14 ms·
AWS acquires Wickr
- thinkingkong 5y agoDid hell just freeze over? AWS has acquired technology instead of simply copying someone elses? Im flabbergasted.
- cle 5y agoAWS has acquired many companies in the past. Off the top of my head, Biba (turned into Chime), Elemental, Cloud9, Annapurna, CloudEndure…I’m sure there’s more.
- WoahNoun 5y agoAlexa is basically 3 tech acquisitions glued together. Ivona (TTS), Evi (Knowledge graph), and Yap (speech recognition).
- useryman 5y agoYou forgot Alexa.com, for both the product and the name. (in mindshare at least)
- waynesonfire 5y agoA9
- contol-m 5y agoFormer A9 employee here. A9 was not an acquisition - it was bootstrapped as a Bay Area subsidiary. Initially A9 focused on web search, then pivoted to doing product search for Amazon retail.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tolidano 5y agoScroll to the bottom of the “my account” page for example and you’ll see a list of dozens of wholly owned subsidiaries and websites, many of which were purchases.
- surge 5y agoProbably going to use it to replace Chime. Edit: For those that have never heard of it, its their own IM, that while publicly available, is mostly used internally for company communications, similar to Slack or Skype for Business. https://aws.amazon.com/chime/ https://aws.amazon.com/chime/
- p0rkbelly 5y agoAWS uses Slack Internally.
- dragosmocrii 5y agoI think Chime is also used internally, and for virtual interviews.
- hughrr 5y agoIt is. I spend about 2 hours a week arguing with AWS staff over chime. It’s quite decent.
- txru 5y agoAmazon allows people to use Slack internally. Chime is still at least the back end for all meetings. And in practice, because Chime chat is still supported, many managers tell their teams to always keep Chime open in case someone messages them there. There’s no way to tell who is on Slack vs on Chime.
- counternotions 5y agoCertainly one unexpected way for the government to scare off and shut down nefarious communications happening on Wickr. Note this platform has been popular amongst the darkest underbelly of the web (e.g. carders, drug dealers).
- skzrskzr 5y agoWhat's a "carder"? Never heard the term and a google search turns up a bunch of benign things.
- tiagod 5y agoPeople that steal credit card numbers to sell online (among other things). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carding_(fraud) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carding_(fraud)
- AndrewUnmuted 5y agoThough true, this is just about entirely irrelevant given where Wickr has gone since 2016. It may surprise you to learn that Wickr was awarded a large US Airforce contract last year. [0] [0] https://wickr.com/wickr-awarded-us-air-force-contract/ https://wickr.com/wickr-awarded-us-air-force-contract/
- wkrthrow 5y agoWhy is it irrelevant post-2016? Wickr was still a preferred choice of drug dealers well up to 2018 (and probably beyond). I know this because I was using it to communicate with them.
- wolverine876 5y agoWhy not WhatsApp or Signal or something similar?
- sibane 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- borski 5y agoWickr is great tech, and I’m glad to see them get a positive outcome - but boy, I really am curious what AWS wants to do with this.
- hughrr 5y agoCharge for it.
- apozem 5y agoIt's right there in the announcement. > With Wickr, customers and partners benefit from advanced security features not available with traditional communications services – across messaging, voice and video calling, file sharing, and collaboration. This gives security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance requirements. Wickr is going to be intertwined with AWS products so Amazon can sell them to "security conscious enterprises and government agencies."
- borski 5y agoThe devil is in the details, and I’m mighty curious as to what those details end up looking like.
- apozem 5y agoA great point. It's easy for an exec to say, "We should buy Wickr to make it easier to land government contracts." You still have to integrate Wickr in a way that makes sense and actually adds value.
- dataminded 5y agoA replacement for Chime?
- noir_lord 5y agoAmazon is pushing hard into government services. Wickr has a large contract already with the US military so I guess this closes a gap they needed closed.
- deadalus 5y agoSo, what are some good Wickr alternatives?
- t-lan 5y agoGreat question. This is pretty unfortunate, data mining secure communications removes much of the value. Signal sold out a long time ago, not sure of another 'verified secure' platform.
