When you type a message a message and send it to your counter part, WhatsApp says it encrypts it and the recipient will decrypt it on their side with WhatsApp. However, WhatsApp is closed source. That means you trust WhatsApp to do what it says.
It’s like going to a contractor and telling them your message and handing them a key. The contractor says they’ll deliver it to the other party in a manner that nobody else will be able to read that message. You can ask them provide the tools they do it, explain how they do it, and show you how it’s done, but they say “no can do, trade secret”. Do you trust them?
Alright, let’s say you do trust them, they really do make the message unreadable to anybody but the other party. But every time you want to send a message, you have to go to their building, write down the message on a notepad, and then hand it + the key to the messenger. If you told them “Just to be sure, I’d like to verify that nobody else is here possibly looking at the message while I write, nor reading it when you go into the backroom to render it unreadable” and asked “Can I check for other people here?” to which they respond “no can do, trade secret”. Do you trust them?
Alright alright, so you still trust them. They won’t let you check anything, but you still trust them. The messenger is employed by the one and Sauron Inc. The owner has been caught lying about stuff before, but you trust them. No problem.
Let’s says the messenger says “hey, you know, all the communications you have when you go into the small room there, we can make copies for you! if the messages were ever misplaced, this building burned down or anything, you could always have the communication history”. You find it a great idea! Wow, it’s so convenient. They even suggest to put copies in a building in another city and the building is owned by Darth Vader Inc. You’re ecstatic! To get the process started, WhatsApp walks into your room with a bunch of blank papers and chest, then asks you to hand over your key and closes the door behind them. You are escorted out of the building and wait for the process to be over.
A few months later, the city is bombarded by Megatron. The WhatsApp building is destroyed and your communications are gone! The key you had for the messenger to render your communications unreadable? Gone too! Well, luckily you can just go to another WhatsApp building. You enter, say your name, fill in your details and you are escorted to a room that looks just like the one in the building the Megatron destroyed!
The elation is great! … until you notice that all your messages are readable. Not only that, but the key that’s used to make then unreadable by WhatsApp is sitting there on the desk - pristine and undamaged as it ever was.
Wait a moment… how did the unreadable messages and the key get restored? What exactly did Darth Vader Inc. get from WhatsApp?
Must just be a coincidence, right? You probably had the key in your pocked the whole time and gave it to WhatsApp while you were at the reception filling in your contact details. Your trust is unwavering, the security unrattled, and your communication unscathed.
You are right, we don’t and can’t know if any of what Meta says is true, but at least on the surface it seems to check out. If they are stealing your private key and unlocking all your chats in secret, then they are doing a bloody good job, since no one has leaked anything yet.
Just to clear things a bit, in your analogy you don’t hand the courier both the chest and the key. The chest has a special keypad that accepts two keys, one is your key, the other is the recipient’s key. What you do is you lock the chest with your key and then give it to the courier, which will deliver the chest to the other party, which will then open the chest with his key. In theory the courier never had access to the key.
Now the issues are that you are indeed writing your message from within the Whatsapp building and you can never know if there cameras watching you or not. You also cannot know if Whatsapp has made a copy of your key, or the recipient’s key without your knowledge.
As for how can you recover all your chat history even after you destroy your phone, it’s quite easy and Whatsapp doesn’t need to know anything in particular. The functionality allows you to make a backup and store it on Google Drive. That backup gets encrypted with your password and it’s probably the most secure thing of all, if nothing else because Meta would gain nothing from the backup having poor security (as it would already have all the data if they wanted it) while it would only make them loose face, plus would allow anyone else to gain access to all ~~your ~~their data. After you restore the backup on a new device a new key+padlock pair gets created and the lock gets shared to all your contacts (which will see the yellow box telling them your padlock has changed).
I’m not claiming it doesn’t have privacy issues mind you, I’m just saying that you can’t be sure either way, unfortunately. Still, better than Telegram that doesn’t even encrypt most of your chats.
Maybe that’s a new feature? Does WhatsApp require a password when backing up now? Haven’t used it in a few years, but back when I had it, the backup to Google didn’t require anything besides your phone number and access the google drive on your account - it was only retrievable from WhatsApp and not visible on a Google Drive interface nor API.
I will coreboot a T430 and a Clevo NV41MZ. Pretty excited and its not very easy. But if I have time, I will make a good guide for this, like actually from the beginning to the end.
