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Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

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Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#301

Post by dsfyu404ed »

vidarh wrote: post #255
tertius wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it beg the question? There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'

Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.

In 20+ years of learning English I've heard it used several times to refer to an obvious question or lack of information

"$noun did $verb which resulted in $result and $result is $something interest which begs the question $question."

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#302

Post by Dylan16807 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #286
Dylan16807 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can set the entropy to any amount you want. You need to consider encryption methods that put in at least a bit of effort to hide themselves. It could select random phrases and pretend to be a spambot.

Well, where's the boundary between cryptography that hides itself and stenography? Is there one? If you include stenography, yes, it's certainly not easily recognizable. I don't think good stenography can be recognized at all, but that's not my area and I've got people contradict me at this (without further info), thus I'm not sure.

There's not much of a boundary, but that wasn't exactly the point I meant to make. You can do something like encode as ASCII 0s and 1s and have low entropy without that hiding anything.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#303

Post by miscellaneous »

melling wrote: post #18
donkeyd wrote: post #4

Even without having encryption in main stream applications, like WhatsApp, it's child's play to communicate secretly. There are so many open source applications that allow you to do this, it wouldn't even be a speed bump for criminals. Targeting main stream applications only hurts main stream users. NYT should write an article about that.

You seem to be overlooking the obvious argument that if a small group of people use encryption, then you greatly reduce the number of messages that you need to flag. Furthermore, if someone on a Watch List starts using encryption then perhaps you have an imminent problem. I'm not on the side of reading messages but you missed the real argument being made. Typical HN. How about someone answering the argument that will…

I don't think that would be the case. If a couple of western Governments "ban encryption" it would probably just mean that they weaken the crypto (e.g. backdoor). The traffic of weakened crypto still looks the same as the traffic of strong crypto - I don't think it would make strong crypto any more noticeable.

Also remember that crypto would still be legal in the rest of the world (China is not going to backdoor their crypto for the NSA's benefit) so you would still have heaps of encrypted traffic moving across the internet. I doubt that such a measure would do anything but make mass surveillance of western populations easier.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#304

Post by pauloday »

bad_user wrote: post #232
pauloday wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you want to get really pedantic, nothing is inherently anything because all meaning is constructed in our minds. Evil is a word humans use to categorize things, not a description of objective reality. I would agree that most people don't think of themselves as bad, but since there's no objective 'bad', wether or not they're 'actually bad' is up to the observer. When a person is labeled as 'evil' it's not a de…

I would argue that, while "evil" cannot be defined in precise terms, you can definitely say that evil acts are unnatural acts that only humans are capable of. Why? Well for one because a natural foodchain is balanced and biased towards long term survival of all the species it involves and towards further creation of life. It's a little ironic that human beings are the only ones in the entire animal kingdom that can c…

You make a lot of excellent points but I think you might have misinterpreted my comment, because it doesn't seem like we disagree. You mention that evil cannot be defined in precise terms, and that's exactly what I'm talking about. It's not a property of things in reality that can be measured, it's a judgement about things made by people. The judgment may be very rational, but it can't be based wholly on objective reality. For that to be the case, it'd have to be based on a physical law or property rather than a moral principle, and I just don't see how that's possible. Your argument for why Hitler was evil is really solid, not because it's based in objective reality but because it's based the principle that the continued existence of the human race is a good thing. I'd say that's a solid enough principle that it may as well be objective reality. But technically speaking, it's still a subjective judgement that we're making about how things should be, rather than an objective observation of how they are.

This is a really pedantic, subtle and (I think) important distinction. If one sees good and evil as objective truth, they're reliant on the source of that truth for their moral judgement. This explains the jihadists you mention. It's not that they enjoy being murdering maniacs (although I'm sure some do), it's that their source of moral truth tells them that the infidels are evil and must be destroyed (or whatever), so they see what they're doing as a good thing.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#305

Post by zrth »

sold wrote: post #287
mewse wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well-known caveat for people who are familiar with encryption, but it's worth calling out explicitly here: If you use the same one time pad to encode two or more different messages, then all the sorts of attack proposed here become plausible again. The security provided by a one time pad relies entirely on the fact that it is only ever used once.

I'd like to add this scenario actually happened during the Cold War. Soviets were reusing one time pads and the US army decrypted some of the messages, among other things this lead to discovery of Soviet spies targeting the US nuclear weapon program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona_project

Is it really still a "one time pad" if you used it multiple times?

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#306

Post by CamperBob2 »

chki wrote: post #240
CamperBob2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in Europe, where I live, the government can be trusted in a lot of issues --- especially it is highly likely that they _try_ to do what is best and are no "evil emperors". The Europeans are fond of reminding Americans that we think 200 years is a long time. So, how long ago was the Stasi disbanded, again?

You can not compare our situation to that of the DDR. If there is more surveillance going on than we currently know, it is certainly not as much as in that time -- a big chunk of the population were reporting to the "Ministerium für Staatssicherheit" directly, which was a well known fact.

I believe this is known as the "Special Pleading Fallacy."

Of course, you could play the "Slippery Slope Fallacy" card against my argument... but we're not dealing with logical entities, are we? We're dealing with often-irrational human beings and governments composed of them.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#307

Post by conceit »

vidarh wrote: post #255
tertius wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it beg the question? There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'

Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.

well, your confusion of tenses kinda colors your knowledge about grammar rather questionable and i say that as a foreign speaker

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#308

Post by ForHackernews »

ewzimm wrote: post #208
ForHackernews wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's even more absurd than that... after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone calls and unencrypted email. I think you're straw-manning their position here. The opponents of encryption aren't claiming terrorists will start using unencrypted communication, they're advocating for legally-mandated…

You're right, but I didn't mean only phone calls and unencrypted email. I considered adding "or their equivalent back-doored technologies," but I hoped it would be clear. Using a compromised technology is the equivalent of unencrypted email and phone calls to whoever has the key. All it does is draw attention to how important it is to communicate in secret. This will be the Streisand effect of crypto.

How would they know, though? For all we know, OpenSSL has been backdoored in some subtle way.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#309

Post by rjsw »

digikata wrote: post #183
ewzimm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more absurd than that. The premise is that we can have a public worldwide debate that emphasizes how important encryption is to successfully carrying out terrorist attacks, convince the world to give up their privacy for the sake of safety, and after the majority of the protestors have been defeated by public awareness that encryption and terrorism go hand-in-hand, the terrorists will go back to using phone…

My thought is that if we implement a back door policy, the public will have communication links which are much easier to compromise by any party, while terrorists can still easily use encryption and/or steganography to secure their communications. All the back doors accomplish in the end is harming the general public.

One of the reports on the Osama Bin Laden raid stated that he had a porn stash, I wondered at the time if this was for use as a starting point for steganographic communications.

Re: Times Pulls Article Blaming Encryption in Paris Terror Attack

#310

Post by tertius »

vidarh wrote: post #255
tertius wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it beg the question? There is no truth being asserted in the premise causing the conclusion to be true. It's fairly clear that it was a statement from an original source, that source being trustworthy is where we would find (or not find) the information which would show the conclusion to be true, not the premise of the 'fantasy.'

Give it up. In 30+ years of learning English, the only times I've ever seen it used in that sense has been when someone is being a pedant on forums and illustrating the now rapidly outmoded meaning of the phrase.

Until it changes meaning, I cannot give it up. A curse I tell you!
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