And people say the US is authoritarian. You can't burn books in Denmark without going to jail and now Sweden wants to spy on all your messages.
Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
161–170 of 283 posts
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#162> The Armed Forces, on the other hand, are negative and write in a letter to the government that the proposal cannot be realized "without introducing vulnerabilities and backdoors that can be exploited by third parties First time I am seeing an organization against this. Kudos to them for standing up.
According to the original article (Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/signal-lamnar-sverige-om-... ), the reason for the armed forces to be against it is because they recently started advocating for its personnel to start using Signal to reduce eavesdropping, so backdooring Signal would decrease the armed forces security. > Men Försvarsmakten är negativa och nyligen uppmanade försvaret sin personal att börja…
Makes sense, the entire point of Signal is no backdoors. If you add one, you might as well make the app illegal.
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#163While I don't personally agree with the law, I genuinely hope we witness a major corporation withdraw from a market just so we can finally observe the concrete impact of these types of threats. (Even though their position is understandable in this particular case.)
Someone is always willing to bend towards what the market requires - including complying with whatever insanity gov wants
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not fully, but making transacting in Bitcoin outright illegal would probably go a long way to making it completely unattractive to 99% of all potential users. And if Apple and Google were forced to remove all wallets from their app stores, it would largely be game over.
Transacting in Bitcoin is already unattractive to 99%+ of potential users.
In addition, simply taking out the on/off ramps, such as Coinbase, would destroy the utility of cryptocurrency as well, since the grand majority of folks dealing in the stuff are only interested in flipping it for more cash money on the other end by finding the next sucker in the chain.
Very few people actually care about the principles of Bitcoin and the like. Maybe the core devs and some very early adopters?
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#165Apple did the right thing in the UK. This means that neither politicians nor the military will benefit from E2EE, while it's clear that they wished that just the plebes would be affected by this. Maybe all IMs should then drop encryption altogether, bringing us back to the stone age of clear text messaging (email sent unencrypted between MTAs). Because this "please let them use encryption, but let us peek around it"…
> Because this "please let them use encryption, but let us peek around it" just doesn't feel right.
Most of gov regulation works like that. You can have guns but only registered ones. Machines guns illegal unless it’s military etc
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption, and now Signal being in a similar situation, shows that you can't just focus on technology and ignore policy and politics. And you'll find out that a ton of people here on HN will care, but most of the public won't. People should take XKCD 538 really to heart (The 5$ wrench on…
> It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. It very much can. In a battle between human force and physics, physics win every time. If I send an encrypted email to you, you have the choice to not give up the key, even if you'll be in jail. With physical letters, you don't have this option. Technology gives you the ironclad ability to keep a secret, only limited by the fortitude of…
You can always burn a physical letter or delete a file.
This bill is akin to making it illegal to destroy your own correspondence.
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google ultimately did that for China. The outcome in that case is that the domestic market filled in the gaps, while complying to all relevant authoritarian legislation. I do not believe that the same would happen for every market where these stunts are being pulled off, at least not to the same level of quality. Why are European countries trying to pull one off from the China playbook, while simultaneously being sho…
Would you want to be reliant on American companies right now?
Not wanting to be reliant on american companies because of the data and technological sovereignty is admirable.
Not wanting to be reliant on American companies because they don’t allow you to spy on your own citizens as much as you want through…
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
You clearly haven't felt a 5$ wrench on your body. Giving up your secrets under torture isn't a character flaw, it's what will happen to 99.99% of people under torture. I can't help you if you don't believe that this is true. And I hope you understand that 5$ wrench is a euphemism for what would 'really' happen. All this to say that no, technology does not triumph over politics and policy.
Technology very much does. It's the flesh that has a hard time triumphing over force. To counteract this, you can also engineer a system that can resist it through e.g. split secrets on multiple people located in different jurisdictions.
If you split a secret over two people, first, we use the 5$ wrench on one of you to identify the other and the rest is easy.
If the second person is somewhere else in a different jurisdiction, how are you going to communicate with each other to get the two halves of the secret together to encrypt/decrypt messages? It's an unworkable situation.
As I see it, you create a fantasy situation that would not work if you just want to communicate with people in a secure way. No amount of technology or encryption is going to work, especially in the real practical world.
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#169There is a reason why Free Software (as in freedom) was invented: To ensure that those who create the software do not overpower those who use the software. The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. And it is wrong, because to be a human in the 21st century means in most cases, that your digital devices and your digital interactions are a core part of wh…
This principle seems out of touch with most people’s reality: products hardly ever do everything you want and often work against you. If someone has a device that doesn’t do what they want and there’s no setting to change its behavior, replacing it is usually the only practical option. (Or if it’s a problem with an app, they might be able to install a different app.) If there is a free software license, it’s of no di…
Yes, because we largely don't have Free Software.
> If there is a free software license, it’s of no direct use to them.
It's of indirect use; they could use a modified version of the software that does what they want, created by someone else. This is why you generally don't see user-hostile features in Free Software; someone would just fork the project and edit them out.
Re: Signal to leave Sweden if backdoor law passes
#170There is a reason why Free Software (as in freedom) was invented: To ensure that those who create the software do not overpower those who use the software. The idea, that companies or politicians can force the user's machine to work against it's owner, is wrong. And it is wrong, because to be a human in the 21st century means in most cases, that your digital devices and your digital interactions are a core part of wh…
It may be wrong, but it proves that technology can't beat politics and policy. The issue with Apple caving to UK demands regarding encryption, and now Signal being in a similar situation, shows that you can't just focus on technology and ignore policy and politics. And you'll find out that a ton of people here on HN will care, but most of the public won't. People should take XKCD 538 really to heart (The 5$ wrench on…
The antidote to XKCD 538 can be steganography. They won't beat you with a $5 wrench if they don't suspect you of doing anything at all. End-to-end encryption can become illegal, but as long as you can run arbitrary code on your machine, you can hide and decode messages with steganography. JavaScript can do the job, so even locked down mobile devices will work if you go to CodePen, JSFiddle, JSBin, etc.
Steganography isn't some magic shield to avoid surveillance though. If authorities are already monitoring you for some other reason, then they can burn a zero-day exploit and see anything you do on your device. And if your entire city is covered in cameras with facial recognition, well... you can have your secret messages but I don't know what kind of resistance you're going to be putting up. So to some degree you're right that you can't fully ignore policy and politics.
Not sure how to get most of the public to care though. I get most people have more immediate concerns in there lives, and crime is a legitimate issue, but even a cursory knowledge of history will show the hell life can be under authoritarian governments. I think far too many people think "it can't happen here", which seems insane considering how often it has occurred even in liberal democracies (Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Argentina, Chile, and many more.) In less liberal and less stable democracies, it has happened even more times. I'm not sure why people have some unfounded faith that their government could never become authoritarian and oppressive.
I'm not saying take down every CC camera and get rid of intelligence agencies -- they are important tools for fighting crime. But there's a difference between a few traffic cameras and CC cameras in places people would presumably commit a crime, and burning targeted exploits for surveillance of truly notorious criminals, and just mass surveillance through banning end-to-end encryption. With zero-day exploits, the government is inherently limited in the surveillance they can do, so it's a limiting factor on their potential for abuse, as the more they use it, the more likely they are to be discovered and patched. But with no end-to-end encryption, the potential for abuse is limitless.