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How to Keep Messages Secure

teenvogue.com

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Teen Vogue has just been amazing recently.

Some other great pieces:

"What It’s Like to Be a Teen Living in an Immigration Detention Center"

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/teens-living-in-immigration-d...

"How to Run for Your Local School Board"

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-to-run-local-school-board

"The TPP: What’s Next for America and the Other 11 Countries"

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-tpp-whats-next-for-americ...

And of course the classic, which put Teen Vogue on the radar for a lot of people who wouldn't read it otherwise:

"Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America"

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/donald-trump-is-gaslighting-a...

Mad props to them; they've been putting a lot of other "grown up" news sources to shame. In an ideal society, school should be what ensures teenagers turn into educated, balanced citizens who can contribute healthily to society regardless of their socio economical upbringing; but the US's school system (and many others) seem to have given up on that. Glad that Teen Vogue is trying to do their part.

I agree! The Atlantic ran a story late last year on the changes there.

"In May, 29-year-old Elaine Welteroth took over as editor from Amy Astley, who helped found the magazine in 2003. Welteroth, the digital editorial director Phillip Picardi, and the creative director Marie Suter have moved the magazine more aggressively into covering politics, feminism, identity, and activism."

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/te...

I subscribed to Teen Vogue for their investigative journalism.

...Never in a million years did I ever think I would be writing that.

I just checked out what their subscription actually means and I am a little dumbfounded.

- "1 year of Teen Vogue in print and tablet for $5" - nice, that's cheap. But can't I do digital only?

"For delivery to a non-US address, please click here."

- Digital only "All non-US orders" - One year for $9.99

WTF

Ads. The print ad rates are set based on the subscription count. They are a big chunk of the revenue for those subscribers.

Thanks for trying to explain it to me - but I still don't get why I shouldn't find a friend in the US to get the paper issues mailed to them (to throw them away, or read them) and still only pay half of the price.

Probably the same thing as every geo-location access (i.e. Steam prices often equalling 1 USD = 1 EUR) - but I've never seen such a severe disconnect.

This is a really good example of how to write about security for a general audience, and how to source such an article. Teens need good advice about how to safeguard their online lives, and how to think realistically about the threats they face.

Kudos to Teen Vogue for a terrific piece of journalism.

Wow, Teen Vogue can teach the Guardian a thing or two about how to listen to relevant people and how to get the facts right.

The whole Guardian incident shows the desire/need of media outlets to write sensationalist pieces even though the stories are completely misleading and could potentially cause at risk users to move to less secure communication platforms. Anything that triggers outrage always gets more eyeballs which translates to more ad revenue and this seems to be the driving force for media outlets these days.

It's obvious that the authors and editors over at Guardian are aware of how misleading their articles about WhatsApp's so called backdoor were, yet they have no incentive to acknowledge that they were wrong and retract those articles. Another case of media outlets' incentives not being in the best interest of the general public.

Also worth mentioning another case where media outlets chase sensationalism over facts, proper research and due diligence was the Wallstreetjournal's piece on Youtuber pewdewpie being anti-semitic. WSJ again ran misleading articles about pewdewpie and took a lot of videos completely out of context to make him look like a nazi. That piece led to many deals/contracts with media companies being canceled because of public outrage.

The point is, fake news has real consequences. Imagine the consequences of activists adopting email or telegram to exchange messages in oppressive regimes, becuase of Guardian's articles.

Here's a timeline of the Guardian's coverage and subsequent response. They tried to stand by their misleading articles, then said their ombudsman was on holiday, and were never heard from again.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nqlE6UQjbUmgoMeJCePVcY5f...

Someone told me last weekend that Teen Vogue was covering the political situation well and providing good technical stories. Of course, I had to ask them to repeat the name of the publication. Good for Teen Vogue.

I now have more respect for Teen Vogue than I do for The Guardian.

What upside down world am I living in?

It's incredible to see Teen Vogue be so frank about the necessity of obscuring one's political activities, even if they are peaceful in nature. Governmental vengeance aside, you simply do not know what could lead to your next denial of healthcare or your being blacklisted by the company you've been trying to join for years.

