Well you know American NSA according to some has backdoors and listening already. Its about time that non-Americans could have at least equal footing.
Look into "FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333" allows Americans to listen to Canadian traffic... And Canadians are worried that Canadians will be listening..LOL.
As for decryption, look into Dual_EC_DRBG where some say they have hacked it to predict the keys.
Satellites are very reliant on ground ops. Its much like crypto. You think all your stuff is in space, but the FBI agent has a wrench and will just break your kneecaps until you let him in. But also the FBI agent will pull your operating permit for the country your ground stations are in and take you offline.
> The real use case for satellite-borne data centers.
Because of physics and the difficulties of rejecting heat in space, data centers in space aren't going to be a real thing until compute becomes more energy efficient by at least 50x-100x as compared to the present.
It's not relevant. The moment criminality (in the view of other nations with these kinds of laws) hosts itself there, they'll find themselves hauled in front of the UK courts, and find that their "micro nation" isn't recognised and that the UK both claims jurisdiction over them and is able to enforce it.
Sealand is a structure within Britain's territorial waters (since they were expanded in 1987)... From what legal analysis I've seen, a structure just wouldn't ever be considered as a 'nation' in any sense, and if anything happened there that the UK was really concerned about they would remove the occupants anyway... So unless they had a navy that could go up against the UK's...
They'd need satellite internet anyway to get connectivity that didn't go through the UK so not going to be great latency.
Use a VPN from country that is hostile to the one you are living in. This way your own country won’t spy on you.
People tend to worry about other countries, but it is usually within the country they live in that they have to worry about their rights being infringed.
aka your local FBI agent. See ANOM or any of the other honey pots that glowed from kilometers away.
And even if they are not backdoored at first, once the state knocks on the developers door with the great offer that their kid will grow up with a father who is not in jail people's principles might change quickly.
Step 1 is making back doors mandatory. Step 2 is banning anything they can't decrypt.
I don't know if the second part has been discussed yet, but it's only possible with the former in place, so it makes sense to just ram that in first.
Most people don't care about this at all because they cannot fathom what it actually means. It takes the government actually turning on you to understand at a visceral level and by then it's too late. It seems there have still not been enough historical examples of this to truly burn it into memory.
I know conservatives love some kinds of control, and centrist/leftist parties love other kinds of control. Swinging from one to the other gets you both, not neither.
"Liberal" is anything that "Conservatives" don't like, and vice-versa. To each, the other is "The Devil Incarnate". They're just the two sides of the same extremist political cultist coin.
I’m more concerned about OpenBSD. Given how centralized the project governance is, and its base in Canada, I can imagine the government attempting to (for example) force the project to serve backdoored images or updates to targeted people. A backdoor or bugdoor in the source would probably be spotted by someone, and I’m not even sure the bill allows a broad tool like that, but that’s not the only way to compromise software users.
Fortunately the mirrors are distributed, so maybe that reduces the risk.
Except that doesn’t work with international software projects. Someone in another country takes over with consent of the community. It’s disruptive but not fatal if there’s sufficient interest in the project.
Like the other reply, I would expect them to just move the project to a different country then instead.
Honestly, the OS that prides itself on "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" is not going to introduce a remote hole on purpose, that'll be one cold day in heck.
Theo has been historically rather uninterested in taking a position on Canadian political issues such as this or engaging as an authoritative voice and source of information with the domestic media and politicians. For instance there is very little if any overlap between Theo and the Munk School's Citizen Lab or associated projects. Or anything that you could broadly classify as an effort parallel to the Citizen Lab. I am not quite sure why this is.
It’s strange because he was very vocal about US political issues during the early GWOT years. I would guess some kind of Canadian patriotism, but he’s originally from South Africa, so that seems less likely. Perhaps it’s just an abundance of caution about upsetting his (and the project’s) current home.
FWIW a lot of Canadians seem to avoid discussing Canadian politics publicly, though.
It was amended to make them less likely, but even the Liberals are saying that it can still be used to target encryption.
And the legislation still requires mandatory data retention and interception capabilities for all VPNs, encrypted messaging services, and every other online service.
That's not quite correct. It requires the collection of available metadata only. It does not require that encrypted messages be decrypted, unless the provider holds the keys rather than the user. Still, it's not a great bill.
And I guess VPNs are not end to end encrypted. The provider would still be able to access your data if they want to unlike something like Tor. So, it will be the death of privacy focussed VPNs. But presumably things like Signal and Apple's disk encryption will be fine as only the user holds the keys.
Signal does a lot to ensure they don't actually know much of what is traditionally considered metadata (like their sealed sender scheme which prevents them from knowing who messages were sent by). Do you know if this bill would require them to roll back those protections?
Based on the latest news yesterday it seems that the law would require them to implement more metadata collection, which they are refusing to do. Not sure what will happen if this actually passes. Wonder if we will be able to use foreign hosted VPN services and use Signal through those.
If its modelled after the Australian Access and Assistance bill, which it probably is, they will just compel the app to provide the capability to gather the data before/after its encrypted/decrypted, and stream it to some kind of logging device the feds install in your rack.
If I was them I would move my head office to the usa anyway, it's the right choice for most Canadian companies, and pretty much all software companies. it's insane how different the capital markets are for growing businesses in the two countries. I basically stopped Canadian private investing a decade ago because of how stupid it was here.
[if they had to comply with the bill as written] Tailscale told The Globe and Mail that it would have to "pursue corporate structures" to distance its international operations from Canada.
Didn't know Tailscale was Canadian, happy to hear it. Them and Signal are big ones. Signal just because the same bill would threaten their ability to operate in the country.
49 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] threadLook into "FISA Section 702 and Executive Order 12333" allows Americans to listen to Canadian traffic... And Canadians are worried that Canadians will be listening..LOL.
As for decryption, look into Dual_EC_DRBG where some say they have hacked it to predict the keys.
Because of physics and the difficulties of rejecting heat in space, data centers in space aren't going to be a real thing until compute becomes more energy efficient by at least 50x-100x as compared to the present.
Note that pirate means no laws apply to you including the ones that would protect you from things like murder.
They'd need satellite internet anyway to get connectivity that didn't go through the UK so not going to be great latency.
People tend to worry about other countries, but it is usually within the country they live in that they have to worry about their rights being infringed.
Except in the USA where they will, in fact, arrest everyone.
And even if they are not backdoored at first, once the state knocks on the developers door with the great offer that their kid will grow up with a father who is not in jail people's principles might change quickly.
I don't know if the second part has been discussed yet, but it's only possible with the former in place, so it makes sense to just ram that in first.
Most people don't care about this at all because they cannot fathom what it actually means. It takes the government actually turning on you to understand at a visceral level and by then it's too late. It seems there have still not been enough historical examples of this to truly burn it into memory.
I know conservatives love some kinds of control, and centrist/leftist parties love other kinds of control. Swinging from one to the other gets you both, not neither.
So much hope in those youth innocence...
Fortunately the mirrors are distributed, so maybe that reduces the risk.
Honestly, the OS that prides itself on "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!" is not going to introduce a remote hole on purpose, that'll be one cold day in heck.
This is really the least thing to worry about.
FWIW a lot of Canadians seem to avoid discussing Canadian politics publicly, though.
And the legislation still requires mandatory data retention and interception capabilities for all VPNs, encrypted messaging services, and every other online service.
And I guess VPNs are not end to end encrypted. The provider would still be able to access your data if they want to unlike something like Tor. So, it will be the death of privacy focussed VPNs. But presumably things like Signal and Apple's disk encryption will be fine as only the user holds the keys.