cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions
sealed sender isn’t theater, in my view. It is a best effort attempt to mitigate one potential threat
But, what is the potential threat which is mitigated by sealed sender? Can you describe a specific attack scenario (eg, what are the attacker’s goals, and what capabilities do you assume the attacker has) which would be possible if Signal didn’t have sealed sender but which is no longer possible because sealed sender exists?
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m certainly not advocating for using WhatsApp or any other proprietary, centralized, or Facebook-operated communication systems 😂
But I do think Facebook probably really actually isn’t exploiting the content of the vast majority of whatsapp traffic (even if they do turn out to be able to exploit it for any specific users at any time, which i wouldn’t be surprised by).
“Anonymity” is a vague term which you introduced to this discussion; I’m talking about metadata privacy which is a much clearer concept.
TLS cannot prevent an observer from seeing the source and destination IPs, but it does include some actually-useful metadata mitigations such as Encrypted Client Hello, which encrypts (among other things) the Server Name Indicator. ECH a very mild mitigation, since the source and destination IPs are intrinsically out of scope for protection by TLS, but unlike Sealed Sender it is not an entirely theatrical use of cryptography: it does actually prevent an on-path observer from learning the server hostname (at least, if used alongside some DNS privacy system).
The on path part is also an important detail here: the entire world’s encrypted TLS traffic is not observable from a single choke point the way that the entire world’s Signal traffic is.
Many people have reverse-engineered and analyzed whatsapp; it’s clear that they are actually doing e2ee. It is not certain that they don’t have ways to bypass it for targeted users, and there is currently a lawsuit alleging that they do, but afaik no evidence has been presented yet.
anyone who objects to mass surveillance obviously hates puppies
Signal protocol is awesome for privacy, not anonymity
The “privacy, not anonymity” dichotomy is some weird meme that I’ve seen spreading in privacy discourse in the last few years. Why would you not care about metadata privacy if you care about privacy?
Signal is not awesome for metadata privacy, and metadata is the most valuable data for governments and corporations alike. Why do you think Facebook enabled e2ee after they bought WhatsApp? They bought it for the metadata, not the message content.
Signal pretends to mitigate the problem it created by using phone numbers and centralizing everyone’s metadata on AWS, but if you think about it for just a moment (see linked comment) the cryptography they use for that doesn’t actually negate its users’ total reliance on the server being honest and following their stated policies.
Signal is a treasure-trove of metadata of activists and other privacy-seeking people, and the fact that they invented and advertise their “sealed-sender” nonsense to pretend to blind themselves to it is an indicator that this data is actually being exploited: Signal doth protest too much, so to speak.
100% of options funded by western governments
One of their four, SimpleX, is not funded by western governments (…but it instead has some venture capital 🤡)
a wifi access point that gets online via a cellular network is called a mobile hotspot, regardless of if it’s running on a phone or a dedicated router device
huh? mobile hotspot is double-bad
I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.
As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.
The term “web app” hadn’t been coined yet but, even without AJAX I think in retrospect it’s reasonable to call things like the early versions of Hotmail and RocketMail applications - they were functional replacements for a native application, on the web, even though they did require a new page load for every click (or at least every click that required network interaction).
At some point, though, I’m pretty sure that some clicks didn’t require server connections, and those didn’t require another page load (at least if js was enabled): this is what “DHTML” originally meant: using JavaScript to modify the DOM client-side, in the era before sans-page-reload network connections were technically possible.
The term DHTML definitely predates AJAX and the existence of XMLHTTP (later XMLHttpRequest), so it’s also odd that this article writes a lot about the former while not mentioning the latter. (The article actually incorrectly defines DHTML as making possible “websites that could refresh interactive data without the need for a page reload” - that was AJAX, not DHTML.)
A cascade of satellite collisions is called Kessler syndrome and the risk of it happening is rapidly increasing due to megaconstellations like Starlink:
Kessler syndrome could be a solution to the Fermi paradox.
Weird this article doesn’t mention Hotmail and RocketMail, which both had email client web apps in 1996.
