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  • What's the point of encryption then? lol

    • Are you kidding? It's a wonderful trap still.

      "None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free,"

    • People disclose more when they think they are safe. Your typical Windows user from year 2009 with their collection of porn banners and botnet nodes would have their private info safer than a new Linux user of the same time. Because the Linux guy would believe he's free now.

      I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes. Or every schoolboy using "but I'll be able to examine the code" in arguments. Or "but the sources are open" on the subject of OS security even by literate people, while how many people have looked at those sources? If just 3-4 times that amount of people look at Windows components' disassembly with the same effort, they'll probably have the same effect on security, one can conceal backdoors in source code well enough. There are so many things one can remember, but those were nice times.

      Same with "security" in the Internet. We were using ICQ and everyone knew one can spy on those messages, we were using HTTP and POP and IMAP without encryption and everyone knew one can spy on these too, but we were fine - we adjusted our behavior for that knowledge and used the Web as it should be used.

      And what's the funniest, this "insecure" Internet was more secure, because people acted on the right premises and formed behaviors that made it secure. When you know something is unprotected and can't be protected, you are not completely taken by surprise if it's lost.

      Now teenage girls use centralized services as they would use private diaries, where an unclearly defined group of people can see the content of those. Many of them think it's safe because that's called "private messages" and they "didn't give access" on some webpage of that service, or even just because there's a lock sign in the browser address line.

      People think they have been given magic that obeys them, magic is different from tech in not requiring understanding to obey. There's, obviously, no magic, only things fully understood obey their owners, and almost nobody fully understands even door locks.

      So - I think the new important kind of social advertising is teaching people to not trust security. Security is like a war victory, it's not guaranteed and never certain enough to rely upon it. No system based on implication of functional security must be used.

      We must use only openly unreliable systems.

      That also applies to home appliances (intended) and all kinds of complex devices. When those came with schematics and detailed maintenance manuals, people dreamed of something not requiring these, and as we can see, that something is not better and doesn't take less effort when breaks.

      Unreliability is freedom, and reliance is slavery. But at the same time unreliable systems are better than no systems. Unreliable systems are the compromise between luddism and degenerate civilization.

      • I remember those manuals how to run Skype and every proprietary program from a separate user, while every client in X11 can capture the whole display and see all keystrokes.

        I don't know what these manuals said, but you can run an X11 software package in Xnest or Xeyphr to functionally sandbox X11. Both of those have been around for a long time. I use firejail, which will use either to isolate software if being used in an X11 environment. That might permit for clipboard snooping, have to check, but avoids the keylogging and display-dumping issues.

        It is true that X11 --- not to mention most traditional desktop operating systems -- were not really designed to sandbox software packages. Local stuff is trusted. Wayland improves on that a lot. But even so, Linux desktop apps in general still don't normally run isolated. Steam games are not isolated in 2025, which is something that I'd kind of like to see.

        But I'm more optimistic than I think your comment is, think that things have generally gotten better, not worse.

        Go back a quarter century and nearly all Internet traffic was unencrypted; most is encrypted today. I'd trust Web browsers to reliably sandbox things today more than I did then. We have containers and VMs, which are a big improvement over chroot jails. My software updates are mostly cryptographically-verified. If you want a cryptographic filesystem, it's not a big deal to set up these days. We don't have operating systems automatically invoking binaries because they happened to live on something that looks like a CD drive that was connected. We're using more programming languages that are more-resistant to some common memory management bugs that historically led to a lot of our security problems.

        I agree that it's important not to falsely believe that security is present when it's not. But I don't think that everything is dismal, either.

  • The idea that Florida can “protect” minors by making them less safe is dangerous and dumb.

    I assume this is less about protecting children as protecting the movement from children, as well as facilitating wrongdoing against children by members of the movement.

    As a general rule there are no backdoors that are good guys only. In fact predators, foreign agents and industrial spies will know them sooner than their distribution to law enforcement.

  • it would require “social media platforms to provide a mechanism to decrypt end-to-end encryption when law enforcement obtains a subpoena.”

    Mmmhmm. Apparently the Threadiverse is about to become illegal in Florida.

