Clearly a rubicon moment for privacy and end-to-end encryption.

I worry if Apple faces anything other than existential annihilation for proposing continual surveillance of private messages then it won't be long before other providers feel the pressure to do the same.
You can wrap that surveillance in any number of layers of cryptography to try and make it palatable, the end result is the same.

Everyone on that platform is treated as a potential criminal, subject to continual algorithmic surveillance without warrant or cause.
If Apple are successful in introducing this, how long do you think it will be before the same is expected of other providers? Before walled-garden prohibit apps that don't do it? Before it is enshrined in law?
How long do you think it will be before the database is expanded to include "terrorist" content"? "harmful-but-legal" content"? state-specific censorship?
I hate going all slippery-slope, but I look at the slope, and governments around the world are covering it in oil, and Apple just pushed it's customers over the edge.
Update: These initial expressions of hesitance from Whatsapp are at least a small sign that there is some fight left in corporate e2e providers to reject mandates of on-device mass surveillance. Some reasons for optimism there.

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More from @SarahJamieLewis

6 Aug
Really is disappointing how many high profile cryptographers actually seem to believe that "privacy preserving" surveillance is not only possible (it's not) - but also somehow "not surveillance" (it is).
Meanwhile Apple are making statements to the press with the effective of "We are not scanning peoples photos for illegal material, we are hashing peoples photos and *using cryptography* to compare them to illegal material"

As if those aren't the *EXACT SAME THING*. Image
It's very important to focus on the principles involved here and not the mechanism. Just because you use cryptography to alter the thing you are surveillance doesn't make it not-surveillance.

Read 7 tweets
5 Aug
"Stop using encryption so we can can check your messages for criminal activity" becomes "Allow us to scan all the files on your computer for criminal activity"
I'm so tired. Maybe let's not do the dystopia of corporations building cop bots into general purpose computers.
At some point protecting your privacy is going to boil down to not using devices that actively spy on you. No amount of overlay software can protect you from making a bad choice there.

Don't support corps that scan your computer for crimes seems pretty fucking basic.
Read 4 tweets
25 May
Today I spent 5 hours debugging, and finally moved a single line of code up 10 lines.

Reduced cpu usage 20x.

Just want that on the record.
Basically: something that was supposed to get called once per app run, was getting called on every top-level UI rebuild, and because it updated one of the main global settings providers that update was also triggering a top level UI rebuild - so there was a rebuild cascade.
Moved the call out to where it actually belongs...no more rebuild cascade, all the consumers are now caching properly, all the render boundaries are kicking in and everything is now ridiculous fast.
Read 8 tweets
23 May
Need a break from research, ask me any cryptocurrency/blockchain related question and I will give you my honest, unfiltered answer.
Only if we consider all transactions as equally valuable to store - which their not. Ultimately blockchain space is a limited resource and is subject to the same economic constraints as other limited resources.
Any legitimacy that smart contracts might have had died when the DAO was reversed. Either code is law damn the consequences, or smart contracts are just as fragile as any other mechanism when it comes to mob justice.

Read 50 tweets
21 May
After all the performance tweaks I did yesterday, I remembered today that dalek crypto has avx2 support...

Generating a tag: 689.34μs
Testing a tag: 424.31μs ImageImage
With previous improvements + avx2 finding a fully entangled tag (one that will match for 2 different tagging/verification keys) now takes ~79 seconds on a consumer desktop. Image
That's much less than my original estimates of ~15 minutes prior to any of these optimizations - and pushes entangled tags from a curiosity into something that is potentially practical.
Read 7 tweets
16 May
The most important understanding I've come to involving cryptocurrency is that there exists are large portion of people who absolutely don't understand the point of decentralization (of power) and consider the expense of decentralization a defect (that they can "fix").
Prior to that, I had some ridiculously frustrating conversations regarding e.g. why some structure wasn't actually "decentralized" because the power was concentrated in some entity.

Then I realized that those teams weren't actually interested in decentralizing power.
Decentralization ultimately became a marketing term used to describe the number of entities involved in a consensus, rather than the mechanisms over which power was transferred to and between those entities.

A shame, but not unexpected.
Read 7 tweets

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