I agree. There are pretty clear grounds here to think about opening an investigation here into illegal tying, or a misuse of market power. Not sure if the FTC maintains a presence on here, but if you're listening...
I'm not sure if this meets the bar for substantive and thoughtful discussion, but this kind of corporate cowardice, enforced by unelected bureaucrats standing at the bully pulpit is only going to get worse as the noose tightens on the open web.
The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.
Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.
These decisions are made whilst America is falling to fascism. Meta may not intend for the abolition of E2E encryption to make fascist crackdown on free speech easier, but that is the reality of what abolishing E2E encryption does.
The "walled garden" isn't even that big a concern anymore. The gestapo reading every single digital communication you have and showing up to harass, threaten, or simply disappear you into a camp if the infraction is severe enough. That is what's at stake here.
This is getting pushed in the EU too, the crucial thing to understand about where the road is headed: the goal is the inverse of who does the illicit content scanning. The idea is the government gives a list of illegal activity/speech to the platforms (such as anti-ICE activism or speaking in support of Palestinians) and then the platforms scan (presumably with LLMs) all public and private messages, deletes them and forwards them to federal and local law enforcement of the user. This is why E2E is under attack everywhere, because it makes that impossible.
Do people expect that Instagram can't read their Instagram private messages? I don't think people expect that. And E2EE is not nearly as cheap as the HN crowd likes to pretend—how do those devices get those keys if not through a central service? Especially if one of them is a web browser?
were like 20 years past that, at the very least 10 years with Snowden.
The people have spoken, caring about your communications not being spied on puts you in the minority. I mean like, just look at social media. You have tons of people who not only don't care about being spied on, they actively document everything for more views.
The answer to most everyone question you’re asking is just, “public key cryptography”. It’s kind of disheartening to me that such basic 1990s tech as implemented by Phil Zimmerman is now obscure enough to merit questions like this.
Both parties exchange public keys through the central service. Only the possessor of the respective (on device, Secure Enclave ideally) private keys can decrypt the messages encrypted to the public key. The process can also work in reverse, encrypting with the private key so only holders of the public key can decrypt: this is called “signing”.
And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?
If the answer is blind trust in a third party that runs the messaging service then I suspect that you can guess what the people asking those questions are really asking.
Diffe-Hellman-Merkel key exchange is vulnerable to attacker-in-the-middle attacks.
Eave could just do key negotiation with Alice and separately do key negotiation with Bob. You have to use a slightly more complicated cryptographic protocol to avoid this issue.
How would the keys get stored in the user's private browsing window? Do they lose all chat history when they log in on a private browsing window and then close it?
I don't know the technical details of that for sure, but I think the answer is that keys and chat history are stored on-device only; for example you lose your WhatsApp history if you don't restore a backup when moving to a new phone.
If a messaging app is showing you message history in a private browsing window then perhaps the encryption key for that history is derived from your password or something like that; that can be done locally so that all the server ever sees is encrypted data.
What if you log into the app and then log out of the app and then log into the app again? Should you be able to see your messages?
E2EE is a fail-secure design. In case of any doubt it deletes your private messages. When applied to this case I don't think the downside of constantly losing all your messages outweighs the upside of Facebook pretending they don't have a copy of all of them.
Are you asking for technical details about E2EE in messaging apps, or simply making the point that you don't like it? If you don't like it, then fine, you do you, however I would point out that we all accept some inconvenience in our lives as a trade off for improved security; the lock on my front door is inconvenient but I'd rather have it than not.
As to whether or not Meta have been lying about it, then that would be on-brand for them, but then what are they turning off if so? Or maybe the whole thing is theatre, and I should better disconnect from the internet altogether? I don't see the value in speculating about that.
Not being able to receive messages except on one device isn't a minor inconvenience.
To fix this, you either need to authorize each device (and web browser) from another device that's logged in, or the central authority holds your keys.
I run WhatsApp concurrently on two phones and receive all messages on both devices. But generally speaking this is where we disagree - requiring all devices to be authorised by me is feature not a bug as far as I'm concerned.
> And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?
Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what used to be entry level knowledge in “our thing” has evidently become so obscure.
You shouldn't be talking down like this, you're wrong about it. Alice and Bob need to exchange keys beforehand in some trusted out-of-band way. There's no protocol that solves this if Eve can be in the middle. I'm not sure what you mean by fingerprints, but if you describe a protocol, I can describe the mitm attack.
Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each other and read off some form of hash of the public key to each other.
A more complex variant would be something like PGP implemented, where Bob and Alice could both sign each others keys after this exchange, ensuring that someone who hadn’t met Bob but did trust Alice could inherit trust in Bob’s Alice-signed key.
You’ve stated unequivocally that I’m wrong, so now, please show your homework.
This is a very frustrating exchange. You guys are saying the same thing. For key exchange to be secure against an attacker who can MITM the channel you're securing, either the public keys or at least their respective fingerprints need to be exchanged out of band, over some channel the same attacker cannot also MITM. For a sophisticated enough targeted attack, a telephone isn't that.
The way military radios handle this is hardware key loaders that have seeds pre-synced in factory, in person. Every day in the field, a unit comms person takes the key loader and loads new keys onto everyone's radios. The key loaders themselves are reseeded and resynced during maintenance periods between campaigns or exercises. They're physically accounted for on every movement and twice a day when not moving, and if they ever can't be found, all messages from any device they loaded keys onto is considered compromised.
Anyone trying to overthrow a government or run a criminal empire or whatever is going to have to take measures at least this drastic. Or quit LARPing and accept that nation state attackers can probably slide into your Instagram DMs, which are probably being sent to people you don't know, and if they're hot and actually answering you, 90% chance they're a honeypot anyway.
Web of trust or centralized trust are the main answers here.
Compromise of the secret key is a whole other issue - revocation.
MITM of a key can be solved pretty well via web of trust techniques.
Apologies if the dialog is frustrating to read! As a “recovering cypherpunk”, I find these sorts of discussions animating, as long as they’re polite and technically focused! Much love!
No, it's not at all this simple. This is why so many "e2ee" apps like Telegram are bogus, they ended up prioritizing UX over security because there are many places where you can't pick both.
Webs of trust based on OOB key verification and signing, or centralized trust authorities are the two primary models I’m aware of.
I’ve always been enamored of the idea of DNS as a back end protocol to enable the former largely decentralized solution.
Bob looks up Alice and receives her key from Alice’s namespace within the DNS hierarchy, along with her trust claims. David then looks up Alice’s key within her namespace, sees a reference to endorsement by Bob, and can validate this by querying Bob’s namespace. David can also issue non-authoritative queries about Alice’s key to Bob’s DNS servers, ensuring that there is no mismatch between the query response received by Bob and the one received by David.
If Mallory manages to compromise Alice’s DNS, but not Bob’s, the result is a mismatch in query responses that both Bob and David can thus detect.
At scale, a MITM compromising a system like this would be difficult without compromise of a large number of independent namespaces, increasing the likelihood of detection via the non-authoritative queries.
The missing component in this arrangement is cryptographic security of DNS, which I cynically suspect is why the DNSsec working group was comprised of the usual suspects and eventually produced a protocol without query encryption. It could still be layered on by a protocol extension, however.
In practice it's possible to make a system that's hard to mitm if users are diligent. WhatsApp publishes a public record of hashes of the keys. If both sides check that record against their local keys, it's hard for WhatsApp to present different versions to each. Though that's a more recent development.
The harder part that Instagram is most likely concerned about is getting low-effort users to keep their private keys safe without losing them.
Throwing this on the "brainstorm if we had an ideal legislative world" pile: Stealing a user's private key should be a felony, even if it hasn't (yet) been abused for anything.
The tricky part is keeping it from being "permitted" by a crappy contract of adhesion. Banning it entirely would make it very difficult to buy/sell backup services...
lol honestly, I think a little on the contrary. If we can make a thing impossible technically, the law defers to that. One thing the government really can’t do easily in Western countries is forcing a company to add features or change core functionality.
I'd say those are legal barriers, rather than technical barriers.
For example, suppose the government demands constant access to your core database. You don't need to invent any new algorithms for that, you might just make an SQL user and a firewall exception and call it a day.
Similarly, If you have a messaging client, you don't need complex R&D to steal the "end-to-end" keys.
I’m not sure why you think so? If the service provider claims E2E but intentionally provides a defective version of this, it’s a pretty clear cut violation of the federal statute, which afaik based on the statute’s language contains no exceptions for defects cajoled into being inserted by government pressure short of a clear statute mandating it, which does not exist afaik.
Can anybody briefly explain what a “rot economist” is? Is it meant to be capitalised “ROT economist” which stands for something? Has my browser not rendered the characters correctly or something?