    First, let's generate a strong public-private GPG keypair for myself and some hypothetical other Threadiverse user, anotheruser@lemmy.today:

     
            $ gpg --quick-generate-key tal@lemmy.today
    $ gpg --quick-generate-key anotheruser@lemmy.today

    And show the tal@lemmy.today public key:

    And then show an example of someone else importing it, pretending that they're anotheruser@lemmy.today (though in my case, I've already got the tal@lemmy.today public key in my keyring):

    And now let's pretend we're anotheruser@lemmy.today and use end-to-end encryption that doesn't have a back door, using sed to prefix each line with four spaces so that we get nice blockquoted Markdown that we can paste into a Threadiverse comment or direct message to tal@lemmy.today:

    And let's have tal@lemmy.today decrypt it:

    I guess the only option will be to lock up instance admins for violating Florida law, as they're operating a social media platform with end-to-end encrypted communications with no backdoor.

    EDIT: It'd also probably be nice to have browser and client support to make this more-convenient, no copy-pasting. I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for its functionality, but for users using Firefox, this Firefox extension claims it can automatically detect and decrypt GPG content in a webpage; if it can pick up on encrypted, ASCII-armored blockquoted text in a Threadiverse comment, that would hopefully let one simply read encrypted messages in Lemmy or whatever without any additional copy-pasting effort (though sending an encrypted message would still require copy-pasting some text):

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnupg_decryptor/

    • Not that I disagree with your point, but Florida law is only relevant within Florida and, to a limited extent, the United States. Admins of US-based instances could likely be subpoenaed and then held in contempt if they refused, assuming they don't pull a PornHub and just block all of Florida.

      That said, this is very worrying since subpoenas have a MUCH lower threshold of legal bearing than warrants. I suspect that Apple will likely challenge this in court or they stop selling iPhones there.

      • ...Florida law is only relevant within Florida and, to a limited extent, the United States.

        And even then only to the extent those with the power to do so choose to enforce it. It might matter if you or I break the law; it will not matter in any meaningful way if Meta does.

      • Oh, yeah, my concern isn't really that Florida is planning to go after instance admins --- I'm just being sardonic --- so much as to point out that any practical enforceability of this is going to have a lot of issues.

        I mean, do you mandate that Lemmy disallow third party clients? Try to force them to detect and block encrypted messages? What happens if I start dumping big PGP messages steganographically in images and simply send those? What happens if the image I'm sending is just a link to isn't even uploaded to pict-rs on a Lemmy instance?

        I don't need to move a whole lot of bits to send messages, and it's really hard to block people who can send any data at all from having software send data that cannot be read by intermediaries, use the existing social media channel to agree upon out-of-band communications channels that social media operators have no control over, and so forth. Like, okay. Say I am a child-molesting terrorist drug running money launderer or whatever. I know someone who uses Facebook.

        Let's even say that Facebook does a fantastic job of detecting and blocking any E2E-encrypted communications like PGP messages of the sort I mentioned in the above comment.

        Okay. Now let's say that there is some other non-social-media system that uses OTR. I use Facebook to send someone my identity on that OTR system, as well as -- which doesn't need to be in any kind of standardized format --- the shared secret OTR uses to bootstrap trust between two parties. That shared secret becomes useless after the initial handshake completes. Is Florida going to figure out everything that I'm saying, manage to break into whatever other channel I'm using, and MITM the thing? Probably not, since even if they supoena Facebook and Facebook gives them that shared secret, it doesn't let them later MITM the OTR communications.

        That sounds complicated, but from a user standpoint it's "Let's talk on

        <program X>

        . I'm

        <user>

        , and here's

        <string>

        ." The other person fires up their program, pastes string in, and unless Florida have already supoenaed and MITMed that channel, at that point, the deed is done -- out-of-band E2E-encrypted communications are bootstrapped, and Mark Zuckerberg can't read them or let anyone else read them even if he wants to do so.

    • Actually, on second thought, maybe the automated in-webpage decryption via the plugin thing I stuck at the end is a bad idea if it just inserts the decrypted stuff right into the page (not sure if this is the case). Like, I bet that a malicious or compromised instance could serve up Javascript in the webpage it provides to read and send the decrypted content from the web page.

      But not a problem for the approach in general, just decrypting-in-place in a webpage. Would benefit from client support in general, though.

      EDIT: Also would be nice to have user profile bios have enough space to actually fit a PGP public key, if that is to be used to distribute PGP public keys (rather than keyservers or something, though one issue with using Lemmy instances to distribute them is that a compromised instance could list bogus pubkeys for users who haven't yet obtained a local copy of the pubkey for a given user). Presently, it looks like the character limit is extremely short on lemmy.today, which is presumably using the Lemmy default; 300 characters. I'd think that it could at least be boosted to the comment length limit of 10,000 characters.

  • Is it really becoming time we encrypt the messages we send ourselves? 🫠

37 comments