6,614 karma · joined May 14, 2013
No, he's saying that people run applications on fundamentally insecure operating systems.
> They're not going to switch.
That doesn't make them right, nor him wrong.
Do you want your boss to see your reddit history?
No, they are sharing (tel:+12025551212 signal:a31d79891919cad24f3264479d76884f581bee32e86778373db3a124de975dd86a40fc7f399b331133b281ab4b11a6ca) pairs. Alice and Bob determine that they both know Charlie; Alice and Bob then — since they both know one another and both know Charlie — feel good about sharing with one another what Charlie's Signal ID is.
> So this protocol can only help people discover contacts they are not yet aware are Signal users.
Which is exactly what Signal's current contact-sharing protocols does, in addition to helping Signal discover all of one's contacts.
> I would continue trying to give you what I thought were constructive technical criticisms, but apparently you interpret that as me being "invested in hating" the idea.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that your repeated failures to understand the protocol and its requirements are due to by own poor explanations, and further that you actually intend to be constructive.
> It's more like I'm invested in providing good user experiences for security tools, which often involves starting with the user experience you want to provide and working backward, not starting with a cryptographic algorithm and trying to bolt-on a good user experience.
I'm starting with a principle, not a protocol. That principal is that: online service providers must know the absolute minimum amount of information to do their jobs. Ideally, instant messaging would use some form of private information retrieval protocol so that server couldn't know who is talking to whom. Given Signal's current architecture, it must know to whom one is talking; there's no reason for it to also know everyone to whom one could be talking.
> The latter is how we wound up with a pervasive ecosystem of unusable security tools that Signal is a refreshing departure from.
Is it better to be usable but insecure than unusable but secure? I think the answer is mu: a product must be both usable and secure. Granted, security is always in the context of some threat, but it should be possible for users to intuitively grasp the security context.
> You are starting with a protocol, not thinking about the user experience
So, what do you think the user experience of contact discovery should be? I've already demonstrated that my proposal has an identical experience to Signal's, with the exception that one must manually register contacts not know to one of one's contacts. How would you implement contact sharing without giving OWS access to everyone's address book everywhere?
The contacts which would be shared would be Signal contacts, identified by some public identifier like their phone number (which is the only public identifier Signal currently supports; it could easily be extended to support other identifiers though).
Yes, it won't reveal to Alice that her friend Etta is also using Signal, if Etta and Alice don't have anyone in common. That's part of the privacy-preserving feature which prevents Signal from knowing who's using it, and whom everyone knows.
Given the small-world phenomenon, the odds are that one will very quickly add most folks one knows about, and the others can be added manually.
> So if we run this chatty, online, synchronous protocol
It's not chatty: the exchanges are large, in order to protect privacy, but they are also rare, and are not ongoing. Whenever you add a new contact, you re-initiate the protocol with your pre-existing contacts, that's all.
It's not online: as I indicated before all that's required is for each party to send & receive messages, and have some state.
It's synchronous, I'll grant, but only in the trivial sense that one party acts, then at some point in the future the other party acts. It certainly doesn't require both parties to be online at any point.
> In my previous post I was really asking about the user experience angle, which you didn't respond to at all, so rather than asking a question, let me simply say: I think this feature (at least in as much as I can conceive of it being used) would provide a poor user experience.
I think that the user experience would be identical to the current Signal UX: from time to time one's phone would buzz and indicate that one of one's friends uses Signal. If one wanted to, one could add a contact in person, e.g. through NFC or QR codes or whatever.
You seem very invested in hating this idea; you might ask why I'm so invested in it. Very simply, Signal is a tool for secure communication, but it requires that end users reveal every person they've ever communicated with to OWS.
That's what a price is: the point at which twp parties are willing to trade ownership of their goods and both feel that they have come out ahead of the exchange. If there's very little demand for Venezuelan currency, then of course it will be very cheap in terms of dollars (and high-demand currency, e.g. the dollar, will be very expensive in terms of bolivars).
I honestly think social science is only slightly more scientific than astrology.
But even were it not, science is not capable of answering questions like what one ought to do. Sure, A & B disagree; it's interesting why they do; maybe they're both wrong; maybe they're both partially-correct; but what should be done about it? Science can only say what is, not what ought to be.
You have to make some philosophical assumptions (e.g. utilitarianism) in order to even think that science can provide direction, and even then you will get bogged down in questions like, 'what is the greatest good for the greatest number?'
As an aside to the downvoters: don't downvote if you think I'm wrong; please share how you think science can answer a question like 'ought we execute murderers.'
They don't actually have to be online at the same time (and they don't care about whether Charlie is online or not: it's a pairwise protocol): they just to be able to send and receive one another messages, and to store state. Fortunately the former is some Signal's quite good at, and storing state is something that phone hard drives are quite good at.
> Also, how does this protocol even help? What's the use case? It allows participants to discover mutual contacts, but what then? Do we use Bob as a web-of-trust style introducer? What if Alice doesn't even want to talk to Charlie? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with Bob? Do we do this for all the friends Alice has in common with everyone?
It's the exact same use case as Signal's existing contact-discovery code, only private: it enables Alice & Bob to share information about a mutual acquaintance, e.g. Charlie. This might be used to share Charlie's key ID, in a trust on first use style. Note that this is no less secure than everyone everywhere trusting Open Whisper Systems on first use.
The idea is that when one starts using Signal, one exchanges keys in some out-of-band mechanism (NFC is a likely candidate) with an acquaintance, and then from that person get keys of mutual acquaintances, and from then others, and so on and so forth. Whenever you add a new acquaintance, one can reiterate the same protocol with all previous acquaintances (it's amenable to batching, too, which is nice) in order to propagate that information.
