Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone • Hacker News Board

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#81

Post by haffenloher » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #78

haffenloher wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not how it works. The GCM message is empty, it just wakes up your device which then fetches the actual message from the Signal servers.

But the "observer" can still know which mobile phone is yours and who communicates with whom? Especially if the "observer" has the info from the Signal servers. Edit (as i can't post you reply to your answer): And based on the NSA principle of the "thee levels of distance" everybody is reachable as long as some common numbers are in our contact lists which we happily upload.

The question wasn't what metadata Signal gets, but what metadata Google gets on Signal messages. Yes, Signal servers know who communicates with whom.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#82

Post by acqq » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:13 PM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #34

superkuh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's doing great and useful work, there's no doubt. But requiring a phone number for an internet instant messenger is still a deal breaker even with Chromium as an alternative.

The most useful piece of metadata available to anyone harvesting user profiles for surveillance or profit. Governments must love phone numbers. Getting an anonymous phone number for each separate service you register with is practically infeasible. I worry about how influential people like Moxie Marlinspike are seemingly turning the modern 'mobile-first' development paradigm into a 'mobile-only' mindset. I don't beli…

Here I copy the "dead" message from "uola":

"Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place.

If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion, but now he's seemingly saying "oh, if you really care about privacy you could/should use a fake phone number"."

---

Personally, I don't know how "a fake phone number" setup can be implemented, especially in the countries where each phone number is assigned to one ID at the time of purchase, so to me "use a fake phone number" sounds like "let them eat cake."

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#83

Post by chris-at » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:17 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #25

dbalan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is moxie's reply in that matter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10665520

He's doing great and useful work, there's no doubt. But requiring a phone number for an internet instant messenger is still a deal breaker even with Chromium as an alternative.

> But requiring a phone number for an internet instant messenger is still a deal breaker even with Chromium as an alternative.

Why is that? There's nothing about it in their faq.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#84

Post by haffenloher » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:25 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #82

Freak_NL wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most useful piece of metadata available to anyone harvesting user profiles for surveillance or profit. Governments must love phone numbers. Getting an anonymous phone number for each separate service you register with is practically infeasible. I worry about how influential people like Moxie Marlinspike are seemingly turning the modern 'mobile-first' development paradigm into a 'mobile-only' mindset. I don't beli…

Here I copy the "dead" message from "uola": "Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place. If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least…

> If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion

This has already been discussed at length many times. Perhaps uola hasn't seen this blog post yet:

https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#85

Post by neerdowell » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:36 PM UTC

jb613 wrote: post #73

neerdowell wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He decided not to. That's completely his right. He doesn't go into a lot of detail about why he has decided this, but it's completely up to him. He doesn't like how F-Droid uses centralized signing keys which are stored online: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/127#...

except Android devices trust Google keys

What? APKs are signed by the developer before they uploaded to the store and the signatures are verified by PackageManagerService which is a part of AOSP.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#86

Post by jb613 » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:55 PM UTC

neerdowell wrote: post #85

jb613 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except Android devices trust Google keys

What? APKs are signed by the developer before they uploaded to the store and the signatures are verified by PackageManagerService which is a part of AOSP.

whether implicit trusts such as for example Google Play Licensing[1] or explicit trusts such as for example the set of Certification Authorities Android devices ship with, you are trusting Google in many ways.

[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#87

Post by jjnoakes » Wed, May 11, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

haffenloher wrote: post #75

jjnoakes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person you are communicating with.

No, that's not how it works. The GCM message is empty, it just wakes up your device which then fetches the actual message from the Signal servers.

You don't think Google could correlate the two?

Google knows device A got messages at times X, Y, and Z, and device B got messages at times X+1, Y+2, and Z+1.5.

I'd be willing to bet with some statistical analysis over time, some pretty interesting data could be mined from that raw knowledge.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#88

Post by acqq » Wed, May 11, 2016, 3:05 PM UTC

haffenloher wrote: post #84

acqq wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here I copy the "dead" message from "uola": "Yes, phone numbers are public enough that they are shared everywhere, but unique enough to lead to a single person not to speak of that persons movements. And "just use twilio" isn't a motivation for using phone numbers in the first place. If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least…

> If he had said "the benefits of finding friends are greater than the privacy implications" or something like that there would at least been a case for a discussion This has already been discussed at length many times. Perhaps uola hasn't seen this blog post yet: https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

That post still goes from the starting point of "social graph" and "5000 users in the contact list." It's completely the opposite of what's the most reasonable need: say if I want to communicate using the encryption only with my girlfriend, I don't want any of other contacts be ever seen by any server, and I can agree with her how we'll identify each other, but we surely don't need real phone numbers transferred to any servers, and we don't even have to use always the same real numbers.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#89

Post by sigmar » Wed, May 11, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

jb613 wrote: post #86

neerdowell wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? APKs are signed by the developer before they uploaded to the store and the signatures are verified by PackageManagerService which is a part of AOSP.

whether implicit trusts such as for example Google Play Licensing[1] or explicit trusts such as for example the set of Certification Authorities Android devices ship with, you are trusting Google in many ways. [1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

In the example you provide, you are trusting google in the same way you are trusting every SSL cert authority. What you are responding to is a reference to the signing of the APK, which is not (and cannot be) done by google even if the security of the transport layer is compromised.

Re: Moxie Marlinspike Makes Encryption for Everyone

#90

Post by belorn » Wed, May 11, 2016, 3:51 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #27

a3_nm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the fault of the people making that policy, not the fault of the people licensing the code under GPL.

Pointing the finger somewhere different doesn't change the practical reality. The only question there is how likely a GPL ban is to actually affect you (seems small to me, to be honest, but I don't know).

If we are talking about probability, I have heard more times that a developer is working in a place which forbids all non-approved software from being installed and used on work computers. One web developer could not even install an alternate web browser to test the code that they wrote. Anything that is not a code snippet that is considered so small as to not be copyrightable was banned.

Of course, their market wasn't very competitive and thus they could have such policy without much risk. In more competitive areas like games, companies like blizzard has shown to use any license that is compatible with their business model, and in some cases, directly asked developer for exceptions. In that kind of market, a ideology based policy doesn't work and would only give ground to the competition.