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WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

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Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#261

Post by aianus »

bsder wrote: post #217
stale2002 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can! Imagine if Brazil tried to ban Bitcoin. How successful do you think they would be?

Very. For the moment, you have to take your salary in your local currency. Therefore, you need an exchange to get Bitcoins, and the exchanges can be shut down. People said The Great Firewall would never work. They were wrong about that, too. The real world CAN infringe on the networked world--quite strongly.

Drugs are (highly) illegal but most people I know are at most two phone calls away from scoring whatever they want whenever they want.

I imagine if some third-world countries with capital controls banned Bitcoin, it would look similar (having to call your Bitcoin dealer and pay a markup to move money out of the country but otherwise easily accessible to those in-the-know).

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#262

Post by i2shar »

soneca wrote: post #64

I'm here to defend the judge's ruling, a position very unpopular among all my friends here in Brazil. Brazilian law regarding regarding privacy of users of internet services is very recent and clear: if a judge order the company to share a specific user data, the company must comply. You can disagree with the law, but the law is there. Now, the judge ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation (a suspect…

Thank you for the perspective from "the other side". Whether or not one agrees with it is another thing, but it's necessary to get the missing context which your post fulfills.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#263

Post by int0x80 »

soapdog wrote: post #175
int0x80 wrote: post #97

You are full of crap. The seventh world economy in the terms you are refering to is meaningless. By your logic, is Brazil welthier than Switzerland or Netherlands? NOT even close. GDP is MEANINGLESS if you really want to know how the average citizen lives in a country. The fact is that in Brazil the prices/inflation are through the roof, housing and goods are extremly expensive and their salaries are ridicusly low. L…

I didn't downvoted you, actually, I agree with you. GDP is not the best way to measure or have this type of discussion. GDP proves to us that the "country is rich", HDI tells us that "this richness is not distributed" which means that we have an endemic and self-perpetuating problem with wealth distribution and access to infrastructure, which I believe you'd agree. I completely agree with your statement that we have…

Oh, the EDIT wasn't targeted to you especifically, more of a general thing.

I agree with you, but I found the first comment misleading, thus my heated response. By meaningless I meant regarding the "feel" that you get as a citizen, or as a turist, or even as an outsider watching the news, which is that the country and its people are in trouble (also relative, compared to UE or US, not to central Africa for example). I completely agree that the country has a lot of potencial, resources, and great people. It has vast amounts of petroleum, the Amazonas etc etc. And I also agree that one of the problems is the distribution of the wealth. And sure, you are improving the situation.

I think a somehow similar "rich" country in a bad situation is Argentina, with lots of resources and also oil reserves. So is Russia. Bad management, corruption, education etc are some causes of it. It is indeed a very complex problem.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#264

Post by cm3 »

dmix wrote: post #200
cm3 wrote: post #187

This is exactly why operating many small Murmur and/or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co's proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it's easy to operate a community Murmur server and it's also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements. Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat…

How would this prevent Telco/mobile operators from blocking XMPP traffic with Murmur headers? The technical details of the court orders has nothing to do with shutting down WhatsApp servers or coercing them into doing a MITM on their own customers... Not that I disagree that decentralization helps add resiliency against state intervention but this particular threat model requires a different solution. Such as prevent…

It's easier to force a company to block access in a certain country, but if you run the servers or there are various parties hosting it for you, you have a higher chance of still using it.

But, that might of course require disobedience until the laws are declared invalid in front of the supreme court. I'm no activist, but the way politics has been meddling with the Internet convinced me that we have to fight to keep existing freedoms.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#265

Post by shostack »

joshvm wrote: post #166
envy2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seem to be a few problems with this analysis. First, WhatsApp is a US company and has no presence in Brazil. Under many readings of US law (specifically, ECPA), US companies are in fact prohibited from complying with requests from foreign law enforcement for content, except in emergencies. Instead, foreign law enforcement must make a request for assistance to the US DoJ, which will then (eventually, and maybe)…

I can believe them when they say they don't keep data. When I got a new phone (the old one broke), I was expecting my conversations to be in the cloud somewhere so that I could recover them. Nope, I lost everything that I hadn't backed up. I don't see what they can gain from storing masses of old chats and then not allowing users to download them onto new devices. If they kept chats to do analytics on, there's no rea…

