Friday, January 30, 2015

Google Warns the Internet Will Disappear

Google Warns the Internet Will Disappear, the Future of Cyanogen 

By Dave Parrack
Google predicts that the Internet will disappear, the future of Cyanogen, Malaysia Airlines gets hacked, Expedia buys Travelocity, and the 1995 Facebook TV commercial that never was.

Schmidt: “The Internet Will Disappear”

The Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, thinks “the Internet will disappear,” but don’t panic, as his words shouldn’t be taken too literally. Schmidt was speaking at the World Economic Forum is Davos, Switzerland when he made the prediction which has spawned countless misleading headlines, including our own.
Rather than suggesting the Internet will one day go the way of the dinosaurs, Schmidt was predicting that the Internet will “become so ubiquitous that you won’t even notice it.” How? By way of the Internet of Things, and how more devices are becoming “smart” every day.
Schmidt further explained, “It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room. A highly personalized, highly interactive and very, very interesting world emerges.
Indeed it does, and at that point the Internet is likely to become less of a service we connect to and more of an omnipresence punctuating every part of our lives. And Google plans to be right at the center of this new reality.
So, if you’re worried about privacy, security, and anonymity now just wait until Schmidt’s future comes to pass.

Cyanogen Moving Away from Android


Fans of Cyanogen OS will be interested to hear the direction in which the CEO of Cyanogen Inc. sees the mobile operating system heading in the future. According to The Information (via Android Authority), Kirt McMaster wants to “take Android away from Google.
McMaster explained, “We’ve barely scratched the surface in regards to what mobile can be. Today, Cyanogen has some dependence on Google. Tomorrow, it will not. We will not be based on some derivative of Google in three to five years. There will be services that are doing the same old bullshit with Android, and then there will be something different. That is where we’re going here.
He continued, “We’re making a version of Android that is more open so we can integrate with more partners so their services can be tier one services, so startups working on [artificial intelligence] or other problems don’t get stuck having you have to launch a stupid little application that inevitably gets acquired by Google or Apple. These companies can thrive on non-Google Android.
McMaster is an outspoken individual, once accusing Google of having a tyrannical hold on Android. These recent comments regarding the future of Cyanogen OS should, therefore, come as no great surprise.

Lizard Squad Hacks Malaysia Airlines

Lizard Squad, the hacking group which took down the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live over the holidays, has claimed credit for hacking the website of Malaysia Airlines. The website displayed an image of a lizard wearing a top hat and monocle, with text describing Lizard Squad as the “Official Cyber Caliphate.
Malaysia Airlines issued a statement maintaining that its “servers are intact,” and assured customers that “its website was not hacked and this temporary glitch does not affect their bookings and that user data remains secured.
The company lost two aircraft in 2014, one which disappeared over the South China Sea, and one which was shot down while flying over Ukraine. Which seems to be the only reason it was targeted ahead and instead of any other airline.

Expedia Acquires Travelocity for $280m

Expedia has acquired Travelocity for $280 million in a straight cash deal. For that underwhelming sum of money, Expedia will get Travelocity’s North American websites. Lastminute.com, which is Travelocity Europe, will be sold to Bravofly for $120 million.

If Facebook Had Made Ads in 1995


And finally, we now know what a Facebook commercial would have looked like had the social networking service been a thing in 1995. This is according to Brent Weinbach, who designed the faux television spot to mimic early spots for AOL, Yahoo, and others.
It’s keenly observed, and should remind us all how far the Internet and its services have come in the past 20 years. [H/T The Verge]

Your Views On Today’s Tech News

Do you think Eric Schmidt’s prediction about the Internet disappearing is correct? Are you interested in Cyanogen and how it will evolve in the future? Would you have used Facebook if it had existed in 1995?
Let us know your thoughts on the Tech News of the day by posting to the comments section below. Because a healthy discussion is always welcome.
Image Credit: Yuhei Kuratomi via Flickr   Source: www.makeuseof.com

Avoiding Internet Surveillance

Avoiding Internet Surveillance: The Complete Guide

By Dann Albright
Internet surveillance has been a hot topic in recent years—we’ve talked about it extensively here at MakeUseOf, it’s been brought up on major news outlets daily, and we’ve seen a slew of new apps, extensions, and products aimed at helping you retain your privacy online.
This article is meant to be as comprehensive a resource as possible on avoiding Internet surveillance. We’ll talk about why Internet surveillance is such a big deal, who’s behind it, whether or not you can completely avoid it, and a wide range of tools that will make you harder to track, identify, and spy on.

