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France rejects backdoor mandate

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Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#41

Post by stop50 »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #27
aucisson_masque wrote: post #26

The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to intercept their communications. makes sense to the average non tech people. The sad truth however is that it wouldn't even solve the issue, criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications: there are open source softwar…

Wouldn't law enforcement just use Pegasus style zero-days to spy on the their targets? So why all the hubbub about making backdoors that become vulnerabilities for nefarious users too? Like why bother convicting Signal to create a backdoor for you, when you can put your nations geniuses to find some RCE bugs in Qualcomm or Apple modems or SoCs, and spy on them that way? This way nobody's the wiser.

There are still methods that are unbroken.

Onetime pad: messages are encrypted using an key that has the same length as the message

An enigmalike machine: the enigma has some problems, but that can easily be fixed. If someone uses more complicated keys than AAA they should be safe from reading the messages.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#42

Post by buybackoff »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #34
buybackoff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in France for the last 5 years. Been to many places in the world. France is OK overall.

Well I am French. "OK overall" is obviously good but at global scale this means better than the "third world", so context is important. The context of my previous reply is France's "direction of travel", which negative like most other European countries. This is a key metric on any meaningful timescale, which is what ultimately matters.

I beliebe you are talking about the first derivative. I want to believe the second is all right lately.

The scariest thing in France I've seen is ~20yo voting for Mel-the-leftist-egocentric-schmuck so that they could keep doing nothing but taxing productive people. Other that that the "direction of travel" is dual: either drown in the mire of ever increasing taxes or kick ass. My feeling is that France has everything for the later, but for some weird reason prefers the former. Yet, in the meantime, it's OK. And the very latest geopolitics headlines are nice, if they ever come true.

My original point was about individual rights. I'm glad the country stands firm on that.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#43

Post by wholinator2 »

jbm wrote: post #30
aucisson_masque wrote: post #26

The backdoor mandate was part of an anti organized criminality law, Bruno Retailleau (interior minister) pretend criminals use encrypted chat to communicate and so backdoor is required to intercept their communications. makes sense to the average non tech people. The sad truth however is that it wouldn't even solve the issue, criminals will always be able to use encrypted communications: there are open source softwar…

While I generally agree with your position, this is the same unconvincing argument I've read for a long time. Even if there is a specific criminal gang that is sophisticated enough to use a properly encoded open source application, the majority aren't, and there is enough of a overhead and annoyance factor that will allow the majority not to use them. If any open source application gets enough people using it, there…

Your assertion that criminals are idiots or lazy might hold true in the case of the high school weed dealer but i'd argue strongly against that case for the international drug trade or traffickers. The more sophisticated the crime, usually the more money, the more incentive to keep it hidden. These laws aren't written about weed dealers, they're written about traffickers. The justifications are always the high level traffickers and related peoples, the people most likely to be locked down anyways.

And besides all that, let's invoke the slope, would you install a camera in your home? Even if you would, are you willing to force that upon every other person, regardless of their feelings or wishes?

Sure, let's think of the children. Can we also think of the potential future regime jailing/torturing all their political opponents? Why must we always be asked to think of only one side of the harms?

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#44

Post by pqtyw »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #18
LPisGood wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vandalism by itself isn’t really a fascist action, so I’m not really sure what your point is. However, it is my experience that people using the phrase “tolerant left” aren’t frequently interested in discussions grounded in reality.

People labeling everyone who disagrees with them as "fascists" or "right wing", aren't capable of any kind of discussion or rational thought. It's my fault I got involved in the silly discussion in the first place since nobody starting a discussion with blaming "the right wing", is fully allright in the head. We closed down the asylums, and so they moved online.

> We closed down the asylums, and so they moved online.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_pot_calling_the_kettle_bla...