All teenagers need to use secure messaging unless they want 60 year old NSA agents passing the photos they send to their boyfriend around the office.

You know, I still don't get why people jumped on The Guardian and Tobias Boelter about the WhatsApp debacle. People keep trying to frame it as "they told everyone to give up on encryption", when it was blatantly clear to me that the message was "you can do better than Facebook for encryption".

I do not like this kinda stuff:

> “If you're a whistleblower like Edward Snowden, or if you are a politician, or if you are a journalist who regularly deals with people at risk of deportation, or if you work regularly in countries with harsh, repressive governments… you will have a different threat model to someone who just wants privacy because they’re talking about intimate or personally important stuff,” says Muffett. In such extreme cases, Tufekci suggests you use Signal to get in touch with experts such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who can teach you the finer points of digital security.

> For the rest of us, the end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp is enough to keep our chats out of snoopers’ hands. Indeed, privacy invasion may not come from the NSA or security services, but the people in your life — if you want to keep your parents or siblings from seeing your messages, you don’t need a secure app so much as a PIN to unlock your phone.

This is not okay. This basically says, "yeah, if you're a huge weirdo with a target on your back, you may want to use Signal". And yet I use Signal to casually talk with my friends about movies and food. I'd like to think that there's strength in numbers, I'd hate for Signal to be, rather than protective, a big bullseye for politically dangerous people.

The continued attack on Tobias Boelter and The Guardian about this, as if they had committed an unconscionable crime, is extremely jarring when people then praise this article that says to kids "privacy invasion may not come from the NSA".

I don't like being considered an "extreme case" for taking effortless, cost-free precautions that have a nice side-effect of not being part of Facebook's ecosystem. Look at this: "whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or a stronger tool such as Signal." It's basically an ad for Facebook properties.

Nobody is attacking Boelter, or mentioning him. The fault here is the Guardian's alone, for not doing the basic kind of journalism that Teen Vogue demonstrates—asking multiple experts their opinion, and vetting their answers with other sources.

The problem with your advice to just use Signal is that Signal is not very usable. It routinely requires message resets, it sometimes initiates audio calls for no reason, it doesn't work in landscape mode.

And it is particularly unfriendly in scenarios where there is a key change (like someone reinstalling Signal in a group conversation). Some of these are bugs that will get fixed, some are tradeoffs required for a higher level of security.

I say this as someone who depends on the app, supports it wholeheartedly, and uses it to communicate with hundreds of people.

Normal users pressed to use Signal will fall back to SMS. This is not speculation, but documented behavior that we see happening among regular users. That's why the Guardian's hatchet job on WhatsApp was so harmful.

You can't give good security advice in a vacuum. Telling teens thinking of attending their first protest that the NSA is not their biggest threat is good security advice.

Telling them to use end-to-end encrypted messaging apps that have good UX is good security advice.

Reminding them that their biggest threat is the person they're sending the message to, or a nosy parent or sibling, is good security advice.

The article does a great job explaining this difficult topic in a way its audience can understand and act on.

> This is not okay. This basically says, "yeah, if you're a huge weirdo with a target on your back, you may want to use Signal". And yet I use Signal to casually talk with my friends about movies and food.

In an ideal world, you would be right. But in the world we live in, using high grade encryption tools does tend to attract more attention. Doubtlessly, those who use a VPN + Tor for all network connections are more likely to attract the attention of various TLA than the average person.

It's sad, but if you really have something to hide, the best advice I've received is to hide it in plain sight or bone up on steganography.

Muffett is ex-FB and worked on messenger. He truly believes in it and doesn't see Facebook as the threat that you (and I) do.

You know something is wrong in America when Teen Vogue ends up on the front page of HN for a story on security nonetheless. Nothing about this presidency is normal.

I think accessible technology journalism in non-traditional venues is worthy of note, if only to see how our products are perceived in the wider world.

And it's one of the best treatments of the subject to date....

Is this my imagination, or are we seeing a lot of anti-Snapchat stories lately? It's like Facebook decided to run anti-PR on them lately.

All this story does is correctly point out to people that Snapchat lacks end-to-end encryption.

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