Soooo, not only has the Belgian Presidency postponed today's vote on #ChatControl, #EU Commissioner #Jurova for the first time publicly admitted that the proposal would break #encryption:
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@josephcox has written a book, “Dark Wire,” about an encrypted messaging service app called Anom, which is used by drug traffickers but was infiltrated by the FBI and Australian Federal Police (AFP). @404mediaco has published this extract about how a kidnapping was both planned and foiled on Anom.
I looked into Matrix back in 2020 on a far more superficial level. Back then I simply wanted to know whether non-technical users can rely on Matrix for encrypted chats without shooting themselves in the foot.
What I found was a huge mess. The different Matrix clients all had very different capabilities, also when it came to encryption. It was pretty much a matter of luck whether your Matrix client could establish an encrypted connection to another Matrix client, whether it would do so by default and whether it would notify you in a useful way if it failed to encrypt the connection. Even the official Riot messenger didn’t perform well. There clearly were no baseline requirements, and expecting users to recognize whether they are secure or not just doesn’t work.
I later got a reply from the developers. I can only quote approximately since that was on Twitter so the conversation is lost now. It essentially boiled down to the fact that reliable encryption was never a design goal of the protocol. They wanted to give client developers the most flexibility. So client developers took that and largely implemented only the easy parts.
Politische Überwachungsphantasien, die mit dem Vorwand gerechtfertigt werden, "schlimmste Verbrechen wie den sexuellen Missbrauch von Kindern zu bekämpfen", sind unerträglich.
Wer wirklich etwas für Kinder tun will, engagiert sich im Kampf gegen den Klimawandel, für sichere Schul- und Radwege, für Bildung, gewaltfreie Familien, Chancengleichheit und freie Entfaltungsmöglichkeiten.
Everything you need to know about so-called 'Swiss Privacy' we learned decades ago from Operation Thesaurus, AKA, Operation Rubicon. We learned that CIA operations and black budget banking are actually headquartered in the Swiss underground.
If you trust any third-party server to protect your privacy, you're a rube. If you trust Proton Mail to protect your privacy, you're a rube getting 'crossed' by the Swiss Rubi-con. Either you own your keys and your data on your computer or else you have no privacy. Someone else's promise that your data will be 'encrypted' so they can't decipher it is a hollow pledge. If you send any form of plaintext to a remote server, no matter how much they claim to encrypt it, you have zero assurance of data privacy.
NSA says: "RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography are the main algorithms that need to be
replaced to achieve quantum resistance."
Here are my instant speculations.
Translation: We already discovered a way to break this stuff, and we're keeping it top secret, and we like reading your encrypted stuff. But we're nervous about it getting out into the wild or being discovered by someone else. We want to avert the fire sale disaster that could result, so we're scaring you with quantum heffalumps to use new algorithms we're sure the enemy can't break.
Knowing the quantum computers are unicorns, heffalumps, and woozles, this is the only intuition that I can draw from the years-long campaign to replace RSA and ECC with post-quantum algorithms.
Do not write to me about the threat of quantum computers. Do not regurgitate the baseless hype. Something else is going on behind the scenes that has spooks and stakeholders nervous. They can't admit they can break this stuff because there would be mass panic. So they are cattle-chuting the industry along in the pre-determined direction.
The commercial Internet is a major tool in securing government power. It is important from the ruler's perspective to ensure this apple cart doesn't get upset by the breaking of public-key cryptography, which would destroy the central point of control over most commerce. And that should tell us what we should be doing if we want more freedom--rejecting digital commerce as much as possible and feasible.
🔎 Secret, coded letters penned by Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in #England by her cousin #QueenElizabeth_I have been uncovered by a multidisciplinary team of international #codebreakers
The contents of the letters were believed for centuries to have been lost
Swiss authorities intervene, Proton Mail not blocked in India ( www.moneycontrol.com )