Separate airgapped device running an encryption app. Type text on it, it spits out a ciphertext, then, use internet connected device to scan the ciphertext, OCR*, then send to target receipient, they also use this same airgap encryption device and they OCR, then decrypt using their key.
*Instead of OCR, you could also use a QR code to have error correction
Tell me how they can ban this? Anyone using a raspberry pi with a battery and touch display attached into one compact thing, is a criminal?
What if we just start using One Time Pad? Can they ban that?
Steganography?
Like seriously, how do you even stop “criminals” using steganography?
So, to Big Gov, here’s my question: Are you gonna ban talking to other people becuause criminals also talk to other people?
I hope more follow, would be funny if “all chat apps have to include a back door” leads to “there are no official chat apps”
Do you really think Meta would ignore the opportunity to both be the default option And have justification to read users’ messages?
Nah i don’t. I can hope though and the backdoor is a threat not just for consumers but also companies.
Haha! Do it if the EU does not give up on their Orwellian control!
Wait, I’m in the EU and I use Signal!
Basically, but what you forget is that Signal is also the standard for every Politician for their group chats because it’s secure, so the idea that they might lose their secure, leak-free* form of communication should worry MEPs and other politicians into taking action. Will it? I don’t know, politicians are very stupid when it comes to tech it seems.
* Baring screenshots
Screenshots, or just adding a journalist to the group chat.
Screenshots, or just adding a journalist to the group chat.
no software can prevent PEBKAC errors. It’s like locking a door and then giving the key to a thief and being shocked when people steal your shit
where are the companys lobbying against this btw?? i mean it is their data they will be leaked aswell
Why would they care about leaks? I guess that’s some missed profit on selling the data, but that’s only if there’s a breach.
i mean like company espionage and similar threats than leaked user data…
That is also a good point. Generally this is dangerous for all and sundry.
Signal CEO Whittaker said that in the worst case scenario, they would work with partners and the community to see if they could find ways to circumvent these rules. Signal also did this when the app was blocked in Russia or Iran. “But ultimately, we would leave the market before we had to comply with dangerous laws like these.”
This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.
I have become convinced by Cory Doctorow’s (tech writer and inventor of the term “enshittification”) argument that the fact that we’re even discussing this in terms of “sideloading” is a massive win for tech companies. We used to just call that “installing software” but now for some reason because it’s on a phone it’s something completely weird and different that needs a different term. It’s completely absurd to me that we as a society have become so accustomed to not being able to control our own devices, to the point of even debating whether or not we should be allowed to install our own software on our own computers “for safety.” It should be blatantly obvious that this is all just corporate greed and yet the general public can’t or refuses to see it.
TBH I was confused when I came across the term “sideloading” for the first few times because I thought it was something new. Part of the plan I guess. Damn.
That means nothing when the servers stop taking EU traffic. I get your point, but the real solution here is putting a bullet (double tap) in Chat Control, once and for all.
putting a bullet (double tap) in Chat Control,
Yes, please.
once and for all.
LOL, no. They’ll come back again with some other bullshit to Save the Children!™, it’s a never-ending whack-a-mole.
We need to get the right to privacy and control over our own devices enshrined as fundamental rights, like so many other rights the EU protects.
And they only have to win once, we have to fight and win every time they introduce a new variant. Its exhausting.
Signal has never done that. Whilst the app might not be available in some regions they’ve been proud to talk about how people can use it to avoid government barriers.
The CEO is saying they are willing to, that should be taken seriously.
That means nothing when the servers stop taking EU traffic
I don’t use any of these apps, so I’m not quite sure how they work. But couldn’t you just make an app that keeps a local private and public key pair. Then when you send a message (say via regular sms) it includes under the hood your public key. Then the receiver when they reply uses your public key to encrypt the message before sending to you?
Unless the sms infrastructure is going to attempt to detect and reject encrypted content, this seems like it can be achieved without relying on a server backend.
It is potentially doable:
A short message is 140 bytes of gsm7-bit packed characters (I.e. each character is translated to “ascii” format which only take up 7-bit space, which also is packed together forming unharmonic bytes), so we can probably get away with 160 characters per SMS.
According to crypto.stackexchange, a 2048-bit private key generates a base64 encoded public key of 392 characters.
