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Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

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Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#231

Post by inigyou »

jatins wrote: post #120
Barbing wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government. Originally you’d communicate by mail and they could get a warrant. The day encrypted comms showed up, they wouldn’t just want to give up. If you love the encryption but hate the terrorism, what to do? Double down on old school / physical surveillance? (Obviously not my field)

> Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government. It's not ordinary citizens' job to figure out solutions to these problems. Government has teams of intelligence agencies to answer these questions. Encrypted chat is fundamental infra that shouldn't be blocked.

It did. The answer it came to? Make encryption illegal.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#232

Post by inigyou »

thewebguyd wrote: post #130
viktorcode wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was fully expecting that was about Trump administration, and was a bit disappointed that my prediction turned out to be wrong. I do not support this; I expected the first federal court and then all the appeals to serve a verdict cementing the right of encrypted communication to exist in the US.

Be careful what you wish for. Bringing a test case to the current supreme court is playing with fire, and we are far more likely to end up with precedent rejecting a right to encrypted communications, given the current make up of the court. They have already shown a willingness to show deference to national security, and our fifth amendment protections are already eroding (State v. Andrews in NJ, government can compe…

At least then we'd have hard proof of what kind of country the USA is.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#233

Post by noncoml »

viktorcode wrote: post #76

> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions. This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for…

“incompetent persons in power”.

The fact that they can get away with shit like this makes them pretty competent in my book.

To me it’s the opposition that’s incompetent, not being able to put an end to the circus.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#234

Post by flerchin »

manytimesaway wrote: post #226
inigyou wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing that happens whenever your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms, or Indonesia and you have legal weed, or to Australia and you have a pineapple. Which is that it depends on the mood of the person in charge. Either you get to keep it, or it's confiscated and destroyed, or you go to jail, or you go to a firing squad. We can guess which is more likely in each country. Indonesia almost alwa…

>your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms ..what? Condoms are not outlawed there, are they?

AFAICT South Korea does not outlaw condoms. Grandparent may be thinking of North Korea. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#235

Post by inigyou »

em-bee wrote: post #215
inigyou wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the tech they care about, it's the network structure.

sure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.

Not on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#236

Post by palmotea »

tavavex wrote: post #166
viktorcode wrote: post #76

> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions. This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for…

I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.

> I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.

There's a lot that scary about AI, but this is one of the scariest. Even if new good jobs pop up to employ all the people who work on things LLMs can do, governments and other powerful organizations now have this ability to analyze surveillance at scale that was unimaginable even by the East German Stasi.

It's conceivable we'll soon have a machine that can listen in on every phone call, read every text message and email, understand them, and flag dissident concepts and content. The manpower limit on oppressive surveillance will be gone. It'll be like having a spy following you around all the time, taking notes. All the guys who's job it is to listen can be redeployed as thugs to beat out the wrong-think.

It so great these smart kids invented all this. Truly for the benefit of mankind. /s

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#237

Post by inigyou »

flerchin wrote: post #234
manytimesaway wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms ..what? Condoms are not outlawed there, are they?

AFAICT South Korea does not outlaw condoms. Grandparent may be thinking of North Korea. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...

I was probably thinking of Romania a century ago. But you can imagine for every normal thing there is probably a country where it is banned. And South Korea is a country where some things are banned that you wouldn't expect.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#238

Post by hamper653 »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #107
viktorcode wrote: post #76

> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions. This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for…

>This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the government. Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference. There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.

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Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#239

Post by ifh-hn »

infinite_spin wrote: post #210
ifh-hn wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what I'm saying at all. If you've taken that from my comment you've misread it.

care to clarify yourself then? It's hard to see what other conclusion I should arrive at, because it seems like you're implying that privacy interferes with safety.

No. I have done so already in other comments.

Re: Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

#240

Post by hamper653 »

abernard1 wrote: post #197
tavavex wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a Constitutional Republic. Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to…

> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America. Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running contin…

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