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I'm very interested in this project. However, the first thing I think of when I see: "We’ve taken several important steps on the road to making “NSA-proof com

by rsync 13y ago

I'm very interested in this project. However, the first thing I think of when I see: "We’ve taken several important steps on the road to making “NSA-proof communication” on your favorite websites possible." is that a lot of use cases involve mobile phones (of course) which have two other computers[1] inside of them that you have no control over and are regularly used to manipulate[2] your android/ios environment out from under you. I love to see these pieces coming together to form a more secure ecosystem, but it's really one step forward and two steps back as long as we don't have an open baseband and sim card OS, etc. [1] the baseband processor and the SIM card [2] OTA updates

higherpurpose 13y ago
The OTA updates one is such a tricky issue. What's more important? Not being able to fix bugs in hundreds of millions of devices for a long time (or at all), which NSA is going to use and abuse anyway, or worrying that one vendor will try to push an NSA backdoor to hundreds of millions of devices? I think the best compromise for that is to have OTA updates but the source of the software being upgraded needs to be open source, so at least there's a disincentive to backdoor it and also the possibility of finding the backdoor inside the new update. As for the baseband processor, we need to keep poking at Qualcomm and others to open source their modem firmware, and then vote with your wallet. Getting a SIM card with an open source OS is probably going to take a while, although Google is in a very good position to push for that right now, since their OS is so dominant in the mobile market, so it's probably Google the one we need to nag to get it.