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France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

reuters.com

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Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#11

Post by Davidbrcz »

conradfr wrote: post #8
Davidbrcz wrote: post #2

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…

And SAIP was budgeted for at least 78M€ ...

That seems insane, even for the French government. Do you have a source ? I can't find anything with a 2 minutes search.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#12

Post by Davidbrcz »

puszczyk wrote: post #9
danielbarla wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find: > We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia and > The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet. I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open…

+1 on that. Based on the article I hope they’re using signal or some other reputable crypto. Ideally they’ll host it in France and provide a good UI

I think it is intended for the government only, you'll never see it as a citizen.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#13

Post by Vinnl »

Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

That's great; this other article I read about this kept mentioning Telegram and how Macron used that during his campaign, so this is much better than I expected :)

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#14

Post by hadrien01 »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #11
conradfr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And SAIP was budgeted for at least 78M€ ...

That seems insane, even for the French government. Do you have a source ? I can't find anything with a 2 minutes search.

http://www.itespresso.fr/saip-application-alerte-attentat-ec...

That actually was the estimated cost; it grew at least at 81,5M€. (there's also a story in the article about one of the components of that seemingly simple app being 37 months late)

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#16

Post by Davidbrcz »

hadrien01 wrote: post #14
Davidbrcz wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems insane, even for the French government. Do you have a source ? I can't find anything with a 2 minutes search.

http://www.itespresso.fr/saip-application-alerte-attentat-ec... That actually was the estimated cost; it grew at least at 81,5M€. (there's also a story in the article about one of the components of that seemingly simple app being 37 months late)

81.5 for the whole project SAIP (broadcasting warnings on several mediums (phone, ad panels, radio, TV,...), not only the SAIP app.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#17

Post by Arathorn »

Vinnl wrote: post #13
Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

That's great; this other article I read about this kept mentioning Telegram and how Macron used that during his campaign, so this is much better than I expected :)

yes, the point of the project is to provide a secure and self hosted (yet interoperable for intra- and inter-government purposes) alternative to Telegram for state comms :)

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#18

Post by Arathorn »

danielbarla wrote: post #7
edhelas wrote: post #6

Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "w…

The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find: > We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia and > The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet. I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open…

As per another comment, the project is 100% FOSS (other than the operational bits) and is built on Matrix.org

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#19

Post by tangue »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #2

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…

You forgot Louvois which was used to pay the soldiers' salary. The project costed 500 millions € before being cancelled and a new contract bid was won ... by the company that was unable to write the software in the first place ...

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#20

Post by Arathorn »

Davidbrcz wrote: post #2

Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…

As someone using it already, it works pretty well actually ;p
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