241–250 of 289 posts
Because LEOs are oversteping their mark by a billion each and every fucking day, but the populace is too fucking computer illiterate to understand that ”data reading” (the norwegian euphemism for hacking into citizens computers) is extremly damaging to the fundamental concept of democracy. ACAB
You could've put the ACAB at the beginning so we know we shouldn't not mind the things you say.
In previous discussion here on HN, Wire was claimed to be more secure than Signal (something related to initial key sharing?) I don't understand why there's so much publicity behind Signal, and Wire is never mentioned. I've been using Wire for years, and it doesn't require a phone number to setup.
Personally, I'm suspicious of Signal because of its publicity, smells like a pot of honey.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a semi-fictional humorous take on American military procurement watch the movie The Pentagon Wars
Is that one more accurate than "Joint Session" (Veep S4E1)?
As an EU citizen I think that's a great decision.
I don't think so. Signal might be open source but the servers are still run in the USA and thus are subject to the US "legal system" (which in turn is subject to the mood of its president).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the government in Germany does IT projects, they usually burn millions of Euros even for simple projects. And then, years after the planned rollout, the project is still unfinished and no politician wants to touch it anymore. My favorites was the "special email inbox for lawyers". So, I am somewhat hesitant to let the EU develop a chat client.
I always wonder how these projects can be so expensive. Heck, they are so expensive you could just order two companies to deliver a product and pit them against each other so that there is a strong incentive to deliver a working product.
While I also feel the temptation to yell "I could do it for 1/100th of that" at a screen when I read/hear about these projects, just basic probability suggests that I'm probably wrong. It's me (with as little enterprise" experience as I could manage) vs a whole lot of people that don't strike me as particularly stupid and who have lots of incentives to keep costs down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is for communications to outsiders, who can't be expected to have an EU-internal app installed on their devices. Signal is reasonably widespread, and probably the best such messaging platform out there, although it has serious issues like the requirement for a phone number.
So why couldn't the EU fund the development of a Signal fork that doesn't need phone numbers?
The EU's structure is also a bit different than that of nation states, with cabinet members and parliament rather limited in their ability to make spending decisions. Anything serious needs approval by the council, i. e. the heads of state.
And just now is probably a bad time for new expenditures, as Brexit will severely cut into revenue.
I once worked in the Commission, briefly. Technical security seemed to be non-existent as far as I could tell (in an admittedly very junior role). Once all of the interns got invited to the U.S. embassy to meet the Ambassador (some guy who literally said he got the job because he was friends with Obama). On the way out the nice embassy staff gave us goodie-bags, complete with handy pen drives... Basically everyone wa…
> some guy who literally said he got the job because he was friends with Obama There are two kinds of U.S. ambassadors: 1) Career foreign service people 2) Friends of the presidential administration at the time Examples of the latter aren't hard to find. Off the top of my head I'm familiar with William Timken, a US businessman who was appointed Ambassador to Germany by George W. Bush because he was a huge supporter […
In previous discussion here on HN, Wire was claimed to be more secure than Signal (something related to initial key sharing?) I don't understand why there's so much publicity behind Signal, and Wire is never mentioned. I've been using Wire for years, and it doesn't require a phone number to setup.
Personally, I'm suspicious of Signal because of its publicity, smells like a pot of honey.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't doubt there are countries that are worse at it, but "the Dutch sites work" is not always true, or sometimes true for questionable definitions of "work". I mean, we've got this nice secure login system for government sites: DigiD, which works fine. So you need that to submit your taxes. A few years ago, it turned out you needed any valid DigiD to submit your taxes, not necessarily your own. There are tons of o…
I wouldn't really call DigiD secure, it doesn't seem to be open-source. Plus, rolling some own protocol/crypto instead of using PKI, that has immense effort behind it to keep secure, is not a good thing. Estonia has a similar solution, but "Smart-ID" was created after PKI was fully rolled out, it's terrible compared to that. Centralized, unverifiable, stores secrets insecurely, does some cryptographic bullshit. The t…
I haven't heard any such criticism about that system before, so it would be interesting to hear. I've been using it for years, it's easy to use and there haven't been any security problems with it. The company that developed it is trying to export it to other countries as well.