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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

#31

Post by afsina »

barbs wrote: post #4
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…

Lets hope it's not as bad as this French government project: https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-fro...

All government projects goes wrong (I was in several of them). But man this was extreme.

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

#32

Post by cm2187 »

Aissen wrote: post #28
draugadrotten wrote: post #26

The spin here is funny. The article pretends this is done to prevent eavesdropping, while it is probably closer to the truth that this is done to ensure eavesdropping by the DGSI.

If you're talking about the metadata, yes, probably. It 's the same kind of eavesdropping capability you'd have from Signal servers (i.e: not much). Also: from what we've seen of Macron's team, they've proven that they have good-enough internal technical advisors; so it remains to be seen if they'd use a solution that can be eavesdropped.

Unless you can verify the deployed build against an open source code, whether the code is open source or not is irrelevant, you trust all the intermediaries. Which is ok for a corporate actor but probably not when you are a sovereign actor and know you are dealing with a keen NSA. How could you control that Apple or Google wouldn’t patch the app before it gets deployed or after it has been deployed?

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

#34

Post by ArmandGrillet »

I wish I would have seen a GitHub repo opened by the French government (à la Keybase) instead of an article from Reuters telling me that 20 officials beta-test an app developed by "we don't know who" using the taxes that pay my parents and friends. Show, don't tell.

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

#36

Post by Arathorn »

tenryuu wrote: post #22
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…

What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?

you simplify the ux (eg autodiscovering the right homeserver); hook it up to directory services and/or SSO; simplify the e2e crypto UX; change the logo and branding, and have a basis to build on for whatever future custom features they need.

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

#37

Post by Arathorn »

spacenick88 wrote: post #23
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…

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

Not really - the protocols are very different. Matrix is a way of replicating conversation history over a mesh of participating servers; a bit like a bunch of Git repositories constantly pushing commits (messages) to one another. XMPP is much lighter weight and builds on simpler message passing and pubsub primitives. You can use both to build comms systems, but they take opposite engineering and governance approaches on almost everything.

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

#38

Post by unicornporn »

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…

I'm so glad Matrix/Riot.im is getting some traction. This and https://blog.status.im/status-invests-5m-in-riot-im-4e3026a8... may be two important steps.

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

#40

Post by blauditore »

cm2187 wrote: post #29

What’s amusing is that foreign secret services are not the only ones snooping on French politicians. French secret services have a whole department (formally called RG) in charge of collecting files on every domestic public figure (own file is a interesting ritual read for a newly promoted minister of interior). The justice dept had also an interesting interpretation of attorney client privilege where it argued recen…

> But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy.

I think this applies to politicians worldwide, at least in western countries.

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