Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond.
https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
#federation #xmpp #irc #slack #whatsapp #http #internet
By analysing signalling messages exchanged during a WhatsApp call using an Android device, the researchers were able to closely examine the authentication process of WhatsApp clients; discover what codec WhatsApp is using for voice media streams (Opus at 8 or 16 kHz sampling rates); understand how relay servers are announced and the relay election mechanism; and understand how clients announce their endpoint addresses for media streams.
A paper about the study, entitled WhatsApp Network Forensics: Decrypting and Understanding WhatsApp Call Signaling Messages, was published in the scholarly journal Digital Investigation. The article was co-authored by F. Karpisek of Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, and Ibrahim Baggili and Frank Breitinger, co-directors of the Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group at the University of New Haven.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/27/whatsapp_forensic_analysis/
via John van Gils.
#whatsapp #android #research #opus #reverse_engineering #forensic
