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Encryption is a necessity

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Encryption is a necessity

#21

Post by newjersey »

kardos wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #11

Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security. On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products against their users: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and a…

> accelerate the proliferation and acceptance of locked-down, user-hostile devices. We're already there. Can you read the Windows 10 telemetry?

Some people said that Nexus phones that default to encrypt local storage was user hostile as there was a perceptible performance penalty. I don't think that is the case. GNU and fsf want freedom for the user. I fully support the freedoms. However, I also think that users do not have a right to force their wishes on vendors.

I think it is fair to say if you don't like the options we give you then maybe you should fork the project and build it yourself.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#22

Post by arca_vorago »

userbinator wrote: post #11

Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security. On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products against their users: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and a…

You know, someone saw this problem years ahead of the rest of the cs community and started a license to help encourage user freedom. Its just a shame that I see gpl shat on so much in that community.

Personally I think RMS is a man ahead of his time, and that history will prove he has the correct view regarding user freedom.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#23

Post by danielconde »

Encryption and security has always been a balance between convenience and capability. Although HTPPS and such are mostly transparent to end-user, we can see that slow adoption of public key encryption (GPG) indicates that people either need to be educated or the user experience needs to improve drastically. It's taken many years but there's a long road ahead.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#24

Post by pjc50 »

kardos wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #11

Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security. On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products against their users: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and a…

> accelerate the proliferation and acceptance of locked-down, user-hostile devices. We're already there. Can you read the Windows 10 telemetry?

On that subject, I'm kind of surprised that it's been out for months and nobody's reverse-engineered it publicly yet.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#25

Post by CyberDildonics »

userbinator wrote: post #11

Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security. On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products against their users: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and a…

How does that make any sense at all. What you are talking about are two orthogonal issues. How are they intertwined by necessity?

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#26

Post by CyberDildonics »

danielconde wrote: post #23

Encryption and security has always been a balance between convenience and capability. Although HTPPS and such are mostly transparent to end-user, we can see that slow adoption of public key encryption (GPG) indicates that people either need to be educated or the user experience needs to improve drastically. It's taken many years but there's a long road ahead.

> Encryption and security has always been a balance between convenience and capability.

You could say the same thing about PCs and the internet, especially during their rise to prominence.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#27

Post by 7952 »

userbinator wrote: post #11

Companies should be encouraged to aggressively strengthen the security of their products, rather than undermine that security. On the other hand, I think they should most certainly not be encouraged to secure products against their users: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html What worries me the most about this seemingly frantic push for more encryption is that it will accelerate the proliferation and a…

We are abandoning the ability to actually listen in to what our devices are doing. The great thing about the web is that hitting Ctrl+Shift+I shows you exactly what data is being sent or received whilst maintaining strong encryption. If every single thing does its own encryption we end up with a set of black boxes squirting out unreadable gibberish. Being able to verify input and output is essential.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#28

Post by SFjulie1 »

Encryption is a business.

We need business for commercial transactions. What about the part of internet that is purely informative and requires no login, like accessing the corpus of laws and rules. Books, public domain, news, scientific papers, official publications, opening hours of business and schools, legal and commercial archives....

Mozilla is backing a FUD. They want YOU to change your behaviour by scaring you. Like MS in the past.

At which point I wonder how much the Mozilla Corporation is taking up on Mozilla foundation (which governance does not represents non corporate open source interests) and if at some points the donation (and search engine revenues) are not used to generate a close to unethical transfer between the R&D of firefox & evengelization to support the income of Mozilla corporation or maybe the share holders (IBM/google/Cisco/RH/HP).

Do we really need to redo the UI nightmares with firefox as a substitute for an heavy client? Is it really secure to think context of execution in firefox are more sandboxed than carefully coded application? Isn't it stupid to not be able to access the credential agents OS provides? Should we not prefer to chose our networks protocols to communicate rather than try to fit all in HTTP/Websockets? Is really the fact billions $ have been injected in JIT optimization in js to compensate for the lack of skills of developers a good way to have better devs?

I sometimes think since XUL that firefox has at best something of a sect, but everybody seems to think these kind of "unifying" vision are good to provide a standard. As if the purpose of mozilla is empowering less skilled workers to increase the competition on the market, while pushing questionable practices (like not caring about resources) that favors sub level coders and companies at the detriment of customers. I find it really really special that mozilla foundation a non for profit organization has a marketing department.

But yes, life is good for moz devs. I understand they want to be sure they will still employed in the next decade, even if it is at the cost of a lot of the freedom of choice of our tools to design applications and default search engines.

Mozilla foundation just cares about people who gives money: search engines and the big corpo giving fat pay check.

Remember that when people communicate they might have a less than idealistic goal in mind, especially when they put their balls in the hand of massive operational expenses.

I think it is time to do free software again. Not free as in free beer for corporation, but free as in free speech fashion for the humanity and especially the poorest that may not be able to afford encryption.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#29

Post by exodust »

throwaway23235 wrote: post #4

Video on a Mozilla page isn't playing on Firefox. Just saying...

It's a poor video, you're not missing much.

Painfully, it suggests "public vs private" hinges on encryption. The implication is that without encryption, your co-workers will see everything you do!

Public and private are distinct choices. Things can be private and unencrypted. Lack of encryption means lack of security in the event of a breach, it has nothing to do with choosing public vs private posts and web searches.

Works fine in my FF.

And for what it's worth, I think Apple should assist in revealing the contents of the phone if they can. I'm surprised people are defending Apple. My understanding is the request is about making the phone open to brute force attack, so it's not like encryption is under threat. It's poor password choice that's under threat. Apple does not need to compromise any other phone in doing this.

Re: Encryption is a necessity

#30

Post by hackuser »

dijit wrote: post #19
matwood wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thunderbird works pretty well with S/MIME to encrypt/decrypt emails. It does not work as well as Mail.app on iOS/OSX, but it works.

it's A) Not transparent and B) No longer supported by mozilla.[0] [0] - http://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-scraps-thunderbird-deve... !

Why isn't it transparent? Isn't the code open source?
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