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Twitter crypto purchase leaves Egypt dissidents in lurch

A company that provided free cellphone encryption to dissidents in Egypt abruptly suspended its services on Monday so that Twitter could integrate some of its privacy enabling technology into the microblogging site. Twitter's acquisition of San Francisco-based Whisper Systems came on Monday, the same day Egyptian citizens …

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Joe Montana
FAIL

Proprietary service...

This is what happens when you depend on a proprietary service supplied by a single entity...

There need to be open standards for secure communication, just like there are open standards for unencrypted communication.

Steven Roper
Thumb Up
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Exactly

And this is why "cloud" services suck. they can be taken away, or turned off, without warning. This sort of thing is exactly why my company won't touch public cloud services.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

You cnuts

would it really have killed you to keep the service running for another week?

Yeesh, talk about PR disaster. "Twitter responsible for damaging Arab spring chances and putting lives at risk"

Big Al
Flame

Sounds like a typical inability to consider the customer/user on the part of a large company to me - whoever made the decision probably didn't even realise the service was being used in Egypt, and probably can't find Egypt on a map, let alone understand its politics.

Pat 11
FAIL

if only

If only there was a group of dissident hackers who could reverse engineer the protocol and set up an alternative server. Some one like the cDc perhaps.

CrikeyMoses

great products and ideas but...

...they transition wasn't exactly handled in the optimal manner, now was it? Guess it's time to get csipsimple setup and running.

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