France is working on an ultra-secure phone for Emmanuel Macron | Hacker News Reader

France is working on an ultra-secure phone for Emmanuel Macron

lemonde.fr

24 pointssamizdis17 comments

Last time they tried to roll their own secure messaging (Tchap based on Matrix), it was a disaster.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/19/security-flaw-in-french-go...

Secure messaging doesn't have to be that lousy. Download XX messenger from your phone app store, or build it yourself from source.

https://xx.network/messenger/

Tchap isn’t a disaster at all. There was one auth bug (thanks to a bug in python’s email validator) which meant that signup wasn’t locked to @gouv.fr email addresses, exposing public chatrooms, which was fixed within about 4h of being reported - before the service was launched.

I just checked their Web sign-up page at https://www.tchap.gouv.fr/#/register: "This password is too weak. It must include a lower-case letter, an upper-case letter, a number and a symbol and be at a minimum 8 characters in length."

If eight chars is the minimum, guess how complex and secure are most of Tchat users' passwords :-)).

I was surprised when I heard that US spied on phone calls of the European leaders such as Merkle. It’s shows how far ahead is US in technology.

Also, surprised that French president apparently used an ordinary phone susceptible to Pegasus hacking til last year.

> I was surprised when I heard that US spied on phone calls of the European leaders such as Merkle.

I wasn't sure who to be more embarrassed for. Doing it to such a significant ally is shameful, having it done to you by an ally possibly worse.

Can’t know if they’re really any ally or not if you aren’t spying on them, can you!

I've just read an article on the topic[0] as I was so fuzzy on the details.

It's much worse than I remembered.

I never really saw the importance of Snowden but he should be a modern day democracy saint after blowing the lid on this type of surveillance.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...

It has nothing to do with technologies, it had to do with trust and negligence, or perhaps a trap ;), both France and Germany are properly equipped when it comes to real "tech", and not just consumer tech

Yep, like Merkle said "friends don't do that to each other". It's that childish trust towards the US.

Maybe she should have listened to Charles de Gaulle -> „France has no friends, only interests.“ ...same with the US and every Country with open eyes.

PS EDIT:

And Henry Kissinger a bit later -> America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.

Kinda feel like the people saying that must live in a depressing world.

Na just reality. If you accept that, you have a pretty fun time "entangling" history, your mindset will change from a mostly black and white perspective to a ~90% grey one ;)

France, the world's first or second biggest spy since they give up nuclear intimidation, is only securing the president phone now? Why secure it anyway, Pegasus leaks were boring.

This title gave me some heavy l'etat, c'est moi vibes.

Information shared between two nodes is as secure as any one node.

They want a french sovereign WhatsApp.

Matrix to the rescue?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19216527

Tchap is currently for lower classification comms. It would sure be cool if Matrix was used for the stuff in the article here, though…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com