Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban • Hacker News Board

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#121

Post by Kenji » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:14 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #65

I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals. Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This i…

Privacy that relies on trust in the state is no privacy at all. You are an opponent of privacy. A shame.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#122

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:15 PM UTC

pedrodelfino wrote: post #24

I am from Brazil and I can say: we are almost becoming the new Argentina. And this is quite interesting because Argentina is becoming the new Venezuela (at least they were, but few weeks ago they had elections and the left wing lost). And Venezuela clearly is becoming the new Cuba.

Your pessimism is undeserved. You seem to have formed your mood 5 years ago, and not revised it since then.

Venezuela just officialized a huge change in direction with a complete majority for opposition in parliament. Argentina has just elected an opposition president that is already undoing the policies of the previous governments.

Now, I'm also Brazilian, and, of course have more detailed info about here than those countries. I've never been so optimist about our country. You know, I've watched the TV news yesterday (I guess first time in the year), and 2/3 of it was about the president's impeachment or criminal persecution of corrupt politicians/businesspeople. Yesterday there was nobody thrown into jail, but just last week there were 11.

You know, those people didn't start yesterday. Corruption was smaller before the current government, but those businesspeople now in jail have been living from government contracts since before the military coup. Some of the politicians now in jail have been in power since the military government.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#123

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

rubidium wrote: post #117

jacquesm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You reap what was sowed. Yes, what the NSA was (is!) doing is completely absurd. The net effect of that is a backlash against all information gathering by authorities and the practical effect of that is that companies will now be differentiated to greater or lesser extent by the amount of privacy their communications platforms give to ordinary citizens. This is what drives https anywhere and other such efforts. That…

First time I've read something by you I completely disagree with. "If they want to provide a communication service here, the law is clear that they must abide by judicial orders that allow wiretapping in very specific cases." I didn't the grandparent to be complaining. Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore. The fact that it had massive popular adaption means W…

> First time I've read something by you I completely disagree with.

That's scary. Well, there is a first time for everything.

> Simply stating that they are upholding the law of the country, which WhatsApp decided to ignore.

Have a read:

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014/country-chapters/brazi...

Brazil is not exactly a paragon of virtue when it comes to police force and legal affairs. Let's give the GGP a free pass for being entirely of 'good intentions', that still leaves you with a police apparatus that is involved in, amongst other things, unlawful killings and the use of torture, they rank 69th on the world corruption index, roughly around the region of such examples of upstanding morality with the authorities of Bulgaria, Romania, Greece and Italy.

If this were North-Korea or China everybody would be cheering on Whatsapp and FB for making a stand and not cooperating with the authorities.

Companies can make it easy on themselves by avoiding hard choices on which regimes to support in their quest for wire-tapping and which not by not having a footprint in a jurisdiction where such abuses are common and at the same time make it has hard as possible technically to actually cooperate in the first place. What you can't do you also can't be compelled to do.

The people of Brazil then have the option to make the use of such software illegal or not.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#124

Post by moxie » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:17 PM UTC

etiam wrote: post #2

Shame they went there instead of to Signal, but I guess it may still be a marginal improvement.

Marginal improvement in what sense? When considering privacy, Telegram is by far the worst option. They store the plaintext message history on the server of every message that every user has ever sent or received.

Even if WhatsApp weren't using end to end encryption by default, they would have no way of complying with government requests like this one, because they simply don't have the messages. Telegram, on the other hand, is a surveillance dream.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#125

Post by kbart » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #65

I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals. Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This i…

"No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it."

The problem is, that by definition, you can't take away privacy from criminals without taking it away from everyone else. Especially when term criminal varies from country to country -- in this case it might be a drug lord, but i.e. in Russia it might be an opposition leader or journalist that dug too deep.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#126

Post by rlpb » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

pqdbr wrote: post #65

I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals. Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This i…

> In Brazil, only a judge can authorize someone to be wiretapped

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10749400, it is claimed that "It says basically that police can require records of visited CONTENT without a court order and the ISP is required to supply that without informing the user." He is corrected by someone saying the text means metadata and not content.

Which is true? Do you not consider grabbing metadata to be a wiretap?

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#127

Post by kbart » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:26 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #98

pqdbr wrote: post #65

I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals. Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This i…

If you think this is going to do anything other than cause criminals to develop their own secure apps, quite frankly you're delusional. With the amount of money the drug cartels have, it will be trivial for them to simply hire developers to write them a secure messaging app.

Exactly. Cartels build their own radio networks[0], compared to that, building secure communications out of the available OSS projects is trivial.

0. http://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#128

Post by Puts » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:27 PM UTC

d_theorist wrote: post #89

pqdbr wrote: post #65

I'm a judge in Brazil. Even tough I'd pray to not be the one that had to give such an impopular order (affecting more then 100 million Brazilians - WhatsApp is really a hit here), we have laws in this country and we must prosecute criminals. Mark's talk about privacy is, in my opinion, totally misplaced. No right is absolute, and that includes the right to privacy. Criminals, for example, simply don't have it. This i…

The point of secure communication is that nobody except the sender and receiver can read it. It's not that we all agree not to read it unless we really really think the people are bad. That is not security. So, you either have secure communication systems available for everybody, and accept that the government is not always going to get what it wants, or you don't. There is no such thing as a secure system that a thi…

I'd say the point of security in communication is being able to verify that all participants are who they say they are. More so than hiding the content from third party. ;-)

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#129

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

bzxbot wrote: post #101

_jgdh wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its absurdly simple to make someone an alleged criminal. You simply need to accuse them of a crime. There are many countries where the government does exactly this - they accuse people such as human rights activists of crimes like "fomenting discord" and "promoting unrest" and lock them up. Under your enlightened regime of revoking the human right of privacy from alleged criminal, these people would have no recourse.…

No, it's not, at least not in Brazil. As mentioned above, wiretapping need to be authorized by a judge. The police must provide a reasonable justification. If the provided justification is weak or deemed unlawful, a lawyer can exclude all the data collected in trial. If privacy is a human right that cannot be violated ever, how are going to deal with criminals that use services such as WhatsApp?

> If privacy is a human right that cannot be violated ever, how are going to deal with criminals that use services such as WhatsApp?

By finding evidence that does not rely on services such as WhatsApp. How did anybody ever get convicted before the age of WhatsApp, or for that matter the invention of the telephone. It's not as if wiretaps and cell phone messages are the only kind of incriminating evidence that can be found on the vast majority of crimes. And if that is the evidence that stands between a free man/woman and their conviction then maybe it is better that they go free because it is all too easy to forge such evidence or to plant it.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#130

Post by etiam » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 1:32 PM UTC

vincentkriek wrote: post #68

julioneander wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Installing Signal to try as well! Can Signal be taken down like WhatsApp if the same happens again in the future?

Yes, Signal's advantage is the cryptographical security of the messages. It's NOT server independent.

I practice I agree, for now.

In principle, since both the Signal client and server are FLOSS, it should be possible to resist a block in some ways that might not be so easy with for example Whatsapp, but as far as I can tell, as things stand right now there is no built-in way to switch server, and asking millions of regular people to make changes to the source code of their cellphone software, recompile and manually reinstall does not seem like a recipe for success. I wonder if one might sensibly work around these things by fallback/optional connection to the server through Tor if Tor is available on the device?