I personally feel the protocol should be opensourced and security bugs should be fixed which are written in cpp for audio/video calls. Or the video or audio call process should be sandboxed and tightened api access
NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
231–240 of 321 posts
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience with Israeli companies suggests that a culture which values intellectual achievement and competition is more widespread there. Similar cultural enclaves exist elsewhere in the world and are presumably similarly effective, but they just aren't as large a portion of the population. Even small cultural differences can have outsized effects because of pollination-- e.g. it's easier to learn from an expert i…
Also humans self-segregate. All else being equal a human who has property A will prefer to live with other humans who have property A, rather than humans with property B. Skin colour, favourite icecream flavour, late risers versus early birds - anything. We can deliberately make adjustments at policy level to reduce the harmful consequences (or of course, we can do stuff like red-lining to make it worse) but that's w…
Do you have a source to cite here, or can you refine what kind of properties you're talking about? I urinate standing up and prefer to live with someone who urinates while seated. This is the prevailing preference amongst people who urinate while standing.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you provide any sources? Surprised to see Credit Karma on here...
It comes mainly from mapping the subdomains over time and analysis of the ASNs. This is key. You will often see a company with perhaps 200 or so subdomains, that only does business in the United States. But then you will see one subdomain that maps to ASN 4803 or whatever, which then leads to “China Telecom xinjiang”. In fact I encourage you to type: org:”China Telecom xinjiang” “NSFOCUS” into Shodan. Also look at th…
>org:”China Telecom xinjiang” “NSFOCUS” into Shodan.
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Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's reasonable, I suppose I'm lucky to have a friend group that universally prefers open source sorftware to good UX -- there was never really a question for us.
It's a little eye opening to me that anyone could have a friend group that "universally prefers open source software to good UX". I have and use Signal with some friends, but there are also loads of people I communicate with who couldn't even tell you what open source software is, let alone articulate a preference for it over good UX. Are all of your friends software engineers and/or technophiles?
"It's a little eye opening to me that anyone could have a friend group that "universally prefers open source software to good UX"
Plenty of us still prefer using command-line to this very day. Most of my work is still done on DOS 6.22.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also humans self-segregate. All else being equal a human who has property A will prefer to live with other humans who have property A, rather than humans with property B. Skin colour, favourite icecream flavour, late risers versus early birds - anything. We can deliberately make adjustments at policy level to reduce the harmful consequences (or of course, we can do stuff like red-lining to make it worse) but that's w…
Do you have a source to cite here, or can you refine what kind of properties you're talking about? I urinate standing up and prefer to live with someone who urinates while seated. This is the prevailing preference amongst people who urinate while standing.
This is colloquially referred to as "the big sort" in the United States - people moving to states where a higher portion of people share their political ideology. Your favorite search engine should point to many sources with this search term, though some are more dubious about the strength of the effect than others.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a dangerous path - saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber. That sort of dialogue is completely taboo at least in the US.
What about Obama's American exceptionalism speech? Seemed to be accepted fine.
Do you really not know the difference between nationality and race? There are people of every race and creed in the US.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its a dangerous path - saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber. That sort of dialogue is completely taboo at least in the US.
What about Obama's American exceptionalism speech? Seemed to be accepted fine.
Myths can be powerful things. Doesn't necessarily make them true.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#238What are Israel doing to get so good at this and chip design and weapons making and everything else they seem to be really good at? There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that. How come they punch so far above their weight?
I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about Israel, and that what’s really happening is that you don’t hear about the other firms in other countries, many of which are either more competent or have better tradecraft.
It's like everybody suddenly forgot about hacking team and vupen and whoever else.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Obama's American exceptionalism speech? Seemed to be accepted fine.
Do you really not know the difference between nationality and race? There are people of every race and creed in the US.
I do actually, but in this context it doesn't really matter. Does any - not first generation immigrant - say I am 10% Irish, 10% Jewish from Russian Empire, 50% Welsh and 30% Italian? Maybe some people do but in reality you say you are an American. And for most of the world that's how it sounds anyway.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
WhatsApp will rekey and send old messages without notifying the user. This means MITM is possible and not always detectable. This is their intended design (but you can change the preference so that you at least get notified when it happens). (Widely reported, see Guardian article)
That guardian article was pretty bad. It scared a lot of people from WhatsApp (which is still in general mode secure than most options) to text messaging by claiming that this was somehow some huge security flaw. From WhatsApp’s point of view this was a reasonable ux trade off. It is a major pain point of signal when it does this (particularly in group chats where it is more likely to happen). But I agree that from a…
Sorry, but his is a major security flaw. WhatApp, their mothership Facebook, or any party who can coerce them into doing so (e.g. the US government), can use this to rekey targets with their own keys, virtually undetectable by most regular users, thereby completely MITMing the message exchanges.
Even moxie, who created this stuff, more or less admitted this[0], by saying the rekeying notification is the only defense, but that one is off by default in whatapp last I checked (which moxie confirmed[1]), which makes whatapp insecure by default at the very least. I wouldn't be surprised if WhatApp servers know if this notification setting is on or off, which would enable them to e.g. target people with insecure default settings only to avoid detection.
I already said this in [0], but let's repeat it: This is essentially the same as if a webbrowser would just accept any TLS certificate without showing a warning no matter if valid or the issuer trust.
Sure, this is hard problem to solve UX-wise and user-education-wise, but that doesn't excuse that you advertise your known-and-deliberately-insecure-by-default default-MITMable product as "secure communication using end-to-end encryption".