Seems like a hint that we should design our means of communication to resist single points of failure.
WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
191–200 of 629 posts
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
How was the justice system able to communicate the shutdown order, but not able to communicate the request for user data?
Because they ordered the shutdown to brazilian internet providers. These internet providers company block the access for Whatsapp services. And they are more than happy to comply, as they hate Whatsapp for taking their SMS revenue. But they are in fact only obeying an justice order.
Ah. I wondered why the ISP's seemed so happy to comply.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#193I'm here to defend the judge's ruling, a position very unpopular among all my friends here in Brazil. Brazilian law regarding regarding privacy of users of internet services is very recent and clear: if a judge order the company to share a specific user data, the company must comply. You can disagree with the law, but the law is there. Now, the judge ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation (a suspect…
I see your point, but what is scandalous in this decision is not that WhatsUp is being shut down, but the way this is happening. You have a judge from a remote jurisdiction in Brazil who has enough power to shut down the service in the whole country. I wound't be surprised if this resulted as a process that went through several levels of justice in Brasil, but the fact that any judge can block a service in the whole…
> You have a judge from a remote jurisdiction in Brazil
Irrelevant.
> judges these days feel that they have power to block even actions of the president of the Republic.
Thankfully so. Presidents are not above the law.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
There seem to be a few problems with this analysis. First, WhatsApp is a US company and has no presence in Brazil. Under many readings of US law (specifically, ECPA), US companies are in fact prohibited from complying with requests from foreign law enforcement for content, except in emergencies. Instead, foreign law enforcement must make a request for assistance to the US DoJ, which will then (eventually, and maybe)…
I can believe them when they say they don't keep data. When I got a new phone (the old one broke), I was expecting my conversations to be in the cloud somewhere so that I could recover them. Nope, I lost everything that I hadn't backed up. I don't see what they can gain from storing masses of old chats and then not allowing users to download them onto new devices. If they kept chats to do analytics on, there's no rea…
Telegram isn't end-to-end encrypted unless you're in a "secret chat", and that chat exists only between two different devices and can't be used by multiple devices on one account.
It's a "feature" of the normal chats/channels/groups/supergroups of Telegram that you are able to download them to other devices, or to restore them on a freshly wiped device, because (and I'm over-simplifying here, but the end result is the same) they are encrypted with a key known to the server, and which other devices signed into your account can then be authorized to use.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
More important. Why aren't congressmen creating rules to prevent these monopolies ?
?? Can't tell if serious. Unless whatsapp did something to wreck their competition in Brazil, any effective monopoly they possess is by virtue of people choosing to use their system over other systems. This sort of effective monopoly cannot and ought not be stopped unless the monopoly power is abusing their position. And how would you when it's a choice people have made? Mandate that every 5th person mustn't use What…
Monopoly isn't even about market size it's about companies exploiting their market position using anti-competitive practices. There is no indication WhatsApp has done any of this except being the most popular product in a highly competitive and open market.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it will be very hard for Brazil and India to shake being labeled as third world countries, with the amount of citizens below the poverty line, and the poor infrastructure of the areas those citizens inhabit. The United States itself is labeled as a third world country when talking about areas of Detroit for example, and the wealth inequality starting to resemble that of Brazil and India. You might take except…
Of course countries can be criticized. There are so many wrong things here that I wouldn't even learn where to begin prioritizing the list of criticisms. Things are getting better, we've managed to get ourselves out of the U.N. Hunger and Misery map. This is a victory, and not a small one. The past 12 years it has been the very first time in 500 years where there are no people starving to death. Still, the problem of…
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Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#197This is exactly why operating many small Murmur and/or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co's proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it's easy to operate a community Murmur server and it's also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements. Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat…
The same holds for Telegram and Signal.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#198What most people outside of Brazil don't realize is that WhatsApp is almost universally used by Brazillians to communicate about EVERYTHING, even your doctor [0][1]. My wife is Brazillian and uses it to communicate with her family in Brazil every day. This will have disastrous consequences for Brazilians domestically and internationally. This policy is being put in place by unelected judges and cartel of monopolistic…
That sounds incredibly dystopian. A proprietary communication protocol made by a foreign company dominating all communications without recourse sounds like something out of 1984. I mean, if your doctor is using it, you know you are screwed the day Facebook does anything you disagree with, because you are wholly dependent on them at that point. That was why we even developed interoperable federated messaging protocols…
It's not without recourse. It's just a system that became a defacto standard. If WhatsApp goes away for good, surely everyone will move on to something else, maybe even considering the "centralizedness" of it, but the transition costs are there, especially on a case with such short notice.
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, as it says in the article, WhatsApp just doesn't have the data the judge wants it to turn over. How does it make sense to punish a company for not doing something that it physically cannot do?
Companies can be punished for failure to obey laws. If a company didn't bother to retain records on who bought something they are now required to recall due to safety failures I can't imagine any country would say that is ok. They would be punished. I don't happen to think the law mentioned is a good one. And I have no idea how the law is actually worded. Depending on how it is worded maybe it is ok to just not keep…
So if a judge demanded a telco hand over an audio recording of any specific conversation, they must comply -- even though calls are not recorded and stored?
If a judge demanded the postal service hand over an image of every envelope processed, it must comply -- even though no such images exist?
Where does it end?
Re: WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
#200This is exactly why operating many small Murmur and/or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co's proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it's easy to operate a community Murmur server and it's also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements. Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat…
How would this prevent Telco/mobile operators from blocking XMPP traffic with Murmur headers?
The technical details of the court orders has nothing to do with shutting down WhatsApp servers or coercing them into doing a MITM on their own customers...
Not that I disagree that decentralization helps add resiliency against state intervention but this particular threat model requires a different solution. Such as preventing ISPs from being able to block your traffic.