India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

Perceptes wrote: post #4

ailideex wrote: post #2

Hopefully they rather use something like http://matrix.org

Agreed. The French government did exactly this!

... and it failed almost instantly.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-go...

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#6

Post by devoply » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:24 AM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #5

Perceptes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The French government did exactly this!

... and it failed almost instantly. https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-go...

Does not look like it. Looks like they found a flaw and fixed it. And this sort of thing, using open source project and building custom projects for private communication between private entities makes perfect sense. Anyone would be a fool to use Whatsapp for any conversations you don't want private companies and Western governments to have access to.

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#7

Post by edhelas » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:30 AM UTC

ailideex wrote: post #2

Hopefully they rather use something like http://matrix.org

Or maybe something like… the existing IETF standard for IM: XMPP. With plenty of implementations, support across the globe, servers that can scale up to millions of sessions.

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#8

Post by vmurthy » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

An interesting aside: In 1998, India tested its nuclear weapons (Pokhran-II [1]). Almost immediately, US imposed sanctions. One of the terms of the sanction? "Bar the export of certain defense and technology material" [2].

I can't find a source but I do remember that IE used to ship with reduced encryption. Perhaps we have learnt some lessons since then :-)

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II

[2]http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/9805/13/india.us/

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#9

Post by fouc » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

What are the chances they're going to use Java instead of Erlang?

Re: India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

#10

Post by xtreak29 » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:58 AM UTC

DocTomoe wrote: post #5

Perceptes wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The French government did exactly this!

... and it failed almost instantly. https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-go...

This was an issue with Python's email parser. Relevant issue : https://bugs.python.org/issue34155