Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp • Hacker News Board

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#41

Post by dingo_bat » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:27 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

jacquesm wrote: post #25

Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was peer to peer , not global centralized services that we all connect to. There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosin…

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

>Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app?

Like email. Let everyone host their own chat server. Pass messages around to the correct server and let it forward it to the user's device.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#42

Post by kyled » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:28 AM UTC

GavinMcG wrote: post #40

kyled wrote: post #38

Mass surveillance does not stop terrorism effectively. Bruce Schneier wrote a book called Data and Goliath and touches on the subject a bit. Simply to many false positives are detected. But how will governments decrypt communications you say? Simple, they hack the devices performing the communication, if they are important enough. They can then get the key if needed. Encryption forces governments to do targeted surve…

There's no "d" – it's Bruce Schneier.

Thanks

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#43

Post by desiderantes » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:29 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

jacquesm wrote: post #25

Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was peer to peer , not global centralized services that we all connect to. There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosin…

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

Well, like this: https://tox.chat

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#44

Post by brightball » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:29 AM UTC

zappo2938 wrote: post #26

avs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is worth taking a step further and asking for a definition of cryptography...what is cryptography? Obviously here we are speaking in a mathematical sense, but encryption of information predates the internet. Hell, it predates electricity. Where do you draw the line? can I not encrypt my conversation with a friend by referencing shared unique experiences?

I was talking to young woman a bunch of us helped get into drug rehab recently and she said when she first moved here she used dating apps to find people who supply drugs. All of sudden, her best friend's name is Molly and going out line dancing mean something completely different on dating sites. I forget what she was calling the different drugs, but like a secret crypto key, they shared a common language.

You should read The Code Book sometime

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#45

Post by zeeveener » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

jacquesm wrote: post #25

Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was peer to peer , not global centralized services that we all connect to. There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosin…

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

In regards to decentralizing something like a messaging app, there are a couple interesting approaches.

1) Have "tracker" servers set up around the world. The App needs to know at least one of the IPs, preferably all, in order to get a list of Peers it can connect to. This is still considered "decentralized" so long as none of the "trackers" is considered a "master" over the others.

2) Have UserA manually enter the IP of another UserB. Then, UserB tells UserA all of the Peers it knows about, which UserA will then connect to, and so on and so forth. This approach can quickly get out of hand unless there is some sort of limit on how many peers a User can be connected to at once. That's up to the developer (or possibly user) to decide.

Theoretically, as long as one Peer is alive and doesn't forget the list of other Peers it has been told of, the network will never completely shut down. Even if it does, however, the network can "start back up" again, but there may be cases of "subnets" within the P2P network if no peers from one subnet ever know of peers from another subnet.

In regards to the actual chat functionality, it's very simple. As long as you can preserve consistency between peers (which is its own subject), it's relatively easy to have each Peer keep a copy of the current chat. Even if the chat is between >2 Peers.

There are intricacies to this, but it's not actually that difficult. It's a lot more complicated to design, but once the groundwork has been laid, it can sustain itself for the most part.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#46

Post by dingo_bat » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:30 AM UTC

capote wrote: post #39

ultramancool wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App stores may not be legally required to take it down as they're outside the jurisdiction... but a threat to block the app store entirely in the country is probably enough to get them to budge.

Blocking an entire app store is so consumer-unfriendly--is there a chance of that happening in a reasonable country?

Not happening in India. To be realistic, even such a thing as a Whatsapp "ban" isn't going to happen/work. It will be at most similar to how porn is "banned". My ISP returns DNS not resolved for most porn websites if you use their resolver, but they pushed an update to the router changing the DNS to 8.8.8.8. The final result is most people haven't even realized that porn websites are banned.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#47

Post by dingo_bat » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:33 AM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #34

Just to be clear this is the Indian Supreme Court . While it is from the indiatimes.com english language news outfit, I would assume the majority of readers on HN are not indian. Context here is important, as some may not read the article unfortunately, and even then, it isn't immeadiately clear.

>I would assume the majority of readers on HN are not indian

Do we have any stats on this? I am assuming most HN readers are American but I think Indians would be 2nd or 3rd on the most readers list.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#48

Post by lucaspiller » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:37 AM UTC

desiderantes wrote: post #43

colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

Well, like this: https://tox.chat

One thing I don't like about most modern decentralised chat services is their main concern seems to making something perfectly secure and private. I agree that's a good goal to have, but right now I'd just like something decentralised and open source, as simple to use as Whatsapp, that isn't owned/controlled by a single megacorp.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#49

Post by olalonde » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:40 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #25

Every time you hear about something like this or read an article about something like this you have to slow down for a moment and realize that we brought this on ourselves. The original intent of the internet was peer to peer , not global centralized services that we all connect to. There is no technical reason why something like whatsapp can't be peer-to-peer. Choosing for a centralized service is implicitly choosin…

> The original intent of [...]

Not that I disagree with you but can we all stop using this as an argument.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#50

Post by zanny » Sun, Jun 26, 2016, 5:47 AM UTC

dingo_bat wrote: post #41

colejohnson66 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Don't you need /something/ to facilitate routing? Or do you use some kind of public-private key encryption on a blockchain? But then how do you get someone's public key if they're offline? And why would you want to store a blockchain of everyone's encrypted messages? To get around that, you'd end up with some centralized server storing the w…

>Serious question: how would you decentralize something like a messaging app? Like email. Let everyone host their own chat server. Pass messages around to the correct server and let it forward it to the user's device.

Which are what XMPP and Matrix do. Both have username / server routing and for Matrix at least history propagates between participant host servers.

Or you go the Tox / Ring route with a DHT of users and cut out the server alltogether, but the server part is pretty much always necessary for "pretty usernames". Tox has been basically dead in the water for quite some time because they have no effective DNS for users that is universal to all the Tox apps with multiple competing implementations.

My personal takeaway is that if you are going to have a server you should take full advantage of it like Matrix does, because Matrix mobile clients can be push-notify based and not need to always be online to get messages (though Tox et al have ways around that, they are all dependent on storing messages locally to the destination in the DHT, and most users do not want to have to cache other peoples messages).