Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

news.trust.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 417 posts

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#291

Post by morganvachon »

roywiggins wrote: post #172
morganvachon wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Email messages are digital postcards. When it leaves your computer (house) and goes to your ISP (local post office), anyone at that place can pick it up and read it before sending it on its way to the recipient's mail handler. While it's in transit, it's not sealed, it's not obscured or encrypted, it is plain text. Now, that doesn't change the fact that Yahoo rolled over like a puppy when the government came ca…

Don't a lot of the big providers pass emails between each other encrypted with TLS? And emails internal to Yahoo's email system wouldn't be visible to your ISP or anyone outside of Yahoo. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/

They might pass the email around via TLS but they store their copy unencrypted on their servers[1]. Even if they do one day decide to encrypt their local copy, they hold the keys, you don't. According to the Ars article on this subject[2], Google has officially said "We haven't been subpoenaed and if we were we'd say 'no'", but that stance could change in the next few years.

[1] https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/saferemail/faq/#wh...

[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/report-fbi-andor-...

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#293

Post by crdb »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #290
crdb wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory). Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow…

Well considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument. There was no argument being made and if they tried to do the work of the commenter for them and make an argument, you'd then say they were putting words into the person's mouth. IMO, if you are relying…

> considering that the quote was the entirety of the post, I don't see how you can then claim that responding with a second quote discrediting the first is in some way responding to the person and not the argument

The first quote laid out a case using a narrative as a metaphor. It explicitly states its position, and as such is an appropriate use of a quote.

The second quote is entirely composed of appeals to emotion and its sole purpose is to ridicule the author of the first quote as well as any readers who might agree with it. As such it is not an appropriate response.

An appropriate response would have first established the premise of the first quote, then argued for or against it.

> "mid-20th century" "21st century"

The age of an idea has no bearing on its quality. To an extent, humanity refines and builds on ideas over time but the basis of Western civilisation dates from Antiquity. To take your specific date range, this post is typed on a browser, operating system, machine, and global network that all date from ideas from the mid 20th century which themselves build on a few centuries of reasoning.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#294

Post by dredmorbius »

zzzcpan wrote: post #60
Esau wrote: post #45

The lesson from this is to not trust corporations with out privacy. Sadly, it seems many of us are not learning it.

Would it even be possible to make similar, but privacy centered products without corporations?

That's what Free Software is about. And it does.

The problems are of establishing protocols and standards, and seeing that others adopt them, and of creating self-contained systems that are bulletproof to set up and operate.

There are projects working on this, but the hurdle for having Joe Random User operate their own server is fairly high.

I'd much rather see a highly, but not entirely distributed system, with pervasive security, and very strong legal protections. I don't know if that can happen.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#295

Post by dredmorbius »

feefie wrote: post #255

Is this is the best solution? https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/ Getting anyone else I know to do this seems like a long shot. Is there something simpler?

Setting up and using PGP personally isn't all that hard, though it's got a few twists. Above and beyond any learning-curve issues:

1. It doesn't protect metadata. Who you communicate with, and when, and what subject you specify, are all available to any system which can read the packets. Unless you only accept and transmit TLS (secured-session) transport (HTTPS), this means that your communications patterns are in the clear. If your receiving party are fetching messages via a cleartext protocol (IMAP or POP, say, and in some cases HTTP, rather than the secured variants IMAPS, POPS, and HTTPS), then the headers and possibly mail body will be clear.

Cryptography has to be end-to-end to be effective, though attack surfaces exist at many levels. Ultimately the viewing device itself may be compromised, but that's a rather unscalable attack.

2. If you're using PGP but nobody else you're communicating with is then you're not gaining much. Keep in mind, I've been yelled at and/or chided by highly technical people with strong security backgrounds over sending PGP-encrypted emails. Including senior Google technical staff and Gene Spafford, of recent memory.

Much of that is due to a wide range of email clients not playing well with PGP, which gets again to vendor issues.