I wonder if they record the necessary analytics data from mining the text, and then delete the actual text. Depending on what data you're trying to mine, you may be able to get what you need on transmission, and then dump the source data in favor of the output of the analytics event.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#266

Post by cm3 »

bsder wrote: post #204
cm3 wrote: post #187

This is exactly why operating many small Murmur and/or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co's proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it's easy to operate a community Murmur server and it's also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements. Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat…

> Comfort seems to trump reliability. Everything is centralized because of one simple reason: you can't monetize distributed. So, as a developer, if I want paid, I'm going to make a centralized system. The fact that the centralized system is way easier to develop/debug is just a bonus. As a user, I'm going to use the system that has the easiest installability/usability cross section. That app is likely to be the one…

You can monetize a fancy client that's commercial.

You can monetize hosting Mumble servers.

Decentralized services are much harder, but at some point we have to prefer them and use federation as a means to have something like a global network of continents of servers (or realms in MMO lingo).

My point is that as long as we don't pursue decentralized services, we won't get them. There are efforts for people to host everything privately, and with ipv6 I like to think it's only a matter of time until all IoT devices can be repurposed as servers.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#267

Post by aninhumer »

MichaelGG wrote: post #173
soneca wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. And I think all this should be framed "is the law right? should we change it?"; instead is always presented as "an authoritarian, out of his league, small town judge who is arrogant and clueless about tech". He is just following the law, so fight the law, no diminish the judge. Remembering that a "single judge" following the law with authonomy launched the biggest attack on corruption of brazilian h…

No, judges need to notice when a law creates a contradiction or a stupid scenario and not make such rulings. Judges are supposed to have "wisdom". Pointing at a broken law, then breaking communications for everyone hardly seems wise. Unless he's secretly hoping this will force a big change in law and government.

Contradictions are one thing, but the stupidity of a law is subjective, and the judiciary should not be empowered to rule contrary to the law based on their opinion of it.

Which is not to say they shouldn't point out that it's ridiculous when they make their ruling, and suggest that the legislature fixes it quickly.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#268

Post by kartan »

robbiemitchell wrote: post #199
curiouscats wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies can be punished for failure to obey laws. If a company didn't bother to retain records on who bought something they are now required to recall due to safety failures I can't imagine any country would say that is ok. They would be punished. I don't happen to think the law mentioned is a good one. And I have no idea how the law is actually worded. Depending on how it is worded maybe it is ok to just not keep…

So if a judge demanded a telco hand over an audio recording of any specific conversation, they must comply -- even though calls are not recorded and stored? If a judge demanded the postal service hand over an image of every envelope processed, it must comply -- even though no such images exist? Where does it end?

That's why Google doesn't operates in China at full scale. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China They decided that was agains the company values to comply with Chinese law, so they stopped offering some services. It's the law, and maybe I don't like it at all, but still I thing that companies should comply. I also thing that that laws should me changed.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#269

Post by int0x80 »

shkkmo wrote: post #219
int0x80 wrote: post #97

You are full of crap. The seventh world economy in the terms you are refering to is meaningless. By your logic, is Brazil welthier than Switzerland or Netherlands? NOT even close. GDP is MEANINGLESS if you really want to know how the average citizen lives in a country. The fact is that in Brazil the prices/inflation are through the roof, housing and goods are extremly expensive and their salaries are ridicusly low. L…

I suspect you are being down voted for your tone, not for the accuracy of your comment.

Yeah ... Personally, I don't find a bit of emotion in the discussion bad as long as you provide arguments.

Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge

#270

Post by laumars »

throwaway_xx9 wrote: post #224
robbiemitchell wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a judge demanded a telco hand over an audio recording of any specific conversation, they must comply -- even though calls are not recorded and stored? If a judge demanded the postal service hand over an image of every envelope processed, it must comply -- even though no such images exist? Where does it end?

Actually, in the USA, USPS records an image of the front and back of all letters. It's illegal to open the envelope, but hey - who knows?

Customs can.
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