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

WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#31

Post by readthenotes1 »

causal wrote: post #25

For anyone wondering what the actual purported security weaknesses are in this article (I used the slop machine to reduce the slop): - Cloud backups — by default, backups to iCloud/Google Drive contain plaintext messages, and E2EE backup is opt-in. Even if you enable it, a weak password collapses the effective security, and any other person in the chat with an unencrypted backup exposes the conversation. - Metadata —…

I thought it was also the live notifications that would display the latest message. I'm not sure those are encrypted?

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#33

Post by omnimus »

dotcoma wrote: post #26
ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it? Underrated fact. Also, no one knows who exactly operates Telegram and IIRC they don't even have an office. But we know Russian authorities have intense interest in it so it's hard to imagine FSB wouldn't figure out who it is and knock on their (or their relatives still in Russia) door. We know that Russian authorities previously banned Tele…

AFAIK, the FSB knocked on Durov’s previous company’s door, VKontakte, a Russian Facebook knock-off. They asked for info on some of their users, were told “no” and… they told Durov that “it would be a good idea if you sold this thing to someone else”. Which he did, for decent money but probably a lot less than it was worth. He then used that money to start Telegram, at first from Berlin and later on from Dubai, from 2…

This might as well be constructed story so people use Russian service (i doubt somebody would even consider it otherwise).

It would be very different if Telegram was all e2ee like Signal and with published client source code. But current state it's far more likely it's just a honeypot.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#34

Post by jchw »

rkent wrote: post #28

I'm getting very tired of all of the "this is ai slop" comments. They are now worse than the slop itself. Maybe HN needs a voting button "this is ai slop" so you can make your point without becoming slop yourself.

OK, well, I'm getting very tired of all of the terrible AI-generated articles.

I made a longer reply that discusses why I think this article is bad on top of the fact that the writing is absolutely fucking horrid, but a single person could theoretically pump out hundreds of these per day if they wanted, so having a nuanced critique for each of these is going to be pretty hard.

There's only one solution, and that is flagging and removing all AI generated articles. Fullstop.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#35

Post by ghusto »

rkent wrote: post #28

I'm getting very tired of all of the "this is ai slop" comments. They are now worse than the slop itself. Maybe HN needs a voting button "this is ai slop" so you can make your point without becoming slop yourself.

Me too. It's like virtue signalling or something. You think it's AI generated. Well done. Next?

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#38

Post by OutOfHere »

jchw wrote: post #34
rkent wrote: post #28

I'm getting very tired of all of the "this is ai slop" comments. They are now worse than the slop itself. Maybe HN needs a voting button "this is ai slop" so you can make your point without becoming slop yourself.

OK, well, I'm getting very tired of all of the terrible AI-generated articles. I made a longer reply that discusses why I think this article is bad on top of the fact that the writing is absolutely fucking horrid, but a single person could theoretically pump out hundreds of these per day if they wanted, so having a nuanced critique for each of these is going to be pretty hard. There's only one solution, and that is f…

Just because some people choose to write poorly using an LLM doesn't in itself make all AI generated content bad. In can in fact be far better than an article written by a human if instructed reasonably.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#39

Post by captn3m0 »

ghusto wrote: post #36

What about calls? I've never understood how calls could be E2EE, but WhatsApp says they are. I didn't read anything in the post claiming they're compromised too.

You can route an encrypted video stream through a server, same as messages. Zoom supports this as well now. You can’t do fancy stuff like transcoding at the server to support an older client, but WhatsApp dropped support for non-e2e really-old clients eons ago (Symbian and the like).

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#40

Post by OutOfHere »

nisegami wrote: post #9

This is why threat modelling is essential. What are you trying to defend against and by whom?

Threat modeling is half nonsense because it becomes an excuse for negligence, often by lazy professionals who are just collecting a paycheck. Would you for example do threat modeling to protect your Bitcoin wallet passphrase or would you just secure it?
Post reply on HN