Subscription version of Snapchat makes its debut

US tech firm Snap on Wednesday launched a subscription version of Snapchat as it looks to generate more money from the image-centric, ephemeral messaging app.

Snapchat+ is priced at $4 a month and will provide access to exclusive features, the California-based company said in a blog post. It said that these would include priority tech support and early access to experimental features.

The subscription version of the service is making its debut in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States, Snap said.

Snap in February reported its first quarterly profit, but two months later warned that it saw the economic outlook as having darkened considerably.

The company said that more than 332 million people around the world use Snapchat daily.

"This subscription will allow us to deliver new Snapchat features to some of the most passionate members of our community," Snap said in the blog post.

Agence France-Presse

Facebook rolls out Messenger Kids to 70 new countries

SAN FRANCISCO, United States - Facebook on Wednesday rolled out its Messenger Kids application to 70 new countries, saying it can help children deal with the challenges of distance learning and isolation during the virus lockdowns.

The app, which is aimed at children under 13, will also be adding a "supervised friending" feature enabling parents to approve new connections, starting in the United States and gradually rolling out to other countries.

"With schools closed and people physically distancing, parents are turning to technology more than ever to help their kids connect with friends and family," Facebook's global head of safety Antigone Davis said in a blog post.

"Messenger Kids is a video chat and messaging app that helps kids connect with friends and family in a fun, parent-controlled space. Today, we're starting to roll out Messenger Kids to more countries and we’re adding new choices for parents to connect kids with friends."

Messenger Kids was launched in the United States in 2017 and expanded later to Canada and a handful of other countries, aiming at children too young for a Facebook account.

With the changes announced Wednesday, kids will be able to connect in groups to help facilitate learning, under parental supervision.

Parents in the US, Canada and Latin America can also allow their children to make their name and profile photo visible as part of the move to get more friends.

Kids will be able to initiate their own friend requests. Up to now these had to be initiated by the parents.

"Parents have told us they want to be able to give their kids more independence in managing their contact list while still maintaining parental supervision," Davis said.

"Previously, it was up to parents to invite and approve every contact for their child. Now with supervised friending, parents can choose to allow their kids to also accept, reject, add or remove contacts, while maintaining the ability to override any new contact approvals."

Some privacy activists have argued the app could be harmful to children by drawing them into online activity and potentially gathering data on them.

Facebook has argued that the app helps parents supervise their youngsters who would be using its platform without safeguards.

The new countries are in various regions of the world and include Afghanistan, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Tuvalu. No European countries are on the list.

Agence France-Presse

Viber, WHO launch chatbot to fight misinformation on COVID-19

MANILA - Viber and the World Health Organization have launched a chatbot to help fight misinformation on the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the chat platform said Tuesday. 

The company said the chatbot is multilingual and interactive. 

"The chatbot, which comes in several languages, answers the most commonly asked questions about the pandemic and gives users important and life-saving information," Viber said. 

The chatbot features a Latest News section that is updated in real-time straight from WHO's website. Other main sections include Protect Yourself, Mask Usage, Travel, and an interactive Myths quiz to test the users’ knowledge of the virus, Viber said.

Users can also send help through a Donate Now feature to support WHO’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

“WHO aims to reach as many people as possible with reliable health information through innovative digital technology,” said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Viber boss rose to CEO from bakeshop beginnings believing in big dreams

SINGAPORE—Djamel Agaoua checks the Viber app on his phone around after every 10 minutes for updates on the messaging platform that he now leads.

Coming from a family of bakers, the 50-year-old French CEO recalled how believing in his dreams pushed him to make a name for himself, and eventually become the big boss of one of the biggest communications apps in the world.

“Believe in your dreams. My father was a baker so it was not written that I would be CEO one day, not even of a small company,” he told ABS-CBN News with a chuckle.

“Sometimes, you don’t believe in your dreams so you don’t put yourself in a condition to achieve those dreams,” he said.

Agaoua, an economics engineer by profession and the youngest in a brood of 4, said his dream of leading a company was no easy feat as he had to support his parents since he was the only one with a college degree.

“I didn’t come from a rich family so I had to support my parents…But growing up, our bakery store didn’t earn that much so they needed some support,” he said.