This story of course includes the now almost mandatory attack on e2e encryption, which according to this account when coupled with the people you know feature is “a dangerous tool” - with little explanation as to the nature and size of the danger.
This part is interesting: “Worse still, accounts that were less than 15-days-old now made up 20 percent of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day…”
The explanation leaves a lot to be desired though:
“…heavily suggesting that Facebook was growing its platform’s “connections” through spam.”
Doesn’t this make perfect sense where a new user joins Facebook with no friends to start with, then in the first few weeks of using it finds all of their friends and adds them?
The whole thing reads like a grab bag of grievances rather than a forensic takedown, shame.
"Rot economists" appears to be a pejorative invented by this newsletter to describe an ecosystem of graphs-go-up growth-at-all-costs venture capital firms, management consultants, and corporate leaders who are pushing companies away from building things customers actually want: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/
It's "rot" as in the companies/society are (metaphorically) rotting.
Off topic but this is a real gripe of mine - analogue speedos that go all the way up to 240 kmph (~150 mph). I am only ever going to do half that speed, so why not just make the dial go to only 120/(80) and give the needle (and me!) twice as much precision!
Some cars also use unevenly spaced tick marks on an analog dial. Nice in that it gives you the sweep needle and range of scale without overly compressing the range of most interest.
Analog tachometers for race cars do/did the the same thing:
Maybe limit the dial at 100mph?. Doing 80 on the Interstate near me will get you passed by the impatient. But the real question is why do you need that much precision?
The report [0] itself even mentions Apple's abandonment of on-device scanning, as well as its plan to add end-to-end encryption to iCloud. eSafety has been curiously quiet about both of those announcements.
I love ncdu and install it on all of my machines. But at the risk of sounding like a broken record - why isn’t its functionality baked into stock file managers on windows and Linux?
Why can’t either of these systems do what the Mac has been able to do since the 90s, and display the recursive size of a directory in bytes in the file manager, allowing one to sort directories by recursive size?
I am not exaggerating to say this is the single biggest roadblock to my permanent migration to Linux!
(I would love nothing more than to hear I’m wrong and “you fool, Dolphin can do that with flag: foo”!)
Except that running "ls" doesn't show you the directory content size, and "ncdu" requires the user to make a tea first. The above poster is right in saying that having this built-in to the filesystem metrics would be a huge win.
use a cronjob for `duc index`, then you can use `duc ui` to see the index. it doesn’t immediately update on change so it’s not quite what you’re looking for, but it might be the closest thing.
I assume the restriction is file system related. It's probably not always cheap to calculate the full size of a directory, especially if it's heavily nested.
Windows will tell you the size of a dir in the right click -> properties menu, but it takes a while to calculate for large/complicated directories.
>Windows will tell you the size of a dir in the right click -> properties menu, but it takes a while to calculate for large/complicated directories.
Caja (and probably Nautilus/other-Nautilus-based managers) does that as well. But although can show it in properties arranging by size doesn't take it in consideration. (Rather it just sorts them by number of items inside.)
Just lie to me a little bit. I wouldn't mind seeing quick cached approximations that assume that I have changed the disk between reboots, or recently just move huge files around (and the OS would know anyway)
> Why can’t either of these systems do what the Mac has been able to do since the 90s, and display the recursive size of a directory in bytes in the file manager
Many file managers can do that, although for obvious reasons it's rather built as a contextual action on a single directory than an always on feature than would slow down the filesystem horribly by accessing it recursively on many levels. On Thunar (XFCE's file manager) for example it's accessible from the contextual menu opened using the right mouse button on a directory name; other file managers would work in a similar way.
I'm sure filesystems could be modified so that any write would automatically update a field referred by the containing directory, so it would quickly propagate to the upper level, but that would imply many more write accesses which for example on SSD media would do more harm than good.
You fool, Dolphin's predecessor Konqueror had a directory view embedding the k4dirstat component! There you can sort by subtree percentage, subtree total (bytes) and amount of items, files, subdirs.
This broke some time in the past (KDE really jumped the shark) and is now available as stand-alone applications only: k4dirstat and filelight. The MIME type inode/directory is already associated with those, so you can run them from the context menu of a directory anywhere, including file managers.
I'm not sure what exactly you're asking for, but Dolphin shows me the size of a directory. You may have to right click and update it from time to time.
Almost every district has a tool called "Disk Usage Analyser" that does exactly what you want. Very helpful when you start getting "no space left on device" errors.