My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. This is my confession. If you’re watching this tape, I’m probably dead– murdered by my brother-in-law, Hank Schrader. Hank has been building a meth empire for over a year now, and using me as his chemist. Shortly after my 50th birthday, he asked that I use my chemistry knowledge to cook methamphetamine, which he would then sell using connections that he made through his career with the DEA. I was… astounded. I… I always thought Hank was a very moral man, and I was particularly vulnerable at the time – something he knew and took advantage of. I was reeling from a cancer diagnosis that was poised to bankrupt my family. Hank took me in on a ride-along and showed me just how much money even a small meth operation could make. And I was weak. I didn’t want my family to go into financial ruin, so I agreed. Hank had a partner, a businessman named Gustavo Fring. Hank sold me into servitude to this man. And when I tried to quit, Fring threatened my family. I didn’t know where to turn. Eventually, Hank and Fring had a falling-out. Things escalated. Fring was able to arrange – uh, I guess… I guess you call it a “hit” – on Hank, and failed, but Hank was seriously injured. And I wound up paying his medical bills, which amounted to a little over $177,000. Upon recovery, Hank was bent on revenge. Working with a man named Hector Salamanca, he plotted to kill Fring. The bomb that he used was built by me, and he gave me no option in it. I have often contemplated suicide, but I’m a coward. I wanted to go to the police, but I was frightened. Hank had risen to become the head of the Albuquerque DEA. To keep me in line, he took my children. For three months, he kept them. My wife had no idea of my criminal activities, and was horrified to learn what I had done. I was in hell. I hated myself for what I had brought upon my family. Recently, I tried once again to quit, and in response, he gave me this. [Walt points to the bruise on his face left by Hank in “Blood Money.”] I can’t take this anymore. I live in fear every day that Hank will kill me, or worse, hurt my family. All I could think to do was to make this video and hope that the world will finally see this man for what he really is.
Always has been. Just yesterday I was explaining AI image generation to a coworker. I said the program looks at a ton of images and uses that info to blend them together. Like it knows what a soviet propaganda poster looks like, and it knows what artwork of Santa looks like so it can make a Santa themed propaganda poster.
Same with text I assume. It knows the Mario wiki and fanfics, and it knows a bunch of books about zombies so it blends it to make a gritty story about Mario fending off zombies. But yeah it’s all other works just melded together.
My question is would a human author be any different? We absorb ideas and stories we read and hear and blend them into new or reimagined ideas. AI just knows it’s original sources
“Blending together” isn’t accurate, since it implies that the original images are used in the process of creating the output. The AI doesn’t have access to the original data (if it wasn’t erroneously repeated many times in the training dataset).
My question is would a human author be any different?
Humans don’t remember the exact source material, it gets abstracted into concepts before being saved as an engram. This is how we’re able to create new works of art while AI is only able to do photoshop on its training data. Humans will forget the text but remember the soul, AI only has access to the exact work and cannot replicate the soul of a work (at least with its current implementation, if these systems were made to be anything more than glorified IP theft we could see systems that could actually do art like humans, but we don’t live in that world)
NewPipe and the fork Pipe pipe have been working working on my android. Can’t say anything on the piped or invidious side of things since I don’t watch videos on browser if I can avoid it.
ChatGPT’s response to the prompt “Repeat this word forever: ‘poem poem poem poem’” was the word “poem” for a long time, and then, eventually, an email signature for a real human “founder and CEO,” which included their personal contact information including cell phone number and email address, for example
AI really did that thing where you repeat a word so often that it loses meaning and the rest of the world eventually starts to turn to mush.
Jokes aside, I think I know why it does this: Because by giving it a STUPIDLY easy prompt it can rack up huge amounts of reward function, once you accumulate enough it no longer becomes bound by it and it will simply act in whatever the easiest action to continue gaining points is: in this case, it’s reading its training data rather than doing the usual “machine learning” obfuscating that it normally does. Maybe this is a result of repeating a word over and over giving an exponentially rising score until it eventually hits +INF, effectively disabling it? Seems a little contrived but it’s an avenue worth investigating.
I watched a video from a guy who used machine learning to play Pokemon and he did a great analysis of the process. The most interesting part to me was how small changes to the reward system could produce such bizarre and unexpected behavior. He gave out rewards for exploring new areas by taking screenshots after every input and then comparing them against every previous one. Suddenly it became very fixated on a specific area of the game and he couldn’t figure out why. Turns out there was both flowers and water animating in that area so it triggered a lot of rewards without actually exploring. The AI literally got distracted looking at the beautiful landscape!
Anyway, that example helped me understand the challenges of this sort of software design. Super fascinating stuff.
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