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WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

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Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#51
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, the model quality is not a problem. They can trivially write professionally. Even a two year old model can. If they write poorly, it's because they are asked to appeal to the lowest common denominator of clickbait.

Actually I disagree, it's pretty apparent that modern frontier LLMs are nearly completely incapable of writing good prose for some reason. I'm not sure if it's the RLHF phase or what, but even when you explicitly tell them to try to avoid the cliches it's never enough. They're geared toward writing heavily punchy, low-substance prose, and it shows up everywhere in their output, even in places like documentation and j…

I ask GPT 5.5 to write professionally or in a moderately formal tone and it does. If you are producing garbage output, there are only three explanations: (1) you don't have a system prompt to obtain targeted output, the kind you need (2) you have a badly written system prompt (3) you have a weird bad model.

The world is bigger than Claude and an oversimplified worldview.

If you haven't even read good quality AI written articles, you have either been wilfully blind to them or you have a bigger problem, because you surely haven't avoided them.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#52
post #25

For anyone wondering what the actual purported security weaknesses are in this article (I used the slop machine to reduce the slop): - Cloud backups — by default, backups to iCloud/Google Drive contain plaintext messages, and E2EE backup is opt-in. Even if you enable it, a weak password collapses the effective security, and any other person in the chat with an unencrypted backup exposes the conversation. - Metadata —…

I thought it was also the live notifications that would display the latest message. I'm not sure those are encrypted?

Yeah though to be fair that's a settings option.

Re: WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

#53

The article opens with a statement by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov who claims that WhatsApp shared Messages with third parties while Telegram "never did and never will" do that. Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it? What I mean is: The message is encrypted on the sender's device and can only be decrypted on that and the receiver's device. Telegram uses transport layer encrypti…

Telegram won’t even let you stop random people from spamming you if you don’t pay monthly. It isn’t a company that cares about privacy at all.

Not true. You have blacklist as regular user.
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