Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#21

Post by dagaci »

benevol wrote: post #15

When tax dollars go into open source, it's just an endless chain of win-win-win-win-... News like this is just great. :-)

I hope its a win for good old capitalist competition and diversification (if it makes it into the public) even though its state sponsored :)

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#22

Post by tenryuu »

Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

What would appear in a lightweight fork of Riot though? Do you just remove a lot of the fluff to make it a bit more accessible for the public/general consumer?

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#23

Post by spacenick88 »

Arathorn wrote: post #10

This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source a…

Would you say it's a correct description of Matrix to call it "Jabber/XMP without the whole XML mess and over HTTP"?

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#24

Post by VMG »

ersiees wrote: post #3

What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.

"Surveillance Risk" means that there is a risk that somebody other than the French government can do surveillance.

> If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.

Keep in mind that they also wasted millions on building a "Google Competitor": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

For the people receiving the money it didn't go wrong though.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#27

Post by [deleted] »

barbs wrote: post #5
ersiees wrote: post #3

What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.

I thought about that too...if their concern is that they want the server to remain on French soil could they not spin up an instance of their own Signal server? https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

[deleted]

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#28

Post by Aissen »

draugadrotten wrote: post #26

The spin here is funny. The article pretends this is done to prevent eavesdropping, while it is probably closer to the truth that this is done to ensure eavesdropping by the DGSI.

If you're talking about the metadata, yes, probably. It 's the same kind of eavesdropping capability you'd have from Signal servers (i.e: not much).

Also: from what we've seen of Macron's team, they've proven that they have good-enough internal technical advisors; so it remains to be seen if they'd use a solution that can be eavesdropped.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#29

Post by cm2187 »

What’s amusing is that foreign secret services are not the only ones snooping on French politicians. French secret services have a whole department (formally called RG) in charge of collecting files on every domestic public figure (own file is a interesting ritual read for a newly promoted minister of interior). The justice dept had also an interesting interpretation of attorney client privilege where it argued recently that it was ok to snoop if retroactively a wrongdoing is found (the Sarkozy case).

If I was a tech savvy French politician I would try to use something that is neither in control of French authorities nor foreign. But French politicians are almost exclusively political science graduates, lawyers, doctors and teachers, not typically tech savvy.

Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service

#30

Post by skocznymroczny »

edhelas wrote: post #6

Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "w…

Because it's not about building an encrypted solution, it's about building "our" encryption solution, so that we can break it when needed and infringe on privacy of citizens. Western European countries are going full speed ahead on censorship and surveillance, so no wonder they are trying to fight 'pesky' foreign encryption schemes.
Post reply on HN