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Ethereum Foundation removes their canary
- fish44 3y agoGreat - can we replace it with a crow if it was the USA, a budgie if it was EU. a magpie if it was Israel, a woodpecker if it was China (etc) Green if it was tax organisation and yellow if is a criminal one
- diggan 3y agoYou kind of lose plausible deniability with that granularity, I'd guess.
- superkuh 3y agoTechnically even just removing a warrant canary immediately could put you at legal risk in the USA. The non-risky way is to update the canary $date every $timeperiod and then stop updating $date after an attack. That way nothing is changed to indicate but it still becomes obvious by lack of update after $timeperiod.
- diggan 3y agoYeah, that kind of irked me with the commit. Currently (769b306) it says: > this commit removes a section of the footer as we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality Which... is just saying what happened? Point is to remove it without saying anything, as if you do, you'd break the "requirement for confidentiality" and put yourself at risk.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoImagine complying with a gag order. That's one of the most blatant abuses of human rights.
- superkuh 3y agoIt is. But when you're on the receiving end and the federal agents bust down your door and point firearms at you you see things a bit differently in the moment.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoAgreed, but that's all the more reason to be louder and more defiant.
- int_19h 3y agoNot everyone wants to be a hero.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoAn hero
- mistrial9 3y agosomehow it is hard to believe that this statement is made .. confidentiality and "gag orders" have ruled the business world for more than twenty years in the USA. Any executive of any public company (stocks) must demonstrate iron-clad compliance with these orders, every week of their employment. Asvmuch as anyone might agree with the aspirational poetry of this statement, it is literally ABCs of US dollar business that this is no joke. surely that is clear?
- superkuh 3y agoThis isn't business. This is the government using secret violent force to keep you from telling others you've been (legally) robbed. It does not involve a voluntary contract that one enters into willingly in the open. These are very different things. Surely that is clear?
- 3y ago
- rsynnott 3y agoA voluntary enquiry with a gag order? I mean, I suppose in principle there's no reason such a thing wouldn't be possible, but it feels like a bit of an edge case.
- adeon 3y agoI'm trying to think to myself if I was running a project and had a canary, what would be the threshold to kill the canary on a voluntary enquiry. If it was CIA and they sent me: "Please give us all information on XYZ so that we can organize an assassination on them. This is voluntary and you don't have to give us that information. This is just pretty please." I think I would kill my canary even if the request is technically voluntary and I wasn't compelled to give out any information. But that was a joke scenario because I couldn't come up with more realistic scenarios. And then I guess if your threshold is too low, you'll kill your canary on something that might be a nothingburger.
- sidewndr46 3y agoI don't think the CIA exactly sends you a note asking for data to be dropped off at their Google Drive. It is more likely you receive an offer to license data you have from a company that is relatively obscure with a financial incentive.
- stusmall 3y agoThe idea behind a canary is while they can tell you to keep it confidential, they can't compel your speech to lie and say you've never cooperated. Adding a wink wink nod nod code word defeats the idea.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoIsn't saying "You can't talk about this" compelling speech? Why can the courts say "You can't talk about this" legally, but can't say "You can't update your warrant canary"?
- RIMR 3y agoBecause, in the United States, you have a constitutional right not to be compelled to say something you don't want to, but you don't have the constitutional right to say whatever you want to, especially in the case of a gag order regarding an active investigation or trial. So if you go ahead and say "I haven't be served a warrant by X group" on your website, the government can stop you from saying the contrary, but they can't force you to lie about it, so you are free to remove the canary since it is no longer true. If the courts ever tried to retaliate against that, they'd run into a mountain of precedent that forbids compelled speech. They would have to argue that you are required to lie, rather than be allowed to retract a non-truth. That's not something the Constitution is going to allow.
- IncreasePosts 3y agoSo, it goes like this? If I have been served a warrant with a gag order: If someone asks me "Have you been served a warrant with a gag order?" - I'm allowed to say "No", and lie about it if I want to. I am not allowed to say "Yes", per the gag order. Now, if someone asks me: "have you been served a warrant with a gag order? Say no if the answer is no, but say nothing is the answer is yes". Now, I am allowed to say no, and allowed to say nothing, even though by saying nothing it directly contradicts the point of the gag order? Is it really the case that these gag orders are meaningless if someone just asks the question in the right manner? I can't really buy that. I suspect canary warrants only "work" because they have never been tested in court yet.
