from the when-you-can't-trust-your-friends dept.
The French government is looking to move officials away from popular apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram -- even if the French president likes using them.
As Facebook continues to reel from the Cambridge Analytica saga, the French government is taking precautions against the social media behemoth's WhatsApp service.
The French government is developing its own encrypted messaging service, Reuters reported Monday. The goal is to alleviate concerns about privacy breaches, which could result in the leaking of private conversations between top officials to foreign parties.
The French government's privacy concerns come amid a backlash against Facebook following a massive data leak concerning millions of users. WhatsApp, which provides encrypted messaging services, is owned by Facebook and shares user information with its parent company -- something that hasn't sat well with privacy regulators.
In December 2016, the European Union expressed concerns over Facebook's access to WhatsApp users' data. Just a month later, the popular social messaging platform was sued in German court over the issue, while French privacy watchdog CNIL warned WhatsApp in the same year to stop sharing user data with Facebook or risk a fine. Last month, Facebook agreed not to access any data from WhatsApp until its activities are considered compliant with a Europe-wide General Data Protection Regulation expected in May.
[...] While few details are available on the French-built messaging service, a ministry spokeswoman told Reuters the app is being designed by a "state-employed developer" and tested by "about 20 officials and top civil servants." It is hoped that the use of this app will become mandatory across the government by this summer before being rolled out to all French citizens, she added.
CNET has reached out to the French government for a comment.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:14PM (20 children)
I mean who wouldn't trust the same guys who are saying backdoors can be perfectly secure to handle their private messages?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:17PM (18 children)
Backup just in case someone doesn't believe you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law#France [wikipedia.org]
Encryption under fire in Europe as France and Germany call for decrypt law [techcrunch.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:48PM (17 children)
Considering that their governments are already omnipresent, and that nobody is allowed to forget what happened in WW2 (oversight of databases is in the law), most Europeans would probably prefer a government-sponsored not-perfectly-private local messaging with strong privacy rules, over some Californian guys with no ethics. Especially in the Trump Era.
The initial hurdle of practicality and critical mass would be the main problem, followed closely by stupid arbitrary usage restrictions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:57PM (13 children)
Yeah, they're used to being subjects rather than citizens. It's just how things have been for a hell of a long time. Me, I prefer to be screwed by guys who don't have a standing army and thus the ability to say "Yeah, we stuffed it right up your ass. And we're going to do it next week too. And there's fuck all you can do about it.".
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bob_super on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:08PM (10 children)
> And there's fuck all you can do about it.
Funny that, I'm pretty sure the French just kicked their two incumbent biggest parties to the curb, and are already busy demonstrating and striking against the changes the newly installed guys are trying to vote in.
The Italians, the Greek and the Brits have also been annoying their politicians, and the Czech and Polish have been pissing off Brussels.
Don't project.
(Score: 0, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:11PM (8 children)
Man, if you wanna buy that the new boss is any different than the old boss, go for it. It's astonishingly foolish but more power to you.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:23PM
Californians, TMB, there were Californians.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:57PM (6 children)
And the reason for that is idiots who either:
1. Don't vote (and tell others not to vote) or
2. Vote for the dogmatic strong-man who promises to fix everything if they could just get rid of those pesky limits on his power.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday April 18 2018, @01:00AM (5 children)
Voting is pointless. TMB just pointed out reality. It DOES NOT MATTER who you elect! It never does. You can take the cleanest, most honest, most ethical, most empathetic man or woman, and 10 minutes after being in office, they will deeply fuck and screw you.
Obama was supposed to be the greatest hope for change that we've had since probably Lincoln, or the New Deal. Except, this time, he was really for us. A man of the people, to fight for the people.
He wasn't, and was instantly tainted the moment he assumed office. Strange how those campaign promises of holding AT&T's executives' feet to the fire for betraying the rest of us. With the NSA's help no less. Did he do ONE thing about AT&T and our loss of privacy? Nope, not a fucking thing. In fact, he turned out to be the greatest campaigner for mass surveillance the world has ever seen. More of our freedoms, civil liberties, and the rest of our hope, died with that man's betrayal of us.
So please. Go ahead and blow smoke up our asses of how voting has ever helped us one fucking time. By "us", I mean the poor and middle class. Of which, statistics show that you have your head firmly lodged up your ass about politics and the hoi polloi.
Voting will never make a difference. Rising up in revolution, surprisingly, actually does make a substantive difference you can quantify. It's hard for the ruling classes to keep fucking with you, when their busy being beheaded at the guillotines.
Yeah. Voting. What a fucking laugh. Yet, you call us idiots. What do you call people that do the same thing every time, expecting it to be different each time? That's what voting is, dude. Get the fucking hint.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:16AM (1 child)
That's nonsense nor is that quality of person necessarily the best choice for the job. Sometimes you need to be screwed badly now rather than screwed worse later. What isn't nonsense is our poor ability, collectively to determine the quality of our public figures.
