511–520 of 591 posts
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> You can't pay rent with good feelings. So just keep making the world shittier. Gotta love individualist capitalism.
To paraphrase Adam Smith, nothing has helped more people more than self-interest in a free market. Raised the standard of living for billions.
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It's true in every country. We are a global service, and our policy on backdoors is the same everywhere: we do not have them and we vigorously oppose them. Sometimes this leads to us being blocked. We were blocked in Brazil, for example, but that block was overturned in the courts.
Thanks! What is your opinion on a rumor that FSB doesn’t have any complaints because they found unintentional/unknown vulnerability that allows them to read WhatsApp messages? Should WhatsApp users be concerned about that?
It'd indeed be interesting to know if the FSB had some kind of baseband vulnerability that they'd used willy-nilly to facilitate dragnet surveillance.
I suspect William Binney was right though - blanket surveillance is just expensive and hides your needles in a mountain of hay; you really want high quality in the data you store in order to ease extraction of meaningful information / intelligence.
(that's not to say that aggregate meta data isn't interesting - just that with actual content noise is a problem)
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Out of interest what is your citation for Signal being nutritious or having messages going missing? Anecdotally speaking, neither I or my friends that have been using Signal for years have every had any messages go missing, so I’m just interested as to why you might be experiencing this.
Every single person I know who uses Signal has complained about this. I'm glad Signal is reliable for you but that is not our experience.
I wonder if it’s something like geography based? By chance are your contacts mostly in the same country - if so which country?
Everyone I speak to on Signal is based in Australia, mostly in Melbourne but a few in Brisbane and Sydney.
We were surprised to read this story and are not aware of discussions that would force us to change our product. We believe people have a fundamental right to have private conversations. End-to-end encryption protects that right for over a billion people every day. We will always oppose government attempts to build backdoors because they would weaken the security of everyone who uses WhatsApp including governments th…
Any comment on this?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-...
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We do not. You don't have to take our word on this -- I wouldn't want you to. As others on this thread have pointed out it's possible enough to tear through our binaries that if we did have a backdoor it would be discovered.
> it's possible enough to tear through our binaries No, it's not "possible enough" and I strongly suspect you fully realize that. A backdoor doesn't need to be in a form of an IF statement or something comparably obvious and silly. It can be a weakly seeded PRNG that would allow a "determined party" to brute-force the key exchange in a reasonable time. That would take man-years to fish out from a binary, and that's w…
Yes, this is something that literally everyone who reads HN will oppose. Meanwhile do you hear the deafening silence from the average Joe who thinks he has "nothing to hide"? Don't hate the politicians who keep pushing this. They're just trying not to get fired. And the surest way to get fired in a western country right now is to be seen doing nothing about the terrorism problem and then having terrorist acts committ…
You are absolutely right. I also already assume the government can access virtually anything I am doing anyways. I think we are all naive to believe otherwise. I also have nothing to hide :-)
That's not your decision to make, as to whether you have something to hide or not. That will be decided by someone else. It's entirely out of your hands and - depending on where and when you are subject to such scrutiny - may be arbitrarily decided, which is in fact a requirement in all authoritarian systems (the law has to be heavily subjective and arbitrarily enforced so it can be directed against anyone at anytime as so required, such that the population is kept in constant fear).
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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…
> 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.
Proper law enforcement (mind the "enforcement" part) can make a neighborhood safe enough so that nobody tries to shoot you and you won't need to wear vests. But in the end of the day, if you are messing with bad people in the bad neighborhood: bulletproof vests are real, laws are not.
And when you are talking about government enforcing the laws that are supposed to forbid uncontrollable government agencies to do what they do: well, government kinda is bad people in the bad neighborhood.
It's worth putting scrutiny both on the UK's desire to create these backdoors in social media apps (a path that many would argue could lead to eventual exploitation and abuse of that backdoor by unintended parties), and also WhatsApp's ability to deny the existence of such backdoors, now or in future.
[0] https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-can-access-suspect...