- fwip 3y agoIf you can just say in a commit message "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality" surely the whole song and dance about canaries is pointless, right? Or did the committer fuck up and ruin their plausible deniability?
- stusmall 3y agoI was really surprised to see that commit message. I wonder if they had that cleared? I'm guessing the committer didn't fully understand the concept.
- dotnet00 3y agoI guess they figure they can say they've received the inquiry, but can't say what the inquiry is about.
- enlyth 3y agoBut then as the parent poster mentioned, what's the point of the whole canary concept
- dotnet00 3y agoMy cynical side wonders if they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of it so they can continue their process of sheding off the final remaining shreds of the original cypherpunk culture of crypto.
- dmurray 3y agoThey might have anticipated receiving a more restrictive gag order when they originally put the canary in place. I wonder if the NSA should have a team that just goes around organisations that have warrant canaries and sends them baseless confidential messages, just enough to trigger the canary. The fact that they don't do this suggests they don't think canaries are much use.
- duskwuff 3y ago
- byteknight 3y agoHow weird is it that the ethereum foundation repo (one of) has only 2 stars?
- diggan 3y agoThe "bigger"/more extensive website is ethereum.org (https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-org-website https://github.com/ethereum/ethereum-org-website), guess people aren't as interested in the foundation as they are in the project itself. I think that's pretty standard in the cryptocurrency scene.
- chrisco255 3y agoEven more relevant would be the Ethereum Improvement Proposal repo (where people submit proposals to change the spec): https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs Or the go-ethereum execution client (the most popular execution client): https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
- operator-name 3y agoThat partially explains why nobody noticed the change being made 2 weeks ago.
- blt 3y agoProbably a complete coincidence but it's interesting that the commit included lots of irrelevant formatting changes too.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y agoRemember not to mix formatting changes into commits with semantic changes. :)
- bmitc 3y agoIt's a good rule of thumb, but it also feels like people use that as a tactic to continually change code to get away from having a formatting change come in. That's why on any new project, even personal ones, I enforce formatting from day one if the language has a formatter. It's pretty annoying to work in a codebase that had no formmatter running so that I then have to make special adjustments to my editor to stop formatting on save for certain files.
- saurik 3y agoI don't understand your point... how would continually changing code avoid formatting changes? If you want to change the formatting, just commit a change to the formatting.
- bmitc 3y agoIf you're making a big commit that formats a large file or files and those files are constantly getting merged in, then it makes the formatting PR hard to get in as it constantly has to merge or just start over. This might be only a concern for certain scenarios in large companies.
- lamontcg 3y agoBecause your change and the formatting change are probably dependent, and between the time you submit the change and the time your PRs are accepted there may be multiple other commits to that file which affected lines that your formatting PR addressed. If changes wait for weeks to be merged (which is actually pretty quick compared to years) you wind up with the formatting change being blocked on needing a rebase. The thing becomes an annoying PITA of merge conflicts and rebases. So either have code formatting standards to start with which are automatically applied, or else accept PRs that have whitespace fixes and merge them promptly (I can accept splitting up the commits into formatting and non-formatting commits but even that is barrier to entry over people being able to submit changes to your software easily--every bit of fussiness is a tax on the submitter's time and will result in less submissions).
- operator-name 3y agoWhat are the implications for a warrent to be served to the ethereum foundation? Unlike the last time[0], this is directed at the foundation rather than individual. [0]: In 2019, Ethereum Foundation employee Virgil Griffith was arrested by the US government for presenting at a blockchain conference in North Korea. He would later plead guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in 2021. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum)
- RIMR 3y agoAh, the same guy who created Tor2Web with Aaron Schwartz, and the immediately used it to try to sell deanonymized access logs to Tor hidden services to various governments.
