• Obinice
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    5512 hours ago

    Real encrypted apps, …or just the ones their own government can use to spy on them?

  • @Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    5814 hours ago

    Everybodies aunt at thanksgiving:

    “I should be fine. I only trust the facebook with my information. Oh, did I tell you? We have 33 more cousins we didn’t know about. I found out on 23andme.com. All of them want to borrow money.”

  • Maeve
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    14515 hours ago

    Oh gee, forcing companies to leave backdoors for the government might compromise security, everyone. Who’d have thunk it? 🤦

  • walden
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    6316 hours ago

    Sounds bad I guess, but the USA has been spying on us for a long time now. Is the bad part that it’s China?

      • @treadful@lemmy.zip
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        15 hours ago

        RTFA

        The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track individuals’ communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders.

      • @stinky@redlemmy.com
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        915 hours ago

        Wouldn’t surprise me. “We’re doing this to be helpful to you!” is actually moustached disney villain behavior.

        ^ similar to the prisoners with cats gimmick. “look how nice we’re being to our prisoners” is actually “stop yelling at your bunkmate or we’ll take away your cat”

    • mox
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      3414 hours ago

      When a whole nation’s communications are intercepted by another entity, yes, the bad part is that it’s another nation. Especially an adversarial one.

      This is not about individuals’ personal privacy. It’s about things that happen at a much larger scale. For example, leverage for political influence, or leaking of sensitive info that sometimes finds its way into unsecured channels. Mass surveillance is powerful.

  • @Bluetreefrog@lemmy.world
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    514 hours ago

    Interpretation - the NSA can now crack all common encryption methods, so let’s disadvantage our adversaries at no real cost to us.

    • @Lofenyy@sh.itjust.works
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      59 hours ago

      I vaguely recall Bruce Schneier saying that there is good evidence that the NSA cannot crack certain encryption methods. At the time, RSA was on the list. Maybe common methods mean roll-your-own corporate encryption, but it’s my understanding that GNUpg and similar software are safe.

      • @jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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        12 hours ago

        Well, GPG doesn’t have PFS, but its a good starting point to say hello and then upgrade to some better encrypted messaging app

  • @OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
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    815 hours ago

    Just stop using your electronic devices. Not like they don’t all have monitors built in already anyway. Every connected device could be sending screenshots home and we’d never know. I mean, I guess you could use something like Wireshark to monitor your home network, but something tells me nowadays there are ways around even that. I’m not a certified network tech or even a script kiddie, but I don’t trust my tech as far as my dog can throw it. I just try to secure through obfuscation as much as possible. Everyone thinks I have carbon monoxide poisoning, but it’s a small price to pay for peace of mind - even a small one.

    • @SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      127 minutes ago

      Do what the Germans did in ww1 when they knew their diplomatic code was broken but couldn’t change it. They put the important stuff in plain sight and treated it like junk mail and encoded the boring stuff.

      • @OldManBOMBIN@lemmy.world
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        15 hours ago

        I’m just saying that, unless you built the device you’re using, and you know what every component does, and you know what it’s doing when, and you know it wasn’t manufactured by a foreign state-owned manufacturer with a penchant for putting spy chips in their devices, then you can’t truly trust anything you do on it, encrypted or not. It doesn’t really matter, if the software is being encrypted by backdoored hardware.

    • @overload@sopuli.xyz
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      I go one further and also use public/private key pairs that my acquaintances must use to decrypt the scrambled letters I mail them.

  • @PagingDoctorLove@lemmy.world
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    42 hours ago

    Question for more tech savvy people: should I be worried about wiping old data, and if so for which apps? Just messaging apps, or also email and social media? Or can I just use the encrypted apps moving forward?

    • @kava@lemmy.world
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      21 hour ago

      the safest perspective to have is this -

      every single thing you send online is going to be there forever. “the cloud” is someone’s server and constitutes online. even end to end encryption isn’t necessarily going to save you.

      for example iCloud backup is encrypted. but Apple in the past has kept a copy of your encryption key on your iCloud. why? because consumers who choose to encrypt and lose their passwords are gonna freak out when all their data is effectively gone forever.

      so when FBI comes a’knocking to Apple with a subpoena… once they get access to that encryption key it doesn’t matter if you have the strongest encryption in the world

      my advice

      never ever ever write something online that you do not want everybody in the world seeing.

      to put on my tin foil hat, i believe government probably has access to methods that break modern encryptions. in theory with quantum computers it shouldn’t be difficult

      • archomrade [he/him]
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        242 minutes ago

        I’d imagine operating a quantum computer for blanket surveillance is cost-prohibitive, but yea, if you’ve given them reason to look at you just assume they have the means to break your encryption.

