• 3 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m just establishing the baseline that there is some degree of privacy which is not only expected but simply justified with intuition alone. So, there is a line somewhere. Where one draws that line may differ. Your line is no doubt extreme to many; certainly me. But some privacy is critical to a functioning society. I tend to believe that aside from those that hold public office, there is little reason not to have complete privacy.




  • Lots of good advice here. Best method arises but cannot be sought. When you run into something broken or you don’t like, don’t set it aside hoping somebody else will fix it. Fix it.

    Even if the maintainer doesn’t want your change. This is the best way to grow the seeds of software freedom you’ve already planted by caring. This is the fundamental ethos in my view of a good steward of the community. When something isn’t ideal, they make it work for themself and then are willing to share if others find it useful.



  • They don’t seem to realize that higher level languages help us understand the code. Language models will be similarly capable of reading the binaries they ship. So what they doing is hiding code from users, not machines.


    To clarify, I don’t mean right now. They haven’t been sufficiently trained on machine code and that lacks some semantic help. But the future they fear will have transformers just as capable with lower level code.












  • Yes, subpoena was poorly worded. NSL is more likely. But still it is a time-forward threat, which means there is value while the server is or was accepting sealed sender.

    And I wasn’t suggesting timing attack is required to defeat sealed sender. I was, on the contrary, pointing out that was a threat even with sealed sender. Though that is non-trivial, especially with CGNAT.

    So in summary. You’re right. Sealed sender is not a great solution. But it is a mitigation for the period where those messages are being accepted. A better solution is probably out there. I hope somebody implements it. In the meantime, for somebody who needs that level of metadata privacy, Signal isn’t the solution; maybe cwtch or briar.


  • Sure. If a state serves a subpoena to gather logs for metadata analysis, sealed sender will prevent associating senders to receivers, making this task very difficult.

    On the other hand, what it doesn’t address is if the host itself is compromised where sealed sender can be disabled allowing such analysis (not posthoc though). This is also probably sensitive to strong actors with sufficient resources via a timing attack.

    But still, as long as the server is accepting sealed sender messages the mitigation is useful.