France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
1–10 of 133 posts
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#2Comment from a French insider:
It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there is an attack...
The worst is that it will cost tax payers millions
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#3What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#4Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…
Lets hope it's not as bad as this French government project:
https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/project-fro...
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#5What about using Signal? Will they do something else then using the Signal protocol? If so, this might be either pretty expensive or could go wrong.
I thought about that too...if their concern is that they want the server to remain on French soil could they not spin up an instance of their own Signal server?
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#6Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution.
But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "what they are doing" and deliver a crappy platform that no one will use :) It already happened too many times.
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#7Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "w…
The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find:
> We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia
and
> The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet.
I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open implementation for most of it.
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#8Comment from a French insider: It will not work. The last two IT projects the government ordered I have in mind are the ears dropping facility for the police and SAIP, an application to warn citizens in case of a dramatic event such as a terrorist attack. Both are failures. On the first one, the police complains of crashes, slowness, and not fulfilling its missions. The second simply does not warn people when there i…
And SAIP was budgeted for at least 78M€ ...
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#9Well looks like our government (I'm French) is having the NIH syndrome as well. Why not reusing existing solutions like XMPP + OMEMO? They can invest a few thousands euros in those projects and in a couple of open source clients. Plus this will also allow the citizen to have a nice, government funded, encrypted solution. But hey, it's not "sexy" enough. So they'll drop some public money to a big company that knows "w…
The article was pretty light on details, but isn't it more a case of "Not Hosted Here"? This is the only relevant parts I could find: > We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia and > The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet. I'm hoping this means they are using a mature, open…
+1 on that. Based on the article I hope they’re using signal or some other reputable crypto. Ideally they’ll host it in France and provide a good UI
Re: France’s government is building its own encrypted messenger service
#10This isn’t a case of NIH; France has adopted Matrix for the project, which is a lightweight fork of Riot.im combined with a large private federation of Matrix servers. The whole thing is open source (although not public yet, as it is very early days) and open standards based. At Matrix.org we’ve been providing some support to them :) It’s very exciting to see open government projects which actually grok open source and open standards.