Why Worry About Internet Surveillance?

Before we get into the details of avoiding Internet surveillance, we should discuss exactly what sort of surveillance we’re talking about and why you might want to dodge it. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a few years, you’ve heard about Edward Snowden and the documents that he released detailing surveillance programs run by the US National Security Administration (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
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One of the most commonly discussed programs is called PRISM, and it allows the NSA to collect data from the servers of US service providers, including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others. Anything you have stored on someone’s servers is potentially at risk of being collected and analyzed (to get the details, check out this article on everything you need to know about PRISM).
Other programs, like FAIRVIEW and STORMBREW, collect all traffic heading through a specific gateway or router. In both cases, there’s a wide variety of information that could potentially be collected, from browsing data and history to emails, chats, videos, photos, and file transfers. There are many others as well, including the recently revealed XKEYSCORE, which could make sure that you’re on the NSA’s watch list if you search for privacy-related things like secure Linux distros or virtual private networks (VPNs).
Of course, the US and the UK aren’t the only countries collecting data on citizens—it happens all over the world. It just so happens that we know the most about what’s going on in these two countries. And governments aren’t the only ones who are watching your movements online—this information is very valuable to private companies as well. While they won’t be reading your emails, they may track your browsing activity, social networking habits, the apps you use, and information about your friends.
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While this information is collected by private companies like social networks and retailers, it’s certainly possible that it will end up in government hands, either through programs like PRISM or through court orders to hand the data over. The same goes for the data collected by your Internet service provider, which you might not even know about (much like users of Telstra had no idea their browsing habits were being logged and sent overseas).
So why might you want to keep governments and companies from getting this sort of information? There could be a wide variety of reasons: you’re a proponent of digital privacy, you’re worried that you could face discrimination or harassment because of your online activity, or because you feel that it violates human rights. All of these are perfectly good reasons for avoiding Internet surveillance.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably already committed to the idea. However, there are a lot of people out there who believe they don’t have to worry about surveillance because they don’t have anything to hide. If we have a right to privacy, however, this argument is invalid. To find out more about why this argument just doesn’t work, you can read the section on it in my article about the Don’t Spy on Us event.
Now that you have a better understanding of exactly what it is that we’re trying to avoid here, we can get into the details!

Hide Your Browsing Data

More than almost anything else, your browsing habits define you as an online entity. The sites you go to, the ads you see, the links you click—they all create a footprint that’s specific to you and your interests. Even if you don’t use your browser to access disreputable or dangerous sites, concealing this information could be valuable to you, especially if you live in a country that actively suppresses non-standard views (as we’ve seen in Iran, China, and Turkey). So how can you make sure no one’s watching what you’re doing online?
One of the simplest ways to go about concealing your actions on the web is to use a virtual private network, or VPN. When you’re engaging in unsecured browsing, your computer reaches out, through your ISP, across the Internet, to another site. Once you’ve made this connection, you can view that site. However, if anyone is looking closely, they can see that connection. A VPN inserts an intermediary server between you and the site you’re connecting to—if someone is looking now, all they’ll see is a connection from the VPN server to the site on the other end. Your connection to the VPN server is encrypted, concealing your identity.
There are quite a few VPNs that are free, which is great if you don’t use them all the time—many people only use them to access region-blocked video when they want to watch Netflix from another country, for example. If you’re interested in getting a higher bandwidth limit, more speed, and no ads, you should look into paying for a VPN—we have a list of the best VPN services that you can check out. In most cases, it’s as simple as downloading a browser extension or an app, running a five-minute setup, and you’ll be on your way.
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If a VPN is thought of as “one hop,” using the Tor network can be thought of as “three hops.” Instead of setting up a single server between you and your destination, using the Tor system bounces your connection through three separate servers before making the connection to the site you want to go to. The increased complexity of the connection makes it extremely difficult for anyone to monitor browsing traffic (though it’s been rumored that the NSA is making some progress in compromising the system).
To use Tor, you just need to download the Tor browser bundle and install it (we have a full guide to Tor available that goes through the process in detail)—then, whenever you use the Tor browser, you’ll be routed through the Tor network. In addition to browsing with significantly increased security, you’ll also have access to .onion sites, websites that can only be visited through the Tor network.
If you want to make sure that your browsing is maximally secure, and that it’s next to impossible to trace, you can route your connection through a VPN and the Tor network. This makes for four servers between you and your destination. No one’s going to go through enough trouble to track you through that mess unless you’re at the top of an intelligence agency’s list.
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Another way that your browsing can be tracked is through files that are placed on your computer: cookies. These files can come from a number of sources, but one of the nefarious ways that you can receive trackers is through ads (which, as we have been finding out recently, can deposit a lot of bad stuff on your computer). So how can you prevent these from sending data to snoopers? Ad blocking.
It’s a controversial practice, because ads keep much of the Internet free (see “Are Ad Blocking Browser Extensions Killing The Internet?” and “AdBlock, NoScript, and Ghostery – The Trifecta of Evil“). However, blocking ads will prevent those ads from placing files on your computer. This means no cookies, no tracking information, and no malware. The prevalence of ad-embedded malware is on the rise, and blocking ads is currently the best way of keeping your computer safe; running an effective antivirus program like Avast is also a good idea (though that might expose you to other forms of tracking, as well).
If you’re not willing to go through the effort (and potentially slow your connection down a bit) to run VPNs or the Tor network on a regular basis, the best thing to do is to download and install a number of browser extensions. HTTPS Everywhere and Disconnect Search are two of the best, and they’re available for both Firefox and Chrome.

