Why Encryption Bans Won't Work: Brazil Government's WhatsApp Block Just Sends Users To Other Encrypted Platforms

from the generating-more-business-for-competitors dept

The battle against encryption being fought valiantly stupidly by the FBI, a few law enforcement figureheads, and a handful of legislators is an unwinnable war. Just ask Brazil, where the government has blocked WhatsApp repeatedly in an effort to force it to comply with demands for information. The problem is that WhatsApp now utilizes end-to-end encryption for all messages, meaning WhatsApp cannot provide any information about message content no matter how badly the Brazilian government wants it.

So Brazil blocks WhatsApp periodically and everyone wanting a secure messaging platform simply routes around it.

Several rival apps that offer encrypted messaging services reported a surge in Brazilian sign-ups, which highlights how the growing ubiquity of private messaging apps makes it hard to stop people from using them.

Both Telegram and Viber reported surges in new signups, with Telegram saying it had gained more than one million new Brazilian users. And this is happening every time the government decides it's going to kick WhatsApp off the internet.

The same thing will happen with any of the proposed encryption bans currently making their way through various legislative entities. Bans have been proposed in both California and New York. If imposed, the only thing they'll guarantee is that locals will be purchasing phones in another state.

And those who don't feel comfortable with the end result of other efforts like Dianne Feinstein's will opt to use communication platforms/cell phone service providers who haven't caved to government demands that companies hold the encryption keys.

FBI director James Comey seems to believe he can make the world unite in the banning of encryption. This is apparently based on his abject failure to convince even a majority of US legislators that bans and backdoors are a good idea.

As long as there are options, people will seek them out. That's the only guaranteed outcome. And the more a government tries to clamp down, the further it separates itself from any usable information, like communications metadata and access to subscriber information. Once you've pushed citizens to using platforms located in other jurisdictions, your powers become severely diluted. It would be better to just accept the growing shift to encryption and explore other options that don't involve slamming your head repeatedly into an immovable force.

And, it must be pointed out that people have communicated securely for years without the government claiming it should have access to every private conversation and the contents of every mailed letter. Just because texting has replaced phone calls and letters doesn't mean the government is somehow entitled to this new wealth of communications. Just because it's easier to obtain in bulk doesn't mean it's the end of the investigative line when encryption takes that opportunity away. James Comey should stop worrying about the "smart people" in tech companies and spend more time with the "smart people" in law enforcement and find out why they're not doing more to alleviate the situation.

Filed Under: alternatives, blocking encryption, brazil, encryption, going dark, messaging
Companies: telegram, viber, whatsapp

The Killing Of Google Reader Highlights The Risk Of Relying On A Single Provider

from the leaves-open-an-opportunity dept

Every few months, Google has been "shutting down" various offerings they feel are under-used, in an effort to regain some focus. Many of these are uncontroversial, though a few have been surprising and freaked some users out. Many, for example, were surprised and upset when Google announced it was phasing out iGoogle. But today's news that it is shutting down Google Reader took many, many people by surprise. My Twitter feed blew up with people freaking out about it. For those who use it, many really rely on it for their daily information gathering process. I know the feeling, because I used to do that -- though a few years ago I shifted to mostly using Twitter via a well-organized Tweetdeck, and found that to be just as (if not more) effective, though a somewhat different overall experience that took some getting used to.

Still, a very large number of folks I know feel like they practically live inside Google Reader -- and I know (for example) that Google Reader is a huge driver of traffic to this site, so I get the feeling many of you use Google Reader as well. The thing that seems to have so many folks upset is the fact that there really aren't any comparable alternatives if you want that same basic experience. In fact, you could argue that Google effectively killed off many of those alternatives. Back in the day there were things like Newsgator and Bloglines, but both were effectively marginalized or pushed into other markets because Google Reader really did become the de facto standard RSS reader that so many used and relied on.

Anyway, I have a few separate thoughts on all of this and might as well go through them bullet point style:

