in India with the Tibetan community there, I have seen Skype, on mobiles at least, almost thoroughly replaced by WeChat, a WhatsApp/Kakao clone made by TenCent, the same Chinese company who created QQ. To my personal horror, we have gone from a somewhat secure Skype with a questionable backdoor policy, to a non-https, China-hosted service who is a known collaborator with the Chinese government.

I do a lot of cybersec trainings for activists. I take a lot of flak from crypto specialists for not deterring people from using Skype. My response isn't "Skype is safe"; it's, "show me the beef." We don't need to get into the "is Skype safe?" conversation here (we all agree that we are less able to prove its safety than we are OTR's, and Microsoft has a record of cooperating with (at least US) LEAs); my point is, I find we're only successful getting folks to change their habits when we can provide evidence (which they believe) that their old habit's unsafe. I haven't been able to do that with Skype, because Skype's insecurity is basically theoretical (for developing-worlds' activists' use cases). But the circumstantial evidence demonstrating WeChat's insecurity is much stronger ... viz. this super piece by John Kennedy: http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1083025/hu-jia-explains-why-mobile -apps-make-activism-spooky Nathan, you've doubtless seen this article. What do your Tibetan friends say about this? "We don't care if they're monitoring our WeChat use--we're out of their reach?" ... or "what's good enough for Hu Jia is good enough for us" ... or "WeChat's convenience advantages outweigh its known security" (i.e. security isn't a sine qua non for them) ... Best, Eric -- Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password at: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE