The most popular messaging apps have hundreds of millions of users, but how secure are they really? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been finding out,producing a “secure messaging scorecard” to rate them on a range of criteria.

Are messages encrypted in transit, and encrypted so the provider can’t read them? Can you verify contacts’ identities? Are past communications secure if your keys are stolen? Is the code open to independent review, is the security design properly documented, and has the code been audited?

“Many companies offer ‘secure messaging’ products – but are these systems actually secure? We decided to find out, in the first phase of a new EFF Campaign for Secure & Usable Crypto,” explains the EFF.

“This scorecard represents only the first phase of the campaign. In later phases, we are planning to offer closer examinations of the usability and security of the tools that score the highest here.”

What’s interesting is that the apps that score seven green ticks are the likes of ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal, SilentPhone, Silent Text and TextSecure. Yet for most mainstream users, what defines their choice of messaging app is not “how secure is it?” but rather “which one are my friends using?”

BBM, Facebook chat, Google Hangouts, Kik Messenger, Skype, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Viber don’t score well on the EFF’s criteria, for example. Apple’s iMessage actually does pretty well, with five out of seven ticks.

Even so, will the EFF’s new research encourage those mainstream messaging apps to beef up their security? Or are we going to continue seeing a divide: security-conscious people messaging other security-conscious people on the niche apps, while everyone else continues using the popular apps?

The comments section is open for your thoughts: I’d be interested to hear how important security is in your choice of messaging app, and whether you’ve tried to persuade friends to switch from one to another on those grounds. If so, did they?

Also on the radar today:

• WireLurker is a new malware family that targets Macs and iOS devices, infecting the former in order to reach the latter – including non-jailbroken devices. “It is the first known malware that can infect installed iOS applications similar to a traditional virus,” claims Palo Alto Networks.
• Musician Aloe Blacc has published an opinion piece on Wired strongly criticising US streaming music service Pandora after he earned less than $4,000 for his co-writing share of a song streamed more than 168 million times. “If songwriters cannot afford to make music, who will?”
• The Verge has tested an early production model of Will.i.am’s Puls smartwatch, and isn’t impressed. To say the least. “It’s objectively the worst product I’ve touched all year... The Puls feels like a Kickstarter concept product that never should have made it to production.” Ouch.
• Snapchat is getting into music, video and news. Or at least preparing to. Digiday claims the messaging app is in talks with Comedy Central, Spotify, Vice, BuzzFeed, CNN, the Daily Mail, ESPN, Cosmopolitan magazine, National Geographic, People magazine and Vevo.
• A crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo by Code.org aiming to provide “an hour of code for every student” is already up to $2.8m of pledges, with Mark Zuckerberg already having chipped in. “Our schools teach kids how to dissect a frog and how weather works. Today, it’s equally fundamental to learn to ‘dissect an app’, or how the Internet works...”
• I actually don’t mind Russell Brand, but the “Parklife” meme – essentially someone realised that his more verbose sentences perfectly suit someone shouting “PARKLIFE” at the end, as if he was delivering Phil Daniels’ lines in the Blur song – has been making me smile a lot this past day.

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What stories have piqued your interest, and what do you think of the pieces linked to above? The comments section is open for your views.

Even if you’re not that angry about the rise of free-to-play (or “freemium”) gaming in the world of smartphones and tablets, the latest episode of South Parkpromises to be a hoot.

It takes aim at the trend of games funded by in-app purchases of virtual items, and judging from reports, nails the flaws of some of the more cynical cash-in titles.

VentureBeat has a good summary of the pitch to characters Terrence and Phillip, who are thinking of starring in their own mobile game:

1.Entice the player with an easy game loop.

2. Compliment the player with flashy casino slots-like rewards and graphics.

3. Train players to spend the in-game currency.

4. Then offer players the chance to spend real money for that in-game currency.

5. Then make the game about waiting, but let them pay to avoid waiting.

It also notes the similarity between the spoof game in South Park, and the very real games based on rival shows The Simpsons and Family Guy. The episode is likely to provoke wry smiles even among defenders of freemium as a business model, but I suspect it may become a rallying point for its critics.

What do you think? If you’ve seen the full episode, do its jabs hit home? And more generally, are you seeing examples of freemium games that aren’t as cynical as the formula above, or do you think the model can’t help but fall into this pattern? The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the tech radar this morning:

• Encouraging news for anyone who wants Twitter to be doing more to help users – women in particular – who are being harassed on the social network. The company is working with nonprofit group Women, Action & the Media on a better way for people to report harassment, from hate speech to doxxing.
• A great piece on Google’s Spotlight Stories short films technology, described as “immersive shorts”, which is being pitched to Hollywood. The action is shot in 360 degrees, then the viewer gets to control the point-of-view. “Something that uses advanced tech to reframe storytelling itself,” as Medium’s Steven Levy puts it.
• PewDiePie isn’t regretting turning off comments on his YouTube videos. “Before I turned off my comments, I think things were going downhill. So, making that change, I feel like we’ve been going back up, and it’s been making me really happy, and it’s been making me really enjoy what I do.” A worrying statement for YouTube, given that he’s its biggest star.
• The latest on the WireLurker malware for Macs and iOS devices uncovered earlier this week in 467 Mac apps. Apple now says it is blocking those apps in order to prevent people installing them, and then having their mobile devices infected. I suspect there may be less on-stage jabs at Android for malware at the company’s next launch.
• Tablet maker Nabi, which focuses on children, has a couple of big new devices. Literally big: they’re 20 and 24-inch tablets. The theory being that multiple children can play together on one device. Having seen my two sons’ differing tastes (currently Angry Birds for one and Toca Boca for the other) I’m wondering if there’s a split-screen mode.

What stories have piqued your interest today? Jump in below the line with your recommendations, as well as your thoughts on the stories above.

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The way Facebook curates the news feed of its users – through an algorithm designed to prioritise 300 updates a day out of 1,500-plus that you could see from friends and pages that you follow – has often been controversial.

Now the social network says it’s giving more control back to those users, or as it put it in a blog post: “more ways for you to control and give feedback on your News Feed”.

How so? It’s all about the news feed settings page, which now makes it easier to unfollow individual friends, pages or groups, as well as re-follow those they’ve unfollowed in the past.

From now, they can also provide more feedback when hiding something from their news feed, including choosing to see less stories from that user, page or group. The idea, seemingly, is more manual curation to tune the settings that Facebook uses to decide those 300 stories a day.

Is this a good move, and if you use Facebook, will you use the new features? But will this fly over the heads of most of Facebook’s 1.3 billion users, given that many still don’t even know their feed is being bossed by an algorithm in the first place? The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the technology news radar today:

• Apple has launched a new web tool, but this time it’s nothing to do with removing Bono from your iPhone. Instead, it’s to deregister old phone numbers from its iMessage system. Very useful if, for example, you’ve switched from iOS to Android at some point.
• DARPA is putting $11m of funding into a tool called PLINY that it describes as “Autocomplete for programmers”. Which doesn’t mean inserting random, occasionally-comical errors into their code, thankfully. It aims to draw on past code: “We envision a system where the programmer writes a few of lines of code, hits a button and the rest of the code appears...”
• Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaine has come out strongly against harassment within the games world. “Over the past couple of months, there’s been a small group of people who have been doing really awful things. They have been making some people’s lives miserable, and they are tarnishing our reputation as gamers. It’s not right...”
• Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi is on the rise, and now it’s apparentlyraising $1.5bn at a valuation of $40bn – a huge round that would fund the company’s continued efforts to expand into the West.
• Vanity Fair has a good piece on how Amazon ended up such a divisive entity within the book publishing world, including its dispute with publisher Hachette. “In general terms, Hachette has claimed that the dispute is about money, whereas Amazon has claimed that it is about e-book pricing. These may sound like the same thing, but they’re not. At the same time, it is likely that the dispute is about both.”

• The European Space Agency is continuing to explore the potential to 3D print a Moon base from “lunar material”. Here’s its latest video on how it might work:

The UK’s next general election looks like it may be dominated by the topic of immigration, thanks to the rise of UKIP and the desire of the established political parties to head off a drain in supporters by edging closer to its policies.

If there’s a looming threat to British jobs, though, isn’t it more likely to come from robots rather than immigration? A new report published by Deloitte, the Oxford Martin School and the University of Oxford hints at exactly that.

It claims that 35% of existing UK jobs are at “high risk of replacement in the next 20 years” from technology, automation and robotics, with lower-paid jobs more than five times as likely to be replaced than higher-paid jobs.

“Unless these changes coming in the next two decades are fully understood and anticipated by businesses, policy makers and educators, there will be a risk of avoidable unemployment and under-employment,” warns Deloitte’s senior partner Angus Knowles-Cutler.

Yet the report also suggests that in London specifically, 73% of businesses are planning to increase their overall headcount, to bring in the new skills and roles required by technology advances.

Even so, are we sleepwalking into a dangerous situation if we don’t put the correct educational elements in place to retrain people for these new kinds of jobs? Is this just a problem for politicians, or does the technology industry have social responsibilities too?

The comments section is open for your views.

Some other stories on the technology radar today:

• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the core of his company: “There is Windows, there is Office 365, and there is Azure. That’s it.” Although I can’t help wondering where gaming fits into this: Nadella has made it clear that he’s not intending to sell Xbox, and spending $2.5bn on Minecraft-maker Mojang is a clear statement of intent. So does gaming fit under “Windows” then?
• There’s another iOS security issue being discussed: Masque Attack. Uncovered by security firm FireEye, it involves replacing iOS apps installed on a device with malware. It follows the recent discovery of the Mac-to-iOS WireLurker malware. “Masque Attacks can pose much bigger threats than WireLurker,” claims the company.

• Like Facebook, Google has launched a campaign to raise money to fight Ebola. It’s promising to donate $2 itself for every $1 donated. “These organizations are doing remarkable work in very difficult circumstances to help contain this outbreak, and we hope our contribution will help them have an even greater impact,” wrote CEO Larry Page.
• There’s a new Raspberry Pi computer in town: the Model A+. It’s smaller and consumes less power than the existing Model A, and will sell for just $20. “When we announced Raspberry Pi back in 2011, the idea of producing an ‘ARM GNU/Linux box for $25’ seemed ambitious, so it’s pretty mind-bending to be able to knock another $5 off the cost while continuing to build it here in the UK...”

• The latest concern for celebrities, politicians and business leaders hoping their private information doesn’t get leaked: DarkHotel. Attackers who lurk on hotel Wi-Fi networks waiting for high-profile guests to check in then log in. “This is NSA-level infection mechanism,” said security firm Kaspersky Lab.
• Finally, Maker Club is a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo trying to raise $10,000 for a kit for children that helps them “learn to code, design and build 3D printed robots”. “All the parts for the robots are interchangeable, like Lego, so once you’ve got the hang of things, there’s almost nothing you can’t invent...”

What other stories have you seen this morning? Make your recommendations – as well as chewing over the stories above – in the comments section.

The default stance on King’s Candy Crush Saga mobile game in the Guardian’s comments section seems to be “It’s rubbish and cynical, and the people who play it are fools”. It gets quite a kicking whenever we cover it.

And yet... Candy Crush Saga has been phenomenally popular, with tens of millions of daily players who don’t give two hoots about online anger over freemium business models or copying older games.

You or I may not be a fan of Candy Crush Saga, but our mums, dads, aunts, uncles, cousins and cats (okay, most of the above) are likely to be several hundred levels down its rabbit-hole.

There’s a real split in perception between the people who talk about Candy Crush on the Guardian and other websites – who hate it – and the people who are playing it out there in the world and loving it.

Anyway, its sequel is out now: Candy Crush Soda Saga. Released yesterday for Android and iOS, it’s still about swapping sweets to make matches, but now with the inclusion of “soda” bottles (i.e. fizzy pop) that fills up the screen to complete each level.

Can it repeat the success of Candy Crush Saga – a game so popular and lucrative that it was the single biggest factor in its publisher going public earlier this year? Or is King in danger of being the next Zynga, overworking a formula that – once you’ve given your mobile life up to it once – may put you off starting again?

The comments section is open for your views.

Also on the tech radar today:

• The latest chart of YouTube channels sorted by how many new subscribers they have, courtesy of OpenSlate and Tubefilter. PewDiePie may have just passed 32m subscribers, but he added another 757,982 in October alone.
• Apple is going to face a federal lawsuit over complaints that users who switched from iOS to Android stopped getting their text messages. The company has just launched a web tool to sort this out, but the lawsuit will proceed.
• Mozilla is having a busy week: its latest announcement is a site called MozVR: a virtual reality website about, well, virtual reality websites. “MozVR is where we will share experimental VR Web experiences, provide resources, and showcase work from developers in the growing VR web community,” explains the company.
• Important news for Windows users: what Ars Technica describes as “a potentially catastrophic vulnerability in virtually all versions of Windows” has been discovered, with a patch already available. The bigger picture: “Tuesday’s disclosure means that every major TLS stack – including Apple SecureTransport , GNUTLS,OpenSSL, NSS, and now Microsoft SChannel – has had a severe vulnerability this year.”
• Finally, as a more positive follow-up to yesterday’s fears about robots taking our jobs, here’s a beautiful time-lapse animation of Androids having a snog fromAndroid Jones.

The current generation of games consoles feels like a relatively open battle: Sony’s PlayStation 4 is perceived to have had the edge over Microsoft’s Xbox One so far, but latest figures from the latter suggest the race is far from won.

“As we head into the busy holiday season Xbox One led generation 8 console sales in the US for the past two weeks,” wrote Microsoft’s corporate vice president of devices and studios, Yusuf Mehdi, yesterday. “Shortly, we will have sold in to retailers more than 10 million Xbox One consoles.”

To be clear, the first sentence relates to the US only, but the latter is global shipments. The releases of Halo: the Master Chief Collection and Sunset Overdrive have brought some bona-fide buzz to Xbox One at exactly the right time, ahead of the holiday-shopping season.

PlayStation 4 hit 10m sales in August, although that’s sales rather than shipments to retailers (which is the Xbox One figure). So Sony remains ahead, but Microsoft is at least gaining ground. How do you see this battle spinning out in the long term, though?

