(Michael Arrington, TechCrunch) “I met with Pinger founders Greg Woock and Joe Sipher last week to see a demo of their new mobile product launching later this year.This is a serious company with a dead simple, viral product in the mobile voice messaging space. Pinger, which was called Project Edgar at the time, raised $3 million from Kleiner Perkins in November 2005, and Kleiner partner Randy Komisar joined the board of directors…”
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Trying Out Pinger
August 20, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Have you tried out Rocketalk?
It is at http://rocketalk.com. I use it on my Symbian Series 60 phone and my friend uses it on a Windows Mobile phone. We send Rocketalk messages to each other
across operators – instead of SMS messages that take so much time to type
on that little keypad.
Rocketalk lets me voice message from my phone to her phone.
Very similar to what SMS or MMS might do except these guys
seem to have actually met the promise of MMS.
All this with addition of text and pictures and videos. I can always
leave a voice message for any phone number or any email address
as well. They also allow me to publish to my personal web page – sort
of a easy going blog that allows text, pictures, videos to be publised
to my blog straight from my mobile phone
December 21, 2006 at 6:13 pm
Do you know the companies PINGER and SNAPVINE?
Pinger and Snapvine are highly INSECURE!!!!
What this means: I can break into your Pinger and Snapvine phone accounts. I can listen to your messages. I can send out messages as you.
How do I do this? Easy. I mask / spoof CALLER ID / ANI. Anyone can do this, amateur hacks, etc.
Well, there are others, but suffice to say that these companies are doing new things with social networking sites and phones that help to connect people.
The problem is that these companies have a scalability problem based on inbound calling.
You see, if you have hundreds of thousands or millions of users, you can’t give everyone a unique dial in phone number.
SECURITY PROBLEM
What these companies have done is based user identification on Caller ID / ANI – meaning that you call their service, and their systems recognize your phone via Caller ID.
The problem is that Caller ID is highly insecure and can be faked.
The problem that these “dial in” companies are trying to solve is one of scalability. They simply cannot have enough dial in numbers for each user.
Therefore, they have architected a way to recognize each caller by Caller ID and to base the entire user authentication system on this insecure method.
This can easily be hacked.
SOLUTION
The solution is funny – both Pinger and SnapVine make you enter in a PIN CODE when you dial in without validating your phone.
After you validate your phone, you no longer need to enter the PIN CODE.
So in effect, when you validate your phone, you make your account INSECURE.
What Pinger and SnapVine need to do is always require the PIN CODE.
January 27, 2009 at 10:07 am
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