| ▲ | Zak 8 hours ago |
| > The Serbian criminals shared photos of their victims on Sky without realizing police had installed a probe on the Sky ECC servers in France, which allowed authorities to intercept and read every user’s messages. I'm surprised criminals keep picking these niche messaging services, which keep turning out not to use proper end to end encryption, rather than Signal. |
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| ▲ | dghlsakjg 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Presumably you don’t hear about the ones that use signal for a reason… |
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| ▲ | notachatbot123 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's what a Fed would say to discourage Signal use. | | |
| ▲ | derefr 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That’s the opposite of what the GP poster meant to imply. They meant that you don’t hear about the ones that use Signal because they don’t get caught. | |
| ▲ | RUnconcerned an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | feds literally fund signal https://www.mintpressnews.com/the-open-technology-fund-makes... | |
| ▲ | krisoft 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > That's what a Fed would say to discourage Signal use. What? No. That is exactly what a Fed (or anyone else) would say to encourage Signal use. "Presumably you don’t hear about the ones that use signal for a reason…" The reason being that they don't get caught so you don't hear about them. |
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| ▲ | red_admiral 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I believe I once read that back in the day, Al-Qaeda decided that AES and the like was probably compromised because it was made by the infidels, and launched their own "Islamic secure messenger" with an encryption algorithm their people had designed themselves. This is not only terrible from a "let's get the list of all accounts who downloaded this app and perhaps track their phones" perspective, but also the encryption turned out to be exactly as good as you might have guessed. |
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| ▲ | TravisPeacock 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just a fun aside: Islam is responsible for the foundations of algebra and the al in algorithm is of the same Arabic root. I'm not an Imam but I feel like if someone wanted to justify using a Western created algorithm they could just say "well technically this is just built on our initial work" | | |
| ▲ | barbazoo 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Islam is responsible for the foundations of algebra I don't think that's true. Algebra has history that goes way back to Babylonian times, long before Islam. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra > The origins of algebra can be traced to the ancient Babylonians,[6] who developed a positional number system that greatly aided them in solving their rhetorical algebraic equations. The Babylonians were not interested in exact solutions, but rather approximations, and so they would commonly use linear interpolation to approximate intermediate values.[7] One of the most famous tablets is the Plimpton 322 tablet, created around 1900–1600 BC, which gives a table of Pythagorean triples and represents some of the most advanced mathematics prior to Greek mathematics.[8] Islam is much more recent than that. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam#History > Muhammad and the beginning of Islam (570–632) | | |
| ▲ | inhumantsar 25 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Algebra as we know it today has its roots in the Islamic world. They took prior works and formalized them into a discipline. From the History of Algebra Wikipedia link: > "Al-Khwarizmi's text can be seen to be distinct not only from the Babylonian tablets, but also from Diophantus' Arithmetica. It no longer concerns a series of problems to be resolved, but an exposition which starts with primitive terms in which the combinations must give all possible prototypes for equations, which henceforward explicitly constitute the true object of study. On the other hand, the idea of an equation for its own sake appears from the beginning and, one could say, in a generic manner, insofar as it does not simply emerge in the course of solving a problem, but is specifically called on to define an infinite class of problems." |
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| ▲ | bjoli 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There was a Swedish case recently where a signal group of over 1000 people was infiltrated. (I think it was this one: https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/uppdrag-i-gruppchatt-morda-... - sound only. Sorry) No e2e is going to help you if you invite the cops to your group chat I guess. |
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| ▲ | or_am_i 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I guess the b2b sales work the same irrespective of the businesses' legal status. |
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| ▲ | jjmarr 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Criminals aren't immune to pitch decks and overspending on bespoke systems?? | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There's people who regard the government as organised crime… and some such people are not even in the government themselves. Likewise for corporations, on both counts. Myself I'm not so cynical as to see that everywhere, but I've seen it. Hard to miss when it gets in the news. | |
| ▲ | Scoundreller 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But you, you’re special. You need the “Enterprise Edition” at 10x the price and half the reliability. Don’t forget our service plan, which you’ll need because only the manufacturer knows how to fix it. |
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| ▲ | brudgers 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My guess is that the law enforcement hackers are professionals and use social engineering to encourage adoption of compromised apps. Because social engineering is the foundation of hacking. Not technology. |
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| ▲ | rolph 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| i think these are the criminals that dont know the concept of local encyption vs encryption services, multiple serial encryptions, subjective "in" euphemisms, or other obfusication of clear payload |
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| ▲ | RobotToaster 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You would think they would have their own tech people. I guess even crime isn't immune to outsourcing. |
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| ▲ | dist-epoch 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Signal requires a telephone number. |
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| ▲ | cynicalsecurity 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | Miraltar 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I guess you didn't really read the article so I'll put it here :
> They intercepted one billion messages, but they couldn't read them at first because they were encrypted. It wasn’t until late 2020 that they managed to decrypt them. |
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| ▲ | kasey_junk 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The article is extremely vague on how they did this. The one big red flag though is that the protocol for the messenger in the article was a bespoke secret design by a single person who wasn't a cryptographer and not a well vetted public one. I would love to see a technical analysis of the supposed end-to-end encryption methodology used here. | | |
| ▲ | dorfsmay an hour ago | parent [-] | | Same here, and would love to find out if they paid the "Million dollar hack" to the Europol people who cracked it! |
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