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Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

blog.tripu.info

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Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#231

Post by tripu »

mbork_pl wrote: post #221
tripu wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know what reports you've read I used these reports, which I already knew before writing this post: • Both Poland and Hungary are classified as “flawed democracies” by The Economist . Only 24 countries are considered to be “full democracies” (and this is irrelevant, but Spain happens to be among them). https://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/DI-final-version... • On a scale of 0–100 on political freedom,…

Thanks. Just three quick comments. > The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. This is highly debatable, though I do not claim to know enough about this issue to be able to say a lot. > Violations of LGBTI rights persisted. I'm not sure what exactly they mean, but I suspect this may be about so-called "same-sex marriage". The definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman is fo…

> Violations of LGBTI rights persisted

Aparently,

> "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'. [...] LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings. [...] In January, during court proceedings brought by one activist who had been arbitrarily detained for 24 hours after the so-called Rainbow Night protest in 2020, the police officer who arrested him admitted: 'We were instructed to stop all persons displaying the colours of LGBT, regardless of how they behaved'".

> Given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom

I don't think that condemning a fetus with terrible congenital defects to be born against the will of its parents is a step towards freedom.

> I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.

I don't know whether you're being honest, or sarcastic. In any case: I tongue-in-cheek "defended" Spain above just because @Radim said to me: "coming from a Spaniard? go fuck yourself" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914718 ), which I found baffling, irrelevant, and very nasty.

I am against all patriotism and nationalism. I am not "proud" or "ashamed" of privileges or defects that I got by chance, or traits over which I bear no responsibility or I can't control.

Assume I'm from North Korea. Or from Vanuatu. Let's discuss ideas, not individuals, please!

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#232

Post by phito »

avodonosov wrote: post #214
phito wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You share your private key with them. Either before dying (that requires a lot of trust, I wouldn't recommend it), or after being dead through a will.

Not secure to have the key printed in ones will.

Neither is it secure to leave your data on your computer without encryption and password

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#233

Post by mbork_pl »

tripu wrote: post #231
mbork_pl wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Just three quick comments. > The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. This is highly debatable, though I do not claim to know enough about this issue to be able to say a lot. > Violations of LGBTI rights persisted. I'm not sure what exactly they mean, but I suspect this may be about so-called "same-sex marriage". The definition of marriage as a union of one man and one woman is fo…

> Violations of LGBTI rights persisted Aparently, > "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'. [...] LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings. [...] In January, during court proceedings brought by one activist who had been arbitrarily detained for 24 hours after the so-called Rainbow Night protest in 2020, the police officer…

> > "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'.

This one is a widespread fake. As for the rest, I don't know, though I suspect similar. As for

> LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings

at least some of the Polish LGBTI right defenders have a rather... rough relationship with the law (outside their activism).

> I don't think that condemning a fetus with terrible congenital defects to be born against the will of its parents is a step towards freedom.

It is. Every human being, irrespective of their age, has the right to live.

> I don't know whether you're being honest, or sarcastic.

100% honest, sorry for not making it clear enough.

> Let's discuss ideas, not individuals, please!

Patriotism is an idea, and a very noble one at that.

Anyway, thanks for keeping the discussion civil. (Also honestly.)

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#234

Post by qweqwe14 »

pmarreck wrote: post #78
tripu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. (Thank you for all the comments!) Yes, I know SSH tunnelling and compiling your own Android are tall orders for the average user. Here I'm just hinting at some examples that are well-known among us geeks, but there are easier to use alternatives to all that. I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail. VPNs are so easy to use nowadays. The UX on Signal isn't particularly challenging to the average us…

> avert catastrophe Catastrophe, you mean like thousands of radicalized people meeting securely in secret online to disrupt an objectively legitimate thing? I would like more widespread penetration of critical thinking (such as teaching people to pattern-match on the most common fallacious techniques used by cults, conspiracy theorists, propagandists, modern snake-oil salesmen, and other ne'er-do-wells) before we dep…

Privacy for everyone includes privacy for people you don't like. Having literally everyone know about ways to have secure and private communications would actually be a good thing.

Do the bad guys use these technologies? Yes, but so what? It's like saying that we shouldn't educate people about knives because some guy can use it to kill people.

This whole fear of educating people about privacy tools because some criminals will use it is so tired and irrational. Criminals do it already and have done it for a long time. It's inevitable that more people will use them in the future, including the "bad guys". How about we just accelerate it and instead think of why people commit crimes in the first place? Nah, too hard, let's try to ban math instead.

> Fortunately, it seems like most bad actors are idiots who have zero qualms about insecurely broadcasting their thoughts on social media leading up to their committing of despicable acts.

