I get that doing things the “right way” can be difficult when in an existential war, but I’m having trouble thinking of any goals with these assassinations that aren’t highly concerning.
Every indication we’ve seen so far is that they’ll vote Democrat and Republican, and the two major parties have exactly the same position with regard to our relations with Israel.
There’s a significant age gap between most of the vocal critics of Israel in congress right now, and its ardent supporters. In even just 15 years a lot of those ardent supporters will be dead. Younger Democrat congresspersons already have a significantly different set of politics than the old guard, and it’s only going to become more apparent as they become the majority, and don’t have to fear censure by the fogeys.
I hope you’re right, but I can’t help but be pessimistic about this.
The old may die, but the wealthy will still be in charge, and as we’ve seen with so many issues, like universal background checks or free insulin and birth control, the wealthy have more than enough power to silence the majority, and we enthusiastically vote for it every two years.
I’ve thought about this for a long time. Nice to see it getting attention.
this is why I don’t really appreciate Graphene’s sandboxed google play services as much as I appreciate MicroG. MicroG allows you to control which GPS-compatible apps get registered to your random ID on google’s servers.
It’s also worth studying your individual apps and how exactly they handle google push notifications. I know that there are various configurations, some which allow Google to see the content of the notification and some which done. of course, regardless of that, metadata such as who it gets delivered to and when, is still there.
Gonna repeat myself since iMessage hasn’t improved one bit after four years. I also added some edits since attacks and Signal have improved.
iMessage has several problems:
iMessage uses RSA instead of Diffie-Hellman. This means there is no forward secrecy. If the endpoint is compromised at any point, it allows the adversary who has
a) been collecting messages in transit from the backbone, or
b) in cases where clients talk to server over forward secret connection, who has been collecting messages from the IM server
to retroactively decrypt all messages encrypted with the corresponding RSA private key. With iMessage the RSA key lasts practically forever, so one key can decrypt years worth of communication.
I’ve often heard people say “you’re wrong, iMessage uses unique per-message key and AES which is unbreakable!” Both of these are true, but the unique AES-key is delivered right next to the message, encrypted with the public RSA-key. It’s like transport of safe where the key to that safe sits in a glass box that’s strapped against the safe.
The RSA key strength is only 1280 bits. This is dangerously close to what has been publicly broken. On Feb 28 2023, Boudet et. al broke a 829-bit key.
1280-bit RSA key has 79 bits of symmetric security. 829-bit RSA key has ~68 bits of symmetric security. So compared to what has publicly been broken, iMessage RSA key is only 11 bits, or, 2048 times stronger.
The same site estimates that in an optimistic scenario, intelligence agencies can only factor about 1507-bit RSA keys in 2024. The conservative (security-consious) estimate assumes they can break 1708-bit RSA keys at the moment.
(Sidenote: Even the optimistic scenario is very close to 1536-bit DH-keys OTR-plugin uses, you might want to switch to OMEMO/Signal protocol ASAP).
Under e.g. keylength.com, no recommendation suggest using anything less than 2048 bits for RSA or classical Diffie-Hellman. iMessage is badly, badly outdated in this respect.
iMessage uses digital signatures instead of MACs. This means that each sender of message generates irrefutable proof that they, and only could have authored the message. The standard practice since 2004 when OTR was released, has been to use Message Authentication Codes (MACs) that provide deniability by using a symmetric secret, shared over Diffie-Hellman.
This means that Alice who talks to Bob can be sure received messages came from Bob, because she knows it wasn’t her. But it also means she can’t show the message from Bob to a third party and prove Bob wrote it, because she also has the symmetric key that in addition to verifying the message, could have been used to sign it. So Bob can deny he wrote the message.
Now, this most likely does not mean anything in court, but that is no reason not to use best practices, always.
The digital signature algorithm is ECDSA, based on NIST P-256 curve, which according to safecurves.cr.yp.to is not cryptographically safe. Most notably, it is not fully rigid, but manipulable: “the coefficients of the curve have been generated by hashing the unexplained seed c49d3608 86e70493 6a6678e1 139d26b7 819f7e90”.
iMessage is proprietary: You can’t be sure it doesn’t contain a backdoor that allows retrieval of messages or private keys with some secret control packet from Apple server
iMessage allows undetectable man-in-the-middle attack. Even if we assume there is no backdoor that allows private key / plaintext retrieval from endpoint, it’s impossible to ensure the communication is secure. Yes, the private key never leaves the device, but if you encrypt the message with a wrong public key (that you by definition need to receive over the Internet), you might be encrypting messages to wrong party.
You can NOT verify this by e.g. sitting on a park bench with your buddy, and seeing that they receive the message seemingly immediately. It’s not like the attack requires that some NSA agent hears their eavesdropping phone 1 beep, and once they have read the message, they type it to eavesdropping phone 2 that then forwards the message to the recipient. The attack can be trivially automated, and is instantaneous.
So with iMessage the problem is, Apple chooses the public key for you. It sends it to your device and says: “Hey Alice, this is Bob’s public key. If you send a message encrypted with this public key, only Bob can read it. Pinky promise!”
Proper messaging applications use what are called public key fingerprints that allow you to verify off-band, that the messages your phone outputs, are end-to-end encrypted with the correct public key, i.e. the one that matches the private key of your buddy’s device.
