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

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#161

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:41 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…

That would be the first system like that available to public ever. "It's not that we all agree not to read it unless we really really think the people are bad" is pretty much the definition of the secrecy of correspondence we had since pre-digital era.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#162

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:47 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #129

bzxbot wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How did anybody ever get convicted before the age of WhatsApp, or for that matter the invention of the telephone.

A nitpick, but I really dislike this line of reasoning. Before WhatsApp criminals communicated using different means which were easier to monitor. Now that they have WhatsApp (or whatever), they will use that instead of easier to monitor methods. A move to modern communication tools gives them an edge over law enforcement, so it's no surprise LE feels a pressing need to do something about it. It's an arms race.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#163

Post by dheera » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

I miss the days of ICQ, MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Zephyr, Gtalk, Facebook's XMPP, and all those other messengers. They had relatively open or decipherable protocols, and on almost all OSes there were at least a couple decent applications that allowed you to login to all messaging services using a single piece of software. I could even write gateways and plugins to use NLP and autoreply, encrypt messages, and all kinds of other awesome things which I can't do anymore.

It seems like we've taken a step back in technology.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#164

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

Kenji wrote: post #121

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.

Society relies on trust in the state. If people have none, then you have bigger problems than police seeing your dick pictures.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#165

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:50 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #162

jacquesm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> How did anybody ever get convicted before the age of WhatsApp, or for that matter the invention of the telephone. A nitpick, but I really dislike this line of reasoning. Before WhatsApp criminals communicated using different means which were easier to monitor. Now that they have WhatsApp (or whatever), they will use that instead of easier to monitor methods. A move to modern communication tools gives them an edge o…

There is no obligation on the part of criminals to make it easy for law enforcement to catch them, and criminals will use whatever tools they can to stay out of jail. Yes, that's an arms race, but that arms race has nothing to do with whatsapp. That's just a general purpose tool that has been re-purposed. This is what I was getting at with my recent comment that knowledge (and by extension technology) is dual use. You can't make something that will not somehow benefit the bad guys too if it benefits the good guys.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#166

Post by whatever_dude » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:51 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…

Incorrect.

WhatsApp could not deliver what the judge requested, even if they wanted to. Messages are encrypted end to end and not kept in their servers.

The Judge requested something impossible. predictably, WhatsApp and Facebook did not comply. The Judge threw a hissy fit and decided to block the service, affecting everyone who uses it (95% of the Internet users in the country).

A similar thing happened years ago when a Brazilian actress tried to get a paparazzi video out of YouTube. The heavy-handedness of Brazilian government got the whole website blocked.

Mark Zuckerberg's complaint is about how any local judge can just order a country-wide order (which is something I also find baffling). This was not a supreme court decision.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#167

Post by personjerry » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

whatever_dude wrote: post #166

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…

Incorrect. WhatsApp could not deliver what the judge requested, even if they wanted to. Messages are encrypted end to end and not kept in their servers. The Judge requested something impossible. predictably, WhatsApp and Facebook did not comply. The Judge threw a hissy fit and decided to block the service, affecting everyone who uses it (95% of the Internet users in the country). A similar thing happened years ago wh…

Banning the middleman in this communication here is kinda like banning pen and paper because people are writing notes to each other.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#168

Post by AndrewKemendo » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

loceng wrote: post #155

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #150

I'm a judge in Brazil. Your comment history says otherwise: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4167143 Seem to be a run of the mill dev to me. I'm surprised you got as many credulous responses as you did.

Why do you assume they aren't someone with a website and have a career?

Anything is possible of course but what is more likely:

1. An elected Judge in Brazil also has a side business of running a marginal tourism website and the time to comment on HN

2. Someone is lying on the internet

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#169

Post by d_theorist » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 2:59 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #161

d_theorist wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That would be the first system like that available to public ever. "It's not that we all agree not to read it unless we really really think the people are bad" is pretty much the definition of the secrecy of correspondence we had since pre-digital era.

We do not live in the pre-digital era. We do now have the technology to make secure communication possible. The question is whether it should be legal. I think it is overwhelmingly the case that it should be.

Re: Telegram gains 1M users after Whatsapp ban

#170

Post by amyjess » Thu, Dec 17, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #112

rplnt wrote: post #21

These messaging apps are worse than... well, I don't know. This is as bad as it gets. Bicycles maybe? Incompatibility, fragmentation.. the worst thing you can have for application that is supposed to be used for communication.

There has always been fragmentation with messaging apps. In the 90s/00s it was MSN and Yahoo and IRQ etc etc

In the 00s, we had multi-IM clients like Trillian, Gaim/Pidgin/libpurple, Kopete, Telepathy, etc.

Now, there's so little work done in reverse-engineering IM protocols. It's really sad. Part of this is because Sean Egan got hired by Google to work on Hangouts, so he's out of the reverse-engineering game for good, and it's sad that nobody took up the mantle from him.