cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/47296462
For now, your encrypted messages have a lock on them.
Only you, and the person you’re talking to, hold the key. Not the app. Not the company. Not the government. You probably don’t think about it. That’s the whole point — it just works.
Until, possibly, the end of this summer. Every messaging app in Canada would be required to build a second key.
With Bill C-22, the government would hold the copy. The lock you trust would no longer be a lock only you can open. It would be a lock the locksmith was ordered to duplicate.
Find and email your MP here to voice your opinion.
With Bill C-22, the government would hold the copy. The lock you trust would no longer be a lock only you can open. It would be a lock the locksmith was ordered to duplicate.
I don’t think this analogy sells just how bad this is. Building a backdoor means fundamentally weakening the encryption. Instead of having an extra key it’s more like building a lock with a concealed button that lets you completely bypass it and open the door, and then just hoping nobody finds it besides the ‘right’ people (i.e cops and gov).
Yeah but the bad guys wouldn’t ever dream of using a backdoor that’s meant for the “good” guys. Not at all. Never.
Holy shit, this is worse than Chat Control (that required “only” on-device OS equivalent of MS Recall)
I think it is time for me to explore whether i can create a messaging platform that relies on i2p, nothing they could do against this.
Why not just a keyboard app that encrypted and decrypted messages, regardless of the platform? Select text and tap on a pop up “decrypt”.
In the keyboard, select the keys and Type with the encrypting keyboard. The message is then encrypted so you can send it through whatever medium you want.
Sadly, juicy metadata is more important than message content, acc. to Snowden
Simplex, Quiet, Keet, & Sessions are some different apps that I have come across.
Also Nextcloud chat is something that you could self-host. Though if this bill does pass I guess hosting this would make you a criminal as soon as it does.
Technofascists need to start being reminded that they’re little fucking nerds that are incredibly sheltered.
For those of us not affected immediately by this, let’s fire up some i2p, tor and simplex routers in order to contribute.
As with tor, where you have the choice to run bridges if you are unable to contribute with a node/server that is vulnerable to identifying your person, simply installing i2p and letting it run is enough to contribute with bandwidth to the network, even if you’re not using it yourself.
Edit: and for i2p, you don’t even need a public IP, as opposed to tor bridges.
I so want to like I2P, but it’s so difficult to do so.
As an example, I set it up on my 100 MBPS fiber connection and it wanted to contribute like 300 KBPS with the automatic configuration and if I wanted to contribute more, I had to manually configure it up.
I run my own Monero node as a tor hidden service, for example, and connecting with my phone to it over tor I get 5 MBPS. I tried an I2P Monero node from a person I trust, and was getting 40 KBPS. At 5MBPS, Monero is perfectly usable. At 40 KBPS, it is totally unusable.
Ah yes, the classic: I want privacy, but I actually don’t, because it’s too inconvenient. There’s technical reasons why any network that prioritizes privacy will be slower than those that don’t. i2p has a technically superior model to tor’s onion network. It’s good software.
Um, no. I am perfectly happy to use 5 MBPS Tor Hidden Services. If I didn’t want privacy, I would just use the fucking clear net because it’s so much faster than Tor.
I’m not super plugged into Canadian politics. But for our friends to the north, I really hope this won’t pass. Wasn’t a similar bill voted down in the EU recently? Chat Control? So maybe there is hope for Canada too?
It seems like it’s the same story everywhere.
Some gov: “We shall require identity verification! We shall require encryption backdoors!”
Randos: “Nah. We’ll VPN around that shit.”
Gov: “Holy shit! Randos are VPNing! We must ban VPN!”
Randos: “Holy shit! They’re banning VPN! We better find ways to circumvent that!”
Gov: “Holy shit! Randos are circumventing our VPN ban! We better improve our VPN detection and blocking!”
Randos: “Holy shit! They’re better at detecting VPN now… We better tunnel over HTTPS…”
Round and round. Unfortunately, once the pain gets too high, it CAN be effective. Some countries went very far down this road already. It isn’t like 100.0000% effective. But it doesn’t have to be. Raise the tech bar enough. Make the legal risks too great. Eventually most ppl will give in. A handful will be super determined. But most won’t.
If Canada is this shitty, then the US has been hacking citizens for years. I’m not sure why they continue with this bullshit. None of these govs ever respected any citizen’s privacy in the first place.
Luckily my MP is one of the good ones. That’s a nice website, makes it easy to contact your MP based on your postal code
