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.

It is at rocketalk.com. I use it on my Symbian Series 60 phone and my friend uses it on a Windows Mobile phone.

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.

It could of course be nothing to do with any of these things, and it could be a genuinely groundbreaking mobile idea….it could……

“I met with X founder Y last week to see a demo of their new product launching later this year.

This is a serious company with a dead simple, viral product in the mobile voice messaging space. X raised $3 TRILLION (three trillion united states dollars) from Morons & Partners some time ago, and they are rumoured to have at least one director.

The founders both came out of their own arses and also worked together on other previous vapourware.

There’s not much we can say yet about the product, but I will say that this is one of the mobile applications that I’ve seen every day. Sign up to be notified of launch on the X home page. And I’m being paid for this article in free hot air balloon rides.”

CNET story here http://news.com.com/Virgin+Ele.....;subj=news

Hope Ping isn’t another “thud” like the 5GB Virgin MP3 player.

You can’t please everyone.

That’d be cool, although not as cool as how Zixxo is in trouble now that Google local does coupons.

Of course, that is what techcrunch is. We all know it, but we come here anyway because the info is valuable.

Remember Segway (aka IT)? It was going to change the world. Entire cities would need to be redesigned. But nobody knew what it was. Years later, cities haven’t been rebuilt and the world of transportation hasn’t been turned upside down. My point: save the hype for people who actually care. We’ll care when we know what it is. People are ultraskeptical these days and tooting the horn for what for all purposes amounts to vapor right now just gives the impression of nepotism.

Dave

hmm… their last product never launched. therefore maybe today’s tech crunch actually is a product launch. they are launching nothing.

this “were a cool startup with special people” and presumptuous notion that we minions should care is getting really, really old.

The sender of the message probably sets up an address book online to enter all of the names, text message addresses, emails, preferred notification method, etc. If pinger is well designed, then when the sender dials in to record the call, the system will have a voice-activated address book (using speechworks or nuance voice engine) that will allow the person to simply speak the name of the recipient or group so that the text message(s) or email(s) are then sent out to the name(s) automatically.

If the dial-in number to retrieve the voice message is a local number (not 800), then the business model could be a rev share with the CLEC (like freeconferencecall.com) where the termination fees from burning the free long distance minutes are shared with the traffic generateor (here, pinger). Alternatively, they could provide an 800 number (not needed, in my opinion) and throw ads on it, but that would be a more cumbersome system. If, alternatively, pinger has found a way to deliver the wav file directly to the phone, that would be a big improvement over dial-in systems.

I look forward to seeing what they’re built. Right now, this is all just a guess.