    • @WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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      11 hour ago

      just wanted to add that deleting an app will not result in deletion of your data stored in the cloud (e.g. your emails)

    • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      127 minutes ago

      That depends on the privacy protections where you live and the policies of each service:

      • most places in the US - they already have your data and aren’t obligated to delete it
      • outside the EU - probably the same as the US
      • the EU or select states (e.g. CA) - you have some protections and a legal obligation to honor delete requests

      For the first two, I wouldn’t bother. I personally poisoned my data with Reddit before leaving, because I’ve heard of then reversing deletions. For the third, deleting may make sense.

      But in general, I’d keep your other accounts open until you fully transition to the new one.

      Below is information when considering a replacement service.

      Anything where data is stored on a server you don’t directly control can be leaked or subpoenad from the org that owns that server. Any unencrypted communication can be intercepted, and any regular encryption (HTTPS) can be logged by that server (e.g. under court order without notifying the customer).

      Even “secure” services can be ordered to keep logs. Here’s an example from Proton mai, and here’s one involving Tutanota.

      So it depends on your threat model, or in other words, who you’re trying to keep away from your data. Just think about how screwed you might be if:

      • a hacker dumps the servers data
      • a police agency secretly orders recording of data and metadata
      • someone steals your device
      • the police confiscate your device

      The answers to the above should help you decide which to type of service you’d feel comfortable with, and what tradeoffs you’re willing to make.

  • circuitfarmer
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    9114 hours ago

    It’s probably also good practice to assume that not all encrypted apps are created equal, too. Google’s RCS messaging, for example, says “end-to-end encrypted”, which sounds like it would be a direct and equal competitor to something like Signal. But Google regularly makes money off of your personal data. It does not behoove a company like Google to protect your data.

    Start assuming every corporation is evil. At worst you lose some time getting educated on options.

    • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      3213 hours ago

      End to end is end to end. Its either “the devices sign the messages with keys that never leave the the device so no 3rd party can ever compromise them” or it’s not.

      Signal is a more trustworthy org, but google isn’t going to fuck around with this service to make money. They make their money off you by keeping you in the google ecosystem and data harvesting elsewhere.

      • @jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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        23 hours ago

        They do encrypt it and they likely dont send the messages unencrypted.

        Likely what’s happening is they’re extracting keywords to determine what you’re talking about (namely what products you might buy) on the device itself, and then uploading those categories (again, encrypted) up to their servers for storing and selling.

        This doesn’t invalidate their claim of e2ee and still lets them profit off of your data. If you want to avoid this, only install apps with open source clients.

        • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          40 minutes ago

          E2EE means a 3rd party cant extract anything in the messages at all, by definition.

          If they are doing the above, it’s not E2EE, and they are liable for massive legal damages.

      • @renzev@lemmy.world
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        48 hours ago

        Of course our app is end-to-end encrypted! The ends being your device and our server, that is.

        • @jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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          3 hours ago

          That’s literally what zoom said early in the pandemic.

          Then all the business world gave them truck loads of money, the industry called them out on it, and they hired teams of cryptographers to build an actual e2ee system

        • circuitfarmer
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          2111 hours ago

          This. Distrust in corporations is healthy regardless of what they claim.

        • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          13 hours ago

          Thats a different tech. End to end is cut and dry how it works. If you do anything to data mine it, it’s not end to end anymore.

          Only the users involved in end to end can access the data in that chat. Everyone else sees encrypted data, i.e noise. If there are any backdoors or any methods to pull data out, you can’t bill it as end to end.

          • @micballin@lemmy.world
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            813 hours ago

            They can just claim archived or deleted messages don’t qualify for end to end encryption in their privacy policy or something equally vague. If they invent their own program they can invent the loophole on how the data is processed

            • @cheesemoo@lemmy.world
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              913 hours ago

              Or the content is encrypted, but the metadata isn’t, so they can market to you based on who you talk to and what they buy, etc.

              • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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                211 hours ago

                This part is likely, but not what we are talking about. Who you know and how you interact with them is separate from the fact that the content of the messages is not decryptable by anyone but the participants, by design. There is no “quasi” end to end. Its an either/or situation.

            • circuitfarmer
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              111 hours ago

              Exactly. We know corporations regularly use marketing and doublespeak to avoid the fact that they operate for their interests and their interests alone. Again, the interests of corporations are not altruistic, regardless of the imahe they may want to support.

              Why should we trust them to “innovate” without independent audit?

            • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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              11 hours ago

              The messages are signed by cryptographic keys on the users phones that never leave the device. They are not decryptable in any way by google or anyone else. Thats the very nature of E2EE.

              How end-to-end encryption works

              When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.

              The secret key is a number that’s:

              Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.

              Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.

              Generated again for each message.

              Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.

              Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.

              They cant fuck with it, at all, by design. That’s the whole point. Even if they created “archived” messages to datamine, all they would have is the noise.

