Monthly Archives: November 2015

The long arm of the law wants ever more eyes, if you’ll pardon the gruesome metaphor. The UK government recently unveiled an attempt to legalize “draconian state surveillance powers.” US voices keep calling for a mythical “secure golden key” for government access to encrypted messages. Canadian police describe encryption plus legal decisions favoring online privacy as “a deadly combination.”

Meanwhile, in meatspace, cameras are everywhere. An EFF report on the thousands of automated license place cameras out in the wild, “mounted on street poles to capture the plates of passing cars as part of ongoing law enforcement dragnet surveillance programs,” revealed that “more than a hundred ALPR cameras were exposed online, often with totally open Web pages accessible by anyone with a browser.” Another informs us that “mobile biometric technologies are now being deployed more widely and cheaply than ever before—and with less oversight”?

Who here thinks that there will be fewer cameras and less biometric analysis in the future? Who here thinks they won’t be fully internetworked? Who here thinks there will never be sky-eye cameras looking down from law-enforcement drones, watching us all? Anyone? Anyone at all? …Didn’t think so.

As a result, in the not-too-distant future, it seems likely that the only real privacy you will have will be online. Maybe, if you’re lucky, inside the walls of your own home. (And perhaps places where you pay for privacy “by the second,” to quote William Gibson’s Neuromancer.) It won’t be long at all before everything you do out in the world can and probably will be mapped, tracked, data-mined, and analyzed. That’s why online privacy is so important, and why threats to it matter.

And that’s why Tor, aka “The Onion Router,” is so important. Tor routes your web traffic through layers of computers that don’t track your data, so that nobody can tell which sites you’re using, and the sites you’re using can’t tell where you are.

It’s been around for many years now, but I’m pleased to report that it’s still taking major strides forward. Last year Facebook made itself more available via Tor. Then Facebook allied with Tor to, as of last week, reserve the .onion top-level-domain for Tor, which will make secure Tor connections vastly easier to set up. And just last month Tor launched a beta messenger app.

Interestingly, Tor was initially developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, who open-sourced its code in 2004. For Tor to be effective, it needs a broadly diverse spectrum of users — if only dissidents use it, then using Tor marks you as a dissident; if only spies use it, then using Tor marks you as a spy — so it has become an entertainingly big tent encompassing all kinds of people who want to use the Internet without being tracked, on all sides of the political spectrum(s).

(This, and Tor’s history of US government sponsorship, has led to series of really embarrassing conspiracy theories from the likes of PandoDaily. This is why non-technical journalists should not write about technical subjects. If you’re going to suggest that open-source software has dark ulterior vulnerabilities, you need to point at exactly where they are in the code (or deployment process), or you will quite rightly be laughed out of the room. Funding and relationships are not unimportant — and I’m sure Pando will now write me off as part of the shadowy conspiracy, as Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum is an old friend — but it’s the running code that actually matters. Sadly, non-engineers don’t seem to understand this, or how laughably ridiculous they look as a result.)

And while we’re on the subject, I’m even more pleased to report that Tor is by no means the only small collective of skilled developers / hackers / activists working to improve your online security. I give you, at long last, Open Whisper Systems‘ brand new Signal release for Android, rolling secure messaging and secure phone calls into a single app named Signal:

…and it’s endorsed by a celebrity, too! But this is one endorsement I’m pretty sure you can’t buy:

In this era of new Star Wars trailers, it’s hard for a novelist like me not to frame the ongoing online privacy battle as one fought between authoritarians using their overwhelming superiority in power, money, and numbers to build the tools for surveillance states (hardware, software, legalware) versus, in the other corner, a rebel alliance of plucky privacy activists (Snowden, the EFF, Appelbaum, Moxie Marlinspike) trying to fight back with the Force math and software.

…And, er, federal funding. Hey, the world is a complicated and nuanced place. Go make it a little simpler, and slightly less widely surveilled; go support and use Tor and Signal. For yourself, and also to help, in a small way, the people who really need it.

Via: techcrunch

The new iPad Pro, aimed at artists, designers and other creative users, will be available for online ordering starting Wednesday, Apple announced today. The device is expected to be in Apple retail stores and other outlets later this week.

Featuring a 12.9-inch Retina display, the iOS 9-powered iPad Pro is priced at $799 (32 GB with Wi-Fi connectivity) and $1,079 (125 GB with Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity). It can be used with two new accessories Apple is also releasing this week: the Apple Pencil and the Smart Keyboard.