That would mean 3 SMSs per person you send your public key to. For a 4096-bit private key, this accounts to 5 SMSs.
As key exchange only has to be sent once per contact it sounds totally doable.
After you sent your public key around, you should now be able to receive encrypted short messages from your contacts.
The output length of a ciphertext depends on the key size according to crypto.stackexchange and rfc8017. This means we have 256 bytes of ciphertext for each 2048-bit key encrypted plaintext message, and 512 bytes for 4096-bit keys. Translated into short messages, it would mean 2 or 4 SMSs for each text message respectively, a 1:2, or 1:4 ratio.
- NIST recommends abandoning 2048-bit keys by 2030 and use 3072-bit keys (probably a 1:3 ratio)
- average number of text messages sent per day and subscriber seems to be around 5-6 SMS globally, this excludes WhatsApp and Signal messages which seems to be more popular than SMS in many parts of the world [quotation needed, I just quickly googled it]
Hope you have a good SMS plan 😉
That is how the signal protocol works, it’s end to end encrypted with the keys only known between the two ends.
The issue is that servers are needed to relay the connections (they only hold public keys) because your phone doesn’t have a static public IP that can reliably be communicated to. The servers are needed to communicate with people as they switch networks constantly throughout the day. And they can block traffic to the relay servers.
I think they’re suggesting doing it on top of SMS/MMS instead of a different transport protocol, like Signal does, which is IP based
Which is what Textsecure was. The precursor to Signal. Signal did it too, but removed it because it confused stupid people.
That makes the assumption you want to use your phone number at all. And I’m sure the overhead of encryption would break SMS due to the limits on character counts.
That makes the assumption you want to use your phone number at all
Can’t use Signal without a phone number.
You CAN use it to interact with people without them knowing your number. The only current requirement is specific to registration.
I think SimpleX removes the need for static relays.
It was so hard getting people to use signal im imagining thisll never catch on
That’s how signal started way back. Doesn’t work well - sms is terrible.
You can run your own server for signal by the look of it
Not officially I don’t think. And even if you did, you’d need a customized app to point to said server, and then you wouldn’t be interoperable with the regular signal network
Most likely the reason, among others, they’re fighting tooth & nail to remove side loading too.
Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.
I mean lol, they require a phone number to sign up, which you can only get with an ID in many countries. You chat with a gestapo officer and they know where you life.
Signal IS GARBAGE. Fucking garbage article, gaslighting bullshit. Fuck this timeline. Honestly this article is fucking terrorism.
You’re confusing privacy with anonymity.
Removed by mod
You are confusing security with privacy. But keep on ranting if you like.
i would even more say with anonymity, considering the chats are still private and the main use case for messanger apps is to communicate with people who know who you are
There can be no security without privacy and a central server that can be extorted. But keep lying if you like.
Central server only gives you metadata. Therevare altrrnative clients if you don’t trust the official one.
Why are you giving gestapo your phone number instead of your username?
Try to think a bit before you post
I think it’s quite a good question to be honest - you can keep your phone number private from all your signal contacts and has been able to since early 2024.
https://thehackernews.com/2024/02/signal-introduces-usernames-allowing.htmlplans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content
Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
A regular captain of industry for whom the automatic searchers of his zero-privacy messenger is one step too far lol
Even if signal was insecure and had no privacy (which it it secure and private), wouldn’t you still prefer people needed a warrant or some form of document that had to go through the court before your messages could be read?
peek rage bait
Jesus lad relax.
Just let it happen
About freedom, not freedom and various other things - might want to extend the common logic of gun laws to the remaining part of the human societies’ dynamics.
Signal is scary in the sense that it’s a system based on cryptography. Cryptography is a reinforcement, not a basis, if we are not discussing a file encryption tool. And it’s centralized as a service and as a project. It’s not a standard, it’s an application.
It can be compared to a gun - being able to own one is more free, but in the real world that freedom affects different people differently, and makes some freer than the other.
Again, Signal is a system based on cryptography most people don’t understand. Why would there not be a backdoor? Those things that its developers call a threat to rapid reaction to new vulnerabilities and practical threats - these things are to the same extent a threat against monoculture of implementations and algorithms, which allows backdoors in both.
It is a good tool for people whom its owners will never be interested to hurt - by using that backdoor in the open most people are not qualified to find, or by pushing a personalized update with a simpler backdoor, or by blocking their user account at the right moment in time.
