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WhatsApp, Used by 100M Brazilians, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge
- verganileonardo 10y ago2nd time in less than 12 months. probably, we are going to see a surge in telegram downloads/usage today.
- andremendes 10y agoYes, it's happening, more than 1M accounts* created by brazilians today. [1]: https://twitter.com/telegram_br/status/727201106166689792 https://twitter.com/telegram_br/status/727201106166689792
- r0muald 10y agoA true shame since Telegram is just as centralized as WhatsApp, minus the strong end-to-end encryption. Should it become the de facto messaging app for Brazilians, the next judge will just block Telegram instead. But decentralized communication networks that work mobile first are hard, we all know it, so there's room for improvement, randomizing server addresses on a daily rotation, or whatever may render pointless these blockades.
- MichaelGG 10y agoWhatsApp could incorporate obfuscation proxies if they wanted to. Like the Tor connection bridges that exist to help get around a Tor block. Maybe only activated once they detect a threat or something.
- mtgx 10y agoToo bad they're switching to a messenger that can easily be subverted by governments and doesn't come with E2E encryption by default. Might as well use Hangouts or Skype. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2016/04/30/russia-telegram-hack/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2016/04/30/russia-telegram-h...
- knocte 10y agoI prefer open source software that lacks features (e.g. E2E, which could be implemented by someone), than proprietary software that "supposedly" has some features (like E2E) which you cannot verify (that is, Whatsapp says they have that feature, but their software not being opensource cannot guarantee anyone that they are stating the truth).
- myth_drannon 10y agoUnlike in N. America, in Brazil a lot of businesses depend on WhatsApp. You can talk with your doctor, call a plumber, claim insurance. On billboards no one puts a website address or an email, just phone number and WhatsUp. That's an economy cripling move and it's shocking how one judge can do it.
- meira 10y agoMore important. Why aren't congressmen creating rules to prevent these monopolies ?
- Jtsummers 10y ago?? Can't tell if serious. Unless whatsapp did something to wreck their competition in Brazil, any effective monopoly they possess is by virtue of people choosing to use their system over other systems. This sort of effective monopoly cannot and ought not be stopped unless the monopoly power is abusing their position. And how would you when it's a choice people have made? Mandate that every 5th person mustn't use WhatsApp?
- dmix 10y agoMonopoly isn't even about market size it's about companies exploiting their market position using anti-competitive practices. There is no indication WhatsApp has done any of this except being the most popular product in a highly competitive and open market.
- Jtsummers 10y agoPrincipally, a monopoly is precisely about market share. Anti-trust and monopoly laws exist for situations where such monopolies are created by unethical or illegal means or when they abuse their monopoly position (directly with ability to charge customers for products and services, or indirectly by somehow shutting down competition). And that's where, as you point out, WhatsApp hasn't done anything wrong. Even if they have a de facto monopoly in Brazil, unless they've done something other than what I've seen in the US, it's almost certainly the result of network effects and nothing to do with illicit practices.
- notliketherest 10y agoWhat most people outside of Brazil don't realize is that WhatsApp is almost universally used by Brazillians to communicate about EVERYTHING, even your doctor [0][1]. My wife is Brazillian and uses it to communicate with her family in Brazil every day. This will have disastrous consequences for Brazilians domestically and internationally. This policy is being put in place by unelected judges and cartel of monopolistic telcos - all at the expense of the people. [0]http://www.cityam.com/230372/digital-health-wearables-and-apps-9-in-10-brazilian-doctors-use-whatsapp-to-talk-to-patients http://www.cityam.com/230372/digital-health-wearables-and-ap... [1]http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-brazilians-use-whatsapp-to-connect-on-zika/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-brazilians-use...
- samstave 10y agoIt's almost like Brazil is the most technologically advanced poor-3rd-world-nation I know from my brief time at Facebook, they use Brazil user-searches in their intro classes to tableau reporting on users' graphs - "show me everyone in Brazil who is 18 years old and posted about subject-X"
- motoboi 10y agoBrasil is the 8th economy in the world.
- erickhill 10y agoPerhaps the country has a large economy, but its people are being left behind. In the list of countries by average wage, they are 47th. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_w... And for the median household income, they aren't in the top 35, either. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income
- myth_drannon 10y agoThe first wiki link data is weird. How is that even possible ? 25 Israel $1,804 26 Russia $1,800
- vezycash 10y agoWould a p2p architecture thwart this kinda blocking?