Fortify Your Email Security

While browsing creates a digital footprint of your life, email has the potential to carry your most personal secrets, important business communications, and other kinds of sensitive information. While you might not send that sort of thing via email very often, it’s likely that you do discuss your opinions, beliefs, and plans, all of which could potentially be of interest to the government. What can you do to keep your private messages private?
First of all, it’s important to know that securing just one side of an email conversation won’t do you much good. If you send an encrypted message to a friend, and your friend stores it in an unencrypted format on a public server, it’s going to be pretty easy for someone to nab that message. Email is an inherently insecure medium, which means you probably shouldn’t be using it for extremely private things at all. But there are a few things you can do to step up your security.
One of the most well-known and commonly used methods of encrypting email is called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). The specific mechanics are quite complicated, but you can get the details in this guide to using PGP. In a nutshell, the message is encrypted on your computer, signed with a digital key, and sent to your recipient. That person then uses their own personal key (which is kept secret) to decrypt the message. Theoretically, PGP is nearly uncrackable.
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PGP is a very popular option, but setting it up takes some minimal time and effort. If you’d skip the setup, you can use secure services like Hushmail, Vaultlet, and Enigmail, all of which were discussed in this article on secure email providers. These offer a number of different protections that help you rest easy that your mail won’t be easily intercepted and viewed by prying eyes.
Encrypting your mail will go a long way towards keeping the government from reading your messages, but they’re not the only ones who are interested in it. For example, Gmail monitors the contents of your messages for specific triggers that indicate that you might be engaging in specific illegal activities. Earlier this year, the system alerted the authorities to a man who was trading child pornography. In addition to this sort of monitoring, they also scan the contents of your personal messages to better target ads.
Because of the insecurity of email and the fact that your email provider could be scanning your messages, your best bet is to not send anything via email that you’d like to keep private.

Encrypt Your Chats and IMs

We’ve started using instant messages for a lot of things, from quick personal chats to in-depth professional discussions. If you use Google’s chat app, you probably have thousands of IMs saved, and it’s quite likely that if you were to look through them, you’d find a huge variety of things that you don’t want other people to have access to. So what can you do to make sure no one’s snooping on your IMs?
One of the most widely used encryption protocols for instant messaging is called Off-the-Record messaging, or OTR. It uses an interesting style of cryptography called deniable authentication, which means that after the conversation, both participants can deny the existence of the conversation. Using OTR is quite simple: if two people have chat clients that can use the protocol, all they have to do is turn it on. A number of OTR-capable clients are now available, including Adium and Pidgin, which provide OTR encryption for Google Talk, Facebook chat, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and a number of other protocols.
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In addition to this widely used protocol, there are a number of other less well-known solutions. A great example of this is Cryptocat, a web app that allows you to create an encrypted chat on the fly and invite others to join it by sending a link. After an hour of inactivity, your chats are wiped. It’s one of the easiest ways to encrypt a chat, you don’t need to download anything, and the browser extension lets you fire it up with a click.
SafeChat is another alternative that’s used for encrypting Facebook chats—so if you use Facebook primarily or exclusively for your IMing needs, it’s a good way to go. It’s available not only as a free Chrome and Firefox extension, but also as an iOS app, so you can continue your secure chatting on the go. ChatSecure is another app that allows you to securely use Facebook Chat and Google Talk from your phone.
Remember that with all of these encryption options, like secure email, both parties need to be using encrypted clients, or else anyone who wants to see what’s in your chat can just pull the information from your interlocutor’s computer.

