France rejects backdoor mandate • Hacker News Board

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#131

Post by kyralis » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 4:33 AM UTC

dataflow wrote: post #39

whatshisface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to construct a cypher with just one key, such that the good guys (spanning several allied nations, dozens of government agencies, perhaps even local police) can use the key, but bad guys (spanning several opposing nations, dozens of intelligence agencies, thousands of hacker groups, tens of thousands of individual cyber-criminals around the world) cannot. We are talking about every single person who…

You're missing my point completely. These folks very well understand that bad people can steal keys. Stolen keys have been a thing since antiquity. It's not rocket science they don't understand. Every single key in history has had a risk of theft and this is no exception. The truth is a lot of them understand this just like you. But unlike you, they are willing to accept this risk . You aren't. That's fine. You have…

This is spot on.

They're not concerned about their own security. They believe that they will have access to tools that will make them safe, but that "those people" will be deterred, and it is acceptable to give up some basic safety for many to catch "the bad people."

And, historically, they weren't necessarily wrong. The problem is more that all of the tradeoffs and probabilities from history have been thrown at the window, because it is now trivially easy to phish the majority of a population and getting a master key gives you access to hundreds of millions of individuals that you can reach from around the globe rather than a couple dozen that you can get to in person from a particular apartment complex.

Understanding encryption is not the problem. Understanding scale is the problem.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#132

Post by imoverclocked » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 4:40 AM UTC

noduerme wrote: post #130

palata wrote: 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.

It kinda doesn’t matter; Individuals aren’t making foreign policy decisions day-by-day, Republicans leaders are. Until we effect change in our government, we are hostile to most of our allies.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#133

Post by csomar » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 4:43 AM UTC

palata wrote: 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…

> it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions.

That's a very gullible take and kind of apologetic for the politicians. If you are implementing a backdoor to crypto-systems, you probably know exactly what you are doing.

That, and this has been re-surfacing time and again under different pretenses make this a deliberate attack on freedom of expression. The politicians know exactly what they are doing.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#134

Post by noduerme » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 4:52 AM UTC

imoverclocked wrote: post #132

noduerme wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

It kinda doesn’t matter; Individuals aren’t making foreign policy decisions day-by-day, Republicans leaders are. Until we effect change in our government, we are hostile to most of our allies.

It matters to me, as a person who travels frequently, that people in the countries I visit don't believe that Americans writ large voted for the foreign policy we see being enacted. Even among the ones who voted for Trump, there seems to be a lot of shock at the aggressive posture toward our allies. I think it's important to convey that a majority of Americans are not on board with this 180 degree turn in our position toward Europe.

But yes... individuals don't make foreign policy, and we are subject to the whims of our polity. That's exactly what I'm asking the parent poster to take into account.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#135

Post by sitkack » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 4:57 AM UTC

palata wrote: 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…

> Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography

We could be seeing the effect of France's top notch level of mathematical attainment in how their politicians are behaving.

Education lifts all boats.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#136

Post by fuzzzerd » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 5:07 AM UTC

thomassmith65 wrote: post #61

If the general public is given a choice between super secret internet messaging, or the current status quo, they will go for the latter. This is because the former hampers law enforcement's ability to track down criminals and terrorists. And the better informed non-techies are about the tech, the more they will support backdoors. No large service will survive providing E2EE. In the near future, there is bound to be s…

That seems a plausible outcome. Pretty dystopian for sure, but plausible.

Sadly the cat is out of the bag, so banning it for the general public means that only the bad guys have it and they're already presumably doing illegal things so why do they care about using illegal software too?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#137

Post by realusername » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 5:10 AM UTC

Cyph0n wrote: post #102

buybackoff wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cela s'appelle la laïcité. If you have problems with that there are so many 3rd world countries that care about medieval stuff more than development. I think laïcité is one of the coolest words/concept, France should only really enforce it further.

Whatever floats your boat. But claiming that France is the pinnacle of maintaining individual freedoms contradicts with a nanny state that polices religious expression. You can’t have it both ways.

Keeping religion out of the state is a good thing, the previous statu quo in France before that used to be that the Christians were policing everybody.

We can see now in the US how not having this concept is creating a lot of social issues with Cristian fundamentalists running the state.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#138

Post by econ » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 5:18 AM UTC

I forsee that the future will bring us LLMs that can reasonably precisely find incriminating chats while keeping everything perfectly unreadable for those naughty untrustworthy humans.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#139

Post by econ » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 5:28 AM UTC

daniel-s wrote: post #116

palata wrote: 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…

These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with individual freedoms and privacy, especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries. What politician do you expect to o…

I sort of agree with them. I want all privacy abolished for politicians. Think about it, if we live stream them in the shower we might get some much needed young people to take the job. Let them keep the ad revenue. Only fans suggests it should be the best paid job out there and the workers are all about public approval.

no more naughty business!

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#140

Post by spapas82 » Sat, Mar 22, 2025, 5:38 AM UTC

precommunicator wrote: post #128

spapas82 wrote: post #63

> 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 tha…

Yes, if you care about forward secrecy then pgp is not a good solution.

> Signal stated already that they would sooner exit certain markets than violate their security

You still need to rely on a third party's goodwill to keep that promise. Also even if they are willing to keep the promise it is possible that they won't be able.