- recursive 10y agoI'm going to guess you meant... thwart? Maybe technically, but probably not legally, although I understand very little of the issues at play.
- vezycash 10y agoThanks for the correction. Fixed
- gnaritas 10y agoYou can't fix social problems with technology. The issue here is Brazilian law and the failure to understand the implications of encryption by the courts, not WhatApp's connection architecture.
- CamperBob2 10y agoI agree, but it's still important to try.
- stale2002 10y agoSure you can! Imagine if Brazil tried to ban Bitcoin. How successful do you think they would be?
- gnaritas 10y agoExtremely, believe it or not, most people aren't willing to break the law to use new technology. If the government says something is illegal, that'll kill most usage of it.
- sergiosgc 10y agoAt the rate bitcoin is being used to circumvent capital exports restrictions, there's no need for imagination. Just wait a bit for government to figure it out.
- dceddia 10y agoThe title makes it sound much worse than it is -- it's actually only a 72-hour shutdown. From the beginning of the article: > A BRAZILIAN STATE JUDGE ordered mobile phone operators to block nationwide the extremely popular WhatsApp chat service for 72 hours...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nv-vn 10y agoIt is as bad as they make it sound. WhatsApp is the biggest form of communication in Brazil. It would be effectively the same as SMS and phone calls being disabled in the U.S. (or maybe just like the effect of blocking StackOverflow for all programmers ;))
- askyourmother 10y agoNot unsympathetic to the brasileros affected, but this is not the first time this happened over there - surely at this point the fragility of centralised platforms, and becoming reliant on them, is well known by now?
- zorked 10y agoIt also points to the fragility of Brazilian institutions.
- gtirloni 10y agoIf the institutions were fragile, the Internet companies would just refuse to comply and block WhatsApp. The fact that they complied shows how strong the institutions are.
- HappyTypist 10y agoI see telcos choosing to comply with the order instead of fighting back (like Apple) as a sign of fragility.
- gtirloni 10y agoIn countries with fragile democracies (or that have recently come out of a dictatorship, like Brazil since 1985), when people say "institutions are strong/weak" they are talking about Congress, the Legal system, Law Enforcement, etc. They are often trying to say that "the law means something" as opposed to elites/politicians/etc ruling the country as they wish, according to personal interests. Telcos and App providers can contribute to make a democracy strong. And so do all citizens. But they aren't what is referred to by "institutions". There is no widespread fragility in Brazilian institutions today. Recent events have shown they are strong as ever. Telcos and App providers have all their rights within the legal system to appeal the recent decision against WhatsApp and get their arguments heard. WhatsApp has already appealed to this judge's decision and this will be heard by an appeals court. This is business as usual in a legal system that is working.
- sickbeard 10y agoKeep electing terrible politicians Brazil
- dboshardy 10y agoThat's assuming there are fair elections in Brazil.
- centizen 10y agoIn this case the decision maker wasn't even elected.
- twoarray 10y agoThis has nothing to do with the state of democracy of Brazil.
- astrodust 10y agoAmerica's track record is often just as bad. The difference is people don't care and the politicians don't end up in jail.
- wallabout 10y agoMarcel Maia Montalvão, of Sergipe state, sounds like a luddite judge with more judicial power than is warranted by her technocratic abilities would warrant.
- kiloreux 10y agoIs telegram also blocked, I think it sounds like a good alternative that people can use now, if it's not already blocked.
- skrowl 10y agoTelegram gets hit hard every time WhatsApp gets blocked in Brazil. It's happened 2x before (at least).
- raverbashing 10y ago"Sorry, Brazil! Your mobile networks can't process as many verification SMS as we're sending them. Over a million users joined, more waiting" https://twitter.com/telegram/status/727200237308227585 https://twitter.com/telegram/status/727200237308227585
- ex3ndr 10y agoSome brazil users started to - Actor (actor.im) Disclaimer: CEO of Actor and Ex-Telegram employee.
- julioneander 10y agoThat app looks really cool! I was looking at the Actor Developer Hub, there is a guide explaining how to install an Actor Server. Does that mean that Actor is decentralized? How does that work?
- ex3ndr 10y agoWe are working on it, right now servers are not connected together. We are planning to integrate with Matrix.org.
- sschueller 10y agoAny ETA on that? I would be huge.