The iPad Pro’s 5.6-million-pixel display is “the most ever in an iOS device,” according to Apple. The device also provides a battery life of around 10 hours, making it useful for users on the go, the company said.

High Expectations

Apple has seen iPad sales shrink over the past couple years, with an especially dramatic decline over the past 12 months. In its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2015, released October 27, the company reported iPad sales for the year of just over 23 million, down 23 percent from 2014 sales of more than 30 million.

The company attributed the decline in part to “a longer repurchase cycle for iPads and some level of cannibalization” from Apple’s other products. The drop also reflected a wider global decline in tablet sales that coincided with the growing availability of mobile phones with larger screens.

Those circumstances mean there are high expectations for the new iPad Pro. While emphasizing the device’s appeal to artists and designers, Apple is also targeting professional users in general, pointing to a range of new apps that have been developed for “everything from productivity, design, illustration, engineering and medical, to education, gaming and entertainment.”

Pencil, Smart Keyboard Bring New Capabilities

“The early response to iPad Pro from app developers and our customers has been incredible,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing. He said the new device is the most powerful iPad that Apple has ever made.

“The iPad Pro is far and away the fastest iOS device we have ever made — its A9X chip beats most portable PCs in both CPU and graphics tasks, but is thin and light enough to hold all day,” Schiller noted in September upon announcing the new device.

The $99 Apple Pencil and the $169 Smart Keyboard are designed to be used with the new iPad Pro. Schiller said the Pencil and Smart Keyboard “enable users to customize their iPad Pro experience to the particular apps they use and the work they do, making iPad Pro ideal for everything from professional productivity to advanced 3D design.”

Apple also said it redesigned the touch subsystem of the iPad Pro’s Multi-Touch display specifically for the Apple Pencil to “dramatically reduce latency and deliver incredible accuracy for activities like fine art illustration and detailed 3D design.”

The full-size Smart Keyboard connects to the iPad Pro via a Smart Connector port, eliminating the need for a separate battery. The keyboard is also designed to work with the new QuickType features introduced with iOS 9 to make typing even faster and easier, Apple said.

Via: enterprise-security-today

Some believe that email is bloated and dying, but by implementing advances from its machine learning and AI teams, Google has been using Inbox — its Gmail-based mobile email client — as a way to raise the bar on how to improve the experience and make it once again into a productive place to communicate with people. Today, the company is taking the wraps off its latest feature: Smart Reply, a way for Inbox to craft automatic responses for you.

Google says that the feature, which is due to launch later this week, will work like this: when you receive an email, Smart Reply will “read” the content of it and select three basic responses at the bottom of the screen for a quick response.

“And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away,” writes Bálint Miklós, a software engineer at Google who worked on the service. That jump start comes in the form of the short phrases that Inbox suggests at the bottom of the screen for the automatic reply, which then become the start of your response.

The app also “learns” as you use it. So, if you never choose, “Yes, please send me more information!” when replying to a particular person who is pitching you a suggestion for something in an email, it’s unlikely to keep appearing as an option when that person writes again (and again, and again).

There have been a lot of apps that have come out to try to make slogging through your inbox easier, but perhaps most of all Smart Reply reminds me of TL;DR, a little app from one of the co-founders of the now-defunct Android launcher Everything.me, which also set out to make email more like messaging by shortening the steps it took to reply to messages by offering suggestions of how to reply.

In both the case of that app and Smart Reply, the pain point is a well-known one: it’s actually kind of a pain to type on smartphones for most people and so creating ways to circumvent this as much as possible makes a lot of sense.

It’s also another step along the gradual evolution in how mobile apps are becoming more predictive. Other obvious examples in this vein are services like Siri from Apple or Google Now, or even LinkedIn’s apps that suggest information about contacts as they enter your vicinity. The bigger idea here is not just that apps are getting easier to use because we have less to input on their small screens, but they are becoming more intelligent and able to act as helpful assistants in our life.

This is partly a practical move on the part of developers: the more crowded our phones get with apps, the less likely we are to open the ones that are difficult to use. But it’s also a sign of how it’s likely all apps will evolve over time.

Google has over the years built up a massive team of people working in areas like machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to build out features in search, mobile and many of its applications.

And in that vein, Smart Reply is not the first feature in Inbox — which was opened up to all users in May 2015 — that relies on those technologies. Google also pushes to-do reminders, helps organize trips, and offers “assists” — small nudges of what you should do next while in the app. In the case of Smart Reply, Google engineers have built the feature using deep neural networks, which are also the basis of improvements in Google’s voice search and the thumbnails on YouTube. You can read more about the mechanics behind Smart Reply here.