Who knew that hype wasn't reality? Who knew? It's not even remotely relevant to the first paragraph because Obama, well before he did whatever he did as president, had shown numerous signs of not being the "cleanest, most honest, most ethical, most empathetic man or woman", much less being a good choice for US president.
If you keep voting for shit, then of course, it's not going to make a difference.
Sure, a shittier society.
But it's quite easy for them to keep fucking with you when they're the ones pulling the rope on those guillotines.
Funny how you can take voting, which works without a lot of fuss, and then propose, not even remotely sarcastically, to replace it with your latest snuff fantasy that won't work at all (and has a long, long track record of not working at all), much less without a lot of fuss.
I can name several. For example, the US has on numerous occasions voted in stealth creationism groups for school boards and similar public education political committees. Invariably, those people get voted out once they show their colors. Seriously, I have yet to hear of an example where such an elected group has survived a future electoral challenge. So yes, the electorate is poor at determining good choices (particularly upon initial inspection) and yes, voting is not perfect, but they usually will fix obvious mistakes unless the other options are worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:42PM
"Who knew that hype wasn't reality? Who knew?"
anyone with half a brain? they pick some no name politician from one of the most politically corrupt places in the country and promote the ever loving shit out of him and retarded ass slaves take him seriously. you people are beyond help.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:18AM (1 child)
Yes, you are an idiot.
An idiot who can't see that things can and will get worse than they are today while too many people think like you.
An idiot who thinks that the world is black and white, instead of shades of gray. Voting may not have the effect that I would hope, but, yes, it does have some effect.
You are truly the idiot.
Actually, I may be an idiot also. Why am I wasting my time reading and posting on SN? The stories are frequently old and the popular discussions are dominated by people whose political development stopped when they were about 15. So, shame on me.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Wednesday April 18 2018, @08:36AM
There's an old saying attributed to someone regarded as an exemplar of good judgement that applies here:
אַל־תַּ֣עַן כְּ֭סִיל כְּאִוַּלְתֹּ֑ו פֶּֽן־תִּשְׁוֶה־לֹּ֥ו גַם־אָֽתָּה׃
It has been loosely translated into English and re-attributed to many people since. A good recent one is "Don’t argue with idiots because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.", or, more briefly, "Don't feed the trolls."
If you have a point to make, make it clearly and succinctly, and don't worry about rebutting fools. Others will read your contribution and evaluate it on its merits. Debating 'talking points' rarely encourages depth of thinking, whereas a well-constructed in-depth argument takes time to put across and be understood. Pithy sentences play well, but are mostly intellectual froth encouraging superficiality.
Thoughtful, well-considered posts make this place worth coming to. If you produce them, others are encouraged to so the same.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:25AM
You are one fucking idiot. You are one of the reasons we have fucked up Trump in the Whitehouse or BREXIT. And if you believe that Syria is better outcome than voting, then you are even more stupid than a fucking idiot.
Ok, so you are stupider than a fucking idiot. Go to Syria and enjoy. And then you can enjoy getting the "ruling class" dropping nerve gas on your ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:38PM
macron? are you fucking serious?
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @10:16PM
Ahahahahahahahahahahaha, this is what Americans actually believe!
You're all proletariat. Your citizenship means nothing. Your rights mean nothing. You're just a meat puppet for the elites. Your daughter is a fucktoys for the elites.
Now go watch some more liberal capitalist propaganda. "Liberal", "conservative", literally matter cause if it comes out of a TV it's all the same shit.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:47PM
guys who don't have a standing army
Why would they when they can just use ours, at our expense?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
Would they prefer the actual unaccountable, inefficient government program with the same lack of ethics versus someone you can sue?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:50AM (1 child)
Sue a corporation and you'll be bankrupt your whole life.
Vote out a govt (in Europe it does happen, you know?) and at least you have a chance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @11:09AM
Doesn't happen in practice. There are plenty of successful examples of such lawsuits. Also, you don't get the point of bankruptcy. It is never a permanent thing. Sure, it can be difficult to recover from when it happens due to long term loss of ability to borrow, but you don't lose your ability to earn and save afterward.
What does a "govt" have to do with this service? You still can't sue it. You still can't vote it out.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:26PM
IIRC, encryption was classed as munition in France until recently (perhaps it still is?). I propose some names for this new service; "porte de derrière", "tache sur les sous-vêtements de la liberté" or "nous accueillons à nouveau le fascisme".
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:19PM (1 child)
messaging? IRC+OTC and the like?
I feel like all of these problems today stem from an un-creative, poorly skilled technical population that has been raised on the pablum of "press-play-to-run" IDEs.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:21PM
Here. [wikipedia.org]
It can be used via direct messaging initiated via IRC.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday April 17 2018, @09:25PM (9 children)
More countries need to create private secure versions of apps which government officials can securely use to keep data private.
