Microsoft and Snapchat vulnerabilities got publicly exposed.

Here's a post to thank people who don't fear to publish information about security threats when the software companies don't care after they have been warned.

Microsoft for instance failed to correct serious issues after 90 days it has been reported to them by Google on its Project Zero blog. I mean, come on! Microsoft is a giant company. 720 hours is plenty to correct the bug in time.

Snapchat isn't a good player either.
For those who don't know, Snapchat is a social media site who mostly focuses on the exchange of so-called "snaps" : photos or short videos that delete themselves upon viewing.

The recipient can only see the video or photo once and while holding a finger on the screen. The "snaps" get deleted afterwards.
Well, not quite. The truth is, the snaps are marked for deletion by the operating system. The files get renamed with a ".nomedia" extension and will be really removed from the file system later, because, as you might have witnessed with the "Gallery" app, this operation is slow.

Many applications, which are illegal by the Snapchat terms and conditions as well as Google Play's, and hence were removed from the store, did something very simple: copy the marked files elsewhere and rename them. Voilà, users could view the snaps as long as they wanted and re-share them.
To prevent this, Snapchat used some encryption.

If you know a thing or two about encryption, you might be aware that the term encryption refers to an infinite number of techniques trying to "hide" data in some way or another. For instance, reversing the letters from a text is considered encryption.
As this very interesting and very well written article from GibsonSec will tell you, Snapchat uses AES/CBC with a single synchronous key. The decryption function in Python is only 8 "instructions" long, including two requests on a web service.

Snapchat founder said he doesn't care about security. He wants his users to have fun with the app. That's obviously something a product design major would say, not an engineer.
Because the truth is that if they want their service to exist in the future and make money, they should consider this issue very seriously. If people can cheat and anybody can save the snaps by downloading an app publicly available on the Play store, their whole business idea goes at the bottom of the sea.

Even if Google removes the apps from the store, Android users, hopefully, are free to download and install what they want on their device. So simply removing apps exploiting the encryption weakness is useless.

Snapchat played its cards very badly, as users got their credentials stolen because the company still considers security a minor issue...
There are plenty of websites featuring stolen photos and videos from Snapchat. What did the company say? It's because users installed third-party apps. Boo hoo. If the government did the same. Who would you blame? The citizens, the hackers? Nope. You'd blame the government. So you should blame Snapchat.

Snapchat doesn't give a **** about your privacy.