Protect Your Messages

Chat, IM, and messaging are all becoming more similar, but there are still times when you want to use an app that’s a bit more like a traditional text messaging appthan an instant messenger. Many of the apps that people use on a regular basis from their phones fall into this category, so it’s worth look at on its own. Because almost everyone uses them, they’re of high value to prying eyes—we saw a great example of this in South Korea last year.
There have also been a number of concerns over the privacy of specific messaging clients, such as when Facebook acquired WhatsApp. Although Facebook still hasn’t done much with the messaging app, it’s common knowledge that they collect a huge amount of data on users of their social network (including data on your offline purchases), and there’s been discussion of collecting some of that data through the contents of Facebook chat messages. Obviously, the acquisition of WhatsApp was cause for concern.
Since then, however, WhatsApp has stepped up its game in relation to security and privacy. In a recent Android update, it turned on end-to-end encryption for messages, meaning that not even the servers at WhatsApp contain unencrypted messages. This is a huge victory for privacy advocates. While this encryption hasn’t been enabled for all platforms yet, it’s likely to come in the near future.
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Although WhatsApp remains at the top of messaging app popularity list, there are a lot of other great options. Telegram is quickly becoming more popular, and beat WhatsApp to the punch on many features, like end-to-end encryption, self-destructing messages, and a web client. Telegram’s cloud-based messaging lets you see your messages from your phone, tablet, computer, and any other computer via a browser. The encryption protocol was developed specifically for the app to be highly secure and very fast. And it beats WhatsApp’s great $1-per-year pricing by being free.
We’ve profiled a number of other secure messaging apps in the past, including Silent Text, Threema, Wickr, and Confide. If you can convince everyone that you regularly message to download one of these apps, you’ll have no cause to worry about the security of your messaging. Obviously it’s best if everyone’s using the same app, but the low cost of these options means it’s easy to message one group of friends with one app and another group with another.

Secure Your Mobile Device

While some of the apps and strategies listed above can be used on your mobile phone, there are a few issues that are unique to phones, such as the collection of metadata. If you’ve been paying attention to the latest news on the NSA’s data collection practices, you’ll have heard of metadata—but you might not know what it is. Put succinctly, metadata is information about your information.
Metadata includes things like the phone numbers you’ve called, when you called them, how long you were on the phone, which cell towers you used during the call, and the location of the recipient of the call. Taken together, these things can actually reveal a lot about your conversation and your relationship with the person you’re talking to. Of course, with a court order, government agencies can also easily get a wiretap on your phone, but that’s much less likely to happen.
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The difficulty in protecting your metadata is that it’s comprised of information stored by your phone company, and that information can be requested or subpoenaed. Companies aren’t exactly resistant in handing it over.
Unfortunately, the things you can do to protect your metadata are limited. Mobile hardware and software focused on privacy, like the BlackPhone and Silent Circle, helps a lot. They encrypt metadata and make it much more difficult for anyone to obtain it. You can also use a burner phone, if you’d rather not have the NSA collecting data on your phone calls, though this approach does come with some inconvenient drawbacks.
One of the interesting points that a few people have brought up recently is the fact that by offering end-to-end encryption in WhatsApp, Facebook is essentially throwing away a huge amount of potentially valuable data. No one believes that they would offer this feature just for users’ privacy after paying $19 billion for the app, so that value has to be made up somewhere—and most people are pointing to metadata. It’s really valuable.
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Beyond the methods above, the best way to keep your metadata out of the hands of the NSA is political: join campaigns to reform metadata-collection laws, hold companies accountable for the data that they hand over to the government, and make sure your voice is heard.
Although it’s tough to prevent the collection of your metadata, there are a number of things you can do to keep the content of your communications private. Using the apps detailed above for messaging is a great place to start (especially if you, like many people, do a lot more messaging than calling). And Guy’s article on three ways to make your smartphone more secure details Kryptos and Silent Phone, two VoIP apps that encrypt your calls, making them very resistant to any sort of data collection.
Messaging and calling isn’t all that you use your phone for, however—a lot of people also do a great deal of mobile browsing, and just like on your computer, this information can potentially be tracked. To protect your browsing data, there are a number of mobile VPN services that you can set up to use just like the ones discussed above for your computer. We’ve written about HotSpot Shield and VPN Express for iOS, as well as a number of Android VPN apps, that will keep your mobile browsing data safe.
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Many VPN services now offer both desktop and mobile protection, and you can get both by signing up for an account—if you’re concerned about your privacy and you don’t wanted limited bandwidth, spending $10 or $15 each month on a premium VPN might be well worth the cost.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult or impossible to prevent your service provider (or Google, or Apple) from tracking your location using the GPS receiver—if you really want to keep anyone from knowing where you are by tracking your phone, your best bet is to turn your phone off and take the battery out, or use the BlackPhone.
And don’t forget to opt out of ad tracking, too. It’s different on each phone, so check out this article on the basics of smartphone privacy.