Via: techcrunch

After a short beta period, Mozilla today graduated its new Tracking Protection feature for Firefox’s Private Browsing mode into its release channel with the launch of Firefox 42.

While Private Browsing (which is Firefox’s counterpart to Chrome’s Incognito mode) ensures that none of your browsing history and cookies for this private session are saved locally, some of your data can still leak out to third-party sites. The new tracking protection ensures that third-party trackers, including those from social networks and analytics companies, can’t receive any data from your browsing session.

That’s not all that different from how plug-ins like Ghostery and the EFF’s Privacy Badger work, but for the time being, tracking protection only works within the confines of the Private Browsing mode.

It’s worth noting that the tracking protection feature isn’t about blocking ads, but given that many ads also track you, chances are you will see significantly fewer ads in Private Browsing mode now.

A Mozilla spokesperson told me today that Mozilla built this new feature into the browser “because the organization believes in giving you more choices and control over your web experience. Creating a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical to the health of the web. Mozilla is dedicated to keeping this balance.”

It’s unlikely that Mozilla will turn on tracking protection outside of the Private Browsing mode anytime soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the organization decided to make it an opt-in feature for regular browsing sessions, too.

Also new in this release is a new icon that shows you when one of your tabs is playing sound. Chrome has been doing this for a while now and it’s nice to see Firefox catch on, especially now that every second site insists on auto-playing video. One nifty feature here is that you only have to click on the speaker icon in the tab to mute the sound. On Chrome, this feature is still hidden behind a flag.

Other new features in this release include an improved Control Center for checking on a site’s security and privacy controls, as well as an improved Login Manager.

The updated version of Firefox for the desktop (Windows, Mac, Linux) is now available here. Most of the changes in today’s release are also available in Firefox’s Android version, which you can find here.

via: techcrunch

CBS’s own over-the-top streaming service aimed at cord cutters has largely flown under the radar in comparison with more popular competitors like Netflix and Hulu. But now the network is hoping to change that, with the announcement that it will launch a brand-new “Star Trek” TV show exclusively on CBS All Access, the company’s on-demand streaming service. The show’s episodes, outside of a special preview broadcast, will not be available on CBS’s television network, the company says.

Instead, only those who pay for CBS All Access will be able to watch the new series, here in the U.S.

Alex Kurtzman, who also co-wrote and produced “Star Trek” (2009) with Roberto Orci, and “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013) with Orci and Damon Lindelof, has signed on to serve as exec producer for the new “Star Trek” series along with Heather Kadin. Kurtzman already has a relationship with CBS, as he is also an executive producer for other CBS shows like “Scorpion,” “Limitless,” and “Hawaii Five-O.”

Little is being revealed about the series itself, except that it will introduce new characters who are continuing to seek out new worlds and new civilizations, CBS’s announcement states. It’s also not related to the upcoming film “Star Trek Beyond,” notes the network.

The series will be the fifth following the original series than ran on NBC from 1966-67. Other “Star Trek” series included “The Next Generation” (1987-1994), “Deep Space Nine” (1993-99), “Voyager:(1995-2001), and “Enterprise” (2001-05).

CBS All Access already offers every episode of all previous series.

“There is no better time to give ‘Star Trek’ fans a new series than on the heels of the original show’s 50th anniversary celebration,” said David Stapf, President, CBS Television Studios, in a release. “Everyone here has great respect for this storied franchise, and we’re excited to launch its next television chapter in the creative mind and skilled hands of Alex Kurtzman, someone who knows this world and its audience intimately.”

The only bad news…well, beyond the monthly price tag? CBS says the new show won’t launch until January 2017.

The CBS All Access service is available today via the CBS app on iOS, Android and Windows 10 and is through connected devices like Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, and Roku. For $5.99 per month, subscribers can access 7,500 episodes from the current television season, previous seasons and classic shows on-demand nationwide. Non-subscribers are still able to watch some CBS TV clips and shows in the app, but not as many.

The promise of a new “Stark Trek” series could prove to be a big draw for fans, some of whom feel the concept works better as a TV show rather than in feature films. (An informal poll around TechCrunch found that our resident Trek fans would, indeed, cough up the subscription fee to watch more “Star Trek.”)

The delay in expanding the “Star Trek” universe through another TV property has had a lot to do with the complicated rights surrounding the nearly 50-year old franchise. CBS controls the TV side of the franchise thanks to its ownership of the Paramount TV library, explains Variety, which is how this is possible.

