I 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
I wonder if this will be used in a more positive way than what most people would assume initially.<p>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.<p>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.
Huge 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.
Probably going to use it to replace Chime.<p>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.<p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/chime/" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/chime/</a>
Never 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: <a href="https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-to-end-E2EE-encryption-for-meetings" rel="nofollow">https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/360048660871-End-t...</a>) - and the table should be fixed - or still true (due to aspects that I might be missing).
> an innovative company that has developed the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology<p>that's a pretty bold claim.
Certainly 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).
I'm surprised that there have been so few mentions on HN over the years:<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=comments%3E0%20%22wickr%22%20date%3C1624631914&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22wickr%22%20date%3C1624631914&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a><p>This is a bit interesting: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jwsec" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jwsec</a>
Anyone 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"...<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/ekefao/rjobuds_is_a_sub_with_over_230k_subscribers_its/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/antipornography/comments/ekefao/rjo...</a>
Increasingly clear that, at Amazon, the most passionate path to getting bigger is obtaining access to tax dollars.<p>... but Amazon's stock would be 1/4 the price if it were valued like Lockheed Martin.
You 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.
I don't trust Wickr solely because it is closed source and a US team<p>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.<p>The AWS acquisition gives me even less confidence.<p>The standard for less skepticism for me is distributed end to end encryption where handshakes are done between the specific parties communicating<p>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<p>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:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wickr_even_work_or_are_there/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/tails/comments/4z182s/does_tails_wi...</a><p>The rest of the literature would be on Tor onion services like Dread, or forums in existing or defunct darknet marketplaces
To give a sense of Wickr's direction (before the acquisition, at least):<p>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."<p><a href="https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-brief-october-22-2020/169494/" rel="nofollow">https://www.defenseone.com/business/2020/10/global-business-...</a>
Feeling like I need to build my own end-to-end secure channel communication web app on my server.<p>As every other is getting sold. With current level of browser support, assuming that might not take too much time.
Probably 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?
And now any trust you ever had in wickr should vanish.<p>You think a company enabling the police state through Ring doorbells gives a rats ass about privacy?