Sadly there are none I can recommend wholeheartedly, all have various problems 😢
There are some controversial picks in there like Proton Mail or Brave. They do have a pretty wide adoption but have severe downsides. I’ll probably remove them again. What do you think?
here is a comment i wrote recently listing some of the reasons not to use proton. i’d also recommend against vivaldi (proprietary), brave (so many reasons), and everything in your messaging category besides matrix (and matrix also has lots of problems but it is the least bad of the ones you’re recommending). sorry that i don’t have time to elaborate right now (it’s a lot), but for the inevitable “what about signal” question see my comment here and more here.
ps. if you do use signal, consider adjusting your Who Can Find Me By Number setting (see that link for a fun implementation of the attack against signal users who leave it as it is by default). note that the same thing could technically be done in matrix too, albeit by matrix ID instead of phone number. 😬
Why not just use proton?
A few of the many reasons not to use Proton:
…
Its Swiss based.
You know who else was Swiss based? 🙄
Not sure about purism but I think its US so avoid it like a plague.
I don’t know enough about Purism to endorse them but afaict they don’t have any of the above problems.
Purism’s e2ee is PGP; you can use their service via their client software or whatever other client you want, and can communicate with people who are using different implementations with different mail providers. I don’t see any mention of them even offering webmail but I expect that if they do they would probably offer PGP there using a browser extension instead of having extremely-impractical-to-verify-before-running-it js code being sent anew from the server every time you load the page (which is how Proton’s webmail works, and also what they offer for non-Proton users to receive mail encrypted using their nonstandard encryption).
I’d rather have US legal jurisdiction and credible e2ee which doesn’t allow the operator to trivially circumvent it for targeted users than to have Swiss jurisdiction and snake oil.
Not sure what you are saying. With the order of the meme reversed it doesn’t make it obvious which point is supposed the clearer point of view…
It isn’t reversed compared to how this meme format is usually used: the glasses-on image is on the bottom, and associated with the viewpoint OP is saying is correct/better.
If one hasn’t seen (or has forgotten) the film, this is the way that makes sense, since glasses (generally) improve the wearer’s vision.
This meme’s canonical format is however in fact at odds with the actual scene in the 2002 film:
A related meme form which doesn’t have this ambiguity is the much older they live sunglasses - here the position of the two images are used less consistently (though as with peter parker, usually glasses-on is the lower one) but the glasses being on showing the truth actually fits with how it is in the film.
One group- memes or something is wholly controlled by Chinese state actors.
As one of the moderators of [email protected] i encourage OP to look at the sort of posts i make and tell me - do you really think i’m a “Chinese state actor”?
Do you think all these posts i make in, eg, [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected] and [email protected]… these are all part of a carefully-crafted cover, and I’m actually being paid by China to delete totally-not-racist posts depicting their president as a yellow cartoon bear?
And for this service, to maintain my cover, they also pay me to create memes like this and this and this and this and this and this (and defending that one against less informed nerds) and this and this and this (a small sample of my OC here)?
And do you think China paid for this understandable explanation of asymmetric cryptography using high-school level math, because someone asked, deep in a thread about a service which I’d also already debunked the snake-oil privacy claims of?
Really?
corollaries to Hanlon’s razor include:
good disclaimer. also, they aren’t open source, and from the tech background of the founder who self-funded it i doubt that he plans for it to ever be. in fact, among other cringe things on Issam Hijazi’s linkedin i see that he’s even worked for, enough to become an expert in the proprietary technology of, (checks notes) the very same zionist billionaire (paywall bypass) who just bought TikTok 😢
Also, one their FAQs is “Where does UpScrolled operate its servers and store data? Does it use Big Tech?”… the answer to which includes:
We do rely on some large-scale cloud providers at this stage — not because it’s our ideal, but because building fully independent infrastructure takes time. We’d rather be transparent about that than claim otherwise. Over time, we plan to reduce reliance on these providers and move toward greater independence.
… but We do rely on some is as far as their attempt at transparency took them - they aren’t actually saying which cloud providers they’re using or for what. (given the founder’s expertise i’d guess it’s probably AWS and/or Oracle.)
Pre sealed-sender they already claimed not to keep metadata logs, so, complying with such a subpoena[1] should already have required them to change the behavior of their server software.
If a state wanted to order them to add metadata logging in a non-sealed-sender world, wouldn’t they also probably ask them to log IPs for all client-server interactions (which would enable breaking sealed-sender through a trivial correlation)?
Note that defeating sealed sender doesn’t require any kind of high-resolution timing or costly analysis; with an adversary-controlled server (eg, one where a state adversary has compelled the operator to alter the server’s behavior via a National Security Letter or something) it is easy to simply record the IP which sent each “sealed” message and also record which account(s) are checked from which IPs at all times.
it would more likely be an NSL or some other legal instrument rather than a subpoena ↩︎