EDIT: This has actually has some improvements made a month ago! Please see the discussion in replies.
When your buddy buys a new iDevice like laptop, they can use iMessage on that device. You won’t get a notification about this, but what happens on the background is, that new device of your buddy generates an RSA key pair, and sends the public part to Apple’s key management server. Apple will then forward the public key to your device, and when you send a message to that buddy, your device will first encrypt the message with the AES key, and it will then encrypt the AES key with public RSA key of each device of your buddy. The encrypted message and the encrypted AES-keys are then passed to Apple’s message server where they sit until the buddy fetches new messages for some device.
Like I said, you will never get a notification like “Hey Alice, looks like Bob has a brand new cool laptop, I’m adding the iMessage public keys for it so they can read iMessages you send them from that device too”.
This means that the government who issues a FISA court national security request (stronger form of NSL), or any attacker who hacks iMessage key management server, or any attacker that breaks the TLS-connection between you and the key management server, can send your device a packet that contains RSA-public key of the attacker, and claim that it belongs to some iDevice Bob has.
You could possibly detect this by asking Bob how many iDevices they have, and by stripping down TLS from iMessage and seeing how many encrypted AES-keys are being output. But it’s also possible Apple can remove keys from your device too to keep iMessage snappy: they can very possibly replace keys in your device. Even if they can’t do that, they can wait until your buddy buys a new iDevice, and only then perform the man-in-the-middle attack against that key.
To sum it up, like Matthew Green said[1]: “Fundamentally the mantra of iMessage is “keep it simple, stupid”. It’s not really designed to be an encryption system as much as it is a text message system that happens to include encryption.”
Apple has great security design in many parts of its ecosystem. However, iMessage is EXTREMELY bad design, and should not be used under any circumstances that require verifiable privacy.
In comparison, Signal
Uses Diffie Hellman + Kyber, not RSA
Uses Curve25519 that is a safe curve with 128-bits of symmetric security, not 79 bits like iMessage.
Uses Kyber key exchange for post quantum security
Uses MACs instead of digital signatures
Is not just free and open source software, but has reproducible builds so you can be sure your binary matches the source code
Features public key fingerprints (called safety numbers) that allows verification that there is no MITM attack taking place
Does not allow key insertion attacks under any circumstances: You always get a notification that the encryption key changed. If you’ve verified the safety numbers and marked the safety numbers “verified”, you won’t even be able to accidentally use the inserted key without manually approving the new keys.
A doctor carried the small limp body of a dead boy in a tracksuit and placed him in a corner, arms splayed across the blood-smeared tile. On the floor nearby, surrounded by discarded bandages and rubber gloves, lay a wounded boy and girl, their limbs tangled with the stands holding IV drips in their arms.
Two young girls were being treated, still covered in dust from the collapse of the house that had buried their family.
“My parents are under the rubble,” sobbed one. “I want my mum, I want my mum, I want my family.”
If you’re not furious, you’re not paying attention.
Honest question, not being catty or anything. Why is this news, exactly? This is a nearly every winter occurrence to get below -50C in Yakutsk, the average winter day is -42C. (It also gets up into the 90s during the summer, Yakutsk is a wild place.)
This would be roughly equivalent to a news article saying Detroit is down to 10F today, i.e. colder than normal, sure, but not really beyond the pale for a December day.
Honestly asking because I’m just wondering if this is the start of the “there can’t be global warming because it’s cold somewhere” coverage for this winter season, or if this is intended to be a fun TIL article for the lucky 10000.
Neither. This is one of the “global warming is messing up the Global Ocean Current Belt, which messes up heat transfer on a global scale, weakening and destabilizing the Polar Vortex, which starts failing to keep arctic air restricted to Canada and instead lets it do its thing down to Texas”.
Higher than normal variability of temperatures, is a side effect of global warming. It may look like “meh, it’s just +2C, who cares”, but when you switch from “-10C to +30C” to some “-18C to +42C”, in the form of heat waves followed by torrential rain followed by heat followed by frostbite, suddenly crops start dying.
Then you can extrapolate to “meh, it’s not likely to go past +5C”.
It’s only 5th December, seems unusually early for -58º. From Wikipedia - Yakutsk, maybe daily min should be about -37º now. I recall crossing Siberia by train in early December, rain in west, fresh snow in east, lakes still water, yet coming back in April you could still walk on Baikal. Seems odd, but they get extra problem of fires in winter, as fire hoses freeze, can’t extinguish them. Anyway polar vortex went wobbly recently, so we get alternating cold and warm waves - always look for both sides of regional anomalies.
“Like the companies, the trade union movement is global in the fight to protect workers,” 3F Chair Jan Villadsen said in a statement, adding that Sweden’s IF Metall union had asked 3F to help."
Powerful stuff. I find myself anxious about retaliatory escalation as unionization continues this spike in growth.
Corporations are already at maximum union retaliation as the default setting. The only thing left is the pinkertons, and somehow I doubt that will fly nowadays.
I’d like to believe so too, but nothing spurs creative innovation like threats to power. But you’re certainly right that there’s no low-effort mode in business to unionization response. This may very well be the most they’re capable of.
reuters.com
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