Keeping Your Social Life Private

Using secure browsing and messaging techniques will keep most of your social networking data from falling into the hands of the government (unless, of course, a social network gives in and hands your data over to the NSA, which is certainly possible). However, social networks—especially Facebook—are doing a lot of surveillance on their own. While they may not be collecting data to see if you’re a potential threat to national security, they can make a lot of money with it. (You can make money selling your own data, too, but that counteracts quite a bit of the advice in this guide.)
The amount of data collected by Facebook is staggering—they collect so much that they can create “shadow profiles” of people who don’t even have Facebook accounts just by collating information from other users’ contacts. Other sites that are linked to Facebook send your information back to their servers (though you can use tools like Facebook Disconnect to prevent that). And let’s not forget about the fact that other companies can gather mass amounts of public Facebook data, too.
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While you might feel like your privacy is being violated—even to the degree where it might be illegal in some cases—there’s not much you can do about it. The terms of service of major online services, from Facebook and Twitter to Google and Dropbox, almost always require that you give up at least a good portion of your rights to privacy to use the service. Even your Facebook chats could be scanned.
Even more unnervingly, Facebook can figure out when its ads have influenced your offline purchase decisions. There are very few places where you’re not being surveilled by the social giant. Remember that Facebook isn’t the only culprit here—it’s just the biggest one. Twitter tracks the apps you have on your phone, and we recently published an article on ten social networks that are pretty bad when it comes to privacy.
If you’ve signed up for a social network, they’re almost certainly collecting some data about you. App.net is a social network that isn’t funded by ads, so you can probably feel safe that your data, even though some if it’s being collected (as can be seen in their privacy policy), won’t be sold to advertisers.
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However, you can take steps to limit the amount of data that’s being collected. One of our Facebook Weekly Tips from 2013 dealt specifically with limiting the amount of tracking Facebook can do. You can also opt out of sharing data with Facebookthrough the Digital Advertising Alliance (though the efficacy of that is debated). It’s a good idea to take these steps, as a lot of social networks, as well as other online companies, may be able to bypass your browser’s security settings.
Unfortunately, the best way to avoid being surveilled by social networks is to not use them . . . and limit the amount of contact that you have with people who do.

Take Privacy Into Your Own Hands

As you can see, avoiding Internet surveillance isn’t easy. In fact, completely avoiding it is nearly impossible. And taking all of the steps above will cost you quite a bit of time, effort, and money. But is it worth it? That all depends on how you feel about your privacy.
We know that “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” just isn’t a viable argument when it comes to online privacy. We are being pervasively watched by governments, companies, and service providers around the clock, while we’re on our computers, phones, and tablets. We’re even being watched by social networks when we’re away from our computers—and often when we don’t even have accounts.
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As I mentioned earlier, all of this, for the most part, doesn’t really affect our daily lives (other than creating an information filter bubble). But if history has shown us anything, it’s that the status quo can be changed at any time, often when we least expect it. And beyond practical safety concerns, what about our right to privacy? Don’t we have a right to have a private life that’s truly private? That can’t be seen by people who are suspicious of our actions or those who are using us to make copious amounts of money?
It’s time to take your online privacy into your own hands. Use the strategies outlined above and share them with others—the more we fight back against pervasive Internet surveillance, the more likely we are to retain our privacy and online freedom.
What steps do you take to ensure that you’re not being surveilled online? Do you feel like your privacy is being violated by companies and governments? Or do you feel that it’s not worth the effort? Share your thoughts below!