- venomsnake 10y agoSkype back in the day went to great lengths to be unblockable (mostly for commercial reason, there was a time before smartphones that people actually payed lots of money for international and domestic calls). It was pre MS. Why are not the other messengers doing the same?
- FroshKiller 10y agoI was never a big Skype user, but my understanding is that Skype relied on individual users serving as "supernodes" in a peer-to-peer distribution network for messages and calls. The Skype client's default configuration opted you into serving as a supernode, and this was a supremely unpopular move.
- venomsnake 10y agoIt was more than that- there were antidebugger measures. The node list was encrypted. Protocol obfuscated. Also people in skype network were nodes. The supernodes were dedicated servers.
- nxzero 10y agoAnyone know how WhatsApp is being blocked?
- skrowl 10y agoThe judge ordered mobile operators to block it. It's on them to set up the firewall rules / null routes / etc.
- kawera 10y agoIP blocking at the carrier level.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lucb1e 10y agoI feel a bit silly for asking, but do you have a source? There is loads of misinformation going around in this thread. Are you from Brazil and do you observe this, or did you read it somewhere?
- kawera 10y agoPlease, don't feel silly for asking anything! Yes, I'm brazillian and in Brazil, work with telcos and follow the surveillance/censorship subject very closely. I can point you to some legal documents if you want but they're all in portuguese (and in baroque legalese to boot!).
- lucb1e 10y agoOkay, thanks for the response!
- mirimir 10y agoThat should be fairly easy to circumvent. Just setup clouds of proxies. As with Tor and China. In AWS etc.
- banach 10y agoGood. Now they can all switch to Signal.
- LXBWtEodYi2G 10y agoWhy should that be any different? Signal and WhatsApp are functionally equivalent from this perspective. Both are end-to-end encrypted and therefore targets, and both are dependent on centralized, blockable servers and therefore vulnerable.
- banach 10y ago1) If people were to switch, it would bring more people onto a platform that is not tied to Facebook, a company that loathes privacy. 2) Signal is free software, including the messaging server (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Server https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Server). This makes it less sensitive to take-downs (anyone could set up an alternate server), and makes third-party security code audits possible.
- LXBWtEodYi2G 10y agoThose are nice to have, but neither would change anything about this current situation. Servers are nice but questionably useful when each one would be living in its own universe, in need of its own app, given Signal architecture.
- twoarray 10y agoBrazilian here. I've always used Telegram for privacy purposes. It was amazing to watch the flood of friends "just signing up".
- jaflo 10y agoAlthough it has to be said that Telegram does not offer true end-to-end encryption by default. For general-purpose usage, WhatsApp may actually be considered more secure than Telegram.
- twoarray 10y agoIndeed Telegram is not more secure than WhatsApp, but I usually take into account the position of each company and how that affects my particular use case.
- free2rhyme214 10y agoTelegram secure chats are more secure than Whatsapp's recent encryption because the code is open source.
- jaflo 10y agoWhile it is true that Telegram's clients are open-sourced, their server-side code is not. So we don't know how information is stored on the server (I do not think that it is encrypted).
- lucb1e 10y agoClosed source servers are no problem in verifying E2E encryption if the client is open source. Whatsapp's issue is that the clients are closed source. Telegram's issue is that it's optional to encrypt your messages. That's the long and short of this whole Whatsapp versus Telegram discussion.
- MrMullen 10y ago
- gtirloni 10y agoThis has nothing to do with massive surveillance, dragnets, etc. It's a simple and very specific criminal investigation where people have been found to be using WhatsApp to coordinate drug trafficking activities. The judge is just following the law and asking Facebook/WhatsApp to cooperate in identifying these people (and is being met with resistance). Tech giants in this area are just facing their own karma for having allowed dragnets schemes to be used in their networks. If they had denounced those activities and continued to only allow targeted surveillance with a court order, we wouldn't have this trust crisis that prompts them to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's technically possible for these companies to come up with ways to identify specific people targeted by court orders so criminals can be identified and punished by their respective country's laws. They simply won't because it will be their word against the vast evidence that they have allowed dragnet activities in the past, which will cause a backslash everywhere.
- cortesoft 10y agoUmm, but the issue is that WhatsApp CAN'T comply with the order, because they do not have access to the communications (because they are using end to end encryption). I have no idea what you mean by "come up with ways to identify specific people targeted by court orders"... they aren't being asked to identify anyone, they are being asked to hand over unencrypted communication, which they do not have access to.