- kurisufag 3y agoI'm familiar with the name because he made a fool of himself on the "King of the Nerds" reality/game show, which got chopped up for YouTube hilarity. https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEun2Auayo https://youtube.com/watch?v=3ZEun2Auayo
- diego_sandoval 3y agoCommit message: this commit removes a section of the footer as we have received a vol… …untary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality
- hnarn 3y agoI am not a lawyer, but just on the surface this seems to me like it's the complete opposite of a canary. If the whole point is that you're continually posting a "no" and you suddenly stop, that makes sense legally because it seems strange that you could coerce someone to keep doing something and lying, as that is not the same thing as "disclosing" something. Like, if you wore a green shirt every day and suddenly started wearing red, it makes sense to me why legally it would be hard to force someone to keep wearing green shirts. This is nothing like that, the commit message itself is literally disclosing the fact that they have received an enquiry.
- neilv 3y agoI'm always anti-canary. Two scenarios: * You're suddenly under governmental orders not to disclose X. You remove a canary that says not-X, effectively disclosing X, and this was obviously your exact and pre-meditated intent. You then have to find a lawyer who will help you argue to a judge and other officials that you're in the clear with this loophole. * You have a canary that says not-X, as an assurance to some other party. X happens, but you're also told at the same time that the folk wisdom you heard on the Internet about canaries will not protect you. So you don't remove the canary. Now your canary is falsely assuring that other party, betraying whatever trust they put in you, perhaps to their detriment.
- supermatt 3y agoThis is why you sign the canary regularly, and then it just expires if you do nothing. Although... I also don't see much use in them either, it seems everyone ends up complying with something eventually and so all canaries end up getting removed.
- djaykay 3y agoThat doesn’t seem functionally different than removing the canary.
- ynniv 3y agoThings break all the time! Usually they get fixed, but sometimes you're just too busy to get around to it.
- supermatt 3y agoRemoving the canary requires action. Not resigning a canary requires inaction.
- kspacewalk2 3y agoI strongly doubt a judge will care to distinguish the two.
- duxup 3y agoI suppose this IS the canary ... the removal of it ?
- ETH_start 3y agoOn the one hand, Congress' anti-crypto contingent is raising alarm over Bitcoin's energy consumption. On the other hand, they are calling on their allies in the SEC to reject the Ethereum ETF, while the SEC is using Ethereum's transition from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake — which reduced its energy consumption by 99.99% — as the legal justification to designate Ethereum a security and thereby severely reduce the market's access to it. "US Congressional Group ‘Disturbed’ by Crypto Mining Energy Usage" https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/congressional-group-disturbed-by-crypto-mining-energy-usage/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/07/15/congressional-gro... "Democrats to SEC: Don't approve spot Ethereum ETFs and any other crypto ETPs" https://www.theblock.co/post/282846/democrats-to-sec-just-say-no-to-spot-ethereum-etfs-and-any-other-crypto-etps https://www.theblock.co/post/282846/democrats-to-sec-just-sa... "According to a person at a company who received a recent subpoena request, the SEC’s probe of the Swiss-based Ethereum Foundation began shortly after the blockchain’s shift to a new governance model known as “proof-of-stake” in September of 2022." https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/20/sec-gary-gensler-ethereum-security-commodity-crypto-foundation/ https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/20/sec-gary-gensler-ether...
- Entwickler 3y agoExactly this. At the end of the day it seems like it's more about control than actually helping society...
- taxmeifyoucan 3y agoGreat point, they are ridiculous
- quazar 3y agoWhy is this not on the front page? Are people flagging this? Why?
- ynx 3y agoHard not to get all conspiracy theorist about canary removals. If I were to don my tinfoil hat, it seems possible to remove the canary with a boring incident for plausible deniability of a prior incident whose confidentiality is more strictly enforced. The stricter gag order gets what it wants - non-disclosure of that particular gag order, the canary gets what it wants - removal after an incident.
- mklarmann 3y agoThe US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has launched a probe into Ethereum to determine whether the largest altcoin is a security, Fortune reported. The SEC sent subpoenas to companies seeking documents and financial records relating to their dealings with the Ethereum Foundation, the story said, citing companies that have received SEC subpoenas.