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UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

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Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#221

Post by [deleted] »

ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #219
jen20 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tying mandate to turnout is actually a very interesting idea. Has this ever been tried?

I am afraid it's rather original. Afraid since originality in politics increases the chance of assassination, or even worse, marginalization. One technical issue to solve beforehand is reducing the cost of elections by 6-7 orders of magnitude. 2020 US election costed $14 billion (presidential and congressional) [1], 2020 India election costed $7 billlion [2]. It's completely unsustainable. Sending 500 million HTTPS m…

[deleted]

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#223

Post by MagnumOpus »

bee_rider wrote: post #66
iso1631 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The king does have some power, but it's mainly lobbying. Big party donors in America have far more power.

Do they lobby much? I vaguely remember a bunch of silliness about trying to figure out the Queen’s preferences around Brexit based on the brooch she was wearing or something like that… I’ve always just thought of royalty as sort of like the prototype for American celebrities like the Kardashians. Just a bunch of people who are famous for being famous.

Ooh they lobby indefatigably. The king has a weekly meeting with the prime minister to harangue him, a privilege for which that other lobbyists pay millions a year in party donations. And then there is King's consent, where the Windsors get to secretly modify or shoot down laws that don't give them enough special privileges...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Consent

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#224

Post by dghf »

denton-scratch wrote: post #47
dghf wrote: post #9

I'm sure we had legislative threats to encryption under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. I'm uncertain whether to be relieved (because multiple previous attempts have come to naught) or worried (because they might actually do it this time).

> under Cameron, and Blair, and quite possibly every prime minister between. There was exactly one Prime Minister between Blair and Cameron, and he (Brown) wasn't elected.

Apologies, between and since.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#225

Post by tialaramex »

dragonwriter wrote: post #217
tialaramex wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no need to speculate, the reason we say Parliament is sovereign is that Parliament ordered Charles I executed for defying them. The King is replaceable, status as Monarch of the United Kingdom is something its Parliament can bestow. Turns out that people who hate fun (Puritans) are even less popular than a King who keeps starting wars, so Parliament installed a replacement King.

> There’s no need to speculate, the reason we say Parliament is sovereign is that Parliament ordered Charles I executed for defying them. Refusal of Royal Assent has happened since then, and not caused similar responses, though (in England; parts of British North America are…a different story; no regicide of course, but the monarchy itself was replaced.)

Yup, the government absolutely can "advise" the monarch to do whatever they want as we saw in that other sub-thread. If the monarch refuses such "advice" they can be replaced, I doubt Parliament would go to all the extraordinary bother to execute a modern King, especially over such small beans - but if the King won't go they can either abolish the monarchy (it wouldn't even be that unpopular to do so right now) or just replace them anyway, passing a law which says actually no, that's not the King, this other person is monarch now.

Most recently Assent was withheld from a law passed in Scotland, on the advice of the British government. This conflict makes sense, the Scottish Parliament is necessarily subsidiary, and this was basically a Culture War law, in my opinion the Scottish were on the right side of history, but it's not astonishing that (as conceived when the Scottish Parliament was set up) the British parliament could say "No".

Before that the last time assent (as opposed to consent) was refused in 1708 is genuinely interesting. It was used because of unfortunate timing. Parliament said OK, those Scots seem useful, we don't fully trust them but we need more armed men and nobody doubts they can fight, so here's a law arming the Scottish. And then, with the Bill passed but Assent not yet granted, they received news of a French Fleet landing in Scotland. Suddenly giving arms to the Scottish seemed less clever as who knows if they'd be on France's side. So Mary was told (by the Government) to withhold Assent from that bill.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#226

Post by xoa »

upofadown wrote: post #210
xoa wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> End-to-end implies traffic between individuals I strongly disagree, this makes zero sense, and I'd never heard of it in decades up until on HN just the other day. End-to-end means exactly what it says on the tin : END to END, with no middleman. The specific identity of what each "end" is, whether human, organization, or even a machine and not a human at all, is irrelevant. The point is that Alice and Bob can commun…

>So if I'm talking to my bank through a link where only my bank and I have access to the info, that's absolutely E2EE. Through TLS? That is certainly not E2EE. That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank. End to end means exactly that. You are able to communicate securely with only the trust of the entity you are communicating w…

>Through TLS? That is certainly not E2EE.

