JusTalk.Com

 

JusTalk is a voice and video chat app, available for both iOS and Android users. If you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, and your friend has an Android phone or tablet, you can still enjoy free video calls together on JusTalk.

According to the Just Talk web-site, you can rest assured your calls and messages are secured. Only you and the person you communicate with can see, read, or listen to them: even the JusTalk team won't access your data! Information and call data are end-to-end encrypted. All of the data are split into multiple random paths to ensure that calls cannot be monitored or saved by servers.
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Having the ability to communicate with multiple end-to-end encrypted apps enhances your overall security. While we all likely have our favorite communications app, the ability to switch to a different communications method can help conceal your communications and also serves as an alternate or back-up means of communication if your primary choice fails or is unavailable. (As an example, Skype and FaceTime are banned in Dubai and the UAE, but JusTalk works.)

Talky.Io

Talky is a simple video / audio chat program. Just open a chat room, share the name with others when you invite them to join the chat and you're connected. No downloads, signup, or payment required.

Talky's privacy policy states: Our default privacy policy is never to gather or store or sell information about you, to log your conversations, or to engage in any other behavior that would compromise your privacy and security in any way. However, we do need to gather one piece of personally identifying information in order for you to use Talky in the first place: your computer needs to tell us its “IP address” so that we can connect you with your friend’s computer (which needs to tell us its “IP address” too). Although we do not track this information or keep a long-term record of it, we do log it for brief periods of time so that we can perform diagnostics that help us improve the service (these logs are erased after 30 days).

I note that you cannot use Talky over Tor, because Talky uses WebRTC. However, Talky works just fine over a VPN, which would mask your actual IP address.

Talky also gives you the option of password protecting your chat room. Choose a unique name for your chat room, set up a password to keep out uninvited guests, and meet friends and family on-line for a regularly scheduled live chat session.

There is an iOS Talky app available, but currently not one for Android. If I am on an iPhone, I would probably just use FaceTime for video chat. But it is from a desktop / laptop that I found Talky to be a quick, easy, and reasonably secure way of having an on-line video / audio chat.  (It was a lot easier than Skype.)

Talky is built and run by the &Yet team in Richland, WA.

Jitsi An Alternative to Skype

Jitsi is state-of-the art open-source video conferencing software that you can self-host or freely use on-line.

You don’t have to download anything. Just go to the Meet Jitsi site and begin an on-line conversation.

Note that WebRTC  today does not provide away of conducting multiparty conversations with end-to-end encryption. As a result: when talking on meet.jit.si your stream is encrypted on the network but decrypted on the machine that hosts the bridge.

However, Jitsi supports the OTR encryption protocol. OTR stands for Off-the-Record Messaging and once you’ve set it up (i.e. clicked on that padlock icon in a chat window and verified the identity of your contact) it allows you to make sure that no one other than you two can read your messages, not even your service provider.

 

 

 

 

Google says Google Documents is Secure Despite Russian Issue

Google said this week (July 5, 2018) that its document writing tool Google Documents was secure even as Russian internet users discovered scores of files that appeared to be intended for private use.

On Wednesday night, Russian social media users started posting scores of such documents, including an internal memo from a Russian bank, press summaries and company business plans.

The Russian internet company Yandex said in a statement that some users contacted the company Wednesday to say that its public search engine was yielding what looked like personal Google Documents files, suggesting there may have been a data breach. Google said in a statement that search engines can only turn up Google documents that had either been deliberately made public by its authors or when a user publishes a link to a document and makes it available for public access and search. Ilya Grabovsky, a spokesman for Yandex, said its search only yields files that don't require logins or passwords. (Komo 4 News, July 5, 2018)
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If you are going to upload files to a cloud service, be sure that you encrypt those files, unless you intend them to be public. One free encryption tool for protecting files in the cloud is Cryptomator.

 

What Journalists Need to Know About Password Managers

The National Center for Business Journalism (June 13, 2018) has published an article "What Journalists Need to Know About Password Managers".

"Password managers are an incredibly valuable tool for generating and storing complex passwords. They allow users to create unique words, phrases, or combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols, for each of their password-protected accounts. Some of the more popular, time-tested password managers include 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, and KeePass.

According to the Pew Research Center, 84 percent of survey respondents indicated that they primarily keep track of their passwords by memorizing them, or by writing them down. This typically limits the complexity of those passwords and makes them much easier to crack."
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If you are not currently using a password manager to generate and safeguard your passwords, I encourage you to begin doing so.
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Facebook Wants to Use Your Phone's Microphone to Record Secret Messages

 

Facebook has filed for a patent for software that could turn on the microphones of smartphones on in order to record secret messages in TV ads, without the knowledge of the phone's owner.

System would allow Facebook to identify what adults and children are watching based on ambient noise.

The patent application describes a system where an audio fingerprint embedded in TV shows or ads, inaudible to human ears, would trigger the phone, tablet or long-rumored smart speaker to turn on the microphone and start recording “ambient audio of the content item”. The recording could then be matched to a database of content to allow Facebook to identify what the individual was watching.
Privacy experts are concerned about the intrusion into people’s homes, particularly as the ambient audio recording would likely catch snippets of people’s private conversations without their knowledge.

“It’s extremely disconcerting for privacy to have an inaudible beacon as it means they want to make it not obvious to the user that the device is listening,” said William Budington, a senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  (The Guardian, June 28, 2018)
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Safari the Anti-Facebook Browser

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this year, the buzz was all about software. One key announcement was a radical update to the Safari browser—one that thumbs its nose directly at data-hungry Facebook. Building on last year’s ad-tech fighting updates, Safari is now getting a suite of of new security features that will alert you whenever a website tries to hoover up data, and it will stop data companies from ‘fingerprinting’ your Mac by disguising your choice of fonts and configurations so your machine is indistinguishable from anybody else’s. “Apple specifically called out Facebook's massive ad network—which is known for employing an array of user tracking strategies, like its ubiquitous ‘Like’ buttons. Safari will now block tracking from “Like” and “Share” buttons, as well as from comment fields. 
(Wired, June 14, 2018)

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