- egberts1 5y agoMatrix protocol, or Element app for iOS
- thanksforfish 5y agoSignal sold out? How so?
- thefounder 5y agoMetadata stuff? They still require phone numbers(unlike wickr)
- wolverine876 5y agoSignal is moving away from phone numbers, developing the components needed to securely provide service via user IDs. My understanding is that their intended audience is the general public, not crypto-security geeks, and as part of that they wanted integration with existing address books. With a small team, developing all the security and usability was more important than eliminating the phone number piece. They apparently don't retain any data but the phone number, and I think the registration date and last logon date.
- tptacek 5y agoSignal is entirely independent and hasn't been acquired by Amazon or any other big tech company. It remains the gold standard for security/privacy technology (whether it's packaged acceptably for everyone on HN is a different question, and I'm not saying you have to use it).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- humbleMouse 5y agoThere goes the last good safe messaging app :(
- secfirstmd 5y agoWhat's wrong with Signal or Matrix/Element?
- mdp2021 5y ago> What's wrong with Signal: telephone number as ID
- cblconfederate 5y agoAh yes, AWS the three letter agency. Glad i never touched it
- crmd 5y agoYou can be sure there is already a team working on the architectural changes needed to implement lawful intercept and passive surveillance on Wickr. This is what happens when a secure platform gets too big. The same thing happened to Skype.
- colmmacc 5y agoI work on cryptography at AWS, and long before that I worked on Skype a bit, so I can't resist commenting! Wickr features end to end cryptography, https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_WickrMessagingProtocol.pdf https://wickr.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WhitePaper_Wick..., and I can't see why we'd change that (and even that framing is a bit weird, I'm sure Wickr will continue to be autonomous but maybe with access to more resources from the rest of Amazon). Increasingly, end-to-end cryptography is what customers expect. We also use end-to-end cryptography in other Amazon systems, most recently including Ring doorbells - https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054941511-Understanding-Video-End-to-End-Encryption-E2EE- https://support.ring.com/hc/en-us/articles/360054941511-Unde...
- rapsey 5y agoAs an american company, customers should absolutely be distrustful of any claims of security. There is very little in the way of the feds giving you a gag order and ordering you to provide a backdoor. Amazon has zero recourse in this situation, neither would they risk their gov contracts fighting it.
- strictnein 5y agoYeah, they definitely just invested $xxx millions in a product that they know they won't be able to keep alive. Amazon has plenty of recourse, and they've been fighting gag orders for years now. Ex: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/microsoft-amazon-google-apple-fox-news-us-gagging-orders/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/09/microsoft-amazon... The company leading that charge: Microsoft. The company that got the huge JEDI DoD cloud contract: Microsoft. Weird, huh?
- knaik94 5y agoI wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially. There are tons of legal situations where confidentiality is absolutely necessary, for example when dealing with medical or legal records. I imagine Amazon's GovCloud might incorporate this as a potential cloud hosted chatting solution. With telemedicine and remote legal proceedings becoming more and more common, secure chatting while complying with HIPAA and confidentiality rules is going to be an important market.
- kovek 5y agoSome data we treat we care. Other data we do not. I wonder if that creates a different culture and risk than if we treated all data with care. What do you think?
- lukeschlather 5y agoIn order to treat all data with care, you have to define what you mean by "care." In security we talk about the tradeoffs between integrity, confidentiality, and availability. In terms of integrity, the most careful treatment is to place many signed copies of the data publicly on the internet. This also is the most careful treatment for availability. Of course it is the least careful treatment for confidentiality. But no scheme with any care for confidentiality can match it for integrity and availability. Signal illustrates swinging far in the "confidentiality" direction - most messaging services don't forget anything you say, while Signal makes it rather hard for you to retain your messages, and also offers ways to delete them automatically. I find it unfortunate there are no secure, open messaging platforms that offer similar integrity/availability guarantees to services like Slack.
- SkyPuncher 5y agoHaving implemented HIPAA compliant software, the technical requirements arent very difficult. If you're following developments beat practices, you have 99% of technical requirements covered. The challenge with HIPAA is building process and documentation that demonstrates compliance. It's particularly challenging at the edges of your engineering org where people tend to use tools that abstract the technical details.
