Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
Head of the Signal app threatens to withdraw from Europe
www.bluewin.ch
Signal app boss threatens to withdraw from Europe
109 comments
-
-
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.
-
where are the companys lobbying against this btw?? i mean it is their data they will be leaked aswell
-
There's an explicit clause that exempts politicians from the ban. They get privacy because they need it, but nobody else does.
-
politicians are very stupid when it comes to tech it seems.
They are so so so stupid, about this.
There will be so much blackmail and ruined political careers if these backdoors get installed.
A backdoor is never solely used by the folks one might hope would use it.
-
-
Why are so many European countries doing this? Why the sudden push for chat control and internet restriction laws?
-
It's understandable from law enforcement perspective that it's important to snoop on actual criminal communications. The EU has pretty reasonable measures and good at cracking down on continental-wide criminal activities. However, can we trust authorities that they won't over reach with the chat control and violate privacy and freedom of speech? Like, come on, nothing good ever came from spying on communications. Catching criminals and/or terrorists is a convenient excuse to spy on dissidents.
We've seen it happen in America with the PATRIOT Act. People dismissed the opposition to it with "nothing to hide" thought terminating cliche, or accuse you of pedophile or terrorist for not wanting spying on communications. Then twenty years later, Americans have a fascist government who allowed a corporate asshole to steal information from the federal government. And those information will be used for surveillance capitalism. The same will happen to us in the EU if we don't push back hard on this Orwellian desires of politicians.
-
-
-
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.
-
-
-
If the law is implemented, I would selfhost my own chat server. I don't see this as Signal fault.
But everybody can`t selfhost. That is a problem I am struggling with.
I am now sure what I would do about email, I assume it is affected as well?
-
I already self host my own matrix server. Everybody can't do that, but everybody can use someone's matrix server. They can't shut it down because it's decentralised and federated. It would theoretically be illegal to use but I don't see how they would be able to stop it.
Email with PGP would then also be illegal but impossible to effectively stop. That's why the whole discussion is so stupid. It only hurts the normies. Criminals and tech savvy people will find a way around it and still use encryption without mandated backdoors.
-
-
I hate this framing. They don't "THREATEN" to leave europe.
Europe is about to change laws that makes their product illegal.
-
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?
-
They don't care about your messages, they don't care about terrorists or pedophiles.
They do care about the general population, and wants to control it. That's what this is all about. The hard right wants to have effective tools to slam down on dissent when they get in power.
A game as old as humanity.
Shameless plug, because I'm trying to do my part ☺️ : Tenfingers sharing
-
-
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.
-
-
So now where will Signal go ?
-
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.
-
-
You are confusing security with privacy. But keep on ranting if you like.
-
peek rage bait
-
-
Where would be the loss with that?
-
We wouldn't have a simple and secure way of communicating?
The apple/Facebook alternatives are not good at all.
-
I wish my instance supported down votes, just so that I could down vote this comment.
-
-
maybe because of this headline some more politicians change their minds
109 comments
This is why we need the ability to sideload apps.
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.
Yes, please.
LOL, no. They'll come back again with some other bullshit to Save the Children!™, it's a never-ending whack-a-mole.
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.
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.
You can run your own server for signal by the look of it
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.
There are groups to support:
And in the UK:
Some political groups are better than others, but most politicians are clueless.
The key is to get muggles to understand we are living in Technofeudalism and why being digital serfs is bad. The problem is ineffective competition law and that monopolies are bad. That monopolies and standards are not the same thing. I have no idea how. Most people are just naturally compliant and unquestioning of something seemingly so abstract.
In the 80's (I'm that old), many home computers came with the programming manual, and the impetus was to learn to code and run your programs on your own device. Even with Android it's not especially hard (with LLM's even less so than it used to be) to download Android Studio, throw some shit onto the screen, hit build, and run your own helper app or whatever
sideloadedinstalled via usb cable (or wirelessly) on your own device.In certain cases (cars, health related hw etc.) I get why it's probably for the best if the user is not supposed to mod their device outside preinstalled sw's preferences/settings. But when it comes to computers (i.e. smartphones, laptops, tablets, tv boxes etc.) I fully agree with Cory here. Such a shame everything must go to shit.
Most of the general public buries their head in the sand. They are convinced being politically involved is either a waste of time or makes you crazy.
Most likely the reason, among others, they're fighting tooth & nail to remove side loading too.
Even the OPLus phones are planning to softlock their phones in newer models