181–190 of 591 posts
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We urgently need new domestic spying laws given that five eyes has effectively broken them.
If people in a position of power can break those laws with impunity then new laws aren't going to change that. The problem is holding the lawbreakers accountable.
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Relying on laws leaves a lot of wiggle room for bad actors, slippery slopes, and political opinions changing over time. Laws are based on trust in institutions (do you _really_ trust large governments?). Laws are probabilistic, whereas math & source code is deterministic. You can verify that computer code does what it says it does. Laws depend on enforcement and complicated judicial systems (based on humans) to inter…
I agree that laws are not enough, independent verification must be possible. But your right to use secure software, and to audit it without risking to spend your life in prison or being killed, is ensured by laws. This is why moving the goalposts and further normalizing surveillance is extremely dangerous. The rights that you enjoy today are not universal, and can obviously be eradicated in less than a generation.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
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Please elaborate?
Not the parent, but true in a sense. Communication is the act of conveying information from one person's consciousness to another. In the usual encrypted chat scenario, that path is unencrypted at two points (plaintext input, and plaintext output at the far end). It is entirely possible though to have a true end-to-end encrypted channel if both parties are able to do the encryption in their heads without the plain te…
So to which messenger should we finally switch to? Telegram, Signal, Threema, Wire or some other newcomer?
I am weirdly.. giddy about this development. The more goverments try so hard to publicly force companies to, effectively, mandate backdoors, the more public will be aware of it. Added benefit is that FB will lose some market share. The sucky part is.. my mom loves Whatsapp. She was able to use it wo any issues. There are few alternatives that she was able to use so easily. All that said, I wonder. What is the breakin…
I've also been surprised how much a properly motivated non-techie can be. I've seen a few grandmothers who live far away purchase and setup a web cam and learn software I find confusing all by themselves.
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> If I can compile the code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors Where does that leave the rest of society? Having open source software and hardware is not enough, we also need laws that prohibit mass surveillance and support our efforts to uphold human rights.
Relying on laws leaves a lot of wiggle room for bad actors, slippery slopes, and political opinions changing over time. Laws are based on trust in institutions (do you _really_ trust large governments?). Laws are probabilistic, whereas math & source code is deterministic. You can verify that computer code does what it says it does. Laws depend on enforcement and complicated judicial systems (based on humans) to inter…
There is no mathematical escape hatch from society. All we have is a messy assortment of technological mitigations that change the cost of surveillance.
These mitigations work best in combination with constitutional rights that limit what the government of the day can do, triggered by the latest outrage in the news.
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> If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise. Careful - you're right that WhatsApp is untrustworthy, but laws that force them to add backdoors could well be applied to open-source code as well. Or make possession of non-backdoored software, open or not, illegal. Or…
If I can compile audited code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors (excluding perhaps hardware level backdoors--but that's why we do the encryption in software). Implementing hardware backdoors that are opaque to end users is theoretically possible, but more difficult in practice. You could, for example, build a screen/monitor that just captures everyt…
In other news: US, UK subjects agree to stop using WhatsApp in favor of Telegram and Signal: https://telegram.org/ https://www.signal.org/ These are free software, not controlled by a giant corporation (although both are limited liability companies; Telegram in London/Dubai, Signal in San Francisco IIANM); with the developer/company not having unencyrpyed access to your data.
I use both apps regularly but neither of them is perfect.
If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise. Platforms that rely on trust (in this case, trusting that FB isn't doing bad things) provide very weak guarantees about privacy/security. They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, fo…
Wouldn't someone from inside the Facebook/Whatsapp team denounce it if that was the case? Like a whistle blower
Here is what is most frightening. So let's say this law passes BUT someone builds a really good open-source messenger. You can't install it now because you can't side-load apps on devices. You alpha geeks can but the other consumers can't. What we need is a law requiring some type of side loading. It needs to be possible to go to a website, and install an app there directly and have it support all of the native platf…
In that case, would you expect the people who wanted this to actively create a means for its circumvention?