Agaoua said he had always wanted to put up his own firm, drawing inspiration from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple’s late boss Steve Jobs.

“At the time Bill Gates was creating his company and Steve Jobs was creating Apple and I was really impressed by those guys and I wanted to start a venture but I couldn’t find the right idea,” he said.

“It was a difficult journey of course, but being an entrepreneur pushed you take some risk and to try to push it further and further,” he said.

After finishing school for free in France, Agaoua worked for a consultancy firm for about 8 years before co-founding AChatPro, a company that offers information technology services.

Agaoua went on to become an investor and board member in several other startups, explaining that the direction he is taking is his way of paying it forward after having businessmen invest in his projects in the past.

“Now, today, I’m an investor and support kids that have projects. The only way to make that happen is to knock on all the doors and try to find people who can make [your dream] happen for you,” he said.

For breadwinners dreaming of putting up their own company or making a name for themselves in the corporate world, Agaoue advises them to find people willing to invest in their ideas.

“They have to support their family of course, but the way I did it is that I convinced people that have money to support me and to invest in my businesses and it’s the only way,” he said.

Now, Agaoua continues to lead Viber, 2 years since he was tapped to head the messaging platform. Agaoua took the helm of Viber in 2017, just 2 years after the messaging platform was bought by Japanese international group Rakuten.

As Viber’s leader, Agaoua explained that he wants the company to put data privacy as its top priority as he emphasized the need to provide users with an alternative from Facebook’s Messenger.

“We think that it’s very important that there’s an alternative to this, a real one not an opportunistic one—one that is based on a very clear strategy…We are here to make business, to offer service that makes sense first of all, that works fast, well, and respects it promises and be able to monetize,” he said.

“I’m not saying that we’re gonna beat Facebook or be the winner at the end. These are not my words, this is not our philosophy,” he said.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Telegram traces cyber-attack during HK protests to China

BEIJING - Encrypted messaging service Telegram suffered a major cyber-attack that originated from China, the company's CEO said Thursday, linking it to the ongoing political unrest in Hong Kong.

Many protesters in the city have used Telegram to evade electronic surveillance and coordinate their demonstrations against a controversial Beijing-backed plan that would allow extraditions from the semi-autonomous territory to the mainland.

Demonstrations descended into violence Wednesday as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters who tried to storm the city's parliament -- the worst political crisis Hong Kong has seen since its 1997 handover from Britain to China.

Telegram announced Wednesday that it was suffering a "powerful" Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which involves a hacker overwhelming a target's servers by making a massive number of junk requests.

It warned that users in many regions may face connection issues.

Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, said the junk requests came mostly from China.

"Historically, all state actor-sized DDoS (200-400 Gb/s of junk) we experienced coincided in time with protests in Hong Kong (coordinated on @telegram)," he tweeted.

"This case was not an exception."

Telegram later announced on Twitter that its service had stabilised. It also posted a series of tweets explaining the nature of the attack.

"Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald's in front of you -– and each is ordering a whopper," it said, referring to the flagship product of Burger King.

"The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place -– but there are so many of them that the server can't even see you to try and take your order."

Evading surveillance

When asked about Durov's claim the attack originated from China, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said he was not aware of the incident.

"What I can tell you here is that China has always opposed any form of cyber-attacks. China is also a victim of cyber-attacks," Geng said at a regular press briefing in Beijing.

China's cyberspace administration did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

Telegram was launched in 2013, and allows users to exchange encrypted text messages, photos and videos, and also create "channels" for as many as 200,000 people. It also supports encrypted voice calls.

The firm announced last year that it had crossed 200 million monthly active users.

Encrypted messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp are preferred around the world by a wide variety of people trying to avoid surveillance by authorities -- from Islamic State jihadists and drug dealers to human rights activists and journalists.

Governments in recent years have devoted significant resources to try and breach or bypass the security features of these apps, according to tech firms and researchers. Some states have outright banned them.

Hong Kong is not behind China's Great Firewall, which heavily restricts internet access in the mainland -- where Telegram is blocked.

The city's special status under its handover agreement allows freedoms unseen in mainland China, but many fear they are under threat as Beijing exerts increasing influence on Hong Kong.

