1. Facebook’s Slingshot challenges SnapChat with ‘Reply to Unlock’
   • Facebook’s new app Slingshot is being seen as a competitor to SnapChat.
   • It lets you share photos and 15-second videos with users on Slingshot.

   • The content is meant to be ephemeral, much like SnapChat.

     As for what happens to your content, once everyone you’ve slinged something to views it, Facebook says it will delete the photo or video from its servers. There is a seven-day delay in case it has to investigate abuse reports, but the team says the content is gone after that. Whether users trust Facebook to keep its word is up to them. Past privacy missteps might scare people, but Facebook is under close scrutiny from the FTC to abide by the privacy policies it puts forward.

   • An important catch in the app is that you can’t view the content shared by the user until you reply to it. (‘Reply to Unlock’)
   • This aims to increase reciprocation and make everyone a content generator.
   • Slingshot was born out of a hackathon. The motivation can be summarized by

     “My brothers are really not technical in any way”, Slingshot inventor and four-year Facebook Product Designer Joey Flynn tells me. “I’d take a photo, upload it in iMessage, and send it to them. And I would just see “Seen”, or in a month I’d see them and they‘d say ‘that was a cool photo’. But hey, I want to see what you’re up to! There was this missing reciprocation” he explains. That was the spark for Slingshot.

   • This app was earlier released on app stored by mistake
   • Facebook had tried to buy off SnapChat, but SnapChat had rejected the $3 billion buyout offer

2. Browser based javascript cryptography considered harmful

   Some of the things pointed out in the article. [Not being an expert in cryptography, I would recommend readers to read the original article to avoid any miscommunication]

   • Code could be injected when in transit. Can use SSL/TLS to avoid that, but then, in most cases, you could simply avoid cryptography at user end.
   • There’s no certainty of information being removed from memory.
   • It is not possible to verify the code/environment to be exactly as it is required to be.
   • Javascript lacks a Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (CSPRNG).
   • Stanford Javascript Crypto library (SJCL) developed at Stanford is a great work, but still insecure.

     The authors of SJCL themselves say, “Unfortunately, this is not as great as in desktop applications because it is not feasible to completely protect against code injection, malicious servers and side-channel attacks.” That last example is a killer: what they’re really saying is, “we don’t know enough about Javascript runtimes to know whether we can securely host cryptography on them”. Again, that’s painful-but-tolerable in a server-side application, where you can always call out to native code as a workaround. It’s death to a browser.

3. UK intelligence forced to reveal secret policy for mass surveillance of residents’ Facebook and Google use
   • Secret policy define UK residents’ communication on Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. as ‘external communication’ because they use platforms based in the US, even if the communication is between two people in the UK.
   • This grants the secret services to indiscriminately intercept communication on these platforms.
   • For an ‘internal communication’, a warrant would be required, however that is not the case with ‘external communication’.

     The Government believes that, even when privacy violations happen, it is not an “active intrusion” because the analyst reading or listening to an individual’s communication will inevitably forget about it anyway.

4. Dropbox acquired Parastructure, a Big Data Startup -

   So what exactly is Parastructure? According to the company’s LinkedIn profile, and its (now-offline) home page, it builds “beautiful data analysis software powered by cutting-edge open source infrastructure.” Parastructure’s GitHub pages give some clues as to what that data-analysis software was tackling, with areas covering Spark for cluster computing; Phoenix, a SQL skin over HBase; CrunchBase; and so on

   • The acquisition was done quite stealthily.
   • Probably, Dropbox requires the software and the team to analyze its data
   • Parastructure was an enterprise oriented startup and its acquisition indicates Dropbox’s intention on strengthening their image as an enterprise product.
   • Dropbox’s increased effort in Dropbox for Business brings it in direct competition with Box, which is currently leading as an enterprise solution.
   • Both the companies are quite aggressively acquiring companies.
   • In fact, Parastructure was acquired on the same day as Box acquired Streem
5. Apple adds a new entry level iMac for ~$1,100
   • 1.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB memory, 500GB HDD, Intel HD Graphics 5000 on board    

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‘Tech News’ is a series of articles where I attempt to share and summarize recent developments in technology (and the related industry) that interest, amaze and/or excite me. These would attempt to cover topics ranging from impressive apps to Google’s latest acquisition to jaw-dropping updates from SpaceX or Tesla Motors and much more.