- malchow 5y agoIncreasingly clear that, at Amazon, the most passionate path to getting bigger is obtaining access to tax dollars. ... but Amazon's stock would be 1/4 the price if it were valued like Lockheed Martin.
- twoodfin 5y agoPerhaps the strategy is to pull more conservative, bureaucracy-bound organizations into AWS. Lots of IT dollars in banking, healthcare, … Focusing on the US Government, they’re jumping right in to the deep end of the pool.
- habibur 5y agoFeeling like I need to build my own end-to-end secure channel communication web app on my server. As every other is getting sold. With current level of browser support, assuming that might not take too much time.
- INTPenis 5y agoA friend does coding work for Briar and he's of a similar mind as myself. If he trusts Briar, I trust Briar.
- drenvuk 5y agowhy build your own? just use element and matrix.
- jodrellblank 5y agoSo they can sell it for easy money, is how I read their comment.
- iaml 5y agoWouldn't making a tinder clone and selling it to match be even easier money?
- jedberg 5y agoOh wow, my first boss after college is the cofounder of Wickr. Congrats to him and his team!
- motohagiography 5y agoHuge congratulations to them. I hope the terms were favorable. It's a small personal vindication to have seen the value early on because I recommended to another (Bezos backed) company look into acquiring Wickr some years ago, but I lacked the cred to make it happen. While it feels a bit small to taint a congratulations with smugness about being right - a hearty and sincere well done to the Wickr team. A success absolutely earned.
- dang 5y agoI'm surprised that there have been so few mentions on HN over the years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20%22wickr%22%20date%3C1624631914&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22wickr%22%20date%3C1624631914&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... This is a bit interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jwsec https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jwsec
- thebeardisred 5y agoKnowing a bit about their history and having met some of the principals, I'm not. Wickr's focus was never on the HN audience. Their "bullseye" was the audience of DEF CON attendees who have some ties to capital "e" Enterprise and/or US public sector. Where there were overlapping users, great, but traction on HN was unlikely to lead to organization wide enterprise license agreements.
- thayne 5y ago> an innovative company that has developed the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology that's a pretty bold claim.
- dijit 5y agoThe lawyer brain in me is asking me to define “the industry”. If “the industry” is one that currently uses POTS then it is the most secure, yes- because they sell enterprise software to various industries. The thing is: they use different protocols on their consumer apps than their enterprise ones; only the enterprise ones have an open (or, released) protocol specification.
- andrewstuart2 5y agoThe post is written by an AWS VP of technology. They probably plan to deploy this as an enterprise service, or use the tech, so you really have to hype during acquisition the aspects you intend to sell. The big sell for enterprises is actually what probably invalidates the statement you highlighted. Compliance, administrative controls, and audit almost always are significant threat surfaces that are exposed deliberately. Ideally to only the right people, but it's basically the equivalent of a cryptographic back door. It's less secure by design, but for a purpose.
- Terretta 5y ago> The post is written by an AWS VP of technology. They probably plan to deploy this as an enterprise service… He is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
- Trias11 5y agoWill AWS collect govt fees for backdooring it? I can't beleive govt is not interested in spying on Wickr convos.
- loudtieblahblah 5y agoAnd now any trust you ever had in wickr should vanish. You think a company enabling the police state through Ring doorbells gives a rats ass about privacy?
- wolverine876 5y agoTo give a sense of Wickr's direction (before the acquisition, at least): Wickr as of 10/2020 "has created a federal advisory board that includes Matt Olsen, chief trust and security officer, Uber (former director of the National Counterterrorism Center); Vince Stewart, chief innovation and business intelligence officer of Ankura (a former deputy commander of U.S. Cyber Command and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director); Jan Tighe, former deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence; and Joanne Isham, former deputy director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency." https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-brief-october-22-2020/169494/ https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-...
