what's up?

October 27, 2017 1:06 PM

Fun with your friend's Facebook and Tinder sessions, Robert Heaton. More:
Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp
A tale of love, betrayal, social engineering and Whatsapp

see also:
Finding out if 2 people are chatting on WhatsApp
Collecting huge amounts of data with WhatsApp



Why I told my friends to stop using WhatsApp and Telegram

posted by the man of twists and turns (18 comments total)

Uggggggggggggggh he's right but getting people who already have WhatsApp accounts to use them instead of SMS has been enough of a pain.
posted by PMdixon at 1:09 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?
posted by cyphill at 1:27 PM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?

Chalk mark on the bench at 3rd and Elm if it's an odd-numbered day.
Angle of blinds for meeting spot as arranged.
If I have a newspaper folded under my arm, break the meeting.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:31 PM on October 27, 2017 [32 favorites]

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?

Not cell phones, that's for sure.
posted by PMdixon at 1:35 PM on October 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

Robert Heaton is a very amusing writer and I hope I never have the opportunity to piss him off.

It's super annoying that you can't turn off the "active/last active" feature on Facebook Messenger* because sometimes I want to ignore people without them knowing I'm ignoring them. Or I don't want to know if they're ignoring me. The unfortunate part of "Active 18m ago" is it doesn't mean they were looking at your message, or using Messenger in general, 18 minutes ago. It means that they have Facebook itself open on some device. I found this out the hard way when I was trying to "hide" from someone; I'd actually deleted Messenger from my phone, but I still showed up as having been online because I was using Facebook in a browser.

* People tell me all the time that you can turn this off. NO YOU CANNOT. You are thinking of chat.
posted by AFABulous at 1:45 PM on October 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

I just make a copy of everything I write and forward it to the NSA.
posted by runcibleshaw at 3:50 PM on October 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

I just make a copy of everything I write and forward it to the NSA.


Yeah, they've been meaning to talk to you about that. They think your prose is to prolix.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 3:57 PM on October 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Forwarding everything to the government is probably the best way to ensure they DON'T read it.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 4:15 PM on October 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Huh... could you overwhelm government or corporate data collection by just filling it with trash?
posted by runcibleshaw at 4:27 PM on October 27, 2017

runcibleshaw, you could not overwhelm the sheer quantity of information stored by the NSA. Forbes suggests that the Utah data center recently opened has a capacity of something above 12 exabytes of data. That's just one data center.

Brewster Kahle suggests that voice recordings of all the phone calls made in the U.S. in a year would take up about 272 petabytes, or just over 200 of those 10,000 racks.
posted by blob at 4:46 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

I just make a copy of everything I write and forward it to the NSA.

I know.
posted by Room 641-A at 5:05 PM on October 27, 2017 [10 favorites]

tinder.com has just been launched, rendering about half of the first link obsolete, and finally once and for all obliterating any chance I ever leave my laptop open in front of my friends
posted by Panthalassa at 6:35 PM on October 27, 2017

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?

The same thing you told them back in the 90's when they ridiculously thought the NSA was monitoring all Internet traffic, or that Google was scanning all your personal e-mails to profile you, or that Facebook was listening to your conversations.

That they're loons, clearly.
posted by rokusan at 7:36 PM on October 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

I just make a copy of everything I write and forward it to the NSA.

This is not true.
posted by NSA at 8:41 PM on October 27, 2017 [13 favorites]

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?

Anarchist carrier pigeons.
posted by thivaia at 9:12 PM on October 27, 2017

runcibleshaw: Hasan Elahi (previously) might be able to give you some tips on that strategy.
posted by sibilatorix at 9:49 AM on October 28, 2017

So what do you use if your friends think Signal is a government run honeypot?

there's a meme going around that Signal is bad and dangerous, bc the initial development took some grant money from US institutions, while Telegram is secure and good, which is absurd. tell them to not use telegram at least.
posted by vogon_poet at 11:02 AM on October 28, 2017

as someone who uses telegram because it's the only messaging app with a combination of
- native linux app
- file sending
- SOME form of encryption
- social network like functions
- useful bots (Skeddy replaced Google calender and is much easier to use, I keep my shopping lists on there, you know - the ordinary things)

any suggestions for a replacement?
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 11:42 AM on October 29, 2017