Items tagged with messaging
WhatsApp has been embroiled in a flurry of confusion since a change in the company's privacy policy sparked the ire of many. People such as Elon Musk suggested that users switch to rival Signal as it does not collect nearly as much data, and that call to action sparked millions to download Signal. All this chaos did...
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In 2019, Google began the rollout of RCS, or rich communication services, across the United States on Android. RCS brings some cool new features to Android messaging, dragging it into the modern era. Google has finally completed the project and will start addressing some of the biggest concerns, such as security, with...
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People have turned to a wide variety of social media and messaging apps to stay connected with friends and loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic. One messaging system that has grown rather quickly is Telegram. The Telegram developers recently announced that they have reached 400 million users and that 1.5 million...
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WhatsApp bills itself as a free and secure messaging application with end-to-end encryption and cross platform support, all of which have made it a popular option. However, it may not be as secure as advertised. Vulnerabilities that were disclosed last year have still not been addressed, and if abused, could allow an...
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Google continues to make its comparatively low-cost Google Fi wireless service a more intriguing option. It already has the advantage of friendly billing versus what the four major wireless carriers in the US charge, those being AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Now on the usability side, Google Fi is enabling RCS...
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Earlier this year, Facebook came under fire when it was discovered that the company let a ton of user information fall into the hands of marketing companies. It's hard to say how that incident will affect Facebook in the long-run, but what we do know is that the aftermath has already led to the creation of a new...
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If you own one of Samsung's Galaxy S9 or Galaxy S9 Plus smartphones a wild bug making the rounds is leaving customers on edge. Reports indicate that some users have seen the default messaging app randomly send photos from their gallery to contacts without their knowledge. One impacted user claims that the Samsung...
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Google has announced a new way that it is connecting people and businesses using RCS (Rich Communication Services) with the goal of bringing enhanced features to standard messaging services on mobile devices with various carriers. Google is working with 43 carriers and device manufacturers to enhance native messaging...
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It wasn't just you, WhatsApp was down for about an hour this morning. The outage impacted global usage of the app, which boasts over 1.2 billion active users. The app is a primary means of messaging between friends and family, and those people were not happy with the outage. The outage was first noticed when the term...
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A popular messaging startup used in business settings is starting to see some interest among major technology players about a possible acquisition. That messaging startup is Slack, and one of the interested parties is Amazon. To make the deal happen, Amazon—or any other technology outfit—would have to come at Slack...
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A hacker has discovered a way to permanently disable the built-in Messages app on any Apple device running iOS 8 through iOS 10. That pretty much covers every iPhone handset and iPad tablet out there, including the recently released iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, save for models that are woefully outdated for whatever...
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Are you having trouble keeping track of all of the different messaging apps that Google offers? Don't feel bad; a lot of us do. In fact, it feels like Google has a number of redundancies in this space, and with its latest move, we get the feeling that the consolidation has begun.
Take Allo, for example, which is...
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If you're looking for yet another way to communicate with your friends and family from your mobile device, you now have Allo, a new and "smarter" messaging app from Google. It's available right off the bat for both Android and iOS devices (sorry, Windows Phone users!) and integrates a preview edition of of the Google...
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It doesn't matter if you're chatting with a co-worker about a sensitive business proposal you're putting together or bantering about basketball playoffs with a group of buddies, the idea that a third-party could be intercepting and reading your communication is creepy. Messaging providers are taking a privacy stand...
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Former NSA contractor turned whistle blower Edward Snowden is a fan of Signal, a secure messaging app developed by Frederic Jacobs (iOS version). Snowden revealed on Twitter last November that he uses signal every day, which is a pretty strong endorsement considering his current situation. That's good news for Apple...
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WhatsApp is eliminating its $0.99 subscription fee in favor of a new business model, one that won't bother you with advertising. Well, not for now, anyway. Instead of replacing the nominal yearly subscription fee with ads, WhatsApp will experiment with bringing businesses on board.
"Naturally, people might wonder...
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We're constantly being reminded that our government has a great interest in our private lives, whether it's flying specially equipped planes over densely populated areas to trick tens of thousands of phones into forking over sensitive data, or snooping on Internet traffic, big brother's watching us. One of the few...
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Arguably, BlackBerry should've opened up its BBM platform to everyone years ago, as it could've leapfrogged Hangouts, iMessage, Snapchat, and some of the other chat tools ahead of where we are now. At this point, the BBM userbase is so small, that it arriving on iOS and Android a while back has had little impact on...
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T-Mobile may not have the widest coverage net of the major U.S. carriers, but boy, are they gaining mind share. And as it turns out, market share as well. After adding nearly 4.4 million subscribers in the most recent quarter, rivals such as AT&T are having to pay attention. They're also having to modify their...
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One has to wonder if Facebook is feeling any buyer’s remorse, as the messaging service the company just dropped $19 billion to acquire experienced an outage on Saturday, according to reports. WhatsApp didn’t provide much in the way of details beyond a pair of tweets that acknowledged the outage and then...
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WhatsApp is a popular cross-platform mobile messaging app, and it now belongs to Mark Zuckerberg and Co., although the acquisition is leaving Facebook quite a bit lighter in the wallet; the WhatsApp deal is for $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and another $3 billion in...
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Snapchat's founders evidently have some big things planned for their startup, and it doesn't involve selling to Facebook for $1 billion. It takes some mighty big you-know-what to scoff at that kind of cash, especially when you're in your early twenties as co-founders Evan Spiegal (23 years old) and Bobby Murphy (25...
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