WhatsApp Web: Everything You Need To Know

By Mihir Patkar
WhatsApp is one of the best messaging clients around, and it just got better. Apart from supporting all mobile platforms, WhatsApp has now launched a web-based client, so you can finally use WhatsApp on your PC and sync with your phone.
Our web client is simply an extension of your phone: the web browser mirrors conversations and messages from your mobile device — this means all of your messages still live on your phone,” WhatsApp said in their official blog.

How To Use WhatsApp Web (And What You Need)

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WhatsApp Web is super simple to use, although it has some restrictions in which devices it works with. You will need:
  • A phone running on Android, BlackBerry, Nokia S60 or Windows Phone. WhatsApp Web won’t work with iPhones because it restricts background multitasking and push notifications, according to The Verge. Chalk up yet another reason to choose Android over iPhone.
  • Google Chrome. WhatsApp Web works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, but it only supports the Chrome web browser. We already know it’s the fastest browser, but apparently WhatsApp believes it has the best push notifications system, according to GigaOm. That seems like a weak excuse to restrict to Chrome, in our opinion, and there might just be something else to the story. However, it works with other browsers based on Chrome, like Opera, which is a faster and simpler ChromeNote: If you’re in a restricted installs environment (like your office PC) and still want to use it, you can download the portable version of Chrome from our Best Portable Apps list. We checked, it works.
  • You’ll need to update WhatsApp from your smartphone app store or install the latest version.
  • Your phone will have to be connected to the Internet at all times.
If you have those elements ready, setting up WhatsApp Web is a snap.
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  1. Open Google Chrome and go to http://web.whatsapp.com.
  2. On your WhatsApp mobile app, tap Menu > WhatsApp Web to start the QR code reader.
  3. Point your phone’s camera to the QR code on your PC screen.
As soon as WhatsApp reads the QR code, it will sync with your phone and you’re ready to go. It’s that simple! WhatsApp rises to the top of web apps that make creatives use of QR codes.

What You Can Do With WhatsApp Web

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The web interface lets you do a number of useful things: 
  • Use your keyboard to type.
  • Access media (photos, videos, audio) in-line. You can also download any media directly to your PC.
  • Start a new conversation with any contact, or search for existing conversations.
  • View contact info.
  • Talk in group chats and view group info.
  • Connect multiple computers to your phone and save them for the future. You can also remotely disconnect any browser from your phone.
  • Get or mute desktop alerts and sounds.
  • Share photos, record audio, or use your webcam.

What You Can’t Do With WhatsApp Web

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The web interface is limited in a few ways:
  • Emojis aren’t mapped to your keyboard, so you’ll need to manually add them using the emoji keyboard available in the web interface.
  • You can’t start a new group chat or leave an existing group chat from the web interface.
  • It’s not possible to share contacts or maps via the web interface.
  • You can’t block users directly through the web interface.
  • You can’t change your profile picture or profile status.
  • You can’t use two browsers at the same time. While you can add multiple browsers/PCs to your phone, you can only use one at a time.

Is It Secure? Is It Worth It?

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While it initially got some flak for its lack of security, last year, WhatsApp rolled out end-to-end encryption for all its messages. The new WhatsApp Web uses the same technology and is dependent on your phone for all message transfers. Plus, you can always check which browser is connected to your phone at any moment, and remotely disable any browser. While it’s not foolproof, the security is good enough.
WhatsApp Web is the best-looking web interface for WhatsApp we have seen, and definitely better than WhatsCloud or WhatsApp Remote. And it’s completely free as well. It has some limitations to what you can do online, but if you pair it with AirDroid 3’s screen mirroring, you won’t have to touch your phone for any WhatsApp-related actions.
Get WhatsApp Web: web.whatsapp.com
Source: www.makeuseof.com

Understanding Why Google Spends Billions on Acquisitions

By Dave LeClair
Google has not been shy about spending billions of dollars to acquire companies in which it sees value. Whether its a hot app that’s making waves or a cell phone company that holds some incredibly valuable patents, Google is willing to take some risks.
But why did Google choose the companies it has purchased? What was the strategy? Which firms might Google have its eyes on next? Check out this fascinating infographic and you’ll get a look at just what Google was thinking with each one, and why it might choose to buy some other companies in the future.
If you were in charge of Google, which companies would you want? Hit the comments section below and let’s play CEO together!
Click To Enlarge
google-acquisitions

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