          • circuitfarmer
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            911 hours ago

            You are suggesting that “end-to-end” is some kind of legally codified phrase. It just isn’t. If Google were to steal data from a system claiming to be end-to-end encrypted, no one would be surprised.

            I think your point is: if that were the case, the messages wouldn’t have been end-to-end encrypted, by definition. Which is fine. I’m saying we shouldn’t trust a giant corporation making money off of selling personal data that it actually is end-to-end encrypted.

            By the same token, don’t trust Microsoft when they say Windows is secure.

            • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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              11 hours ago

              Its a specific, technical phrase that means one thing only, and yes, googles RCS meets that standard:

              https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

              How end-to-end encryption works

              When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.

              The secret key is a number that’s:

              Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.

              Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.

              Generated again for each message.

              Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.

              Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.

              They have more technical information here if you want to deep dive about the literal implementation.

              You shouldn’t trust any corporation, but needless FUD detracts from their actual issues.

              • circuitfarmer
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                911 hours ago

                You are missing my point.

                I don’t deny the definition of E2EE. What I question is whether or not RCS does in fact meet the standard.

                You provided a link from Google itself as verification. That is… not useful.

                Has there been an independent audit on RCS? Why or why not?

                • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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                  11 hours ago

                  Not that I can find. Can you post Signals most recent independent audit?

                  Many of these orgs don’t post public audits like this. Its not common, even for the open source players like Signal.

                  What we do have is a megacorp stating its technical implementation extremely explicitly for a well defined security protocol, for a service meant to directly compete with iMessage. If they are violating that, it opens them up to huge legal liability and reputational harm. Neither of these is worth data mining this specific service.

              • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                12 minutes ago

                Even if we assume they don’t have a backdoor (which is probably accurate), they can still exfiltrate any data they want through Google Play services after it’s decrypted.

                They’re an ad company, so they have a vested interest in doing that. So I don’t trust them. If they make it FOSS and not rely on Google Play services, I might trust them, but I’d probably use a fork instead.

      • @sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1711 hours ago

        It could be end to end encrypted and safe on the network, but if Google is in charge of the device, what’s to say they’re not reading the message after it’s unencrypted? To be fair this would compromise signal or any other app on Android as well

        • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          That’s a different threat model that verges on “most astonishing corporate espinoage in human history and greatest threat to corporate personhood” possible for Google. It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google employees coordinating in utter secrecy to commit an unheard of crime that would be punishable by death in many circumstances.

          If they have backdoored all android phones and are actively exploting them in nefarious ways not explained in their various TOS, then they are exposing themselves to ungodly amounts of legal and regulatory risks.

          I expect no board of directors wants a trillion dollars of company worth to evaporate overnight, and would likely not be okay backdooring literally billions of phones from just a fiduciary standpoint.

          • circuitfarmer
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            1211 hours ago

            It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google semployees coordinating in utter secrecy

            This is usually used for things like the Moon Landing, where so many folks worked for NASA to make it entirely impossible that the landing was faked.

            But it doesn’t really apply here. We know for example that NSA backdoors exist in Windows. Were those a concerted effort by MS employees? Does everyone working on the project have access to every part of the code?

            It just isn’t how development works at this scale.

            • @Pips@lemmy.sdf.org
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              28 hours ago

              Ok but no one is arguing Windows is encrypted. Google is specifically stating, in a way that could get them sued for shitloads of money, that their messaging protocol is E2EE. They have explicitly described how it is E2EE. Google can be a bad company while still doing this thing within the bounds we all understand. For example, just because the chat can’t be backdoored doesn’t mean the device can’t be.

      • circuitfarmer
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        312 hours ago

        You may be right for that particular instance, but I’d still argue caution is safer.

      • @CatLikeLemming@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        43 hours ago

        Note that it doesn’t mean metadata is encrypted. They may not know what you sent, but they may very well know you message your mum twice a day and who your close friends are that you message often, that kinda stuff. There’s a good bit you can do with metadata about messages combined with the data they gather through other services.

      • @MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        End to end matters, who has the key; you or the provider. And Google could still read your messages before they are encrypted.

        • @mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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          138 minutes ago

          You have the key, not the provider. They are explicit about this in the implementation.

          They can only read the messages before encryption if they are backdooring all android phones in an act of global sabotage. Pretty high consequences for soke low stakes data.

        • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          15 minutes ago

          Yup, they can read anything you can, and send whatever part they want through Google Play services. I don’t trust them, so I don’t use Messenger or Play services on my GrapheneOS device.

      • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
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        7 hours ago

        End to end could still - especially with a company like Google - include data collection on the device. They could even “end to end” encrypt sending it to Google in the side channel. If you want to be generous, they would perform the aggregation in-device and don’t track the content verbatim, but the point stands: e2e is no guarantee of privacy. You have to also trust that the app itself isn’t recording metrics, and I absolutely do not trust Google to not do this.