> This is just completely wrong - banks only loan out money they have. If you go to a bank and get a loan the bank didn't just edit a database entry - they had that money. Banks loaning out money they don't have is extremely illegal.
I'm afraid to say that this is completely wrong. Commercial banks do in fact create money via lending! The 101 textbook explanation offered here is at best outdated and at worst misleadingly perpetuates a myth that simply must die.
The Bank of England's note on money creation in the modern economy [0] is the place to start - and more or less reflects the explanation in the article.
Page 19 seems to show that the newly generated money has to be backed by somebody's deposit and not just minted though. Like for any situation that doesn't involve you taking a loan from a bank to use that money at the bank the BoE paper calls out that the bank needs to get deposits from where you're sending the loan.
So, you buy a house using say Chase and the seller has Wells Fargo then Chase "mints" say 1M the money for your loan but then solicits 1M of deposits from Wells Fargo. like why does it matter if the 1m for your loan came from Chase depositors or Wells Fargo depositors? The point is that it's backed 1:1 by cash that came from a person which BoE example shows.
> the newly generated money has to be backed by somebody's deposit
Ok. Suppose I am a bank, and pg deposits $10. Then I lend to you, lesourac $9. This $9 is "backed" by pg's deposit. But I, the bank, only hold $1, and you, lesourac, hold $9.
In your head, you hold $9. In pg's head, he has $10 of assets. There are $19 of imagined assets running around, even though the "real" assets are only $10.
It's all good until pg pulls his $10 sooner than I expected, or if you, lesourac declare bankruptcy and default on your loan, and unable to pay back those $9. This is why bankruptcies are deflationary.
We could have a safer banking system if loans were from individual to individual, possibly mediated by a bank, and the lender fully accepted the risk of default.
Oh interesting. That seems academic given the reserve requirements by the Fed under Regulation D which basically says every bank must have $x dollars in reserve for every $10 loaned out. Thus, the bank already has to have that $10 deposit before it's able to make the loan, but as long as those reserve requirements are met, they can make all the loans they want. Given the size of a commercial bank with deposits and withdrawals going on constantly across many customers, they run with some amount of margin, but basically they'll be able to make a good number of loans before they're anywhere close to their reserve limit. So to answer your question... sorta?
So, the side I don't particularly like goes like this. Alice deposits $10 into Bob's Bank. Bob's bank now has $10 of liabilities (Alice's account) and $10 of assets (Alice's ex-Money). Charlie _wants_ a loan of $10. Bob records an increase of assets by $10 so now the bank has $20 in assets and records a corresponding increase in liabilities (to balance out the minted money) of $10 so now the bank has $20 in liabilities. Then the bank gives Charlie this _new_ money. In essence, the bank is not giving out depositor's money for loan but instead new money. (See the Bank of England (BOE) paper for details showing this [1]).
My argument is that (1) the same BOE paper shows that whenever that minted money needs to leave the minting bank's computer systems an equal amount of money from somewhere (either that bank or the receiving bank) will be destroyed. (2) That money will commonly move between banks. Therefore the fact that money is minted is irreverent because it's subsequently quickly destroyed.
Side note, it makes total sense to me that a bank would rather mint money in a lump sum exactly equal to the amount needed for a loan than figure out what fractions of the loan should come from what depositor. Its just practical.
Do you consider the value in your yield bearing savings account to "not be money" in the sense that your stocks "aren't money"? If the median American does, then your argument holds water. I don't think this is the case, though.
The BoE considers savings accounts to be part of the 97% of money in an economy. Although I'm still not too sure if you're on the side of a bank using a depositor's money or minted money for a loan.
> Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority — 97% of the amount currently in
circulation.
We had a lot of smoke tainted “experimental” wines out from Australian vineyards as 2019 and 2020 releases - some were really interesting, others simply dreadful (with winemakers just glad you were happy to take a punt and get rid of it for them).
Not sure repeating the bushfires that created those releases is a long term strategy though…
What a lot of the comments in here are bumping up against with regards to “fairness” is the fact that willingness to pay is a function of both preference intensity and ability to pay.
The way to make sure TS tickets go to the biggest TS fans is to remove the influence of ability to pay and sort only by preference intensity.
Solving wealth inequality fixes this problem entirely - among others!
Edit: like all good economists, I leave solving that particular bit of the problem as an exercise to the reader.
