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Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

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Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#321

Post by brewdad »

x0x0 wrote: post #284
bdangubic wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

all these are easy excuses… you are here on HN, probably some dope SWE doing amazing shit, I am sure you are more than capable of solving any “picture sharing” problem that is an issue with SMS.

I am not capable of solving shitty downscaled image sharing; flakiness with mms message receipt (esp photos) both on tmobile and verizon; and even worse downscaled video sharing. Because those cannot be addressed by anyone but the telcos. Nor the inability to add people to groups. sms doesn't have groups; it has pools of numbers. And it works terribly when, eg, one of you is traveling or living outside the US.

You send the photo via mms. When there's that one great shot you really want to save, ask them to email it to you. This isn't nearly as hard as you make it out to be.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#322

Post by brewdad »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #199
dataflow wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't push notifications logged and used for getting people's data? This was in the news over a year ago: https://www.wired.com/story/apple-google-push-notification-s...

In general, all your personal information stored with Google or Apple or any other American company is subject to getting requested by a court order. If you listen to any of the True Crime podcasts, you'll always hear how google searches and cell tower location are always presented in a trial as evidence. People here always think they are so smart saying > Actualllly you can't prove that it was me who made that searc…

I was on a jury where data like this harvested from Facebook pushed us beyond a reasonable doubt. There was just enough doubt to acquit or have a hung jury with only the physical evidence and eye witnesses. There was plenty of doubt with only the social media stuff. When you put all of it together, we reached a verdict pretty quickly.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#323

Post by bawolff »

I kind of suspect this is more a desperate regime on the brink of (at least military) collapse grasping at straws.

Potentially they might be worried about anti-regime activists organizing on whatsapp and want to push people to more easily monitoriable alternatives.

If iran knew meta was doing this for a long time, then it raises the question of why they are just asking people to delete it now. One would presume that such a serious opsec issue would require immediate action.

If they just figured this out right now, its a bit hard to imagine how that happened given how disruptive the bombing campaign has been.

The timing just seems really suspicious to me.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#324

Post by dralley »

ty6853 wrote: post #43
gspencley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why are we toppling all these foreign governments I don't want to speak to the other foreign governments, and I think there is a LOT of room for healthy criticism of how the USA handles its foreign policy, past & present. But to answer the question directly with respects to Iran, specifically: the leadership has been repeatedly chanting "Death To America" for its 45 year history and have been actively trying to dev…

I don't pretend this is an argument at all in towards the situation in Iran, so don't quote me as justifying action or inaction there in regards to this, but it is interesting to take note North Korea actually has dozens of real nuclear weapons and the death to America rhetoric and all we seem to do is laugh at them. Of course NK has no real ability to blow up the US, but they could likely nuke or at least obliterate…

North Koreans are (mostly) not subject to death cult mentality in the same way that the Iranian leadership is. Note: Iranian leadership, not the people.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#325

Post by dralley »

chimineycricket wrote: post #264
ngruhn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet. The middle east is more complicated than quantum mechanics. There are like gazillions of factions, local and foreign. You would think you can roughly group them into Israel+US, Russia, Shia, Sunni. They surely all hate each other. But there are still constantly shifting alliances. At some point Iran (Shia?) was funding ISIS (Sunni?) only to later team up with the US and Israel to fight them. Sometimes all thes…

Iran did not fund ISIS.

Right, they do fund Sunni Palestinian groups, especially Hamas, but mostly they stick to Shia paramilitaries.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#326

Post by [deleted] »

platevoltage wrote: post #140
toast0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stable Iran seems to be doing a pretty good job of breeding terrorism, too though. If we're being extremely generous, the goal of regime change would be to bring a new stability with economic prosperity and inclusion as well as more meaningful political inclusion, so as to reduce the amount of marginalized population with nothing to loose that are easy to recruit for terrorism. Of course, when the nation building f…

You've got to be kidding me. The US actively supports and runs interference for the biggest terror state in the Middle East right now. We are also buddy buddy with another country in the Middle East that dismembered one of our journalists and provided most of the 9/11 high jackers.

[deleted]

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#327

Post by usr1106 »

mgraczyk wrote: post #298
RajT88 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta lies about all kinds of other things. No reason not to now - they seem to have paid very little penalty so far for getting caught.

Is there any evidence Meta has ever intentionally lied about anything? Like do you have any examples?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44169115

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#328

Post by dralley »

lenerdenator wrote: post #237
anon291 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why we should be 'fine' with people existing in their pre-1967 borders. I'm not advocating any military action, but the idea that we should just shrug while a great classical civilization's entire history and archaeology are being held hostage by iconoclastic religious zealots is not something any humanitarian should just shrug at.

It’s a reference to borders that do not include Gaza, the Golan Heights, or the West Bank. It’s likely that any two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine crisis would roughly look like how things were before the Six-Day War. However, I’m getting more at the fact that Iran is unwilling to accept a two-state solution because necessarily, one of those two states would be Israel.

The 1967 borders don't include Gaza or the West Bank, though?

Israel isn't giving up the Golan Heights for basically any reason, and the Druze living there don't really seem to want to be part of any other country either.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#329

Post by vineyardmike »

zug_zug wrote: post #202
rdrd wrote: post #7

I find the wordsmithery on Meta's statement the most interesting: “We do not track your *PRECISE* location, we don’t keep logs of who everyone is messaging and we do not track the *PERSONAL* messages people are sending one another," it added. “We do not provide *BULK* information to any government.”

This is just a lie. I personally know somebody who worked at meta and they had a whole set of teams dedicated to building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries Now I don't know the exact details of which governments had which access (was it just for warrants, which nations, what was the line between actual terrorist versus persecuting journalists), but there was absolutely bulk export and t…

> building tools for governments to mass-export data based on their queries

While I can totally imagine that governments would mass-export data, and I don’t doubt your friends claim, I can also imagine more innocent interpretation of this work.

I once worked on a large company’s GDPR data-export project. It was a large enough company that it also had a dedicated team to handle legal requests regularly from government(s). GDPR exporting needs to work “at scale” for all accounts, without human-in-the-loop work, and without causing any load issues to running services. The same system also handled legal requests, where the legal team could get an export for a user (almost) identically to the process of a user getting their own data. The legal team had tools set up to work with warrants, subpoenas and similar (internationally) legal data requests from courts and law enforcement. It looks like a “mass export” system, because it was, but it wasn’t used in “bulk requests” from the legal system.

Re: Iran asks its people to delete WhatsApp from their devices

#330

Post by gkbrk »

lxgr wrote: post #245
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sharing private keys gets around all that.

That would require explicit code to do so, which would probably be extremely hard to explain away.

Are people publicly archiving, reverse engineering, and auditing every single version of Whatsapp?

Would you even know if you got a special copy of Whatsapp (still signed by Meta and valid) that has this explicit code?

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