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Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits. The NSA leaks were a forcing function that led to a massive uptake of encryption. Up until that point it was common for websites to support only HTTP.

The NSA leaks dominated news cycles for the entirety of 2013.

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> All the companies involved in PRISM made public statements saying they ceased participation. Google undertook a costly initiative to add encrypted connections over their datacenter circuits

This is as helpful as Whatsapp's so called E2E encryption comms (that just happens to not be applicable by default in certain situations).

What are those certain situations?

Backups are not encrypted by default. It just takes a single person on the other side of the chat not enabling e2e for your messages to be readable.

Meta data is also not encrypted. Your messaging graph is known to Whatsapp including message timestamps.

Also, IIRC, they (Meta) could also partially bypass the e2e (they can't access past messages but they can receive future messages) without you noticing (unless you have certain settings on whatsapp enabled, settings most people don't even know they exist).

The new feature of sharing past messages with new arrivals to a group also further widens the potential scope of messages leaking.

> Backups are not encrypted by default

And it is very difficult to back them up anywhere other than a secret bucket at Google

Also they say messages are E2E encrypted. I don't recall that page saying anything about what happens at rest. Presumably the Meta AI will have, or already has access to them.

my llm api traffic terminates tcp at cloudflare in lovely plain text :/

it does give better peering. reduces latency a bit for me.

I had no idea that this was a thing. How can you figure out where SSL turns into plain text on its route to the destination?

in this case it's my design to use cloudflare.

but you can also see from curl or traceroute, that the endpoint you talked to was a cloudflare ip and your ssl ended there. after that you can't see inside cloudflare.

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