Interesting reaction. Is the highly negative reaction correlated with US culture maybe ?
I've used them for many years and had several complex support interactions with them.
Their customer service policy is very "API-like" in that you get exactly the t&c you paid for and nothing more. Hand-holding and soothing noises are not included in the t&c. They fuck up you get a refund, you fuck up they'll tell you exactly that.
Outside that they're very casual relaxed humans to communicate with.
I find that far more trustworthy (in the mathematical sense) than a "slick" twitter feed.
General design failures/bugs from assumed acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers vs not-acting-in-good-faith silicon/sw designers.
Assuming the radio's are the primary threat to privacy then I'd prefer a design from a privacy activist company who explicityly designs the hw so that the less trustable parts are forced behind physcial and defined interface "firewalls".
> Complex parts like the cellular modem or the WiFi can access the very same RAM that is used at runtime to store your most private data, but at the same time they are controlled by binary-only firmware that no one except the manufacturer of that chip has access to.
For the cellular modem, in your run-of-the-mill iPhone or Android phone nowadays, it is simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM. Can't tell you about WiFi, but I expect a similar situation.
There's a lot of room for improvement in secure smartphone architectures, but the "baseband can read your photos" trope is simply false.
I don’t know much about the responsibilities of the baseband but it seems that there are other attack vectors. Can it read storage? What about unencrypted content going over the network?
only there is no process isolation so no strong guarantee that secrets aren't leaked. no control over baseband makes the whole environment in which (other privacy protecting) apps are running extremely hostile from a security pov.
Modern Android/Qualcomm phones have pretty sophisticated security architectures that do indeed isolate the baseband, partly because exploiting baseband bugs was such a common source of phone unlocks in the past. If an app is using SSL then the baseband can't read what's happening.
If the chips are tightly integrated propriatary black boxes like on most hw then from my POV its _physcially_ possible for them to read anything regardless of what the designers/industry say because I do not trust them.
You trust your sources that say "..simply false that the cellular modem can access arbitrary data in RAM". I don't.
Even if you claim to have personally designed, fabbed and shipped that silicon I still have no practical reason to trust.
consider the concept that lots of businesses operate perfectly fine whilst temporarily having full physical control over
physcial objects owned by their customers
why not treat data the same way ?
yes it will be very disruptive to some businesses. i hope.
The problem is that the links to these sites already grab my attention. If ads can't be blocked on a web site, links to the web site should be blocked, so I never see them in the first place.
Same, I've been avoiding domains that I know will just show me an unacceptable banner (on mobile) or paywall (desktop). It's funny that I've trained myself to avoid them. I wouldn't really mind them being blocked in these lists, as long as I can optionally disable/enable the domains, or whitelist them if I want (there are some news websites I've paid for)
i fear people will "want it" when it gets good enough
the combination of "dumb screen(TV?) as interface" with "any/all content* you want (cheaper with ads)" will be very attractive to the 99% of humans who dont want to think about computing
is widespread personal physical ownership and control of general purpose computing a feature of the future ?
what laws do we need to think about to prevent harm that may cause ?
A warrant canary is utterly useless as a defense.
Any secret legal order to alter IT systems (the specific threat model it is most often suggested for) can logically also include an order to maintain a fake warrant canary.
Part of the theory of a warrant canary is that compelled speech (and in particular a compelled lie) may be easier to challenge than suppressed speech. While that isn't definitive, there's some jurisprudence to back that theory. If you have a warrant canary, you should be prepared to challenge any such order in court and use that as the defense.
An important detail in the US juristiction certainly.
On a practical basis i cannot evaluate the jurisprudence involved and I would assume the number of people who credibly can is very small, especially in the context of "secret courts for national security reasons".
A useful test would be if any of those few had demonstrated a personal risk using this as a defense and succeeded.
The rest of us can only guess the risk based on the reputation of the entites involved.
How so? Censorship is explicitly forbidden by the US constitution, and even so it happens (in this case, "in the name of national security" or whatever).
The current interpretation says there are certain reasonable restrictions on the 1st for the public safety. Compelled speech isn't accepted as constitutional.
Remember the constitution only really, effectively, says whatever the current Supreme Court says it means. And really I don't think anyone want's the 100% literal 'shall make no law' interpretation of free speech; that would throw out any kind of labeling laws for starters, companies would have no government compulsion to accurately label drugs or food products for example.
is ordering silence and secretly seizing control of the publication technology (ie website) then maintaining a false warrant canary a way around compelled speech ?
if so then regular live press-conference/video appearances would be the only practical implementation method.
if they say nothing and exit then the canary is dead.
It could be, I'm not a lawyer. That seizure would be something you could fight in court too on two fronts: seizure of property and if the government takes over your means of communication and pretends to be you what separates that from directly compelling speech.
You threaten that and they say “go pound sand in the courts”. And even if you “win” in the courts you still lose because “the process is the punishment”.
A practical problem I see is that even if everyone used this everywhere, an attacker has no reason to believe any forceably decrypted plaintext.
The disclosing party would have had to beforehand craft a fake plaintext that was credible enough to trick an alerted attacker based on its contents alone.
I've used them for many years and had several complex support interactions with them.
Their customer service policy is very "API-like" in that you get exactly the t&c you paid for and nothing more. Hand-holding and soothing noises are not included in the t&c. They fuck up you get a refund, you fuck up they'll tell you exactly that. Outside that they're very casual relaxed humans to communicate with.
I find that far more trustworthy (in the mathematical sense) than a "slick" twitter feed.
Politness does not imply trustworthiness.