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Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#71

Post by forgotpwtomain »

chdjdjdnc wrote: post #66
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 issue is that people want to use things backed by a slick marketing campaign. This is why we have Slack instead of IRC, Facebook instead of talking to your friends the old fashioned way, etc.

> This is why we have Slack instead of IRC

We have slack instead of IRC, because IRC sucks.

Consider in order to have offline history I'm logged in permanently via. tmux session on a server which I connect to with Mosh. Weechat is a barely okay client (totally not suitable for non-technical users and Mosh still has significant delay).

What do you expect the non-engineering part of the company to do?

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#72

Post by Bromskloss »

forgotpwtomain wrote: post #71
chdjdjdnc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that people want to use things backed by a slick marketing campaign. This is why we have Slack instead of IRC, Facebook instead of talking to your friends the old fashioned way, etc.

> This is why we have Slack instead of IRC We have slack instead of IRC, because IRC sucks. Consider in order to have offline history I'm logged in permanently via. tmux session on a server which I connect to with Mosh. Weechat is a barely okay client (totally not suitable for non-technical users and Mosh still has significant delay). What do you expect the non-engineering part of the company to do?

> We have slack instead of IRC, because IRC sucks.

Just the other day, a friend created a Slack channel (or whatever it's called) for a group of friends to plan a trip, and then promptly set up an IRC tunnel so he wouldn't have to use it. :-)

I don't have an opinion myself; I just find it to be amusing.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#73

Post by eternalban »

hitr wrote: post #55

Many comments here say that it is an intrusion of privacy but a random machine sitting some corner of the world, parsing boatload of data(including yours) and detecting that there is an act of terrorism and in effect saving people. I am OK with that machine parsing through my data. I feel that when you write your email or uploading photos on FB/Instagram or send a tweet ,A machine is already doing that and many peopl…

Communication is merely one component of the necessary means for coordinated action. Lets push the hysterical notion of OP's "activist" to an extreme and consider the situation:

In this hypothetical scenario, humanity has developed the ability to remotely project thoughts to designated individuals. No technology is involved. Interception of projected thoughts is simply not possible. Plans are made, and then time comes for executing the plan, which must by necessity occur in the physical world.

Per your position, prevention of destructive acts by sociopathic actors in the above hypothetical world is not possible?

The freedom to associate and communicate unhampered by special interests -- corporate or governmental -- is a fundamental requirement of free societies. This fundamental requirement trumps every other consideration. For example, in the above hypothetical world, the society at large still has recourse to other means to detect and prevent destructive action. However in the world that you seem to be proposing, perfectly sane and reasonable actors can be trivially denied from the exercise of the fundamental right of free speech, communication, and association.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#74

Post by Cozumel »

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…

The site is currently down https://paul.kinlan.me/serverless-sync-in-web-apps/ but there was a good tutorial here on how to build a serverless message app.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#75

Post by reachtarunhere »

gnoway wrote: post #4
Alterlife wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is probably no direct connection between RTI and encryption. Here are some other stories I found involving this gentleman: -- http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/gurgaon/Most-mobile-... http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/delhi/two-gurgaon-sc... http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/move-to-link-digital-l... --- All three don't have anything to do with government corruption. What I get from this is: 1.…

The article points out that he's 27 years old.

And I thought that only the old fogies were the crazy lot. Pity.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#76

Post by reachtarunhere »

hitr wrote: post #55

Many comments here say that it is an intrusion of privacy but a random machine sitting some corner of the world, parsing boatload of data(including yours) and detecting that there is an act of terrorism and in effect saving people. I am OK with that machine parsing through my data. I feel that when you write your email or uploading photos on FB/Instagram or send a tweet ,A machine is already doing that and many peopl…

I wish I had enough Karma to downvote him.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#77

Post by gjkood »

seabass wrote: post #31

To someone new to crypto, how do companies like WhatsApp implement their end-to-end encryption? Where are keys generated and how are they persisted in a way that allows messages to be re-read no matter what device users are running the app from but doesn't allow governments any chance at access to the keys?

If you want to do the heavy lifting in understanding Cryptography, almost all the relevant documentation can be found at the following resource.

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsFIPS.html

A lot of the hard (math heavy) stuff used in modern cryptography has been published almost a couple of decades ago and good books are available on Amazon. I usually just buy them used as you get very good deals for books that have been published several years ago.

I would recommend Bruce Schneier's 'Applied Cryptography, Protocols, Algorithms and Source Code in C'. I was surprised to see the 20th Anniversary Edition is out now.

https://www.amazon.com/Applied-Cryptography-Protocols-Algori...

The math involved uses a lot of number theory (prime numbers, prime factorization, modulo computations, chinese remainder theorem, elliptic curves, etc)

Once you get a basic understanding of the math, you will find out why it is hard to find the keys (if properly generated) through brute force computer attacks.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#78

Post by imrehg »

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…

Bitmessage https://bitmessage.org/ no blockchain, though, just relatively short-lived messages, works pretty decentralized (though it is still sort of solution in search of a problem, even if I'm using it myself for a long time - nothing useful, mind you)

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#79

Post by gjkood »

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.

I ran into this very same issue during another posting on HN. It was auto correct at play. I had to go back and reedit it twice because it was auto correcting it back to 'Schneider'.

Re: Supreme Court to hear petition seeking ban on WhatsApp

#80

Post by DKnoll3 »

dineshp2 wrote: post #14

One of the arguments against mass surveillance is that it is blatant intrusion of privacy, and hence it should not exist. On the other hand, the arguments against encryption seem to be that it cripples the Government agencies in their work against terrorists, which is a genuine concern. There seems to be no way to address both these major concerns (that I am aware of), and hence the battle between privacy advocates a…

Please explain how the State had 100% surveillance of attackers'/terrorists' communications before they became electronic, and I'll be "genuinely concerned" about the "crippling" of their work.

Sounds more like we're returning to a state of how things were (suspicions would have to be aroused, and actual police work would have to be done, instead of just retrieving all of the relevant metadata on people the State doesn't like from a database of just about every piece of information transmitted across a wire for 50+ years).

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