New and Digital Media Stories

WhatsApp messenger makes move to the web

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/22/whatsapp-messenger-makes-move-to-the-web

This article is about the way in which Whatsapp is now being able to be accessed online, on computers, laptops and other platforms other than mobile phones. 

- The Facebook-owned service recently announced that it had 700m monthly active users who send more than 30bn WhatsApp messages a day. It has added about 25m users a month since August 2014.

- WhatsApp’s main rivals include Facebook’s own Messenger app, which reached 500m active users in November and can be used through a web browser without a connection to the smartphone, along with Chinese messaging app WeChat, which reached 438m active users in August.

In my opinion I think this is an interesting article as it is proof of an application that I use myself, developing and changing over the years. This shows the way in which there is going to become competition for rivals, such as OOVOO, Viber.

WikiLeaks demands answers after Google hands staff emails to US government

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/25/wikileaks-google-staff-emails-us-government

This article is about the way in which it took Google almost three years in order to disclose all the information that had been leaked, of the US Government which was under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge.

- WikiLeaks has written to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to protest that the search giant only revealed the warrants last month, having been served them in March 2012. In the letter, WikiLeaks says it is “astonished and disturbed” that Google waited more than two and a half years to notify its subscribers, potentially depriving them of their ability to protect their rights to “privacy, association and freedom from illegal searches”.

- The data grab is believed to be part of an ongoing criminal investigation into WikiLeaks that was launched in 2010 jointly by the US departments of Justice, Defense and State. The investigation followed WikiLeaks’ publication, initially in participation with international news organisations including the Guardian, of hundreds of thousands of US secrets that had been passed to the organisation by the army private Chelsea Manning.

- Testimony given during the prosecution of Manning indicated that at least seven “founders, owners or managers or WikiLeaks” were put under the FBI spotlight in the wake of Manning’s disclosures. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in military prison for crimes related to the leaks and is currently being held in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

- The WikiLeaks warrants cite alleged violations of the 1917 Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act – the same statutes used to prosecute Manning. The data seizures were approved by a federal magistrate judge, John Anderson, who a year later issued the arrest warrant for the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

- In the first six months of 2014, Google received close to 32,000 data requests from governments, an increase of 15% compared with the second half of 2013, and two-and-a-half times more than when Google first started publishing it’s semi-annual Transparency Report, in 2009.