As a frequent WhatsApp user, I must say I find this more amusing than anything. I've never really understood what the status feature is for anyway.
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As a frequent WhatsApp user I don't find this amusing at all. If this is how the engineers handle security issues, it might be time to convince my friends to switch to another messenger. It's not like there was no competition in that field.
Kik Messenger seems to have been doing very well recently.
Do you know if this can be used with Jabber and if the messages are sent on an encrypted connection to the server?
If not, any good apps that do for Iphone or Blackberry?
I played a little with reverse engineering Kik a while ago. I'm not sure about the messages, but I was able to siphon off the plaintext password using ngrep. It's XMPP, btw.
When they originally launched, they were not using SSL, and were using plain text authentication. Since then, they changed the authentication so it wouldn't be sent in plain text. Then they later added SSL. Then in the middle of last year, they updated their SSL setup so it actually did certificate verification.
It took them a while to get there, but it's secure now.
The initial design of WhatsApp was as an app to share your status. Only later did they add messaging. Which is the functionality that actually made them take off. But they've never removed the statua part, even though nobody uses it.
Of course, these security holes are not so hilarious to WhatsApp users who think their chats are encrypted on route to WhatsApp's servers :)
Umm, I think a malicious user could write things in your status that could have negative consequences for you.