- vmception 5y agoI don't trust Wickr solely because it is closed source and a US team The government contracts don’t give me confidence in their technology, it gives me the impression they sell snake oil to “security conscious” organizations just like that article says. Its like worded specifically to avoid any liability in the eventual lawsuit where people complain that it didn't offer what they expected. The AWS acquisition gives me even less confidence. The standard for less skepticism for me is distributed end to end encryption where handshakes are done between the specific parties communicating This is common (but often ignored) knowledge on darknet forums and markets, where Wickr also doesnt have a good client for darknet operating systems - further pointing to it having an intended purpose of not offering privacy by not prioritizing it for Whonix and Tails Most of the literature about this trepidation and solutions are not on clearnet but you can get a glimpse of sentiment in comment replies here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wickr_even_work_or_are_there/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wi... The rest of the literature would be on Tor onion services like Dread, or forums in existing or defunct darknet marketplaces
- ENOTTY 5y agoThere's definitely room in the e2e messaging space that is more corporate oriented. Think centralized administration, key escrow, etc.
- cbsmith 5y agoI kind of want to say "Stop trying to make Chime happen" with my best Clueless impersonation.
- ablekh 5y agoNever heard about this company before. Took a quick look at their website and noticed that in the table on front page (located in the section "Vetted by the NSA") Zoom is listed as a product lacking "Full E2E Encrypted Functionality". I'm wondering about whether this isn't true (considering Zoom's E2E being GA: https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-to-end-E2EE-encryption-for-meetings https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t...) - and the table should be fixed - or still true (due to aspects that I might be missing).
- jdavis703 5y agoThere are still cases where it’s not E2E, such as when a user is dialed in via a phone call.
- ablekh 5y agoFair enough. However, it seems that such corner cases would prevent any other product, such as Wickr, to be considered fully E2E encrypted.
- markzzerella 5y agoZoom lied to users about end-to-end encryption for years, FTC says https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044254
- Sunspark 5y agoI remember when Wickr first started on iOS, the founder said at the time that she wanted an app her kids could use safely. I never met anyone who used Wickr though. Pretty good job on their part that it went from a niche app to an Amazon acquisition. Now that it will have a corporate implementation people should remember that corporately administered clients (e.g. Teams) save and record a copy of everything you say and do and AWS Wickr is likely to be no different. As Signal is mentioned in this comment thread, I don't see the hit on Signal about the phone number piece as being a big downside. The app is about privacy not anonymity and a phone number is a pretty unique UID. I never installed Signal to talk to anonymous strangers, everyone on my list is someone I know because of the phone number UID. True, I don't know everyone's phone number but I'm probably also not talking to them often or ever. It's very hard to get people to try a different messenger. People are very wedded to the Facebook corporation (FB, Instagram, Whatsapp). It bothers me when I talk about something and then see ads for it shortly after. Obviously not only is it bot-mined for ad purposes, but rather, I don't believe FB ever deletes the data. They are the administrator and likely keep it forever. This is why I personally think Google is better, they mine it with bots, but unlike FB they don't sell data to third parties. Signal is probably at the current time the last non-corporate messenger that is secure and is easy enough to setup and use (other suggestions like Matrix have a barrier to entry that is too high because it requires both technical knowledge and the ability to find your correspondents). It can't be acquired due to it being a non-profit foundation so it's likely to be around for a long time to come.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- emsy 5y ago>I never met anyone who used Wickr though. I used Wickr to order Weed once. (Illegal where I live)
- TheNorthman 5y agoYes. In Denmark, Wickr is the chat-app of choice for dealers alongside Snapchat. My non-tor skilled friends use it for that. I don't think anyone uses it for anything else. Why Wickr, I don't know. It's not to protect the buyers because the police does not care about them.
- grouphugs 5y agoi dno why people keep giving bezos more nazibuxxx, y'all fucked yourselves royally this time
- grammers 5y agoProbably good for Wickr founders, but else? Amazon is facing growing antitrust issues, why add to this with more and more acquisitions? Do they want to own the whole web?
- aurea 5y agoAnyone that has ever set foot on Reddit or 4chan knows that Wickr is heavily used to share child pornography, and revenge pornography. Entire subreddits have disappeared for this reason [1]. I wonder how AWS is going to deal with this. Unfortunately due to the nature of the app, they can probably safely say that they were "no aware of it"... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/ekefao/rjobuds_is_a_sub_with_over_230k_subscribers_its/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/ekefao/rjo...