- rakoo 10y agoEnd to end encryption in Whatsapp is extremely recent, I doubt the information the judge is after falls under that.
- uph 10y agohttps://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/ "The most recent WhatsApp Android client release includes support for the TextSecure encryption protocol, and billions of encrypted messages are being exchanged daily. The WhatsApp Android client does not yet support encrypted messaging for group chat or media messages, but we'll be rolling out support for those next, in addition to support for more client platforms. We'll also be surfacing options for key verification in clients as the protocol integrations are completed." This was in 18 Nov 2014. The latest announcement from last month was: "Over the past year, we've been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. This includes chats, group chats, attachments, voice notes, and voice calls across Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, Nokia S60, Blackberry, and BB10. As of today, the integration is fully complete. "
- whatever_dude 10y agoAgain?
- soneca 10y agoI'm here to defend the judge's ruling, a position very unpopular among all my friends here in Brazil. Brazilian law regarding regarding privacy of users of internet services is very recent and clear: if a judge order the company to share a specific user data, the company must comply. You can disagree with the law, but the law is there. Now, the judge ordered Whatsapp to share a particular user conversation (a suspect murderer - edit: drug dealer). But the problem is: Whatsapp have no offices or operations in Brazil. The order was sent to Facebook, who ignore as Whatsapp is another company. So, without any executives in Brazil that could be held responsible for disobeying the law, the judge fine the company. They continue to disobey the order (for months). The judge suspends Whatsapp activity (for 24h a few months ago, but that order was suspended itself after a few hours). Now Whatsapp continue to disobey the judge's order until this day. The judge suspend the company again. All arguments I hear against the judge is in the line that Whatsapp is "too big to fail". That's not a valid point in my opinion. If they disobey the law, it must have consequences, no matter how big and important to brazilian society they are. If they had operations and executives in Brazil this would never had happened at the first place. They would have lawyers fighting against the decision to share the user data and this would be solved by the justice system (never coming to have its activity suspended). But Whatsapp simply ignored brazilian justice system as if it was above the law. It is very unfortunate that it came to this point, but it is not like a judge decided yesterday that Whatsapp should sufer for whatever reason. They got a lot of months of warning for this. And he is acting completely according to the law. For me, all of this is Whatsapp fault.
- hughes 10y agoHow was the justice system able to communicate the shutdown order, but not able to communicate the request for user data?
- soneca 10y agoBecause they ordered the shutdown to brazilian internet providers. These internet providers company block the access for Whatsapp services. And they are more than happy to comply, as they hate Whatsapp for taking their SMS revenue. But they are in fact only obeying an justice order.
- marcosdumay 10y agoAnd I'm sure we'll not grab the opportunity to use a descentralized messaging protocol. It's like people want somebody to exploit them.
- tn13 10y agoI don't know about Brazil but these sort of things happen routinely in third world countries like India all the time because some judge could not understand what the new technology is. The decision will be reversed in one or two days.
- int0x80 10y agoYou are full of crap. The seventh world economy in the terms you are refering to is meaningless. By your logic, is Brazil welthier than Switzerland or Netherlands? NOT even close. GDP is MEANINGLESS if you really want to know how the average citizen lives in a country. The fact is that in Brazil the prices/inflation are through the roof, housing and goods are extremly expensive and their salaries are ridicusly low. Let alone the rampant and systemic corruption. So no, maybe Brazil as a whole concept is not poor. But the Brazilians? Yes, most of them are. EDIT: BTW, this is a forum to discuss. If you think I'm wrong say why, don't just downvote. And no, saying "crap" in the internet is not a reason to be wrong.
- soapdog 10y agoI didn't downvoted you, actually, I agree with you. GDP is not the best way to measure or have this type of discussion. GDP proves to us that the "country is rich", HDI tells us that "this richness is not distributed" which means that we have an endemic and self-perpetuating problem with wealth distribution and access to infrastructure, which I believe you'd agree. I completely agree with your statement that we have a rampant and systemic corruption scheme in place here and that makes solving all of this mess an extremely complex problem. Being the seventh world economy is not meaningless, it proves that with the correct measures in place, we have the economic power to move economy/jobs and wealth forward. If we could pair that with proper access to education and opportunities then we'd have a really marvelous place. All the criticisms you made there are true and still, we're in a better place than 20 or 25 years ago, specially when we're talking about the low-income classes and impoverished. Lots of advancements there but nowhere close to solving the problem...