It may have some interesting uses in a certificate transparency sense, but I don't know about that.
> You end your last post with "So, problem solved" but I'm not sure this protocol even solves any practical problems for the Signal use case
It solves the exact same problems the Signal contact-discovery protocol solves, without actually revealing all one's contacts to OWS. That's all. If it did nothing more than that, it would be a good thing.
So people could use their address books securely if they wanted — if OWS would allow them.
It's a solved problem, but Signal doesn't implement it.
Supermajority voting on all legislation & referenda? After all, 2/3 of the population forcing 1/3 to obey a law is much more reasonable than 51% forcing 49%.
And making amendments take a 3/4 vote is even better: if 75% of people think something is a good idea, then it probably is.
Science says that a human being is a collection of genes which are formed at conception; it can't say anything about abortion, murder, capital punishment or self-defense. Those aren't topics on which it is competent: all it can do is inform discussions thereon, by affirming, 'yes, we are talking about a human being in this case, but in this other we are not.'
You simply can't address every issue with an appeal to science.
Or just create new ones …
Is it more likely that a police baton ends the peace, or a protester's stone? Is riot gear offensive in nature, or do the police wear it to defend themselves from violent attack?
> Police murdering unarmed citizens with their arms raised.
While that has certainly happened, you are referring to Michael Brown, who did not, in fact, have his arms raised and was, in fact, beating the police officer who shot him.
> The mass imprisonment of citizens who's only committed what most people consider a minor offense.
I suspect you blame Drug Prohibition (and I agree that it should end immediately), but that's not actually true: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-...
Looking at what people actually go to prison for, it often seems like stuff we'd want to send people to prison for: murder, assault, theft, rape, fraud. Maybe we might look at why Americans commit so much murder, assault, theft, rape and fraud?
Innocent folks are executed. Innocent folks breathe their last breaths as life prisoners. Innocent folks die of hear attacks a year into their sentences. Innocent folks spend decades in prison. Innocent folks are forced to register as sex offenders. Innocent folks go into bankruptcy due to fines.
You can't get your life back whether you're executed or die in prison. You can't get your years back. You can't take back public humiliation. You can't restore lost opportunities.
That innocents suffer is not an argument against a justice system, because having no justice system at all is yet more unjust.
As an aside, I agree with you that it's despicable that inmates have to fight so hard to use exculpatory evidence, particularly when that evidence simply didn't exist when they were convicted. This is indeed a great problem.
There's more than one person in prison in Texas: surely those prisoners deserve some thought too. Is the governor to personally rehear every case?
And then there are all of the other things a governor is elected to do on behalf of the other 25 million Texans.
It's just not possible to devote oneself 100% to everything. Heck, a system in which the executive rehears every judicial case personally would almost certainly involve quite a bit of injustice as well.
Willingham was convicted by a jury (presumably of his peers, although that guarantee has become ever more worthless over time); his conviction was upheld by numerous courts; the techniques which produced evidence against him were supported by the state forensics review board. He wasn't executed by a man: he was executed by an entire system.
So, if he was indeed innocent, then we should focus on the entire system. Do forensics techniques need to be improved? Do police investigating techniques need to be improved? Do judicial procedures need to be improved? Do board nomination procedures need to be improved? A commenter upthread notes that Governor Perry's nominees were reflexively pro-prosecution: were they; are there reasons why he felt he ought to nominate those people, or reasons why he felt he ought not nominate other people? Which of these things could be improved? Would those improvements themselves have negative side effects? Would the side effects outweigh the improvements?
Some folks say that our adversarial court system has problems, but I can easily see that non-adversarial systems have problems as well. Nothing's perfect, but can we be better?
I disagree that there's not much potential upside: one gets fame & attention, which I think would be pretty appealing to a fabulist.
> However, just because she lied about the details of the rape does not mean she was not raped, or sexually assaulted, or that something terrible did not happen to her.
That's quite true. But, at a certain point one has to quit paying attention to a boy crying 'wolf!'; if someone has established himself as a poor witness and — worse — an outright liar, eventually one just dismisses his statements.
> It's possible she lied about the location, the fraternity, etc., and I can see motivations for that: avoiding retaliation or attempting to remain anonymous. If you believe that she was raped or assaulted, squirrely behavior like that seems more reasonable.
Squirrely behaviour also makes sense in the context of someone who's untrustworthy. I think you're affirming the consequent here: that her behaviour makes sense if she was raped is not logical evidence that she was actually raped, since there are other explanations for her behaviour.
> Thus, it's very likely that Jackie lied about the specifics of the situation, but that something terrible (rape or assault) did happen to her.
That's a non-sequitur. I don't think that there's any compelling evidence that anything terrible happened to her in college (what problems in her upbringing or character led her to spin tales are another story).
> This interpretation is more in line with a rational persons motivations than inventing a rape story for unclear motives.
Why do you assume that her behaviour was rational? Clearly it wasn't: lying to friends, inventing people, asking folks to text the invented people.
A wonderfully aromatic plant …
Neither do folks with 'assault weapons.' More people are killed with knives than with all long guns; approximately as many are killed with fists & feet[1]. 'Assault weapons' bans are just feel-good measures.
Oh, and shells are artillery ammunition …
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Unfortunately that's true (and Justice Scalia was complicit in that: when he was right, he was typically really right, but when he was wrong he was rally wrong); that's why I've always respected Justice Thomas, who really does seem to attempt to consider what the Constitution actually says, requires and is silent on.
The one saving grace is that the Supreme Court is not, despite what folks think, a super-legislature: it only has the power to rule in specific cases. There's nothing which prevents litigants bringing a similar case as one already decided, and the Court is free to ignore a previous, erroneous ruling. So there is some little hope that with the right justices it might ignore bad precedent.