The move makes sense for CBS, which has been betting big on more sci-fi and fantasy shows in recent months. For example, the premiere of its new drama “Supergirl” did even better than expected, making it fall TV’s top new show. It then used “Supergirl’s” opening to push another techie-filled series, “Scorpion,” which hit a five-week high thanks to its lead-in – the best since its season premiere, Variety also reported.

Those series would have similar audience demographics as the forthcoming “Star Trek,” giving CBS an opportunity to establish its own niche in the streaming landscape if handled correctly.

But we should note that CBS’s push of its streaming service is something of a departure for the network, which has practically crippled All Access in the past by making some of its best content unavailable.

While the service today offers access to a number of current seasons and past seasons for a variety of CBS Shows, including “The Good Wife” and “Blue Bloods,” for example, as well as older shows like “CSI: Miami” or “MacGyver,” its few subscribers are likely frustrated to find that some of CBS’s current shows can’t be viewed in their entirety, including past seasons.

For instance, All Access today only offers clips or a limited number of episodes on-demand for a couple of its most-watched shows, “Big Bang Theory” and “2 Broke Girls,” even for its paying subscribers. (You can watch all 6 of “Big Bang’s” Season 9 episodes to date, but nothing else. “2 Broke Girls” only has 8 clips.)

And it’s unclear to potential new subscribers which CBS shows will offer full seasons and back catalogs, and which won’t.

Meanwhile, CBS has oddly bet instead on making live TV streams – that is, linear TV – available on mobile and connected devices. By July, it said its live TV coverage reached 75 percent of the U.S., thanks to its growing lineup of affiliate partnerships. Today, live TV coverage is available in more than 110 markets across the U.S., the network says.

In addition to being available on CBS All Access, the new “Star Trek” show will also be distributed to a worldwide audience by CBS Studios International though television and other services.

Via: techcrunch

Well here’s a blockbuster acquisition for you. Gaming mothership Activision Blizzard has entered into an agreement to acquire King.com, maker of the wildly popular game Candy Crush and probably other games that I have nor ever will play. Mobile. Games. It’s all of the hot things.

Oh, and King says it had 474 million monthly active users in the third quarter this year. So there’s that. King went public in 2014.

Here’s what Activision had to say:

On November 2, 2015, Activision Blizzard, Inc. and King Digital Entertainment plc announced the signing of a definitive agreement under which ABS Partners C.V., a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, will acquire all of the outstanding shares of King for $18.00 in cash per share, for a total equity value of $5.9 billion.

Activision Blizzard believes that the addition of King’s highly-complementary business will position Activision Blizzard as a global leader in interactive entertainment across mobile, console and PC platforms, and positions the company for future growth. The combined company will have a world-class interactive entertainment portfolio of top-performing franchises.

Activision Blizzard CEO, Bobby Kotick, sold the acquisition to investors in a press release by saying:

The combined revenues and profits solidify our position as the largest, most profitable standalone company in interactive entertainment. With a combined global network of more than half a billion monthly active users, our potential to reach audiences around the world on the device of their choosing enables us to deliver great games to even bigger audiences than ever before.

Now-uber-rich CEO of King, Riccardo Zacconi, said:

We are excited to be entering into this Acquisition with Activision Blizzard. Since 2003, we have built one of the largest player networks on mobile and Facebook, with 474 million monthly active users in the third quarter 2015, and our talented team has created some of the most successful mobile game franchises. We believe that the Acquisition will position us very well for the next phase of our company’s evolution and will bring clear benefits to our players and employees.

Most players of Candy Crush will probably never know that the company who created it sold it. They’ll keep playing their games happily. Crushing Candy. I mean, that’s what you do in that game, right?

Anyways. Mobile eyeballs are the hot hot, especially in gaming.

Many jokes were made as the announcement hit Twitter. I’m not going to call this a good tweet, but it’s pretty indicative of what you’ll read for the next few days:

Via: techcrunch

Alphabet, which backs diversity in all facets of technology, is helping to shed light on a specific project…a film called “CODEGIRL“. It comes via filmmaker Lesley Chilcott, who you might be familiar with from her work on “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Waiting for Superman.”

As an extension of Google’s “Made With Code” project, the new documentary is being shared, free of charge, on YouTube until November 5th. The film will be in theaters in the next few weeks.

