> Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? Yes. Absolutely. That's the only logical endgame.
I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling their own encryption, using well documented algorithms. You'd need to literally outlaw Wikipedia. Hell, even one-time-pads could still be used by truly motivated bad actors that wanted to communicate securely.
You also can't outlaw physics or chemistry. Let me know how non-approved rocketry enterprise goes.
The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…
The keeping safe argument from government is indeed preposterous. As if that was their mission to keep us safe. Why are they allowing our nature to be destroyed in favor of money/economy? This years heatwaves killed many thousands of people in Europe only, some estimates are in the tens of thousands. This is real deaths in 1 year, not because of terrorist attacks, no fucking backdoor will stop this. And what are they doing? Measures that won't make any difference. The cars will keep driving, the factories continue to produce poisons. Pesticides will still be allowed for better economy at the cost of entire insect species being wiped from this planet in just a few decades. The list goes on and on. It is so sad that I don't really want to listen to politicians anymore. They are the only ones who can change things by law, not me. And what law are they coming with for my safety? A backdoor for Whatsapp and Facebook.. We better ignore all this shit and try to enjoy our little lives for as long it will last.
The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…
Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.
The idea that using a webmail provider's draft feature provides security might have been true a long time ago--I don't know--but it's really stupid to think it does so nowadays.
I've said this before, but you can't outlaw the maths. There's nothing stopping anyone from rolling their own encryption, using well documented algorithms. You'd need to literally outlaw Wikipedia. Hell, even one-time-pads could still be used by truly motivated bad actors that wanted to communicate securely.
You also can't outlaw physics or chemistry. Let me know how non-approved rocketry enterprise goes.
Pretty well? People make small rockets as a hobby all the time. The barrier to entry to cryptography is many times lower too.
Still remember how one German Islamist terror group just used their web-email provider's draft feature. They never 'sent' anything. There are often quite simple ways to circumvent this kind of thing.
Yeah only a stupid person can think that backdooring whatsapp will actually prevent the next 9/11. And that's in my opinion the core issue with most politicians, stupidity/tech illiteracy. I'd love to hear about either a possible alternative government structure in which there are no politicians or a way to attract the smartest people in governments.
Politicians are not at all stupid in general. The problem we have is in their selective listening after we elect them.
If a legislator is not technically up to speed, considerable tax payer money goes towards hiring people in government to do the research and the explaining. Some high level advisers may come from organizations with a private agenda and after a few years of working within the goverment these experts pop right back to their industry jobs and we don't hear of them anymore.
Ultimately its the same need in whatever form of government we want – we need people we can trust.
The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…
Outlawing AES will be difficult since it is embedded into P
CPUs.
The idea that moves like this will "keep us safe" is utterly preposterous; there are a multitude of other ways in which terrorists (or the boogeyman de jour ) could communicate - are the UK and US governments going to insist on backdooring IRC, Slack and face-to-face conversations? Are they going to outlaw encryption libraries? I truely fear for the future that western governments, in particular the 5 eyes members, a…
Ah but you see the government is also mandating that terrorists use these backdoored apps. So it will work
If congress and the president decide they want to increase the SC to 99 justices and add and additional 90 of their choosing then that's when the US Constitution officially dies but it can be done according to the law.
What’s the difference between 9 of their choosing and 99 of their choosing?
It's easier to have public scrutiny on 9 justices than 99. There isn't enough time for the media or for people's memories to constantly remember to be angry at a few dozen people.
> If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise. Careful - you're right that WhatsApp is untrustworthy, but laws that force them to add backdoors could well be applied to open-source code as well. Or make possession of non-backdoored software, open or not, illegal. Or…
If I can compile audited code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors (excluding perhaps hardware level backdoors--but that's why we do the encryption in software). Implementing hardware backdoors that are opaque to end users is theoretically possible, but more difficult in practice. You could, for example, build a screen/monitor that just captures everyt…
Debian's OpenSSL fiasco. For the record, I use, like and support Debian, OSS and free software but we must not spread myths