Live data from Hacker News

European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

eureporter.co

241–250 of 273 posts

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is just scams and intervenes with elections. Google is just privacy hell that sells your data for ads. Amazon is in the business of abusing its workers. Point being, it was asked for success. Not if people like the company or not.

What a cynical interpretation. These companies have QoL for billions, directly and indirectly. You are just normalized to it now. For some reason I don't see you blaming Cambridge Analytica - the actual company running the interference by exploiting APIs - for the interference itself.

Did the point go above your head? Because my point was that the EU companies mentioned also have earned money and been used by billions of people, no matter if the other commenter likes them or not.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is just scams and intervenes with elections. Google is just privacy hell that sells your data for ads. Amazon is in the business of abusing its workers. Point being, it was asked for success. Not if people like the company or not.

What an intellectually dishonest take comparing Candy Crush to US big tech. You should be embarrassed.

I wonder what's done more good for the world.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#243
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they are being removed from the UK to Rwanda (which is the aim of UK government), "the place they came from" is the UK.

Q: Is France "safe" compared to the UK?

What does this have to do with anything?

The reason people are trying to get to the UK from France (and other countries) is they are trying to apply for asylum in the UK. Not in France, in the UK. And the reason they have to do that in the UK is the fact the UK cancelled the possibility to apply for asylum at its embassies. So if you don't want people coming from France to ask for asylum, enable the option to apply at the embassy and you are done. Simple, and you will save many lives.

Now of course the same applies to all western countries. There are lots of people trying to come here, some for legitimate reasons, some not, and also we need some of them because of shortage of workers, even if we don't say it loud, because even more would try to come. All western countries allow to apply for asylum only on their soil, thus creating a humanitarian catastrophe, because while the right to asylum is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it does not say how hard can it be to apply.

But all of this is to say it does not matter whether France is or is not a safe country. We could arrange for international cooperation where asylum seekers could ask for asylum and while their application is processed they would stay in some safe country, but next to no safe country will do this because of internal political reasons, so what remains is treating asylum seekers like hot potatoes and not people. It's a sad state of affairs, but there are too many factors and no easy way to direct the blame.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only constitution that the UK has consists of Acts of Parliament. So I don't know why it should seem odd; the US courts can't strike clauses of the US Constitution, and the UK courts can't strike Acts. Amusingly, the UK government is currently trying to pass an Act to the effect that black is equivalent to white, i.e. that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent. This is analogous to the Stat…

pi is objective. Lets be objective here for safety: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/compare_countries_result.jsp?co... Rwanda is safe

Numbeo lists no sources, is not peer reviewed and provides statistics to questions such as "Worries home broken and things stolen".

Perhaps not a valid source then? Objectivity does not come from a website.

edit: the data comes from visitors to the website.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#245
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which _sounds_ bad, but the UK has an extremely long history of relative stability compared to basically anywhere else on the planet, so something must be going right. The more I learn about British history, the more I think this reputation for stability is merely due to how well all the civil wars (and parliament inviting in a new royal family) were brushed over.

When was the last time the British had a civil war or invited in a new royal family? Having issues hundreds of years ago hardly seems worthy of denying the stability of a country. Many countries have come into existence and no longer exist in that same period of time.

> When was the last time the British had a civil war

1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

If that's sub-threshold for you, I'd also add the 1919 to 1921 Irish War of Independence as, likewise with the Troubles, it was part of the UK at the time.

Personally, I would also argue that almost all of the independence movements in the former colonies count as examples of the governments of the UK being "not stable" even though those colonies were outside the nation itself, and that would even extend to cases like Malta where independence happened peacefully after a proposal to give them a seat in Westminster, and not just cases like Cyprus where they used guns to kick us out and yet somehow the British Sovereign Base Areas are still there.

> or invited in a new royal family?

1689, which you may feel is a while ago now, but the USA Revolutionary War was 1775, and proportionally speaking that invitation was only 34% longer ago than the formation of the USA, so I wouldn't call it an "extremely" long history relative to that… even if you don't want to count the Revolutionary War itself as an example of instability in the British government, which I would as the British was the other party in that conflict.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#246
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought precedents only matter in the US "common law" framework, but most of the EU is following the "civil law" framework where precedents do not matter. Does this precedent really matter?

It's funny seeing "common law" referred as a US thing when it's literally been in use in the UK for centuries before the US was a thing, and that's where the US inherited it from. And precedent has it's place in civil law countries too, mostly around clarifying existing legislation in case of ambiguity, but it isn't an automatic ironclad thing.

An interesting quirk of English law is that murder is a common law offence. There is no Act of Parliament proscribing it; it's just something that everybody has always accepted is a crime.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#247

For a better understanding: The Court held (in the circumstances of this case) that a legal obligation to decrypt E2E communications is a disproportionate interference with the right to privacy. The law in question specifically obligated messengers such as Telegram to hand over communications alongside the "information necessary to decrypt electronic messages if they were encrypted". To come to that conclusion, it re…

Perhaps a dumb question, but why would the EU courts be able to overturn laws in the UK now that the UK is not part of the EU anymore?

ECtHR is not an EU court. UK is part of Council of Europe, which also includes Russia. Being member of Council of Europe entails mandatory treaty law of ECHR.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#248
post #94
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite sure they can use the app store to push a targeted update just to some.

Yes, an operating system that uses a compromised software supply chain is at risk of compromise, but that really has nothing to do with e2ee.

E2EE itself as a concept is ridiculous. The word was stolen from networking, end to end, and repurposed for an entirely different and non-sensical context to describe sth completely else. It has to do with "E2EE" because the biggest provided of it, Signal, pushes you to use 'compromised software supply chains' that are iOS and Play Store, evensofar as to spreading FUD about alternative distribution mechanisms, like APKs. That's why you have to go over yourself to find the APK of the App on Signal's website.

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#249
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it the other way around. Majority of EU member countries wanted to to ban E2E, but the EU institutions prevented that.

No, the ECHR is not a EU institution, it's just European. The bad guys here are the commission and some EU member states.

Here's the actual position accord to the commission:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2023-00166...

Re: European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption

#250
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, an operating system that uses a compromised software supply chain is at risk of compromise, but that really has nothing to do with e2ee.

E2EE itself as a concept is ridiculous. The word was stolen from networking, end to end, and repurposed for an entirely different and non-sensical context to describe sth completely else. It has to do with "E2EE" because the biggest provided of it, Signal, pushes you to use 'compromised software supply chains' that are iOS and Play Store, evensofar as to spreading FUD about alternative distribution mechanisms, like A…

I am very suspicious of Signal, for not not being on f-droid, but being on play store.

I'm sure the protocol is fine and all, but playstore can easily be used to compromise everything anyway.

Also I've read many times Bruce Schneier claim that Signal is the most secure communication system that exists, and Whatsapp is the 2nd best, because it (allegedly, but we don't know) uses the same protocol.

Post reply on HN