The US should start with a secure private encrypted version of Twitter which the president can use.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:33AM (6 children)
This is for the president, yes? The standard government rate for this application 5 million dollars per device. The cost comes from the development time necessary to streamline and deduplicate the secure encrypted database. You can tell the deduplication is working because the database's, growth is rather logarithmic. In fact, the first few million entries you will not see any growth at all! Yes the database is named null. No, don't 'ls -a /dev/null' to get the database size. /dev/null is just the interface, the actual database is kept in /var/null where it should be. As you can see, the with just the base encryption it is 5GB in size. Of course it just appears to be a 5GB cat videos! That's the encryption! The tweets are encrypted by the /dev/null interface and then stenographically stored and deduplated in a cat video!
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday April 18 2018, @01:05AM (2 children)
The sad thing is, I can see you in a room with people wanting to give you lots of money for all that impressive word salad.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:02AM (1 child)
Would you be so kind to tell where that room with those people waiting is located?
I'll make sure to hire a limousine for DECbot to get there and deliver the presentation; nothing else in return but an entry for me with a camera and a press badge. I even promise I'll lmao in private, not during the presentation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:40PM
Follow up Q&A:
How are the messages transmitted?
Just like how you would normally share cat videos across the internet.
How do you retrieve the message from the video?
And what? Break the encryption?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by TheGratefulNet on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:29AM
now, translate that to proper DCL, my DECbot
;)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 18 2018, @01:24PM
The best feature of this is the open-source nature of it, while having the code completely under reasonable intellectual property control measures such that it is proprietary. Also, by default the lines that are read are immediately translated to The Cloud. When processed the electrons tunneling through the system handling the data have quantum states, so the latest qubit technology can be used to ensure that the null repository has total randomization which everyone agrees is the best encryptive methodology.
While in the past we used to leverage the synergy of private/public key technology, this new quantum computing approach allows for the ability to no longer require the keys. After the null write phase your data is truly compliant with serverless architecture, taking advantage of the latest theory on how dark data is less likely to be discovered by others - it's a digital detox which can sidestep or incorporate microservice architecture as desired. It takes advantage of your ability in working with null to easily produce self-service analytics as the computational answers all work to lowest-sum technology without needing a blockchain. It is projected that we can put this into a Mobile First environment and it is well suited for all IoT environments.
Thus DECbot has given us technology that is absolutely suited for the 21st Century Managerial environment and will ultimately reduce technological support costs as the simple nature of this base is fully realized.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:35PM
Nobody is gonna mention that pipe with /dev/null on the other side? Wrong redirector man
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:23AM (1 child)
I'm sure that the best and brightest among us can come up with a scheme (well, actually one already did) that could divert an adequate portion of US tax revenue in their direction, but I think any successful scheme will have as one of its steps, "TAKE THE GOD-DAMN PHONE AWAY".
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:08PM
The Russians would be displeased with the phone being taken away. I mean the unsecured personal Android phone.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by richtopia on Tuesday April 17 2018, @11:22PM (5 children)
Dear France,
There are open source implementations of encrypted messaging already. Feel free to implement your own software, but please leverage an existing protocol. For example, Google Chat was XMPP initially. Check out all of the options out there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_messaging_protocols [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:34AM (2 children)
Thanks for that. It looks like TOX is the way to go, being serverless and all. I wish more people would do things this way. Then maybe we can give the tyrants something to really cry about. Still even with this, the service provider can snip you out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:40AM (1 child)
Wow, peeps is still using Bitmessage [wikipedia.org]. Stable release 59 days ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:38AM
uTox might be the better option. Let's see how the idea catches on. Getting rid of central servers is a good way to go.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ptman on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:54AM
They are not creating something new from scratch. It's based on matrix [matrix.org] and riot.im [about.riot.im]. The french fork can be found on github [github.com]
Matrix and Riot are pretty cool. Open, federated, e2e encryption, good support for bridging and more. Check it out!
You can take a look at what Arathorn (matrix founder) has to say in the hacker news discussion [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:54AM
That's good, because you know, they are probably going to use Riot (https://about.riot.im/) which is an open source implementation of the Matrix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(communication_protocol) )protocol.
Translated quote from french and paywalled source https://www.nextinpact.com/news/106463-la-france-travaille-a-messagerie-detat-chiffree-pour-cet-ete.htm [nextinpact.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @02:00AM
... and Android phones in their pockets? You know, those ones with Siri and OK Google listening to everything they say.
Once upon a time the NSA had to go to a lot of trouble to bug those foreign cabinet meeting rooms.
(Score: 2) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday April 18 2018, @04:39AM (1 child)
Seems that people could just use Signal and be done with it; rather then spend millions of Euros on this. A lot of other applications use the Signal Protocol to achieve end-to-end encryption.
I just started using it again after a year or so; it has gotten better and the desktop integration is much better then when I last used it. Voice and video calls are a nice bonus.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 18 2018, @01:30PM
I wasn't aware Signal supported Reasonable Encryption [theinquirer.net] - probably a prerequisite for France, see above.
This sig for rent.