Displaying items by tag: Messaging

The popular socialization platform, Discord, is alerting users to a data breach that occurred due to the compromise of a support agent account. The breach appears to be limited in scope to the ticket queue that the third-party agent was responsible for. The ticket queue contained email addresses, attachments and all messages that might have been exchanged during ticket resolution with this agent.

Snapchat is an application for Android and iOS devices that allows users to send messages and recordings with a time duration is soon going to get a new option to send instant messages (IM) and video calls.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission approved Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp, which was announced in February. Before finalizing the transaction, companies will have to wait for approvals from other international regulators in countries where both companies operate. However, the FTC's approval did not come without warning and instructions related to the issue that stood out as the most contentious - the protection of user data.

Facebook has announced that they have reached a final agreement on the purchase of WhatsApp, a popular system for instant messaging via smartphone, for enormous figure of $16 billion in cash and stock (4 billion in cash and 12 billion in Facebook's stock). Additional three billion of US dollars in Facebook's shares will be offered to the founders of WhatsApp during the next four years after finalizing the contract.

In October WhatsApp had 350 million users. The company has now announced new data - the number of users of this application for instant messaging has exceeded 400 million. Statistics include number of monthly active users, and the explosive growth in the number of users continues from earlier. Just four months ago WhatsApp had „only“ 300 million users.

Last month, a huge public attention was drawn when a successful start-up Snapchat made a decision to refuse billions from Google and Facebook and stay, at least for now, in the hands of its founder, who are students at Stanford.

WhatsApp has refreshed their user interface, added new icons and now it fits perfectly in the new layout of the iOS 7. However, team responsible for the development of applications has not only dealt with cosmetic trifles, but in addition they corrected several errors and threw in a couple of novelties.

According to the latest study conducted on nearly 4,000 mobile phone users from large markets such as the US, China and Brazil, WhatsApp has come out as a winner in the category of mobile applications for instant messaging. It is located on the first place in the preferences of the users, of which 44% said they used it at least once a week. Facebook Messenger is regularly used by 35% of surveyed users.

Back in April of this year (2013) we published two articles that countered Apple’s claims that their iMessage application was not as secure as they claimed. The first was after an alleged DEA memo was leaked to CNet. This memo detailed the frustrations of the agency in their inability to acquire text messages sent using Apple iPhones. Sadly for the DEA the “leaked” memo ended up making them look rather foolish as they were trying to get the information from carriers instead of from Apple. Apple countered with their usual, there is no flaw and for many that was that.

Skype has this year in his application for Mac OS X, iOS and Android implemented functionality that allows you to send video via chat message up to three minutes long, regardless of whether the recipient is currently online or offline. This possibility was marked as beta and came Restricted – you could send up to 20 messages, after which you had to pay Skype Premium subscription (5$ per month).