Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 591 posts

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#451

Post by SequoiaHope »

fabiospampinato wrote: post #274
jhh wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

In all seriousness this is the aim of all historical anarchist movements. Despite the propagandization of the term "anarchism", that philosophy has a long history of attempts and writers and thinkers, and it has more often than not "failed" when a powerful state entity violently disbanded the efforts or killed prominent leaders. In other cases anarchism has not failed at all but has existed in tribal communities in different ways long before european thinkers wrote on the subject.

In particular anarcho-communism or the more detailed Communalism of Murray Bookchin (The Next Revolution, 2015 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/239261/the-next-rev...) looks totally plausible to me.

The biggest issue with state-less society is the conflict with the existing state powers this philosophy creates. However the method of governance has found success in present day Mexico with the Zapatistas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww46lxIc6-w As well as Rojava in Syria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcndZ0nZ0mo

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#452

Post by huhtenberg »

wcathcart wrote: post #423
technics256 wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you currently have any backdoors installed?

We do not. You don't have to take our word on this -- I wouldn't want you to. As others on this thread have pointed out it's possible enough to tear through our binaries that if we did have a backdoor it would be discovered.

> it's possible enough to tear through our binaries

No, it's not "possible enough" and I strongly suspect you fully realize that.

A backdoor doesn't need to be in a form of an IF statement or something comparably obvious and silly. It can be a weakly seeded PRNG that would allow a "determined party" to brute-force the key exchange in a reasonable time. That would take man-years to fish out from a binary, and that's without considering that you may (be forced to) distribute an altered binary on demand and to specific targets only.

So in the end all we have - realistically - is in fact just your word. There's no way for you to prove that you are trustworthy by pointing at some random binary. The only option is to distribute reproducible builds from an audited open source.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#454

Post by OrgNet »

ptman wrote: post #276
OrgNet wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

matrix seems pretty good, but it is still young and buggy (at least with the the client that I use, riot.im)

What's buggy?

One example is that voice calls only ring on one side, sometimes (on the calling side).

Another is that when some rooms get updated, you can get unread notices from the old room and your client keeps telling you that you have new messages even if you don't.

Another thing that I think should be considered a bug, is that when you enable encryption in a room and you have multiple devices on the same account, you have to approve all your devices separately so that they will be able to decrypt the messages...

There are more bugs related to how the encryption process works and I stopped using encryption because of it (some might have been fixed by now...)

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#455

Post by TaylorAlexander »

gtycomb wrote: post #336
fabiospampinato wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

This is why people have advocated for bottom up governance, where local groups make decisions and select rotating representatives to take those decisions as made by the group to larger regional councils, etc. In this way no individual has any real power. This is called democratic confederalism and is in progress in Rojava now but could be done in the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcndZ0nZ0mo

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#456

Post by foldr »

cosmodisk wrote: post #48
rvz wrote: post #27

This is essentially a worrying prospect if these developments are actually implemented or advance further. The users trust in the social media service is breached if a backdoor where to be placed in their products (It also defeats the purpose of the end-to-end encryption argument). If you reside in the UK and especially in London, things have just become 500% more Orwellian. >Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, h…

I live in London.It has already gone way beyond of what Orwell could have ever imagined. However,despite of all the surveillance, London is the crime capital of the world.This is probably the best place for criminals,as unless you pull a machine gun on a crowd,not much will be investigated.

>London is the crime capital of the world

Please don't irresponsibly spread this kind of inaccurate information. Crime in London is not unusually high.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#457

Post by foldr »

propogandist wrote: post #84
poooogles wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In London alone, it is not possible to pay for public transport with cash and a card is required. Their reasons for doing this because it "benefits criminals" is echoing the "ban encryption" nonsense. Not strictly true. You can buy an oyster card with cash, you can load it with cash and use that. After a weeks worth of journeys you can return it and get your £5 deposit back and buy another one. Not exactly perfect b…

although you anonymously purchase the oyster card, you can be de-anonymized the moment you scan the card, as face recognition links you with that card.

Sure, but the link to an ephemeral Oyster card doesn't give them anything that the face recognition doesn't give them already. If they can track faces, then they can track journeys even if you're paying in cash directly for every ticket.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#458

Post by qroshan »

grawprog wrote: post #344
blobs wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They are the only ones who can change things by law, not me. I had this thought yesterday as I read about several prominent politicians in Canada, including the prime minister, actively participating in the climate 'protests' that occurred yesterday. Who were they out there protesting? Themselves? They're the ones with the power to change things. Why were they outside with signs instead of in their offices doing som…

Not all politicians have equal power. In the US, the nominations of important positions, the laws and policies are determined by 20 Senators in GOP.

Those 20 senators (from Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas) are answerable to the demands of their constituents. Those people are not asking for Climate Change Policies. It has nothing to do with money, but the values and culture of the constituents.

It is incredible how HN and majority of the supposedly 'smart' crowd completely fail to understand the dynamics of how policies and laws are passed or made in this country or anywhere else.

It is also incredibly stupid to paint all politicians with the same brush, because if you are an immoral, evil politician you'd exactly want that situation. "All politicians are the same", "All media is the same" is the foundational strategy of bad actors.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#459

Post by TomMckenny »

m-p-3 wrote: post #375
blobs wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The goal of national security isn't to protect its citizen, but to protect the established order and whoever leads it. Backdooring a communication is only done to safeguard a government's power under the pretense of security.

This becomes more true the further a country moves away from democracy: in a vibrant popular democracy, people will honestly work for their nation's good and corruption is viewed as evil.

Further away from democracy, leaders are purely self serving, successful corruption is seen as a sign of intelligence and whistle-blowers, far from being heroes for pointing out maleficence, are threatened with execution.

And indeed, institutions eventually shift to working solely for the benefit of themselves and the people in charge. Mostly because any that don't are undermined until they do.

Re: Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K.?

#460

Post by qroshan »

godelski wrote: post #401
blobs wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? I don't think it is quite as simple as this (I'll preface this with saying I don't think we should have backdoors and that I wish we had STRONG encryption everywhere). I think the problem is that different departments have differe…

Thanks for this nuance answer. Unfortunately, "Nuance" will always lose to "Pitchfork", even in supposedly smart and intelligent communities like HN.

There are ZERO people from the pitchfork community who understands the pressure of working in keeping a community, region or country safe. If there is a terrorist attack, the pitchfork people have to answer to ZERO questions, while CIA/NSA/Police will have to answer 'Why didn't you do something".

It is so easy to sit in their comfortable offices and homes and philosophize about privacy when you have no skin in the game.

Post reply on HN