- int0x80 10y agoOh, the EDIT wasn't targeted to you especifically, more of a general thing. I agree with you, but I found the first comment misleading, thus my heated response. By meaningless I meant regarding the "feel" that you get as a citizen, or as a turist, or even as an outsider watching the news, which is that the country and its people are in trouble (also relative, compared to UE or US, not to central Africa for example). I completely agree that the country has a lot of potencial, resources, and great people. It has vast amounts of petroleum, the Amazonas etc etc. And I also agree that one of the problems is the distribution of the wealth. And sure, you are improving the situation. I think a somehow similar "rich" country in a bad situation is Argentina, with lots of resources and also oil reserves. So is Russia. Bad management, corruption, education etc are some causes of it. It is indeed a very complex problem.
- ultim8k 10y agoWho gives a fuck about a bloody judge? Judges, politicians, governments are all involved in huge scandals. Let's stop respecting them.
- ultim8k 10y agoIt seems there are a lot of conservative people on HN. Go vote Trump guys.
- return0 10y agoMaybe this is a great opportunity for whatsapp competitors? Especially brazilian?
- educar 10y agoMakes me wonder why people aren't making a self-hostable IM system that govt can host and ask it's citizens to use. There can be a setting to switch end to end enable/disable encryption. I am not being entirely facetious. It's after all how Cisco made a lot of money by selling IDS equipment.
- Freak_NL 10y agoI suspect that most (neoliberalist) governments do not feel that it is their job if the market is handling it. Also, people seem to trust megacorporations like Facebook more than their own government for private communication, although I am profoundly troubled by this naive majority view on privacy — I'd rather have my communications end-to-end encrypted without some huge corporation or any government harvesting my (meta)data; it's just too easy to abuse.
- cm3 10y agoThis is exactly why operating many small Murmur and/or XMPP servers is a better approach than relying on a single big-co's proprietary service with which you no signed SLA. Just like game servers, it's easy to operate a community Murmur server and it's also possible to set up one on your home router given the low bandwidth and hardwre requirements. Yet, if I suggest that I prefer Mumble over closed source voice chat or centrally provided WebRTC service like appear.in, people downvote me or treat me a like a luddite. But I do understand that given the comfort of a centrally managed WhatsApp, it's hard to resist. The only reason there are no fancy mobile clients is that those who would build them are doing it for the silo'd Vibers, Skypes, and WhatsApps. Comfort seems to trump reliability.
- dongping 10y agoThe same holds for Telegram and Signal.
- dmix 10y agoHow would this prevent Telco/mobile operators from blocking XMPP traffic with Murmur headers? The technical details of the court orders has nothing to do with shutting down WhatsApp servers or coercing them into doing a MITM on their own customers... Not that I disagree that decentralization helps add resiliency against state intervention but this particular threat model requires a different solution. Such as preventing ISPs from being able to block your traffic.
- cm3 10y agoIt's easier to force a company to block access in a certain country, but if you run the servers or there are various parties hosting it for you, you have a higher chance of still using it. But, that might of course require disobedience until the laws are declared invalid in front of the supreme court. I'm no activist, but the way politics has been meddling with the Internet convinced me that we have to fight to keep existing freedoms.
- bsder 10y ago> Comfort seems to trump reliability. Everything is centralized because of one simple reason: you can't monetize distributed. So, as a developer, if I want paid, I'm going to make a centralized system. The fact that the centralized system is way easier to develop/debug is just a bonus. As a user, I'm going to use the system that has the easiest installability/usability cross section. That app is likely to be the one that gets the most developer time. The one that gets the most developer time is likely to be the one that lets the developers get paid. And thus, the circle is closed, and the feedback loop begins.
- morsch 10y agoSeems like a hint that we should design our means of communication to resist single points of failure.
- cheatnews 10y agocomment
- dmix 10y agoFor the record, WhatsApp has had end-to-end encryption enabled for Android<>Android since 2014. And 92.4% of smartphones in Brazil use Android: http://www.statista.com/statistics/245189/market-share-of-mobile-operating-systems-for-smartphone-sales-in-brazil/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/245189/market-share-of-mo... So it is very unlikely they have any plaintext data for the users in question. Especially if the investigation happened recently since the roll-out of E2E on all devices. Additionally, it's possible WhatsApp did not even store old messages for non-encrypted devices beyond a certain timeframe.
