Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 342 posts

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#321

Post by throw10920 »

bigdang wrote: post #162

> The company’s aggressive pursuit of growth, coupled with lack of moderation in the app, has already led Signal employees themselves to publicly question whether growth might come from abusive users, such as far-right groups using Signal to organize. Lol what? What exactly does far-right mean in this case? Why intersperse irrelevant political digs at another ill-defined faction? Does far-right just mean non-progress…

Because Wired, and to a lesser extent some Signal employees, have a political agenda to push that they're willing to distort the truth for.

There's zero evidence that Signal is being used for radical reactionary groups any more than radical progressive groups - and if there was evidence, the Signal employees would have very little additional knowledge due to app's design.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#322

Post by cmiles74 »

catiopatio wrote: post #159
cmiles74 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the comparison to weaponry is pretty loaded and unreasonable. It evokes scenes of mass shootings, secure communication has no similar destructive power. Warrants are still a thing! The government in the US can still get a warrant and they can compel you to show them the contents of your Signal messages. No fancy E2E backdoors are required. ;-)

Unfortunately, it’s not a fringe opinion that speech is similarly dangerous and should be similarly regulated. It’s also not clear that the US government can compel you to reveal a password, much less compel you to incriminate yourself.

I'm having trouble finding coverage in this, but I believe the current state is that the warrant can require you to unlock the phone but you don't have to tell them how or provide your password.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/11/29/fbi-n...

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/police-should-n...

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#323

Post by bovermyer »

MoSattler wrote: post #229
bovermyer wrote: post #112

The way I got some of my coworkers to adopt Signal was when we went to Re:invent as a group, and texting no longer worked reliably. I suggested everyone install Signal, and we didn't have a problem communicating after that. Now everyone still uses it. It's interesting how temporary solutions to problems can become permanent features of a (small) community.

This approach, unfortunately, won't work in the majority of the (western) world where WhatsApp has already replaced text messages as the de facto standard.

I don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I live in the eastern United States.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#324

Post by MoSattler »

bovermyer wrote: post #323
MoSattler wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach, unfortunately, won't work in the majority of the (western) world where WhatsApp has already replaced text messages as the de facto standard.

I don't know a single person who uses WhatsApp. I live in the eastern United States.

Yeah, the US is one of the few exceptions.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#325

Post by edrxty »

dools wrote: post #126
edrxty wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider technology to be an extension of mind. I'm not ok with the police literally cracking open my skull and probing my brain, not just because of the invasive torturous nature, but because it's an invasion of the very state that forms my existence. Similarly, the bits of my mind that I offload to other places.

So like, if you wrote a journal detailing a bunch of crimes and/or criminal motives, you don't think that journal should be admissable as evidence in a criminal proceeding? Nor do you think that a warrant should be capable of granting access to that journal for the purposes of a criminal investigation?

Within the narrow context that a journal is a mental device rather than "literally any document", yeah, I would prefer that be inadmissible.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#326

Post by soulofmischief »

dools wrote: post #304
foo-bar-bat wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Live outside of society" has a nice ring to it, but the meaning of those words when choosing to disobey court orders converts via bailiff to residing in jail cell. That's not living "outside society" or its constraints. It's very inside of them. If you want to actually live outside of society, perhaps the only way to do that is on a simple sailboat like Moxie did for a while: https://archive.org/details/holdFastADoc…

There are millions of people who live totally lawless lives. Sometimes they get imprisoned, also sometimes they get killed or tortured. But living a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.

What exactly is the point you're making? The rejection was of OP's use of the word "moral" when discussing legal compulsion.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#327

Post by katbyte »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #215
katbyte wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may have been the intent (which I seriously doubt) but in practice it means teachers cannot even mention their same sex partners or even that gay/trans people exist because that could be considered “sex ex” by a parent who doesn’t want their children to know gay people exist (and for the record it is not sex ed) Hence the use of the phrase “don’t say gay”

I would government employees to not talk about sex, their partners, their bedrooms, and all manner of topics to 5-9 year old kids.

So you don’t want female teachers to mention their husbands? Or their partner is male? Or that marriage even exists?

Because that would be the equivalent.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#328

Post by soulofmischief »

dools wrote: post #302
anonym29 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot choose to live outside of society. See: Waco, Rubgy Ridge, etc. You cannot even choose to renounce the citizenship that you did not want, never asked for, and never consented to, without getting another citizenship first. The social contract is the only contract in the world that you can be legally bound to the terms of without ever having agreed to it. In this way, the government acts very much like any o…

There are plenty of organised crime syndicates who live outside of society. They sometimes get caught by law enforcement and sometimes they get caught by rival gangs. I didn’t say you can live outside of society peacefully in such a way that everyone will just leave you alone but a life of crime is a choice available to everyone.

This is a naive perspective. The reality is it's not available, but gets forced upon entire classes of people as the only viable option, and leads to a lifetime of economic and emotional struggle.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#329

Post by soulofmischief »

dools wrote: post #126
edrxty wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider technology to be an extension of mind. I'm not ok with the police literally cracking open my skull and probing my brain, not just because of the invasive torturous nature, but because it's an invasion of the very state that forms my existence. Similarly, the bits of my mind that I offload to other places.

So like, if you wrote a journal detailing a bunch of crimes and/or criminal motives, you don't think that journal should be admissable as evidence in a criminal proceeding? Nor do you think that a warrant should be capable of granting access to that journal for the purposes of a criminal investigation?

They can take the journal. They can't compel me to provide a key to unencrypt the contents.

Re: Signal walks the line between anarchism and pragmatism

#330

Post by ldarby »

georgeplusplus wrote: post #316
TillE wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverse engineering is not onerously difficult if you have the right tools, some experience, and a decent grasp of assembly language. It's only really annoying if you can't use a debugger.

Any good resources you recommend for a noob to the art who doesn't know assembly? I've reverse engineered file types. But not actual code.

You just need to understand assembly. Maybe there are books that can help, I'm not aware of any, but to get started I'd recommend taking a binary of any open source software (preferably a non-optimised build, or just your own hello world with some loops etc), run it in a debugger, and step through each assembly instruction at a time and figure out what it's doing, with the corresponding source code. Eventually you may be able to do this without needing the source code, which is the goal. I think this is about the same effort as learning a new language (spoken, not programming), i.e. it'll take months of being immersed in it to get good at it.

On the other hand, maybe your binary can be decompiled to source code (e.g. CFR can decompile java classes, I've used that a bit but haven't checked if that's useful for Android apps).

Post reply on HN