Completely disagree. It was just a week or two before Snowden came out that New York Times was praising Skype for how "secure" it is, even against government snooping. The poor souls thought Skype was still P2P, when that stopped being true many years before. The NYT journalists were also probably using Skype to talk to their sources, thinking they are secure. That's why it's so important to have such reviews of these apps - especially if they're a more "mainstream app", and there's a potential for hundreds of millions of people to use it. If we can get hundreds of millions of people to use end-to-end encrypted communication, why not do it properly, and give them half-baked secure apps to use instead?
Also all "secure apps" that aren't fully open source should be considered insecure by default. No compromises. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Hangouts, Skype, they're all insecure and you can't rely on them for keeping your communications private.
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Completely disagree. It was just a week or two before Snowden came out that New York Times was praising Skype for how "secure" it is, even against government snooping. The poor souls thought Skype was still P2P, when that stopped being true many years before. The NYT journalists were also probably using Skype to talk to their sources, thinking they are secure. That's why it's so important to have such reviews of these apps - especially if they're a more "mainstream app", and there's a potential for hundreds of millions of people to use it. If we can get hundreds of millions of people to use end-to-end encrypted communication, why not do it properly, and give them half-baked secure apps to use instead?
Also all "secure apps" that aren't fully open source should be considered insecure by default. No compromises. Whatsapp, Snapchat, Hangouts, Skype, they're all insecure and you can't rely on them for keeping your communications private.