It certainly is. Encryption is a separate problem from authentication.

>That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank

The CA that helps with mutual authentication does not have access to the plain text, and it's perfectly possible to have other checks on top.

>You definition pretty much covers any effective use of cryptography for privacy. That would make the distinction meaningless.

Wrong. In fact, it's your definition that excludes nearly every single existing use of cryptography, also making the distinction meaningless. For most people even Signal involves a central party and trust for establishing authentication. iMessage? WhatsApp? None of this is E2EE according to you, which is ridiculous. MitM attacks and endpoint security are the core modern challenge for E2EE systems, but E2EE is still notably distinct from all the many kinds of communication that existed and still exist that aren't E2EE, and where neither of those are even required because the plaintext itself is available.

Edit to add: I don't tend to use wikipedia as much anymore, but regardless of objective objections to its definitions, I do think it's certainly worth considering for a view on what subjective consensus is. Ie, whether or not the articles are all correct, if you're trying to answer a more meta question of "what do people think it is" then that's always helpful. Which of course is a big question when it comes to language definitions. So fwiw, its entry on E2EE [0] agrees:

>End-to-end encryption ensures that data is transferred securely between endpoints. But, rather than try to break the encryption, an eavesdropper may impersonate a message recipient (during key exchange or by substituting their public key for the recipient's), so that messages are encrypted with a key known to the attacker.

Which is how I've always understood it. Authentication is a major second level challenge to encryption, but without any encryption at all it just doesn't generally come up when it comes to privacy. There is no particular authentication for HTTP or telnet. E2EE is one of those "necessary, but not sufficient" items.

----

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_encryption

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#227

Post by Veen »

hgomersall wrote: post #202
Veen wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that right-wingers say precisely the opposite and can produce plenty of evidence showing the BBC's left-wing bias.

The problem is often reality having a left wing bias.

That's a lazy, trite, and untrue cliché.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#228

Post by regularjack »

nuklx wrote: post #121

In practice, this probably just means that WhatsApp, Signal etc. have to implement a lawful intercept capability, whereby a targeted user can have their communications read but everyone else continues as normal. Doesn't seem like such a big deal, considering this would be done by court order and limited to users suspected of engaging in criminal activity.

This requires the system to have a back door. Choose one: secure (i.e. encrypted) or has-back-door. It's not possible to have both.

If authorities want to read the messages of someone, they need to lawfully get access to their device and read the messages.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#229

Post by brokenmachine »

ben_w wrote: post #90
vincnetas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So shou…

FWIW, my reaction to the side-of-a-bus adverts for Saw franchise films in the UK was visceral disgust that there exist enough people who would buy tickets on the basis of those adverts to justify the existence of the adverts, let alone the films themselves — if I thought banning them would actually make any difference, I would call for exactly that! I don't know of human psychology really works like the toy model in…

I would like daytime TV to be banned because of the harm it causes.

Re: UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption

#230

Post by brokenmachine »

greybox wrote: post #131
vincnetas wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting times ahead. I would assume that child porn is illegal because it's production harms children. When we can synthesise it without child involvement, what are the reasons for banning it? It becomes on the same level as gore movies, kink adult porn or any fictional perversion book. It's up to consumer to choose to consume it or not. And at the end everything mentioned before can be turned to 1 and 0. So shou…

Possession of "synthesised" CSAM (or extream pornography such as rape) is already illegal in the UK. There have been prosecutions too. I believe the reasoning was that studies revealed that viewing synthesised content, lead to a higher chance of possessing real CSAM content, or of committing sex crimes themselves.

Interesting that those laws were supposedly guided by "studies", when I can think of many other laws that were clearly not.
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