661–670 of 785 posts
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In Saudi Arabia and other places, Whatsapp is not encrypted. Otherwise those services would be banned.
This is pure speculation. WhatsApp is banned in some authoritarian countries such as China and UAE. It probably remains unbanned in others simply because it is so important for business.
I had to look it up.
I feel we've been collectively losing the battle to keep our conversations private. The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim. And perhaps that's true to some extent. But since most people believe the battle is lost, moreso that this has always been the status quo, then any batt…
> The anti-encryption laws are likely vocally opposed only by a minority, while the majority believes they had no privacy to begin with and governments can read your messages at a whim Traditionally, couldn't they with texts? And with all the major social media players? Isn't stuff like Signal they can't track relatively new and getting outlawed in many places?
Tho as I understand it, Signal's security is more robust.
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This feels pretty opposite to me. I mean sure UK is pretty privacy hostile in practice (CCTVs everywhere), but what does the US have for companies surveillance of people? How much of that data is legal for governments to buy? Maybe the US gov isn't spying on citizens, but how many 5-eyes partners are definitely sending data to them in proxy (by careful surveillance design)? I guess my question boils down to what spec…
Is TFA not a good enough example?
First, the TFA is about Apple, not the US. The US gov. also attempted to get backdoors from Apple (only to give up and go for the standard security vulnerabilities instead of getting a clean entry point)
Then cloud data stored on Apple servers is still open game, and Apple syncs message on iCloud by default. There's very little incitive for the US gov to burn political will on this issue when it won't matter for 99% of people using the devices. Except the UK gov doesn't get that privilege as the data is on US servers, not UK ones.
Easy decision considering Apple gains little to no money from them.
They should beta test on everyone in the House of Commons. Today.
Nobody in the UK uses iMessage. Not sure about Facetime but it's definitely not anything anyone relies on. This is a meaningless threat.
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LTE and 5G standards allow end-to-end encryption of the roaming traffic. So, it's by design. If your operator chooses to enable e2e (and usually they do), there would be just two options: block your traffic entirely or let it pass as it is.
What's the end in this case?
The same Apple that lets the CCP operate its entire App Store in China? It's easy to criticize a government when you know there will be no retaliation. To judge a company's true stance on such issues see how they behave when there's a prospect of real financial loss.
In the end the choice is simple: follow local laws or drop features or devices. The calculation is going to be different in each country, but there is no hypocrisy here. The Chinese government messing with Chinese servers affect the Chinese market, which makes a lot of money so there is a strong incentive to remain in it. The UK backdooring FaceTime compromises it for the rest of the world and would actually put Appl…
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The right to repair is a direct extension of "banging the rocks together" - i.e. toolmaking, the main thing that defines us as humans. How can that not be a human right?
> the main thing that defines us as humans. How can that not be a human right? Plenty of animals use tools [1]. And this isn’t how we define human rights. Bipedalism is quintessentially human, that doesn’t make tunnels a crime against humanity. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_non-humans
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Group messages. If I send an SMS message to a group of people, they all see a message from me. They don't know who else got it. And if they reply, they reply only to me. Is your experience different? WhatsApp (and I think iMessage) allow me to create a group with a name/purpose and send messages to the group and receive replies to the whole group. (P.S. I went from dumb-phones to Android and have limited exposure to…
I imagine your experience of sending a message to multiple people and it not making a "group message" was your older dumb phones weren't switching to MMS, it was keeping it as pure SMS. In the SMS world, there is one recipient. In MMS, it's like an email, you can list a lot (100+ in some cases) of receipts and they can all see the list.
That kind of pricing made WhatsApp an infinitely preferable alternative.
Phones automatically switching to MMS would be catastrophic.
Data (WhatsApp) is essentially free in comparison. £10 (13 USD) per month gets you 20GB: which doesn't care how many messages/recipients/photos you send.