An online privacy tool endorsed by former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistle-blower Edward Snowden is being used to protect WhatsApp messages from snooping by encrypting them.
Open Whisper Systems on Tuesday announced a partnership with Facebook-owned WhatsApp to use the TextSecure protocol to scramble messages in transit.
“WhatsApp deserves enormous praise for devoting considerable time and effort to this project,” Open Whisper Systems said in a blog post. “Even though we are still at the beginning of the rollout, we believe this already represents the largest deployment of end-to-end encrypted communication in history.”
Photo: AFP
WhatsApp confirmed the announcement, but declined to comment further.
TextSecure encryption enabled automatically as a default setting is already built into most recent version of WhatsApp for mobile devices powered by Google-backed Android software, with billions of messages being exchanged daily, Open Whisper said.
Open Whisper is an open-source project supported by donations and grants.
While taking part in a South By Southwest conference earlier this year, Snowden praised encryption tools offered by Open Whisper.
Snowden connected to the gathering remotely from Russia, where he took refuge after leaking information about widespread online surveillance by the NSA.
Facebook last month completed its purchase of WhatsApp, with the mostly stock deal tallying nearly US$22 billion.
On Tuesday, Facebook launched a mobile app for its Groups feature that lets users create and interact with communities on the site.
More than 700 million of Facebook’s 1.35 billion members use Groups, the company said.
The app is meant to make accessing Groups easier on a mobile device, the company said.
Additional reporting by AP
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS