filtering and
MITM attacks are common, and the infrastructure is owned by the opponent.

What's needed in those cases isn't peer-to-peer encryption, but peer-to-
service (and service-to-peer) encryption: tweets encrypted on the device,
sent, and decrypted on Twitter's servers; timelines sent encrypted, and
decrypted client-side.

Twitter still gets plaintext, but intermediaries can't trace/target
pseudonymous users (or filter content).

This could be a real edge for Twitter in countries (China) where they're
losing ground to monitored/censored clones (Weibo).

tl;dr: They're probably building Tor, not Skype/BBM.

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masonlee
Twitter already has client-to-service encryption with their https APIs.

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pajju
I don't see this as a talent acquisition.

Waiting for someone to shed more light on this acquisition.

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siavosh
Maybe they want to create an enterprise offering (like Yammer).

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samstave
This is in line with Square perhaps we will see "Pay-by-tweet" with a secure
encrypted tweet coming along.

With wrapper apps around this.

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grumblepeet
A hardened Android stack? Maybe Twitter are developing a phone?

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hello_moto
Either that or someone knows someone and would like to have a "successful
investment" _wink wink_.

Too early to say though.