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#45

Post by whatshisface »

dataflow wrote: post #39
whatshisface wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is impossible to construct a cypher with just one key, such that the good guys (spanning several allied nations, dozens of government agencies, perhaps even local police) can use the key, but bad guys (spanning several opposing nations, dozens of intelligence agencies, thousands of hacker groups, tens of thousands of individual cyber-criminals around the world) cannot. We are talking about every single person who…

You're missing my point completely. These folks very well understand that bad people can steal keys. Stolen keys have been a thing since antiquity. It's not rocket science they don't understand. Every single key in history has had a risk of theft and this is no exception. The truth is a lot of them understand this just like you. But unlike you, they are willing to accept this risk . You aren't. That's fine. You have…

I don't believe that France is actually willing to accept that every opposing intelligence agency will obtain the key...

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#46

Post by buybackoff »

hansvm wrote: post #36
buybackoff wrote: post #12

I've found the original debates video on the National Assembly website. My French is good enough for that (not enough for cooking et al. though), so I believe I understood. I'm positively surprised by some deputies remarks. But Bruno (interior minister) Retailleau is either totally incompetent technically, with his advisors as well, or is a liar. "We will apply the math selectively, only for those that are a threat a…

Totally unrelated, but since you brought it up a bit, I find recipes written in French to usually be much higher quality than similar recipes I find in English -- enough so that I'll alter my country and language for search engines when searching for recipes, and for ChatGPT I'll ask the question French. Modern translation products aren't too terrible to cook from. Especially if you know some French already, I think…

What I had in mind is that I go to a local market every Sunday to buy some nice fresh food. But e.g. for the fish/meat I still only understand 1/3 or 1/2 of the names/terms. Nevertheless, I have read some lengthy tax code sections more than once in details... I do not cook like a French, and - oh - they cook really nice! :)

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#47

Post by m463 »

palata wrote: post #3

Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also not have no clue at all. Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryptio…

With things like this I think of the bill that tried to change the value of pi:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#48

Post by mytailorisrich »

buybackoff wrote: post #42
mytailorisrich wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I am French. "OK overall" is obviously good but at global scale this means better than the "third world", so context is important. The context of my previous reply is France's "direction of travel", which negative like most other European countries. This is a key metric on any meaningful timescale, which is what ultimately matters.

I beliebe you are talking about the first derivative. I want to believe the second is all right lately. The scariest thing in France I've seen is ~20yo voting for Mel-the-leftist-egocentric-schmuck so that they could keep doing nothing but taxing productive people. Other that that the "direction of travel" is dual: either drown in the mire of ever increasing taxes or kick ass. My feeling is that France has everything…

I agree with you. On individual rights I would qualify that by saying that France has never been leading on them. The state is what matters and individual rights have always in practice been restricted to that effect.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#49

Post by dataflow »

whatshisface wrote: post #45
dataflow wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing my point completely. These folks very well understand that bad people can steal keys. Stolen keys have been a thing since antiquity. It's not rocket science they don't understand. Every single key in history has had a risk of theft and this is no exception. The truth is a lot of them understand this just like you. But unlike you, they are willing to accept this risk . You aren't. That's fine. You have…

I don't believe that France is actually willing to accept that every opposing intelligence agency will obtain the key...

Maybe they don't think it's as likely as you think. Or maybe they think the time horizon is long enough that it is worth it. Whatever it is, I assure you they are not too stupid to realize this is a possibility. They just differ on either the degree of the risk, or on the value they get in return. In which case, logic dictates that if you believe the actual risk is higher than they would tolerate, to find a way to convince them of that.

Re: France rejects backdoor mandate

#50

Post by [deleted] »

whatshisface wrote: post #16
palata wrote: post #3

Just like for other big challenges like biodiversity and climate change, it feels like it often boils down to the politicians just not understanding enough to take rational decisions. Of course they can't all have a PhD in cryptography, but they should also not have no clue at all. Over an over again, politicians are asking for backdoors. To me it just proves that they don't understand the very basic of how encryptio…

I would like to know what the public opinion on these issues is before blaming politician's ignorance, considering that to them the relevant knowledge is knowledge of what voters will support or tolerate. The impossible promise of backdoors that France can enter but no other country, organized criminal syndicate or petty government-employed stalker can find is only one impossible promise among the many we can hear fr…

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