grid11

transcribed from video:

I think there are good solutions we can implement to mitigate a lot of the surveillance. And I don't think the solution is to just lay down and die. If everyone thought like privacy doomers, none of this [privacy related issues] would even be a discussion.

They [pessimists] really just making the world worse place by giving up. And that's what a lot of pessimism really is, when you dig down deep, just a coping mechanism for covering up the fact that you're too lazy to take action. All you have to do is take action, instead of doing nothing.

The world needs more people who just care, don't be a doomer.

You can be a random person walking in a busy metro area and happen to get in range of someone who is scanning for a particular device to use a side-channel attack on. You don’t have to be a POI.

I guess if you're broadcasting all the beacons your phone can be pawned even if you miss the last month OS update on your latest, greatest, shiny toy. This is just inevitable.

It's generally best to get a phone that receives software updates and security patches for more than 2-3 years.

See first paragraph again, not everybody is as affluent as you're, look at the problem from the other perspective

Additionally, threats can come from various sources like:

malicious apps,

will take control of the phone from the inside out, nothing will withstand that

texts,

Pegasus will use 0day, nothing to do about that

USB devices, or physical access,

Once somebody have physical access because you're some POI and not an average Joe, not much you can do

Choosing a manufacturer that supports phones longer can help reduce these risks over the life of the device.

See first paragraph, parenthesis content. Also phones are made with short lifespan on purpose, this gives steady inflow of money for the manufacturers, only few will give you what you want

So for the average users that only want to go on with their lives and not buy brand new phones every 2-3 years (or don't live in places where fairphone and pixel phones are available) what would be the solution?

If a person is not some POI, don't you think that wouldn't be better to flash something that at least includes some relatively up to date security patches?

And how those rootkits are being loaded to phones with outdated firmware? Bundled with the last OS that was flashed or remotely by exploiting security flaws? Not a dev, but curious about it.

so few devices are supported >?<

I don't agree with that, take a look at this:

Officially supported devices and the list of unofficial /e/ builds part1 and part2 (those might not be working as good as official builds)

some interesting excerpts:

The analysis notes that a government can easily tell when a person is using WhatsApp, in part because the data must pass through Meta’s readily identifiable corporate servers. A government agency can then unmask specific WhatsApp users by tracing their IP address, a unique number assigned to every connected device, to their internet or cellular service provider account.

The assessment makes clear that WhatsApp engineers grasp the severity of the problem, but also understand how difficult it might be to convince their company to fix it.

It will be difficult to better protect users against correlation attacks without making the app worse in other ways, the document explains. For a publicly traded giant like Meta, protecting at-risk users will collide with the company’s profit-driven mandate of making its software as accessible and widely used as possible.

“WhatsApp has no backdoors and we have no evidence of vulnerabilities in how WhatsApp works,” said Meta spokesperson Christina LoNigro.

That's why you slam e2e encryption banner all over the app to make this statement even more true instead of doing an independent code review that could confirmed that on paper.

On a different note, did anyone noticed a link to discussion on privacy, referencing this post (2x) on threema blog, see post: Chat Apps, Government Ties, and Transparency ?

PD, on the other hand ...

&

Then, PD chimed in

refs to this: --> https://lemmy.world/post/15169047

which was federated through .world but originally posted on ml.

rip rd

He/it? looks like a RoboCop, I wonder what's it seeing in that RoboCop visor on that bionic lookalike head?