Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.? • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#171

Post by brenden2 » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:36 PM UTC

twoelfer wrote: post #155

brenden2 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a super difficult problem. Having the source code available, and being able to validate the builds yourself makes everything a lot easier. It's one of the reasons the Debian project has worked so hard at reproducible builds: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/About Bugs can certainly occur (like Heartbleed etc) but the alternative (closed source opaque binary blobs) is much worse.

No ordinary person is capable of building anything from source.

I used to use Gentoo, and I built my entire OS from source. I'm not extraordinary in any way, I'm just an ordinary person who has a deep interest in software and computers.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#172

Post by nairboon » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:39 PM UTC

So to which messenger should we finally switch to? Telegram, Signal, Threema, Wire or some other newcomer?

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#173

Post by ISL » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#174

Post by Smithalicious » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #164

I am weirdly.. giddy about this development. The more goverments try so hard to publicly force companies to, effectively, mandate backdoors, the more public will be aware of it. Added benefit is that FB will lose some market share. The sucky part is.. my mom loves Whatsapp. She was able to use it wo any issues. There are few alternatives that she was able to use so easily. All that said, I wonder. What is the breakin…

You are assuming that the public isn't aware of it and would care if they were. I think the public is aware of it, they just don't care.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#175

Post by paulddraper » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:40 PM UTC

pmlnr wrote: post #89

brenden2 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FB's history suggests they have a culture of not blowing the whistle when shady things are going on. I suspect most people want to keep their $500k+/year jobs instead of sticking their necks out. My friends who work at FAANG are largely mentally checked out, and just do it to collect their monies and retire ASAP. You can't pay rent with good feelings.

> You can't pay rent with good feelings. So just keep making the world shittier. Gotta love individualist capitalism.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, nothing has helped more people more than self-interest in a free market.

Raised the standard of living for billions.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#176

Post by fsloth » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #164

I am weirdly.. giddy about this development. The more goverments try so hard to publicly force companies to, effectively, mandate backdoors, the more public will be aware of it. Added benefit is that FB will lose some market share. The sucky part is.. my mom loves Whatsapp. She was able to use it wo any issues. There are few alternatives that she was able to use so easily. All that said, I wonder. What is the breakin…

Unless your mom is planning to involve herself in illegal activities I don't see a problem. Most electronic communication channels are compromised anyway. If you don't want eavesdroppers, don't use electronics.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#177

Post by skybrian » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

brenden2 wrote: post #43

If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise. Platforms that rely on trust (in this case, trusting that FB isn't doing bad things) provide very weak guarantees about privacy/security. They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, fo…

Trust isn't binary. You can trust a company to keep your conversation private for most purposes without it being safe from a government wiretap. We do that whenever we use a phone.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#178

Post by adrianmonk » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

tiernano wrote: post #50

Gys wrote: post #17

> Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter. This sounds as if the platforms are already sharing with the US authorities. So this being about them sharing it now with UK authorities.

If I'm reading that right, they are getting the encrypted messages, not the decrypted ones. Either whoever wrote the article doesn't know the different or the uk police have been fucked over by the us...

There are two ways to read it.

"Encrypted" could mean that's how they'll be delivered to the UK.

Or it could be a definition of the set of which messages are in question. The set is defined as the ones that users expected were supposed to be protected by encryption (or that government could not access because of encryption).

In other words, from the phrasing alone, it's not clear whether "encrypted" describes the state of the messages or the scope of the sharing.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#179

Post by GordonS » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #82

cosmodisk wrote: post #36

There's a funny,rag level newspaper in the UK, called DailyMail. I suggest reading comments under the article about this, gives a good idea of how naive people can be. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7514787/Facebook-fo...

Nothing funny about the Daily Mail, it's the mouth piece of the reactionary idiots on the right (there are just as many on the left before I get tagged as a liberal) and has been for a century give or take. This is the newspaper that had an editorial starting with "Hurrah the Blackshirts". https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2017/oct/31/horrible-h... Other than using it as a way of keeping an eye on what some peopl…

I fully agree with this. I know people intelligent people who used to be pretty liberal; years of reading this vile hate-rag seem to have poisened their minds.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#180

Post by einpoklum » Sat, Sep 28, 2019, 4:44 PM UTC

In other news: US, UK subjects agree to stop using WhatsApp in favor of Telegram and Signal:

https://telegram.org/

https://www.signal.org/

These are free software, not controlled by a giant corporation (although both are limited liability companies; Telegram in London/Dubai, Signal in San Francisco IIANM); with the developer/company not having unencyrpyed access to your data.