Technology: 100 million WhatsApp calls are made daily!

WhatsApp

Facebook-owned insta message service Whatapp claimed that its users are making 100 million calls a day.

To recall, the company had rolled out voice calling feature to its users in phases last year. The feature was first rolled out to WhatsApp users on Android followed by iOS, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone.

The voice call feature on Whatsapp is free and non-chargeable. The consumers use internet data to place the call. Although, the data used is charged according to the internet pack. The instant messaging service back in February had claimed that one billion people used WhatsApp.

"For more than a year, people have used WhatsApp Calling to talk with friends and family around the world. It's a great way to stay in touch, especially when connecting with people in other countries, or when messages alone won't do. Today, more than 100 million voice calls are made every day on WhatsApp - that's over 1,100 calls a second," WhatsApp said in a blog post.

On June 29, the Supreme Court will hear a petition seeking a ban on WhatsApp on the ground that the messaging platform's end-to-end encryption gives terrorists a means of communication that is impossible to intercept.

Filed by Sudhir Yadav, a Haryana-based right-to-information (RTI) activist, the petition said WhatsApp has from April started to enable its every message with 256-bit encryption that cannot be broken into.

Seeking a ban on WhatsApp in India, Yadav said any terrorist or criminal can safely chat on WhatsApp and make plans to harm the country and the Indian intelligence agencies would not be able to tap into their conversations to take necessary actions.

The petition said that in order to decrypt any message on WhatsApp, one would need a whopping 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,935 key combinations, which is almost impossible for even a super computer.

Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years, Yadav said.

In May this year, WhatsApp became the most popular messaging app all over the world used in 109 countries, or 55.6 percent of the world. The countries include India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia and many other countries in South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

WhatsApp currently has over one billion monthly active users. In India, over 70 million people use the messaging service. Of the 187 countries that SimilarWeb -- a Britain-based information technology company -- examined, WhatsApp was the world leader claiming 109 countries. (Read more)

Also in May, noted American computer programmer and creator of the first commercial anti-virus program, John McAfee claimed that he and his team were able to read encrypted messages from WhatsApp after exploiting a supposed flaw in the Android operating system. (Read more)

WhatsApp introduced the desktop app for both Windows and Mac in a bid to extend its reach beyond smartphones and tablets. Unlike WhatsApp for web, this app is not dependent on the mobile version for functioning.

The new desktop app is available for Windows 8+ and Mac OS 10.9+ and is synced with WhatsApp on the mobile device and because the app runs natively on desktop, users can expect more notifications, better keyboard shortcuts, and more. (Read more)
- With inputs from Jagran Post and Agencies