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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • So yes.

    You think a nearly trillion dollar public company has an internal division that writes malware against flaws in its own software in order to harvest data from its own apps. It does this to gain just a bit more data about people it already has a lot of data on, because why not purposely leave active zero days in your own software, right?

    That is wildly conspiratorial thinking, and honestly plain FUD. It undermines serious, actual privacy issues the company has when you make up wild cabals that are running double secret malware attacks against themselves inside Google.


  • Anduril is Palmers Luckey “smart” missle/border tower company. Palmers Luckey, the alt right billionaire that sold Oculus to Facebook, whose sister is married to child rapist and former attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz. He has deep ties to alt right billionaire Peter theil, the facebook/paypal billionare, that owns the data harvesting/ai company Palentir that Israel uses to target “enemy combatants”.

    Theil is an outspoken monarcist who literally believes in an american king and that women should not be allowed to vote. He was the primary donor to Vance senate campaign, and a large reason he was the VP pick.

    Yes, deeply fucked.








  • Not that I can find. Can you post Signals most recent independent audit?

    Many of these orgs don’t post public audits like this. Its not common, even for the open source players like Signal.

    What we do have is a megacorp stating its technical implementation extremely explicitly for a well defined security protocol, for a service meant to directly compete with iMessage. If they are violating that, it opens them up to huge legal liability and reputational harm. Neither of these is worth data mining this specific service.


  • That’s a different threat model that verges on “most astonishing corporate espinoage in human history and greatest threat to corporate personhood” possible for Google. It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google employees coordinating in utter secrecy to commit an unheard of crime that would be punishable by death in many circumstances.

    If they have backdoored all android phones and are actively exploting them in nefarious ways not explained in their various TOS, then they are exposing themselves to ungodly amounts of legal and regulatory risks.

    I expect no board of directors wants a trillion dollars of company worth to evaporate overnight, and would likely not be okay backdooring literally billions of phones from just a fiduciary standpoint.


  • Its a specific, technical phrase that means one thing only, and yes, googles RCS meets that standard:

    https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en

    How end-to-end encryption works

    When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.

    The secret key is a number that’s:

    Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.

    Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.

    Generated again for each message.

    Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.

    Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.

    They have more technical information here if you want to deep dive about the literal implementation.

    You shouldn’t trust any corporation, but needless FUD detracts from their actual issues.


  • The messages are signed by cryptographic keys on the users phones that never leave the device. They are not decryptable in any way by google or anyone else. Thats the very nature of E2EE.

    How end-to-end encryption works

    When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.

    The secret key is a number that’s:

    Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.

    Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.

    Generated again for each message.

    Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.

    Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.

    They cant fuck with it, at all, by design. That’s the whole point. Even if they created “archived” messages to datamine, all they would have is the noise.