5 ms·

> A system can be broken without being useless. Sure, just as a completely insecure system can be useful. I'm not arguing that. But not useful for the purpos

• khedoros 10y ago
  >But not useful for the purpose of protecting users against surveillance. I'd argue that it can be useful for that purpose without being perfect. If it stops my communication from being caught in a mass dragnet, then it's useful for protecting me against surveillance even when it's possible to circumvent the security on the scale of individuals (rather than populations). > skrebbel made a blanket statement, which I was replying to. Right, they did. They made the statement that even flawed security makes mass surveillance much more difficult than an unencrypted system would (or words to that effect). It seems like "stop mass-scale surveillance" is a separate goal from "stop individual-scale surveillance". I feel like you set up a strawman, rather than actually addressing what skrebbel originally said.
  • mikegerwitz 10y ago
    > It seems like "stop mass-scale surveillance" is a separate goal from "stop individual-scale surveillance". I feel like you set up a strawman, rather than actually addressing what skrebbel originally said. My point was that security is often black-and-white because a crack can turn out to be a crater, and often is. With regards to state-sponsored, dragnet surveillance: those are the most skilled attackers, and they've exploited far more subtle issues than the one being discussed here; they're the ones that you need to be worried about for undisclosed vulnerabilities, letalone terribly obvious flaws like this one.