- simonh 10y agoWhatsApp have said they don't store the messages anyway, whether they were sent in plain text or not. Also any such records would be stored on servers in the US, not Brazil, so would be subject to US law. The Brazillian judge should be entering a request with the US DOJ but is either too much of an idiot or too busy doing political grandstanding with stupid futile gestures like this.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- bluefox 10y agoNations seem to care alot about "cyberattacks". Yet a single well-positioned person has the power to disrupt a mass communication service for 72 hours. Without a single keystroke. Impressive.
- ramon 10y agoI'm here to defend my rights, put the service back now! Fine WhatsApp or Facebook or whatever, but don't block the service nation-wide!
- rgo 10y agoMy sister worked closely with many of the parties involved in the "Marco Civil", Brazil's brilliant Internet Bill of Rights. Two years later, I feel much of her work was in vain. No significant legislation was enacted from it and lately judges are trying to circumvent common sense by brute force. Now over 100M people are unable to use their communication platform of choice for 72h. In the meanwhile, congressmen are busy impeaching the president and calling it an act of god, probably as a device to expiate their own sins. It would make a good argument for a Game of Thrones clone series, some would say. And my sister, she's been out of the job since last January. She was let go when local NGOs ran out of money for fighting for an open internet. It seems freedom is the first thing that runs out in a recession. Scarcity is a bitch.
- satysin 10y agoHow exactly are they shutting it down? Are all ISPs ordered to block it?
- lxe 10y ago> The Telephone, Used by 300M Americans, Shut Down Nationwide Today by a Single Judge Try rationalizing this headline. All communication services, whether they are "apps", "networks", "utilities", etc... should fall in some category of protection where such things cannot happen.
- makecheck 10y agoI am so tired of these “takedowns” and other brute-force methods that are used to essentially squash ants. It always seems way, way too easy to do, and the collateral damage is way too high. The Internet needs to start acting like a series of dumb pipes again: so dumb that you have no idea where information really is, and so huge so as to be impractical for anyone to control. Consider highway systems. For roads, the only way to “shut down” somebody’s access without controlling every road, everywhere is to have some idea where your target is. And even then, you probably have to control several access points to really keep that target from moving. And unless they live at the end of a single country road that you control, being draconian about road control is usually going to be very hard and probably impossible. And that is a good thing, because if shutting down highways made any sense then a hell of a lot of people would be inconvenienced on a regular basis (or worse than inconvenienced, if they were in an ambulance or something). Blocking Internet tools is arguably far worse than blocking highways because networks transport an almost incomprehensibly-large amount of information and the effects are vast. By the same token, seizure of a device is arguably far worse than seizure of something like a truck because a device can effectively provide access to someone’s entire life and not just the little bit of information that an authority is seeking. Enough paranoid blocking and seizure, let’s try to focus on world progress.
- pas 10y agoThe reality is still a few big telcos/ISPs operating the infrastructure, so government has zero problems mandating filtering/wiretapping/blocking. And since laying fiber is expensive, and putting up sats is even more expensive, and running a mesh through the continent is pretty unfeasible, we're stuck with these economically optimal big targets (the ISPs/telcos). As long as there is a network operator with access to core and edge routers, blocking is easy. And by the nature of BGP and the Internet you'll always know who to ask next to filter something. Or you can use Tor and-or a VPN. Multi-homing for times like this should be set up by default in operating systems.
- lazaroclapp 10y agoTelex? https://telex.cc/software.html https://telex.cc/software.html As long as you can connect to an ISP implementing the protocol, which is outside of the targeted jurisdiction, you should be able to access the destination site.
- rdl 10y agoThis is why we need decentralization.
- x0054 10y agoThe solution to this isn't a legal one, unfortunately. We can no longer trust the government, of what ever nation, period. In US we have Clinton and Trump as the presumptive nominees, both will be terrible for privacy and liberty. The solution is for WhatsApp (and others) to design a protocol that runs over common ports and encrypts end to end the communication and the protocol. Make it impossible to block without costly deep packet inspections and banning of thousands and thousands random relays, and it will not be blocked.
- Dorian-Gray 10y agoSomeone needs to create sane international e-commerce laws. I guess the question is "Who?"
- oruam 10y agothis is my shitty country and his shitty law.