Here’s Susan Wojcicki’s (CEO of YouTube) summary of the film:

“CODEGIRL” follows the story of 5,000 girls from 60 countries as they compete in a global entrepreneurship and coding competition by Technovation. The girls have three months to develop an app that attempts to solve a problem in their local community. In the film, they size up their competition, interact with teachers and local mentors, learn to code, and pitch their ideas all in hopes of winning $10,000 in funding and support.

Wojcicki cited optics as a reason for a lack of women who code and called out some of Google’s own research:

Girls don’t see positive role models of other girls and women in popular culture. In a study of popular films in 11 countries, fewer than 20 percent of computer science or tech roles were held by women.

YouTube seems to be a great place to launch this film, as AdAge just reported that some popular female YouTubers carry more clout than some mainstream celebs:

You can support the film by sharing it with the hashtag “#Rallyforcodegirl.”

Via: techcrunch

In a crushing blow to the tech industry and privacy advocates, the Senate today passed the controversial Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).

The bill, which passed the Senate on a 74-21 bipartisan vote, is intended to allow companies to share information about cybersecurity threats with the government. However, critics, particularly those in the tech industry, say the bill will extend the surveillance capabilities of government intelligence agencies while doing little to prevent hacks.

The bill has already passed the House of Representatives. The White House backs CISA, and it will likely sign the bill into law.

Prior to the bill’s passage on Tuesday, senators fought for amendments that would reign in CISA and offer more privacy protections. However, all amendments intended to increase the removal of personal information from threats failed. Senators adopted a 10-year sunset clause for the bill, though privacy advocates like Senator Al Franken hoped the bill would expire in six.

Though the bill was expected to pass, today’s vote was a huge setback for tech’s lobbying efforts on surveillance issues. In the wake of the revelations of former government contractor Edward Snowden, large tech companies have pushed the government to curtail surveillance practices, most recently with the passage of the USA FREEDOM Act.

Via: techcrunch

Reminder: The U.K. government is preparing to publish a draft bill aiming to strengthen and shore up the intelligence and security agencies’ capabilities in the digital era. The proposed legislation, called the Investigatory Powers Bill, is expected to be published on Wednesday — kicking off the parliamentary debate process in earnest as MPs and a special committee get to pore over the proposals in detail.

The bill will replace the contentious DRIPA (which has a sunset clause of 2016): aka the data capture legislation pushed through the House of Commons with unseemly haste back in 2014, as the then-coalition government claimed emergency legislation was necessary to plug the gap left after European data retention powers were struck down as disproportionate by Europe’s top court.

Earlier parliamentary debates on the impending U.K. Investigatory Powers bill have included MPs asking the Home Secretary, Theresa May, whether the government will be adopting specific independent recommendations — such as from theAnderson report — that judicial sign off be required for intercept warrants, rather than allowing senior ministers to grant warrants as is the case now.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC yesterday, May said her decision on this point would be revealed when the bill is presented to Parliament on Wednesday.

As others have also noted, the government PR engine has been spinning up ahead of publication of the draft legislation with May attempting to paint the bill as ‘watered down’ compared to her prior attempt to legislate in this area — aka the 2012 Communications Data bill — which had been dubbed a ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ by critics.

That earlier bill failed to get the support of enough MPs to pass through Parliament. The government clearly wants to avoid being handed another legislative scalp.

“It doesn’t have some of the more contentious powers that were in that bill. So, for example we won’t be requiring communication service providers from in the UK to store third-party data, we won’t be making the same requirements in relation to data retention on overseas CSPs,” said May yesterday, of the new bill.

“And crucially, we will not be giving powers to go through people’s browsing history. That is not what the investigatory powers bill is about.”

However media reports suggest ISPs will in fact be required to retain web browsing history for 12 months and this data will be accessible to intelligence and security agencies without a warrant — with only specific pages visited within a website requiring the authorization of a warrant.

It remains to be seen exactly what the bill will propose but measures to sanction state-powered hacking are another possibility, given such powers were also mooted in the Anderson report as a possible workaround for strong encryption.

There have been recent moves by the government to clarify some of its anti-encryption rhetoric — with the Internet Safety Minister last week stating the government will not be attempting to ban encryption, as Prime Minister David Cameron had appeared to suggest earlier this year.

But given that a ban on encryption would never have been workable (not to mention politically untenable), this encryption ‘u-turn’ is best viewed as a strategic exercise in misdirection — i.e. to detract from other measures the government is seeking to control, and screws it does plan to tighten, in the incoming legislation.