If you’re a gamer and have chosen one (or both) of these consoles, how happy are you with your choice, and what would you like to see Sony or Microsoft do in the next couple of years to take it forward? Let’s not forget Nintendo: is the Wii U finding its niche in the current console market?

If you’re not a gamer, are any of these devices appealing to you in their other guise – as home entertainment systems – or are you more likely to have a box powered by Apple, Google, Amazon or other tech firms sitting under your TV? The comments section is open for your thoughts.

Also on the technology radar this morning:

• Twitter has opened up about some of the changes it’s planning to make in the coming months: the ability to record, edit and share videos natively on Twitter; better ways to show users what they’ve missed when they log back in, and “an instant, personalised timeline for new users who don’t want to spend time cultivating one on their own”.
• There’s a new round in the row between Taylor Swift and streaming service Spotify: her label says it’s been paid “less than $500,000” for US streams of her songs in the last year, while Spotify counters that it’s paid her label and publishers $2m globally in that period. “We paid Taylor’s label and publisher roughly half a million dollars in the month before she took her catalogue down...”
• More big news from Microsoft: plans to open up its .NET and Visual Studio to more developers, including open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack, and expanding it to run on Linux and Mac OS X as well as Windows. The vision: to reach developers “whether you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating”.
• Good news for gamers: “Playing action video games substantially improves performance in a range of attentional, perceptual, and cognitive tasks”. Call of Duty is good for your brain! Although I can sadly report that having children that don’t sleep well substantially reduces your performance at action games. And, to be honest, the full gamut of attentional, perceptual, and cognitive tasks...
• Samsung’s Oculus Rift-powered Gear VR will go on sale in the US in Decemberfor $249 with a Bluetooth joypad bundled in, or $199 standalone. Are you excited about strapping a phablet to your face and exploring virtual worlds?

• But while we’re on Samsung, boo hiss to the company for making its startling corporate-diversity rap video private, after it was reported by tech sites. “Samsung, we 280,000 humans, 40% 112,000 women, you don’t have to worry after giving birth...” I suspect it’ll be returning in a few mashups imminently.

What else? The comments section is open for your thoughts on the above, and other links you’ve spotted today.

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Apple’s new Health app – and the HealthKit platform that lets other companies’ health and activity-tracking apps tie into it – was one of the big new features in its iOS 8 software, which launched a couple of months ago.

Health is capable of collecting, storing and analysing a range of personal data, but there are clear privacy implications here – for Apple and any company involved in this space, from Google and Microsoft to the growing number of smaller fitness-focused app and device makers.

According to Reuters, the US Federal Trade Commission is alive to the issues. It reports that the FTC is “seeking assurances from Apple that it will prevent sensitive health data collected by its upcoming smartwatch and other mobile devices from being used without owners’ consent”.

The report also claims that Apple is stressing during the conversations that it will not be selling health data to third parties like advertisers, with spokesperson Trudy Muller telling Reuters that “we designed HealthKit with privacy in mind”.

This is less an Apple issue than it is a wider regulatory challenge, when health data is heavily protected if it’s gathered in a medical context, but much more of a grey area when it’s gathered by an app and/or device.

So, questions: if you’re using health-tracking apps and gadgets, are you thinking about the privacy of your data? Have you dug into the providers’ privacy policies and found anything reassuring or worrying?

And if you don’t use these apps and devices, is privacy one of the reasons? What are your concerns, and how would you like to see technology firms and regulators alike approaching the issue? The comments section is open for your thoughts.

Some more stories ripe for discussion today:

• Hachette and Amazon have settled their long-running dispute, agreeing that the book publisher will have “full responsibility” for setting its ebook prices on Amazon’s Kindle Store. Watch now for the ripples as other publishers react.
• Samsung is apparently spending “tens of millions” developing a new shortform video service codenamed Volt, which would try to take on YouTube with exclusive content and, possibly, music. Although YouTube has plenty of both, so it would be a tough challenge.
• This is a really interesting use of Oculus Rift and virtual reality: Canadian environmental group Dogwood Initiative is using the technology to show what an oil tanker spill near Vancouver might look like, and how it would affect the city.
• “The men are coming to Pinterest” reports TechCrunch. Apparently men now account for a third of all new signups to the site, whose gender split has traditionally been 70-30 or 80-20 in favour of women. And in countries like India, Japan and South Korea, the split is now 50-50.
• Finally, Tubefilter and OpenSlate have published their latest chart of the top 100 games channels on YouTube. It’s another reminder of just how popular games are on the service, with 4.6bn views for the top 100 alone. No surprises for guessing who’s top: PewDiePie.

What else? The comments section is open for your thoughts on the stories above, and your suggestions of other links worth reading.