- Yabood 10y agoWhat I find interesting the most is that they have 100M users in Brazil, yet they don't have an office there.
- blaquee 10y agojust a passing thought, would this happen to have anything to do with privacy and surveillance concerns? seems oddly suspicious this comes after WhatsApp announces end to end encryption
- ryenus 10y agoGoogle, Used by 1B+ Chinese, Blocked Nationwide for Years by GFW.
- bikamonki 10y agoDo we need more proof? The Internet is broken. A few months back there were protests against government in my country (also in South America). That day I witnessed how Twitter images were selectively blocked. (I remember reporting it here on HN). What was really scary is how they could select the pictures/videos to block, almost in realtime. Here we have about 5 ISPs serving 95% of the market (counting both mobile and landline) and all hook to a couple of bigger pipes to move ALL Internet traffic in/out of the country. Try as I might but can't understand why we do not break free from centralized communications, given that we already have both the hardware and software technology to do so. I like an old saying: when banging your head against a stonewall, you will always break the head and never the wall. So, what do we gain from discusing politics? What do we gain with laws written on paper but bent for the best bidder? Let's be pragmatic, in particular on a site like HN. We shouldn't be talking about the law, whether it is right or wrong, we should be discusing how many nodes do we need on a mesh network to solve communications for a city like Sao Paulo. Is the tech there yet? Can it get there? Who's advancing on these subjects? How can we help? (like really help not writting useless letters to congressmen) Don't bang your head on the stonewall...
- paavokoya 10y agoApps exist that route around censorship. People need to inform themselves. We are in an era where encryption and self-sustenance are deemed scary and suspicious. If all of these 100m users were on FireChat, this headline wouldn't exist.
- bikamonki 10y agoNot sure, we tried Firechat among friends and family on the last aftermath of an earthquake and some had problems installing or activating it. Also, it just drains the battery. However, I agree with you, the technology to circumvent centralized and censored communications is already there, it just needs adoption and improvement. But we need to think bigger, not only chats, we need a free Internet.
- yason 10y agoThey should shut down access to the whole internet in Brazil, then. It happens to be full of companies, forums, services and data networks which probably don't give a rat's sit-upon about what the law in Brazil or any other country says but just keep on transmitting messages and bits from user to user. I don't think being a messenger should come with obligations to divulge private persons' conversations or, more generally, bits to anyone. Local laws can force local companies to do so but it has nothing much to do with internet: a letter remailing company (or, the post office, as we used to say in the 1900's) could provide similar service. To generalise, all private communications reduce down to talking in private. If you really had to, you could talk to your friend in private and there's nothing any government could do to retrieve those conversations back after the fact. Technological means just make the communication more flexible but it should not mean the conversation should become less private just because it happens on the internet instead of the local backwoods. In fact, when governments (across the globe) do that it will only motivate creating solutions which make it impossible for the company to hand over their customer's data, with end-to-end and client-side encryption. Yet all governments do see that it's their right to make demands because it's always the easy thing to do.
- jeena 10y agoI'm not saying the judge did the wrong thing but I think one could avoid this kind of problems by using decentralized services.
- andywood 10y agoI hope that someday someone smarter than me figures out how to make a truly free internet that isn't bound to be undermined by laws, ISPs, and hosting providers. Of course you would still be free to program censorship into your own walled garden, but the substrate would not be controllable by anyone. I used to think that the Internet was that, but it's proven not to be almost daily.
- basicplus2 10y agoThe only way is for every home to have its own node in a web so it is entirely private, but one still needs to cross the oceans and deserts.
- known 10y ago"Politics is the art by which politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other" -- Oscar
- reachtarunhere 10y agoand I thought only India had technically laid back judges.
- known 10y agoFirst its iPhone/Apple. Now its WhatsApp/Facebook.
- smoyer 10y agoI'm going to guess that this isn't only affecting consumers. Governments and businesses gradually (sometimes informally) adopt tools their employees use outside work. Tools that are convenient, consistent and prevalent are especially valuable. If this becomes the "new normal", I'd expect to see criminals launching more burglaries and terrorists launching more attacks during the service shut-downs. If you know your target is in a weakened state, you're going to take advantage of it.
- pietrasagh 10y agoSimple solution (just 4 steps). Instal Orbot (tor proxy), run it, setup Settings->Select apps->What's up and give the finger to your censors.