cultural reviewer and dabbler in stylistic premonitions

  • 276 Posts
  • 539 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Nice, thanks.

    It would certainly be nice to be able to pre-download language pair models without selecting to and from and then actually initiating a translation using the model i don’t have yet.

    re: getting uBlock externally, i also see the attraction of that approach but unfortunately Debian’s package was last updated in October (from 1.62 to 1.67) while AMO has a release from January (1.69) :/

    imo it would be better to bundle UBO and ship its updates along with browser updates.

    are there plans to distribute Konform via flathub?




















  • could Red Hat eventually take control of the project

    Fedora started in 2002 and merged with “Red Hat Linux” in 2003.

    Red Hat, Inc has had full control of it ever since then.

    It is a “community project” inasmuch as there are Fedora developers who are volunteers (and some who are paid by companies other than Red Hat), and the Fedora Council includes people who are not employed by Red Hat - but the Project Leader is always a Red Hat employee, and if the Council ever has an irreconcilable difference with Red Hat then Red Hat can simply ignore and/or dismiss them.

    Red Hat owns all Fedora-related trademarks, and the Fedora Project is not an independent legal entity: it is a part of Red Hat.

    If Fedora developers don’t like Red Hat’s decisions regarding the project, they can fork it but they’d need to change the name and find some other sources funding.

    Also, icymi, Red Hat became a subsidiary of IBM in 2019.













  • So in summary. You’re right. Sealed sender is not a great solution. But

    Thanks :)

    But, I still maintain it is entirely useless - its only actual use is to give users the false impression that the server is unable to learn the social graph. It is 100% snake oil.

    it is a mitigation for the period where those messages are being accepted.

    It sounds like you’re assuming that, prior to sealed sender, they were actually storing the server-visible sender information rather than immediately discarding it after using it to authenticate the sender? They’ve always said that they weren’t doing that, but, if they were, they could have simply stopped storing that information rather than inventing their “sealed sender” cryptographic construction.

    To recap: Sealed sender ostensibly exists specifically to allow the server to verify the sender’s permission to send without needing to know the sender identity. It isn’t about what is being stored (as they could simply not store the sender information), it is about what is being sent. As far as I can tell it only makes any sense if one imagines that a malicious server somehow would not simply infer the senders’ identities from their (obviously already identified) receiver connections from the same IPs.


  • Sure. If a state serves a subpoena to gather logs for metadata analysis, sealed sender will prevent associating senders to receivers, making this task very difficult.

    Pre sealed-sender they already claimed not to keep metadata logs, so, complying with such a subpoena[1] should already have required them to change the behavior of their server software.

    If a state wanted to order them to add metadata logging in a non-sealed-sender world, wouldn’t they also probably ask them to log IPs for all client-server interactions (which would enable breaking sealed-sender through a trivial correlation)?

    Note that defeating sealed sender doesn’t require any kind of high-resolution timing or costly analysis; with an adversary-controlled server (eg, one where a state adversary has compelled the operator to alter the server’s behavior via a National Security Letter or something) it is easy to simply record the IP which sent each “sealed” message and also record which account(s) are checked from which IPs at all times.


    1. it would more likely be an NSL or some other legal instrument rather than a subpoena ↩︎


  • sealed sender isn’t theater, in my view. It is a best effort attempt to mitigate one potential threat

    But, what is the potential threat which is mitigated by sealed sender? Can you describe a specific attack scenario (eg, what are the attacker’s goals, and what capabilities do you assume the attacker has) which would be possible if Signal didn’t have sealed sender but which is no longer possible because sealed sender exists?