“Encryption is important for people to be able to keep themselves safe when they are dealing with these modern communications in the digital age but we will be setting out the current position, which does enable the authorities with proper authorisation to issue warrants,” May told the BBC yesterday.

What would happen in the case of a warrant being issued on a service provider to decrypt data when they have implemented end-to-end encryption and thus have zero access to the data being sought remains to be seen.

Another area the bill is expected to tackle is the oversight regime for investigatory powers — with a view to replacing the problematic, 15-year-old RIPA legislation with a clear legal framework for surveillance. On this point, the Anderson report noted:  “The current law is fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent.  It is time for a clean slate.”

We’ll find out more on Wednesday when the draft bill is finally made public.

At the same time as the U.K. seeks to legislation for greater data retention powers, Europe as a whole continues to move the other way — with the European Court of Justice last month invalidating the 15-year-old Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement between the EU and the US owing to concerns about the privacy impact of government mass surveillance programs on European’s fundamental privacy rights.

Via: techcrunch

Today, there are a variety of apps to choose from if you just want to privately chat with friends or even place phone calls without having to give out your real phone number – for example, Google Voice, Burner, kik, Viber, Whatsapp and others are popular choices. But these apps aren’t fully private. Users still have to provide a phone number or email when creating an account, or, in some cases, those you chat with can still find you at any time via your permanent user name.

A newly launched app called Buzz has a different idea – instead of offering self-destructing messages, Buzz’s focus is on self-destructing connections.

That is, the connections you make on Buzz will automatically expire after 72 hours, unless both parties choose to continue chatting.

It’s a concept that makes sense for those who are just meeting for the first time – like someone you meet while at a bar, perhaps, or those you want to chat with when online dating.

Often, dating site users will ask for your digits in order to continue your conversations outside the dating platform itself. But not everyone is ready to hand over their real phone number, which is why apps like Burner or kik have come in handy.

But virtual phone numbers from Burner are not free, and they expire after a limited time unless you buy more credits or choose to subscribe to Burner’s auto-renewing service. In addition, if you use the same phone number while chatting with multiple new friends you met via online dating, you can’t “burn” the number (i.e., destroy it) to end contact with that one connection who isn’t panning out, but then continue to use that number to talk with others.

Meanwhile, though the majority of chat applications offer a way to communicate without having to give someone your actual phone number, you’re still discoverable by way of your username. That means that if someone wanted to stalk you, they could create new accounts to find you again on the service because they know your identity.

Buzz, however, is far more private. Users only have to add a photo, name and gender when signing up. Then, you’re provided with a temporary, unique identifier known as your Buzz Code. This is how others add you in the app.

After connecting, your conversation will only last for 72 hours before expiring unless both users indicate they want to continue chatting. If only one party says “yes,” the connection and conversation self-destructs and the other party no longer has a way to contact you. However, if both parties indicate they want to keep talking, the conversation can continue in the app. (You can also end conversations at any time if things get creepy, we should note.)

Plus, unlike competing messaging apps, your Buzz Code is not permanent and you can change it whenever you choose. The company says that it may soon offer disposable “vanity” codes as an in-app purchase, so you can be added by a name, nickname, or other handle of your own creation instead. These, too, you can change at any time for privacy reasons.

The idea for the app comes from co-founders Matthew Groves, Brian Albright and Hanna Xu – all three having previously met while they worked at the messaging app Tango. Groves and Albright were QA engineers, and Xu was a designer.

The team first thought up Buzz after hanging out in a bar, and watching the interaction between a guy and girl who had been flirting. “[Matt and Brian] were joking around, saying ‘she’s probably giving him a fake number,'” explains Xu. “But working on a chat app, we see that a lot – people don’t want to give out their contact info to strangers…so why not make an app that keeps your contact information private and is a really easy way to end conversations?,” the founders realized.

Groves and Albright left Tango in January to develop Buzz and Xu later joined them, though the Sunnyvale-based startup itself was not officially founded until July. Thanks to their mobile messaging backgrounds, the team decided to build their own infrastructure, rather than relying on third-party APIs like Layer, Twilio or Sinch, the latter whose API they tested during the TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2014 hackathon.

Though the team ran a small beta with a hundred users before its launch, the real market test is happening now that the app is available to the public. The hope is that users’ increased interest in maintaining their privacy, combined with the challenges faced when using alternative messaging apps, will allow Buzz to establish its own niche in the crowded messaging landscape.

Buzz is a free download on iOS and Android.

Via: techcrunch