Live data from Hacker News

France rejects backdoor mandate

eff.org

171–180 of 320 posts

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#171
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…

"the US have become hostile to Europe."

1. I don't believe that anything changed in recent months/years other than the US repeating the statement that maybe EU should take care of its own defense. Not exactly a new sign of "becoming hostile" IMO.

2. If this would even be true then they have always been hostile to Europe and only just recently started becoming honest and open about it (but again, I dont see any sign of actual change). Five eyes, NSA, etc is not exactly new and have super obviously been used and are still being used by the US to do economic and political espionage on Europe for at least decades. The leaked news of NSA spying on German chancellor Angela Merkel's phone is like 10+ years ago by now?

My opinion is that every EU company that uses Onedrive, Teams, Outlook, Google etc (99 percent of them is my guess) are basically paying to give away their trade secrets to their US competitors. "but the terms of the contract say..." yeah right...

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 positio…

>Even among the ones who voted for Trump, there seems to be a lot of shock at the aggressive posture toward our allies.

Source?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#173
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.

On the other hand, people can believe experts without being experts. Perhaps the French parliamentarians just listen better.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#174
post #148
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. T…

Listening to the debates in the lower chamber (Assemblée Nationale) and the arguments of those arguing in favor of backdoors clearly show they do not have a clue how any of this works. They are not clever players doing double-bluffs. They are ignorant stooges.

Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today.

In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their answer would be ‘ban encryption’)

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#175
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…

As a French, English is my default language for most queries on the web, but it wouldn't cross my mind to look up for a recipe in English. I also find that we have a lot of good science/maths youtube channels.

If searching for recipes in English, you need to add "UK" or maybe "Australia" to avoid the American recipes. (Avoiding US measurements and processed ingredients.)

But even then, there's still a lot of spammy or dumbed-down content. I look for sites I recognise.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#176
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to the debates in the lower chamber (Assemblée Nationale) and the arguments of those arguing in favor of backdoors clearly show they do not have a clue how any of this works. They are not clever players doing double-bluffs. They are ignorant stooges.

Why do they need to understand how encryption works ? They’re mostly interested in the goal ( a lock that can be broken by law enforcement, and allow wiretapping), and will tell you that these things are already possible in the physical world today. In other words they’re fine with intruding upon citizens privacy - this doesn’t require any understanding of encryption I think ( and if encryption prevents that, their a…

[dead]

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#177
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…

You mean UKUSA? Echelon? Patriot Act? SSL and encryption 'bans' making the vendors get OpenSSL from the Canadian OpenBSD?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 count…

Crime rates from immigrant populations are highly dependent on where the immigrants come from, and the US tends to do a better job at integration than European countries in recent years. Not that the US did not experience problems with immigrant crime from South America, but it is much worse in Europe, notably with immigrants from the Middle East. I think the baseline crime rate in the US was also higher than it was…

The US is an ocean way from Middle East. What did you expect? If the US imported inmigrants from war zones, (like Mexico with narcos but far worse), California, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas... would be shitting bricks today.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#179
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…

"the US have become hostile to Europe." 1. I don't believe that anything changed in recent months/years other than the US repeating the statement that maybe EU should take care of its own defense. Not exactly a new sign of "becoming hostile" IMO. 2. If this would even be true then they have always been hostile to Europe and only just recently started becoming honest and open about it (but again, I dont see any sign o…

Its just become harder to stick European heads in the sand.

Is government agencies to. In the UK the NHS uses AWS, courts use Teams.... IT security is just ignored - its only recently that it occurred to the govt to remove Chinese cameras from sensitive sites.

European militaries are heavily dependent on the US too and have a lot of equipment that is reliant on US supplies or can only be used in line with agreements with the US.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#180

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…

> Freeing France from the drug trafficking trap

This reason just like all the other reasons that have been used to try and strip away every shred of privacy that we have (think of the children, fight terrorism and so on) is complete bogus.

My mom was working as an admin person in a police station in France back in the 90s and from the many conversations she had with the cops, knowledge was never the problem. They already knew back then where all the drug hot spots were but truth be told there has been a lack of enforcement of the law.

Why you ask?

Simple, in most of the suburbs were drug trafficking happens, you have high unemployment, people low education and very few prospects for their future, so it has been said that the government has avoided coming down too hard on drug traffickers because they don't want these areas to erupt in chaos and start rioting.

In a way, the French government has used the drug money to indirectly buy social peace.

If the French government wanted to fight crime and get rid of these drug traffickers, it could simply legalize pot like in Germany and Canada and kill the black market.

Instead, it chooses once again to go after the sellers and the buyers. It makes zero sense because unless you are going to enforce the law by punishing the traffickers with the death penalty like in some countries, we know from all the data of the last 30 years that you cannot stop the flow of drugs.

We can't even keep drugs and cell phones out of jails/prisons, how is it that we think we can keep them out of entire countries?

The solution is simple, you legalize it and tax it and make it hard for kids to get it just like we do today with alcohol and tobacco.

That is the only sensible approach. What do you think the drug cartels fear most? The cops or legalization?

Post reply on HN