The current protests were sparked by fears the proposed law would allow extraditions to China and leave people exposed to the mainland's politicized and opaque justice system.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Messaging service Telegram hit by DDoS cyber attack

Messaging service provider Telegram has been hit by a "powerful" distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and users in the United States and other countries may experience connection issues, the company said in a tweet Wednesday.

Telegram did not immediately respond to a request for more details on the attack.

In DDoS attacks, hijacked or virus-infected computers are used to target websites. 

source: news.abs-cbn.com

UK says WhatsApp lets pedophiles and gangsters operate

MANCHESTER - Britain said WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption communication services allowed pedophiles and organized crime groups to operate beyond the reach of the law and called on the messaging service to move faster to help governments catch offenders.

After 4 militant attacks in Britain that killed 36 people this year, senior ministers have stepped up demands over the past 6 months to make internet companies do more to suppress extremist content and allow access to encrypted communications.

The government says full-scale encryption has complicated the job of law enforcement both in thwarting extremist attacks and in investigating more commonplace crimes.


Internet companies say they want to help governments remove extremist or criminal material but also have to balance the demands of state security with civil liberties.

"Every day hundreds of millions of people use WhatsApp to communicate with each other – including to share sensitive personal information. Encryption helps to keep all those communications safe and secure," a WhatsApp spokeswoman said.

In the face of resistance from the industry, Prime Minister Theresa May - a former interior minister - proposed trying to regulate cyberspace after a deadly attack on London Bridge in June.

Such a sharp public reprimand for WhatsApp indicates frustration within the government.

"We also know that end-to-end encryption services like WhatsApp, are being used by paedophiles," Home Secretary Amber Rudd told party activists in the northern English city of Manchester.

"I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement," Rudd said. "We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency."

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and similar services let users communicate with pictures, video and text, using "end-to-end" encryption that can be read only with a key held on the user's device. Without access to the devices, security services cannot read the messages.

Rudd also called on technology giants such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to go further and faster to counter extremist material.

The industry argues that encryption is vital to protecting the wealth of personal information that electronic devices collect about individuals and for securing everything from banking and shopping to government records. They say they need to balance demands by law enforcement with privacy protections.

"Child exploitation has absolutely no place on our service -- which is why we work with law enforcement to identify these accounts and block them," the WhatsApp spokeswoman said.

Britain's MI5 security service has said it needs access to encrypted communications to foil attacks. In the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has pushed for full access to encrypted communications and devices, but Congress has so far refused.

The issues are hotly debated even among security officials. Jonathan Evans, who ran Britain’s MI5 spy service from 2007 until 2013, said that while encryption did make attacks harder to stop, it also helped to prevent criminals and even foreign governments from hacking private data.

Security Minister Ben Wallace, who oversees British counter-terrorism and communications data legislation, said he was disturbed to see that end-to-end encryption services prevented security services from tracking criminal messaging.

"We see on a daily basis that this end-to-end encryption protects pedophiles, it protects organised crime too, but it is very disturbing in my job when I know that we know 2 pedophiles are talking and we think they are doing something about snatching a child but we don't know and we can't get into these communications," Wallace said.

"There are other ways I can't talk about which we think they can help us more without necessarily entering into end-to-end encryption. So we think they can do more."

source: news.abs-cbn.com

WhatsApp adds Snapchat-like disappearing status

MANILA - Messaging platform WhatsApp has rolled out in the Philippines its "status" feature, allowing users to share photos and videos that expire in 24 hours.

The disappearing posts were pioneered by Snapchat and has since been adopted by properties of social media giant Facebook.

Before WhatsApp, Facebook added a "stories" feature to its Instagram photo-sharing feature and "My Day" to Facebook messenger.

WhatsApp allows users to limit the audience of status posts. A camera icon was also added to the upper left side of the interface for easier posting.

source: news.abs-cbn.com

Grab launches instant messaging platform

MANILA - Ride-sharing service Grab on Tuesday launched an instant messaging platform to allow quick chats between drivers and passengers through the app.

GrabChat comes complete with commonly used template messages for drivers and passengers to enable safe communication between drivers and passengers, the company said.

“Many Filipino drivers and riders still rely on calls and text messages before a ride commences, either to help drivers locate passengers or inform drivers of a rider’s specific whereabouts," Grab’s country head Brian Cu said in a statement.

