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France rejects backdoor mandate

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121–130 of 320 posts

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#121
post #64

Tangentially, France has had the CNIL [1] since ~1978, following a scandal about creating a national citizen's database, and exists to prevent exactly that. (I believe the objection stemmed from memories of the Petainist fascist regime during WW2) The CNIL is why France (and now Europe) has "Right to Forget" laws. It is the direct ancestor of stuff like GDPR. Unfortunately, I feel like the CNIL is fairly neutered now…

I wonder if not having such state database is not causing today more issues than it defends from. In the 80s I would get it, the state was the only one able to build such a database and people were afraid of what it would do secretly with it. Nowadays, "everybody" has a database with millions of people (ex: facebook, linkedin, x, tax offices, etc.) and discriminatory actions are done based on whims/stupidity rather t…

The CNIL is doing a ton of work to limit private databases and cross-checking as well.

It can be hard to believe from more business focused countries, but the agency setting precedents has had dissuasion effects, and most companies do end up caring about their data retention and management policies. I've been in enough meetings where UX proposal gets entirely reworked because of a simple link to the CNIL's guidelines.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#122
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> French want less criminals and immigrants in the street. Whatever it takes. What about using the probability that a specific race or religion will commit crimes then target those people with aggressive tactics. As for the public they could make those people feel unwelcomed through constant harassment in the hopes they leave the country. Thus reducing the crime rate by any means. ---- I checked the murder rate and i…

> I haven't check other stats but what if your views on crime are being manipulated by people who have agenda that normally wouldn't be possible if the true reason was revealed? Actually, you're right about murders, but you're wrong overall i'd say. Organized crime is on the rise since 2004? Maybe a bit before. Politicians "reformed" the police, removed our "proximity police" which were basically social workers with…

Can you provide some stats?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Please learn to recognize sarcasm. And just to be clear, even if you are responding in a tongue in cheek way. One person is joking about damaging physical property, and you're joking about about sending that person to prison for 20 years for their sarcastic remark. Do you really think a Tesla is more valuable than a human life? Do you really think a low effort joke is more valuable than a human life?

What sarcasm?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a coherent set of values that lead to saying "no encryption", but not one for "only backdoored encryption". While I oppose building backdoors, I don't really agree with this claim. There's nothing incoherent about developing a threat model.

Your government isn't the only one out there. If your government can have a backdoor, so can every other government. If the US, EU, Russia, and China all have backdoors to everything, who are you keeping it secret from?

The powers that can't pay? If the US, EU, Russia, China all have nukes to everything...

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#125
post #36

I've found the original debates video on the National Assembly website. My French is good enough for that (not enough for cooking et al. though), so I believe I understood. I'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks. But Bruno (interior minister) Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his advisors as well, or is a liar. "We will apply the math selectively, only for those that are a threat a…

Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll alter my country and language for search engines when searching for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French. Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from. Especially if you know some French already, I think…

Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#126
post #59
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I generally agree with your position, this is the same unconvincing argument I've read for a long time. Even if there is a specific criminal gang that is sophisticated enough to use a properly encoded open source application, the majority aren't, and there is enough of a overhead and annoyance factor that will allow the majority not to use them. If any open source application gets enough people using it, there…

Even it would occupy them 20% of their time, the issue with such a backdoor is what it can do to non-criminals (ex: loose the backdoor to an enemy nation state that would allow spying on all citizens, or allowing some party to eliminate opposition). I always find this "war on drugs" strange, considering they are so many buyers to make it worth. Annoy/treat/educate/understand the buyers, if enough people want somethin…

[deleted]

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#127
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Your lack of empathy for others is always baffling for me. “I haven’t had problems with occupants, therefore they are not a problem.” They just said that they hadn't observed the same thing in their entourage. > Some had to crawl, bleeding on the floor, reciting to Coran. Are you referring to a recent event in France? Can't find any with the query "réciter coran otage". That quote makes France look like a war zone.…

I find your linked study intriguing, as an American who's aware of studies on my side of the Atlantic that show an inverse relationship between immigration and criminality - i.e. immigrants commit less crime than native born citizens: https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/illegal-immigrant-murde...

Is that truly not the case in France? I'd be curious as to the results of a study comparing this effect across both countries.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#128

> provision that would have forced messaging platforms like Signal and WhatsApp to allow hidden access to private conversations. The fact that this could have been possible is the reason why the pgp/gpg way ( you manage your certificate and you choose whose certificates to trust) is still the only way to have true encrypted communications. Using centralised services to encrypt important data is a joke.

PGP/GPG by default have no perfect forward secrecy though.

In Signal you can check the certificates checksums in conversation settings, to compare them e.g. when physically present to the other device.

There are other solutions that use Signal protocol or that have PFS that are decentralized. And you can build your own, it's open source at the end.

Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain markets than violate their security (e.g. https://swedenherald.com/article/signals-ceo-then-were-leavi...)

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#129
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll alter my country and language for search engines when searching for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French. Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from. Especially if you know some French already, I think…

Try German, too. I'm always amazed at the level of German writing, even by regular joes on forums and Discord, compared to for instance Dutch writing.

I might. I hardly know anything about the German language though right now. Do you have a rough sense of how much I'd need to study to be able to supplement with automatic tools and do something useful with German sources (50hrs, 500, ...)?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#130
post #3

Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also not have no clue at all. Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryptio…

>> given that the US have become hostile to Europe

I'd like to comfort you that this is not true for the majority of Americans. We are having a hard time wrapping our heads around what our new government is doing.

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