321–330 of 629 posts
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They didn’t – they didn’t hand over the IP addresses that were requested.
Where did you read that?
Try rationalizing this headline. All communication services, whether they are "apps", "networks", "utilities", etc... should fall in some category of protection where such things cannot happen.
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…
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If the institutions were fragile, the Internet companies would just refuse to comply and block WhatsApp. The fact that they complied shows how strong the institutions are.
I see telcos choosing to comply with the order instead of fighting back (like Apple) as a sign of fragility.
Telcos and App providers can contribute to make a democracy strong. And so do all citizens. But they aren't what is referred to by "institutions".
There is no widespread fragility in Brazilian institutions today. Recent events have shown they are strong as ever. Telcos and App providers have all their rights within the legal system to appeal the recent decision against WhatsApp and get their arguments heard. WhatsApp has already appealed to this judge's decision and this will be heard by an appeals court. This is business as usual in a legal system that is working.
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…
But saying "you are full of crap" on HN is a reason to be downvoted.
The Internet needs to start acting like a series of dumb pipes again: so dumb that you have no idea where information really is, and so huge so as to be impractical for anyone to control.
Consider highway systems. For roads, the only way to “shut down” somebody’s access without controlling every road, everywhere is to have some idea where your target is. And even then, you probably have to control several access points to really keep that target from moving. And unless they live at the end of a single country road that you control, being draconian about road control is usually going to be very hard and probably impossible. And that is a good thing, because if shutting down highways made any sense then a hell of a lot of people would be inconvenienced on a regular basis (or worse than inconvenienced, if they were in an ambulance or something).
Blocking Internet tools is arguably far worse than blocking highways because networks transport an almost incomprehensibly-large amount of information and the effects are vast. By the same token, seizure of a device is arguably far worse than seizure of something like a truck because a device can effectively provide access to someone’s entire life and not just the little bit of information that an authority is seeking.
Enough paranoid blocking and seizure, let’s try to focus on world progress.
What most people outside of Brazil don't realize is that WhatsApp is almost universally used by Brazillians to communicate about EVERYTHING, even your doctor [0][1]. My wife is Brazillian and uses it to communicate with her family in Brazil every day. This will have disastrous consequences for Brazilians domestically and internationally. This policy is being put in place by unelected judges and cartel of monopolistic…
That sounds incredibly dystopian. A proprietary communication protocol made by a foreign company dominating all communications without recourse sounds like something out of 1984. I mean, if your doctor is using it, you know you are screwed the day Facebook does anything you disagree with, because you are wholly dependent on them at that point. That was why we even developed interoperable federated messaging protocols…
In fact, a lot of people prefer Telegram, and a lot use neither, preferring good old cellphone conversations. Oh wait, isn't that a closed protocol that dominates all offline communications? How dystopian...
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> WhatsApp publicly stated that it does not and has not retained any message content once messages are delivered This does not make a lot of sense. If they don't retain any message content, then how am I able to browse all my message threads on https://web.whatsapp.com ? EDIT: I'm wrong.
I also use the web interface and I believe it tethers your phone to the browser - so the phone is sending the unencrypted messages to the browser window. If you delete a message on the phone the message disappears in the web interface too.