Fantastic, the party that is all about personal freedoms is waging a war against personal freedom. We have come full circle.
DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
241–250 of 347 posts
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm starting to get the feeling that a lot of these jobs, both tech and government, are low key treating non public data access as a perk. For context, I interviewed with a company that had police videos stored on their systems and were using them for entertainment, to the point of showing me one at the beginning of the interview for grins
This is possibly true at smaller companies, but this kind of thing does not fly at larger tech companies.
twitter employees have in the past been bragging in a bar about their ability to look at people's DMs and were recorded doing so.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#243Seriously question, how are they going to stop me from downloading signal from source, building it locally, and installing it on my and everyone i knows cell phones?
They won't try to stop you. The average persons indifference will do it for them. Most people won't build Signal from source or let you install it for them. Anyone who does won't get any updates, so over time the installed base would be vulnerable to attack anyway. Since less people would have Signal then less conversations would be protected by it in practice.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
One time pads are not secure by modern cryptographic standards. Elaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6008695
Huh? First off citing yourself isn't an elaboration. Second if you are arguing that one-time-pads don't work / won't work in modern times that goes against our entire understanding of certain bits of cryptography. You'll need to yield some real sources first.
I referenced my own comment because I didn't feel like rephrasing what I had previously written, nor just spamming a copy of it. A logical argument doesn't rely on a "source":
> A one-time pad XORed with a message doesn't provide integrity, and therefore can't reliably secure an arbitrary protocol
The point is that sure, one time pads "work" the way they're described. But their properties don't actually fulfill what we require from modern cryptosystems. Note the sibling comments talking about augmenting them with half baked authentication schemes. Which are all into the realm of computational-complexity cryptography, and no longer "mathematically unbreakable!!1!"
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freedom isn't free. I think people have just ought to realize that. People have this idea that free countries are more efficient, which is probably true in the long run, but it's a cop-out to just call it a day there. Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for…
> But it does work. I was at a restaurant there. Some girls are chatting, and they walk away to go get something, and just leave their bags there unattended. Why? Because it's an authoritarian country - people aren't going to steal stuff there. Chances are high that you could do the same in most European countries. Just like in the Soviet Union, thieves exist in Belarus. People's perception might be that they're safe…
Just to add to your point. In old time mafia controlled villages in the old country, anecdotally you did not have to lock your car, but few would argue that an average person in that village was 'safe'.
It almost reminds me of some my parents' peers yearning for the good ole days of communism, cuz riffraffs would not dare to talk back to a cop.
edit: It is hard to argue with that kind of sentiment. It is technically right.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is possibly true at smaller companies, but this kind of thing does not fly at larger tech companies.
I've worked on both sides of that, I think you'd be surprised. I also suspect that it's worse at the TLAs and any organization with access to FBI, license plate and various criminal databases. Obviously CCard databases and stuff are off limits as their use is outright fraud, but stuff like traffic cameras, imaging systems, etc.
I don't know about US, but many European countries have access logging in police and health databases, which checks to see for unwarranted snooping. With actual convictions taking place when someone gets too interested in, say, the behind-the-scenes data of the latest celebrity news.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#247A small anecdote. A few years ago in an undergrad business class, we were having some discussion and the topic of encryption came up during one of my presentations. A student asked a question related to the ethics of encryption (I don't recall exactly what), and I was clearly confused by the question. To clear up confusion, the professor asked those who thought encryption was "bad" to raise their hand, and at least 6…
Should have followed up with: Do you think having a lock on your front door is bad?
Eh. Locks can be picked and doors can be rammed. Layered encryption is really hard to break and one time pads are impossible.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#248Sorry, did I miss something? WTF is the "techlash"?
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freedom isn't free. I think people have just ought to realize that. People have this idea that free countries are more efficient, which is probably true in the long run, but it's a cop-out to just call it a day there. Once I was in Belarus. It's a heavily authoritarian country, make no mistake. When they had protests against their rigged elections, they traced the phones of everyone who went, then brought them in for…
> But it does work. I was at a restaurant there. Some girls are chatting, and they walk away to go get something, and just leave their bags there unattended. Why? Because it's an authoritarian country - people aren't going to steal stuff there. Chances are high that you could do the same in most European countries. Just like in the Soviet Union, thieves exist in Belarus. People's perception might be that they're safe…
Just like during Soviet times, people felt safer, but crime still happened. It just wasn't talked about, because it makes the state look bad.
Poor example. The anarchy that attended the collapse of the Soviet system brought about a dramatic increase in crime. And while reported petty theft was arguably a reporting problem, the dramatic rise in homicides was not.
For the record my mother-in-law lived in St Petersburg at the time. And her anecdotal reports were that crime that she and friends experienced rose dramatically.
Re: DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
#250So terrorists will use one-time pads and other strong encryption and everyone else will have their information exposed on a massive scale when the backdoors inevitably are exploited.
I look forward to the day when one time pads are the norm for general encryption.
A scifi novel I read, "A Deepness in the Sky" described how the pads themselves were a valuable item of trade. I don't think it's farfetched to imagine purchasing OTP data to use with internet browsing, the way we buy yubikeys to use with passwords. It would be a far simpler encryption scheme than those we currently use, and that simplicity would make it easier to catch bugs like heartbleed in the future.
How hard would it be to extend the ssl protocol to allow the use of OTP pads, where available?