        They make so of their big money from profiling and ads. No way they’re not going to collect analytics. Heck, if you use the stock keyboard, that’s collecting analytics about the texts you’re typing into Signal, much less Google’s RCS.

      • @zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Signal doesn’t harvest, use, sell meta data, Google may do that.
        E2E encryption doesn’t protect from that.
        Signal is orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Google in that regard.

        • @renzev@lemmy.world
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          78 hours ago

          There’s also Session, a fork of Signal which claims that their decentralised protocol makes it impossible/very difficult for them to harvest metadata, even if they wanted to.Tho I personally can’t vouch for how accurate their claims are.

    • @s_s@lemm.ee
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      43 hours ago

      End-to-end encryption matters if your device isn’t actively trying to sabotage your privacy.

      If you run Android, Google is guilty of that.

      If you run Windows in a non-enterprise environment Microsoft is guilty of that.

      If you run iOS or MacOS, Apple is (very likely) guilty of that.

  • mox
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    3214 hours ago

    End-to-end encryption is indispensable. Our legislators (no matter where we live) need to be made to understand this next time they try to outlaw it.

  • @phoneymouse@lemmy.world
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    14410 hours ago

    The US Govt 5 years ago: e2e encryption is for terrorists. The govt should have backdoors.

    The US Govt now: Oh fuck, our back door got breached, everyone quick use e2e encryption asap!

    • @theherk@lemmy.world
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      218 hours ago

      Different parts of the government. Both existed then and now. There has for a long time been a substantial portion of the government, especially defense and intelligence, that rely on encrypted comms and storage.

      • Justin
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        148 hours ago

        FBI has definitely always been anti-encryption

          • @Astronauticaldb@lemmy.world
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            22 hours ago

            Lobbying as well as developmental issues I would assume. I’m no real developer just yet but I’d imagine creating robust security protocols is time-consuming and thinking of every possible vulnerability is not entirely worth it.

            • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              No, security is pretty easy and has been for decades. PGP has been a thing since 1991, and other encryption schemes were a thing long before. ProtonMail uses PGP and SMTP, the latter of which predates PGP by about a decade (though modern SMPT with extensions wasn’t a thing until 1995).

              So at least for email, there’s little technical reason why we couldn’t all use top of the line security. It’s slightly more annoying because you need to trade keys, but email services could totally make it pretty easy (e.g. send the PGP key with the first email, and the email service sends it with an encrypted reply and stores them for later use).

              The reason we don’t is because servers wouldn’t be able to read our email. The legitimate use case here is searching (Tuta solves this by searching on the client, ProtonMail stores unencrypted subject lines), and 20 years ago, that would’ve been a hardship with people moving to web services. Today, phones can store emails, so it’s not an issue anymore, so it probably comes down to being able to sell your data.

              Many to many encryption is more complicated (e.g. Lemmy or Discord), so I understand why chat took a while to be end to end encrypted (Matrix can do this, for example), but there are plenty of FOSS examples today, and pretty much every device has encryption acceleration in the CPU, so there’s no technical reason why it’s impractical today.

              The reason it’s not uniquitous today is because data is really valuable, both to police and advertisers.

          • @ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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            110 minutes ago

            Because the USA has been a broken fascist husk ever since the red scare and has been in slow decline ever since.

    • @sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      224 minutes ago

      More like 23 years ago when the Patriot Act was signed, and every time it has been re-authorized/renamed since. Every President since Bush Jr. is complicit, and I’m getting most of them in the previous 70-ish years (or more) wish they could’ve had that bill as well.

      • @dan@upvote.au
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        217 hours ago

        I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can’t ban maths.

        If I remember correctly, there’s also a law in Australia where they can force tech companies to introduce backdoors in their systems and encryption algorithms, and the company must not tell anyone about it. AFAIK they haven’t tried to actually use that power yet, but it made the (already relatively stagnant) tech market in Australia even worse. Working in tech is the main reason I left Australia for the USA - there’s just so many more opportunities and significantly higher paying jobs for software developers in Silicon Valley.

    • @zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      Yes, like Signal!
      Which does not only use end-to-end encryption for communication, but protects meta data as well:

      Signal also uses our metadata encryption technology to protect intimate information about who is communicating with whom—we don’t know who is sending you messages, and we don’t have access to your address book or profile information. We believe that the inability to monetize encrypted data is one of the reasons that strong end-to-end encryption technology has not been widely deployed across the commercial tech industry.

      Source: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

      I haven’t verified that claim investigating the source code, but I’m positive others have.

    • @jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      We’ve long had NSA slides that showed Tor and e2ee solutions as “disastrous” to their visibility.