11–20 of 86 posts
It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store" If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it. With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.
It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store" If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it. With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.
Couldn't the government ban the company from making the service available? The app depends on the service.
It struck me as I was reading this, the entire reason this is even a possible thing is the advent of the "App Store" If users obtained thier software elsewhere, the system could still "ban" it, but people would still obtain it. With the app stores, it becomes fairly easy for a government to unilaterally ban a piece of software.
On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern.
There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates and the camp against encryption in the name of national security will continue.
Banning a single service such as WhatsApp is not a solution to this problem. If someone really wants their communication to be encrypted, they can easily make it happen using the numerous tools available, and there is nothing the Government can do about it.
One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist. On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern. There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates a…
Generalizing this argument a bit, banning encryption is also not a solution to this problem. The cat is, as they say, out of the bag, and unless we're going to burn every cryptography book and remove every website documenting cryptographic methods or hosting cryptography code, there's no putting it back [1].
1: Presuming the development of effective post quantum cryptography cannot be prevented and distributed, which considering the current state of PQC seems unlikely.
This is probably my US-centrism talking, but it seems like the title could be updated to reflect that this is India 's Supreme Court, not the US Supreme Court.
I'm tempted to agree, but if we consider the domain part of the title (which we do), it already says India. And it's good for HN readers to have to work a little.
"Almost" impossible is a stretch. It's regarded as impractical regardless of computational power or other available resources with current computational technology. We might as well not even try.
> Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years, Yadav said.
That's an interesting way to phrase it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't the government ban the company from making the service available? The app depends on the service.
The company isn't in their jurisdiction. At most, they could try to block it, like Brazil did.
One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist. On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern. There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates a…