At some point they'll stop doing it and become more aware of their OPSEC. Or they do it intentionally because they want to get caught.

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#235

Post by iggldiggl »

defend wrote: post #180
crazygringo wrote: post #27

I can sympathize with the general notion that more encryption is better, even if I wouldn't go to the extreme of declaring it a duty . But the author just completely lost me at: > We should all use PGP, SSL or equivalent tools; VPNs, Tor and/or SSH tunnelling; IPFS, or other distributed file systems — and ditch proprietary OS's in favour of Linux or truly free Android distros... Those tools and techniques should ceas…

It's only impractical if you actually require end users to understand and apply all of these technologies. It's a lot more tractable if they're abstracted away. The fact is that developers very (very) rarely have to interface directly with TLS or the Signal protocol, yet billions of non-technical users implicitly use them in our browsers and via Signal or WhatsApp. In my view, the challenge in the adoption of secure/…

> Without (significant) feature superiority

Problem is – if you can't trust any server, end-to-end encryption naturally often leads to feature inferiority in the context of multi-device usage.

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#236

Post by iggldiggl »

tripu wrote: post #20
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #8

The author advocates using encryption as an ethical duty, OK. But it would not be an effective form of civil disobedience. This is unrealistic: > We should all use PGP, SSL or equivalent tools; VPNs, Tor and/or SSH tunnelling; IPFS, or other distributed file systems — and ditch proprietary OS's in favour of Linux or truly free Android distros. This is not anything the general public, for whom today their mobile phone…

Author here. (Thank you for all the comments!) Yes, I know SSH tunnelling and compiling your own Android are tall orders for the average user. Here I'm just hinting at some examples that are well-known among us geeks, but there are easier to use alternatives to all that. I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail. VPNs are so easy to use nowadays. The UX on Signal isn't particularly challenging to the average us…

> I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail.

End-to-end encryption without a trusted server makes multi-device usage rather complicated within a number of contexts. Full-text search for example then requires all your e-mails to be indexed on each individual device you're using for accessing Protonmail, and you need to keep that index permanently unless you want to re-download all messages and re-index them again the next time you need to search something.

I don't very frequently use full-text search from my phone for example, but when I need it, I do need it, so neither proposition (permanently occupying valuable space on my mobile phone with a search index I only occasionally need, or else wasting a noticeable amount of time and data volume to re-index all mails every time I want to search something) sounds really enticing.

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#237

Post by iggldiggl »

denton-scratch wrote: post #147

> We should switch to Protonmail or similar webmail Doesn't Protonmail decrypt at the server? That is, can't Protonmail read your encrypted messages? And don't they have form for grassing people up? I'm not sure about those two claims. But that's the point - it's difficult for even a techie to use crypto(graphy) safely. If you want to use it as an impediment to snoopers, or as some kind of statement, cool. But if you…

> Doesn't Protonmail decrypt at the server? That is, can't Protonmail read your encrypted messages?

It doesn't decrypt them server-side, but since they're the ones serving you up with the webmail interface, you still need to trust them that the webmail code doesn't do anything nasty it shouldn't actually do.

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#238

Post by johnisgood »

tripu wrote: post #229
johnisgood wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They classify Hungary as a "flawed democracy" because people living in Hungary do not support Western values as much as they would like them to do. I would take those classifications with a pinch of salt. Both the Hungarian government and the Hungarian people are seeking to keep their cultural values, and/or traditions. Telling them to do this and that to undermine it is going to be responded to with criticism. Of co…

I'm not denying that bias or that animosity that you describe. It may well be that Hungary is despised in some circles because it's more conservative than most European countries. That is still compatible with a dispassionate evaluation of the democratic quality of its political system. Again, I'm not necessarily defending my sources here. But I'm not automatically discounting them, either. The Economist classifies H…

Political corruption is definitely a huge, pervasive problem in Hungary, and there is a lot of favoritism/nepotism going on. I would also say that the media is not independent either.

Re: Encrypting private data and private communications is now an ethical duty

#240

Post by Citizen_Lame »

gaoshan wrote: post #70
Citizen_Lame wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as unrealistic, as for your comprehension ability, that's debatable. For this to work on everything, it needs to be hardware implemented (security chip/SOC), to avoid taxing the CPU and rest of the system. Software engineering has been lax for so long, but paradigm is changing and it should be security first.

"as for your comprehension ability, that's debatable" This comes across as rude, especially in response to someone that did not themselves say anything warranting a rude response. You can disagree and make your point without doing this. I'm pointing it out because you genuinely may not be aware and I want to give the benefit of doubt (something I myself too often do not do online).

Thank you for your concern, it was purposefully rude.
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