"GrabChat is part of making transport freedom a reality among Filipinos, as it provides an in-app communications solution to drivers and passengers, minimizing call and SMS charges,” he added.

An auto translate feature will be added to the service by the end of the year to allow regional travelers to communicate easily with local drivers.

GrabChat is currently applicable for GrabCar and GrabTaxi services and will be gradually rolled out this week for all Android and iOS users.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Why Viber is introducing 'public chat' feature

MANILA – Free messaging app Viber now allows users to "eavesdrop" on the conversations of celebrities and personalities through its recently launched public chat feature.

The public chat feature allows Viber users to view live discussions of public chat accounts and “like” specific text or photo messages.

Viber chief executive officer Talmon Marco likened the experience to watching a reality show, to maximize on the digital age’s fascination with celebrities.

“Public Chats for us is a fascinating social experiment. We are taking Viber to the next step in many ways by giving our users something new to do on the service. We are letting them address a need, which is universal and has been so for ages, and that is to follow what other people are doing,” he said in a press briefing in Taguig on Thursday.

“Public Chats, of course with the permission of those you are listening to, is allowing you to follow in a way that is really unprecedented the lives of the people you care about: celebrities, personalities, sports people, or just average group of people that have something interesting to talk about,” he added.

Currently, there are 25 active public chat accounts in the Philippines, which include personalities such as radio trio Boys Night Out, podcast hosts Becky Nights, and Manila Secrets.

Manila Secrets, which is described as a group that chats “about Manila’s hidden secrets,” is a group composed of Tim Yap, Bubbles and Paolo Paraiso, Divine Lee, and JM Rodriguez, Aiko Melendez and Aubrey Miles, among others.

Brands such as Globe, Smart and SM Supermalls also have their own chat accounts.

Marco said more local celebrities and brands are expected to open their discussions to the public, but the content is entirely up to the participants.

“Where this is going, we don’t know. That depends on where those who chat will take it and we’ll see what happens,” said Marco.

“It’s so much interesting to follow a chat than to follow posts. Chats are far more interactive and interesting,” he added.

Currently, followers of the chat accounts are not allowed to comment, but Marco said a comment feature may soon be added.

He said the feature is being introduced on a “controlled rollout” to allow the Viber team to customize and configure chat settings.

Around 300 public chats are now open globally, but Marco said interested parties can apply to start a public chat be sending a request to publicchats@viber.com.

“We’ll take a look at it, if we think it’s interesting, then we’ll give them their own public chat. Later on the objective is to really open it up to everybody,” he said.

The new feature is available for update on Android and IOS devices, and will soon be available on Viber’s desktop version.

Marco said Viber is looking to add functionality and more features to the app, while maintaining its core function of sending multimedia messages.

“Viber is about communicating and sharing with the people around you, people you care about. The public chat is really an extension of that, which are the people you care about but you don’t necessarily know,” he said.

Mobile remittances?

One of the possible features that Viber may soon adapt is a mobile remittance service.

“I think the ability to send money, which is something very interesting for the Philippine market, is definitely something we are looking at closely,” he said.

In September, Viber launched a video call service on both its desktop and mobile versions.

Viber is available for free for iPhone, Android phones and tablets, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Blackberry 10, Windows, Windows 8, Mac, Linux, Symbian, Nokia S40 and Bada devices over 3G/4G or WiFi connections.

Viber has an estimated 209 million users worldwide, 18 million of which are located in the Philippines.

source: www.abs-cbnnews.com

Microsoft to drop Messenger, switch to Skype

NEW YORK—Microsoft is dropping its instant-messaging program and forcing most users to switch to Skype.

Maintaining Windows Live Messenger made less sense after Microsoft Corp. bought Skype for $8.5 billion last year. A new version of Skype released a few weeks ago allows users to sign in with a Microsoft account. By merging the two services, people won’t have to maintain two separate contact lists.

Microsoft says much has changed in how people communicate. There’s more use of text messaging and social networking.

Microsoft says that Messenger users who switch to Skype will get benefits such as the ability to call landline and mobile phones and better support on mobile devices.

Except for mainland China, Messenger will be discontinued worldwide after the first quarter of 2013.

source: technology.inquirer.net