It’s a bad tool even for them, if we account for false sense of security of people, who run Signal on their iOS and Android phones, or PCs under popular OSes, and also I distinctly remember how Signal was one of the applications that motivated me to get an Android device. Among weird people who didn’t have one then (around 2014) I might be even weirder, but if not, this seems to be a tool of soft pressure to turn to compromised suppliers.
Signal discourages alternative implementations, Signal doesn’t have a modular standard, and Signal doesn’t want federation. In my personal humble opinion this means that Signal has their own agenda which can only work in monoculture. Fuck that.
that’s a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn’t federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase.
And lots of social woo-woo that doesn’t extend much further than “people don’t understand cryptography and think it’s therefore scary”.
A pretty weird post, and one which I don’t support any statement from because I think you’re wrong.
that’s a lot of words to say you generally accuse any programm that isn’t federated of having an agenda targeted at its userbase
No, that’s not what I’m saying. I used the word monoculture, it’s pretty good.
And lots of social woo-woo that doesn’t extend much further than “people don’t understand cryptography and think it’s therefore scary”.
Not that. Rather “people don’t understand cryptography, but still rely upon it when they shouldn’t”.
A pretty weird post, and one which I don’t support any statement from because I think you’re wrong.
I mean, you’ve misread those two you thought you understood.
Using mono ulture as a word doesn’t change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.
I do give you credit about the second part - it would be better to have your own private key in chat apps, which isn’t handled by the app itself, at the very least to establish a shared key. I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many, even in a “flawed” implementation with the “control” being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they’d never store the keys themselves, not even hashes. Unless you’re part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
Using mono ulture as a word doesn’t change the meaning here. If anything, its a pathway for the foal you ascribe.
Of course it does. Federation can be a monoculture too (as it is with plants). A bunch of centralized (technically federated in IRC’s case, but united) services, like with IRC, can be not a monoculture.
Monoculture is important because one virus (of conspiratorial nature, like backdoors and architectures with planned life cycle, like what I suspect of the Internet, or of natural one, like Skype’s downfall due to its P2P model not functioning in the world of mobile devices, or of political and organizational one, like with XMPP’s standards chaos and sabotage by Google) can kill it. In the real world different organisms have sexual procreation, as one variant, recombining their genome parts into new combinations. That existed with e-mail when it worked over a few different networks and situations and protocols, and with Fidonet and Usenet, with gateways between these. That wasn’t a monoculture.
Old Skype unfortunately was a monoculture. Its clients for Linux (QT) and Windows and mobile things were different implementations technically, but with the same creators and one network and set of protocols in practice.
I still think the existence of crypto is a massive boon to many
That’s the problem, it’s not. You should factor psychology in. People write things over encrypted channels that they wouldn’t over plaintext channels. That means it’s not just comparison of encrypted versus plain, other things equal.
even in a “flawed” implementation with the “control” being on the side of corporations - tho if they are smart, they’d never store the keys themselves, not even hashes.
And that’s another problem, no. Crooks only steal your money, and they have adjusted for encryption anyway. They are also warning you of the danger, for that financial incentive. Like wolves killing sick animals. The state and the corporation - they don’t steal your money, they are fine with just collecting everything there is and predicting your every step, and there will be only one moment with no warning then you will regret. That moment will be one and the same for many people.
Unless you’re part of the signal project, I doubt you know the exact implementation and storage of data they do.
What matters is that the core of their system is a complex thing that is magic for most people. You don’t need to look any further.
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
EDIT:
Still, thanks for summarising your lengthy post, even if I had to bait you into it. Sometimes, brevity is key.
Yeah, I just woke up with sore throat and really bad mood (dog bites, especially when the dog was very good, old and dying, hurt immunity and morale).
XMPP was sabotaged by google (and meta) but is still alive and well.
It was intended as an ICQ replacement, and its advocates even managed to sell it as that for many normies. It became supported, with federation or not, by many email service providers, social networks, and so on. Then that support mostly vanished. Its users percentages are not inspiring.
I think you mean IRC replacement.
I think you may need some sleep man. wtf are you talking about
Perhaps you need to get some sleep if you don’t understand what I’m talking about.
I get it messenger = gun wow i didnt know!
Holstering my phone now thanks