I recently posted a long critique of email on HN, and ultimately it's the lack of privacy, security, encryption, authentication, and reputation which make me think it's time to scrap it and start over, although learning from it and taking the best bits along.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12620997

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#296

Post by aswanson »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #11

I think the attitude here that most tech companies are rolling over and just complying without a single ethical consideration is misplaced. The government has been doing an excellent job of basically extorting these companies into compliance. They threaten the full weight of the US government's wraith and then tie every order up with classifications and gag orders. You aren't legally allowed to talk to other companie…

I used to work for a govt contractor. The only chance freedom has is for people to say shit like this to signal some of the bs I witnessed under those circumstances. Nuff said.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#297

Post by [deleted] »

dEnigma wrote: post #196
trendia wrote: post #192

In China and Russia, it is well known that all oligarchs are corrupt. However, not all of them will go to prison -- only those who cross the politicians will ever be tried and convicted.

Which reminds me of this great passage in Atlas Shrugged : “Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough…

[deleted]

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#298

Post by ubernostrum »

crdb wrote: post #271
CodeMage wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." -- John Rogers

Responding with an ad hominem - whether at the author of the quote or the poster of it by association - is both an ineffective response (the appeal to emotion signals an inability to argue rationally) and lowers the quality of discussion (by taking it away from the point, into emotional territory). Constant appeals to emotion and resorting to a wide array of fallacies allows for strongmen to build tribes which follow…

I suggest you read Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" which, though it was written with no knowledge of Ayn Rand (it predates all of her published works), anticipates her work (through a philosophy Heinlein introduces, called "Functionalism") and proceeds to demolish it on basic economic and common-sense grounds.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#299

Post by ubernostrum »

crdb wrote: post #287
CodeMage wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was tempted to reply with a "found the objectivist" just to illustrate what "ad hominem" really means, but I'm waiting for a build, so I have time to kill. Ad hominem would have been to attack Ayn Rand. I didn't do that. The quote I used doesn't attack the author, it attacks the work. I happen to agree with it. If you want to criticize it, you would do better to point out that the quote I used is not constructive c…

The problem is that language is much higher bandwidth than the information content of the words. Context and implicit shared knowledge play a huge part and should be taken into account when assessing someone's words. Both the quote, your original use of it, and your reply to my comment are ad hominem attacks where the attack is mostly in what is left unsaid but understood by the relatively smart, well read, culturall…

Ah, yes, you'd like more reasoned, rational debate. Which is why you turn to Scott Adams, who is of course a paragon of that, as he is a paragon of every field of study and endeavor of all of humanity, or can quickly become so, according to himself.

Re: Yahoo scanned customer emails for US intelligence

#300

Post by crdb »

ubernostrum wrote: post #299
crdb wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that language is much higher bandwidth than the information content of the words. Context and implicit shared knowledge play a huge part and should be taken into account when assessing someone's words. Both the quote, your original use of it, and your reply to my comment are ad hominem attacks where the attack is mostly in what is left unsaid but understood by the relatively smart, well read, culturall…

Ah, yes, you'd like more reasoned, rational debate. Which is why you turn to Scott Adams, who is of course a paragon of that, as he is a paragon of every field of study and endeavor of all of humanity, or can quickly become so, according to himself.

Why, again, attack the man instead of the argument? It's especially grating when the entire thread is about ad hominems.

Saying that Scott Adams has been known to be irrational is at best tangential to the example he gives to qualify whether the Trump and Clinton campaigns are using emotional manipulation, especially ad hominem attacks, to achieve their respective goals.

It's an appeal to emotion built upon an ad hominem: you use your attack on Scott Adams' ability to reason coupled with an association fallacy [1] to attack me in order to invalidate my line of argument.

Specifically: Scott Adams is irrational; you presented an example by Scott Adams; you therefore agree with an irrational man; this makes you irrational; your arguments are therefore irrational; let's not bother debating your irrational arguments.

I might be wrong, so attack the flaws in my reasoning, not me or the author or my examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Post reply on HN