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It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote – The Atlantic
Without fail, whenever a free speech controversy hits, someone will cite this phrase as proof of limits on the First Amendment. And whatever that controversy may be, “the law”–as some have curiously called it–can be interpreted to suggest that we should err on the side of censorship. Holmes’ quote has become a crutch for every
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Why Falsely Claiming It’s Illegal To Shout Fire In A Crowded Theater Distorts Any Conversation About Online Speech | Techdirt
This post therefore intends to do two things: explain in greater detail why it is an incorrect statement of law, and also how incorrectly citing it as the law inherently poisons any discussion about regulating online speech by giving the idea of such regulation the appearance of more merit than the Constitution would actually permit.
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Public Report – WhatsApp End-to-End Encrypted Backups Security Assessment – NCC Group Research # check out the final results!
Check out page 21: During the summer of 2021, WhatsApp engaged NCC Group’s Cryptography Services team to conduct an independent security assessment of its End-to-End Encrypted Backups project. End-to-End Encrypted Backups is an hardware security module (HSM) based key vault solution that aims to primarily support encrypted backup of WhatsApp user data. This assessment was
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It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and @Verge are characterising “Car-Park USB Drops” as means of Whistleblower Entrapment. Because of course that’s a thing. Not.
Other Silicon Valley leakers have not been so lucky and often face more serious consequences for speaking out. Facebook itself has reportedly resorted to some fairly extreme tactics to crack down on leakers, including monitoring internet use and phone calls, randomly searching bags and vehicles, and leaving decoy USB drives out in the open as
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Question: “What do you mean by ‘standalone end-to-end encryption’ and what does [Frances Haugen] mean?”
A journalist meant “what do [I] mean by ‘standalone’ end-to-end encryption”: Here’s my response: What is Standalone End-to-End Encryption? What are the alternatives? Some products [e.g. apps] aim to do one thing, and one thing well. They are unifunctional, and it’s easy to see where end-to-end-secure-message-passing plays its role. Signal is one: there are people,
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The Prodigal Techbro – The Conversationalist
The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with
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Game over for digital rights? – Hi, I’m Heather Burns
So if I sound like I’m spitting sour grapes, I can’t help but think that you would too, if you learned that your abrupt unemployment happened in order to pay for the globetrotting tour of a Prodigal Techdaughter and her VIP entourage. And given how the operation that surrounds her seems very slick for an
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The Whistleblower And Encryption: Everyone Has An Angle, And Not Everyone Is A Policy Expert
Again, Haugen has likely done the world a great benefit in leaking a bunch of internal documents (I’ll have more on those soon). But it’s important to remember that just because she blew the whistle regarding Facebook research, it doesn’t make her an expert on everything else. She’s not an expert on content moderation, or antitrust,
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On Public Messages, Private Messages, Multicast, Broadcast, Large Groups, and End-to-End Encryption
It’s really interesting to see HackerNews get its knickers in a twist about the concept of a end-to-end-secure “chat” group which might have (for the sake of argument) 1000 participants: Their question is: “Is such a big group not effectively ‘public’? Is a message sent to onesuch group not already somehow public content, fit for
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Anyone who feels that memes & social-media are a distraction from the realities of the world, presenting a (relatively) new menace to society, should read this Saki short-story on “Music Hall” in 1914
Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar, Fido, Jock, and the big Bor-zoi! – read it, and tell me it’s not familiar… “Politics and patriotism are so boring and so out of date,” said a revered lady who had some pretensions to oracular utterance; “we are too cosmopolitan nowadays to be really moved by them. That is
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Reason: Whistleblower Absurdly Attacks Facebook’s Privacy-Protecting Encryption Efforts
https://reason.com/2021/10/25/whistleblower-absurdly-attacks-facebooks-privacy-protecting-encryption-efforts/
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Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption
In 2016 I quit the best job I ever had: the most impactful, the most challenging, and (yes) the best paid. I did so in part because of explicable burnout from shipping a radical product, but also and primarily because of a shift in Facebook’s company goals towards degrading user-experience for profit, and for experimentally