• This highlights the problem of relying too much on a single provider when there are few alternatives. As such, I wonder if Google may not realize the wider impact of this move. For example, it has me directly rethinking how much I rely on Google Calendar, Google Drive and Gmail. Now, I don't think any of those are going away any time soon, but not too long ago (um, yesterday, according to some...) you could have said the same exact thing about Reader. I'm now planning to do a more serious personal audit of services I use and how reliant I am on a single provider, and start making sure I have working alternatives in place and ready to go. In the end, this will certainly make me a lot less tied to Google's services, which is probably a good thing, but probably not the sort of thing Google is hoping its users will be doing.
• As mentioned, personally, I moved away from RSS readers to a purely Twitter/Tweetdeck approach to consuming news. It took a few months of doing both, but when I shut down the RSS reader, I never looked back. It's a different experience, but has some benefits. But, what that suggests is that if people are looking for a culprit for what brought us to this moment, Twitter is the prime suspect. Yes, Twitter and RSS are different in many significant ways. But, in terms of the basic user benefit that people get out of both ("my stream of news & info"), they clearly compete.
• The lack of serious alternatives represents a serious opportunity for someone enterprising. Believe it or not, before Google Reader even launched we at Techdirt had built our own RSS reader, called the Techdirt InfoAdvisor, that functioned quite a lot like Google Reader, but which had some other really useful features for us internally and for some of our business clients (we would use it to curate accounts for clients, with added commentary from us). Eventually, we shut it down, because (as Google has discovered), it's actually a lot of work to maintain something like that for a variety of reasons, and soaks up tremendous resources. Still, my first reaction was to joke that maybe we should dust off our old code, put it up and see if anyone wanted to use it. We're not likely to do that (unless all of you start throwing money our way), but someone else likely is going to jump into this space quickly. They may not build a huge business out of it, but I'd bet if they weren't looking for VC-style hockey stick returns, that someone could build a decent business out of it.
• It is always interesting to look at product lifecycles, but most of the time when online products die off, the writing was on the wall long before it happened. This one struck me as a surprise since so many people relied so heavily on it, and it seems really abrupt and likely to upset the basic workflow of so many -- especially in the journalism and academic fields. I can respect the reasons for killing off a "non-essential" product, but it feels like Google seriously underestimated the level to which people had built Google reader into their daily lives.

It wouldn't surprise me, given how loud the backlash is, if Google extends the deadline for shutting down Reader, or if it eventually tries to work out some sort of alternative resolution. We saw the same thing, to a lesser extent, back when AskJeeves tried to shut down Bloglines (the Google Reader of its day before Google Reader existed). And, eventually, Ask sold it off to another company who apparently has kept it running (though, who knows how many users it has today). I think that experience actually pushed a bunch of Bloglines users to jump to Google on the assumption that Google Reader was safe. You would think that someone within Google would remember how that whole thing played out. It's surprising that they don't appear to have learned anything from it.

Filed Under: alternatives, google reader, readers, rss, shutting down, single providers
Companies: google, twitter

Kickstarter Becomes The Darling Of Sundance By Financing Lots Of Movies... Without Movie Studio Arrogance

from the alternatives-arise dept

We've certainly talked about the massive growth of Kickstarter, especially in the movie space, and apparently that's being noticed at famous movie festivals like Sundance. David Carr has an article at the NY Times, in which he compares Kickstarter to a movie studio but without the arrogance of a studio. And, of course, it is a very different proposition. Unlike in a studio relationship, the artist retains the ownership of the work. Unlike in a studio relationship, there's no one at Kickstarter who has to "greenlight" the picture to get it made. Instead, it's entirely tied to the ability of filmmakers to get people to pay up (in small bunches) to make it work. And it does seem to be working:

[Kickstarter] had helped finance 10 percent of the festival's slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

And did it all without the obnoxiousness of a tradtional Hollywood studio/distributor. Of course, this really highlights a point that we've been making for over a decade. While some traditionalists with little vision have spent the last decade screaming about how there are no new business models for producing content, it's become increasingly clear that where there's a need, such services and business models will get created. And, even better, they seem to be ones set up in a way where the artist has more choice and more control.

Filed Under: alternatives, business models, fan funding, movies, sundance
Companies: kickstarter

As Expected, Alternative DNS Systems Sprouting Up To Ignore US Censorship

from the not-like-people-weren't-warned dept

After the US government, via Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division, started seizing domains without any notification or adversarial hearing (things that most of the world would consider to be reasonable due process), some folks quickly put together a browser extension, called MAFIAAfire, that would route around any ICE seizures and take you directly to the sites whose domains had been seized. This is, as the internet saying goes, a form of seeing censorship as "damage" and routing around it. Of course, that could be done on a much larger scale. As a bunch of the folks who built key pieces of the core internet infrastructure warned, continuing this kind of policy (and extending it with PROTECT IP) will lead to more workarounds that inevitably will fracture key pieces of the internet and make it significantly less secure. Supporters of PROTECT IP refuse to heed this warning -- and, from what we've heard -- refuse to compromise and make sure that the basic functioning of DNS will be protected.

So now, totally as expected, we're already seeing alternative DNS systems showing up, advertising that they should be used to route around US government censorship of such websites. The one getting attention these days is called BlockAid.me.

What's just as stunning as the fact that supporters of PROTECT IP still can't figure out how this is really, really bad, is that they also don't realize how this pretty much destroys any argument the US makes around the globe in trying to protest political censorship. Some claim it's entirely different, but it's not. Both involve a government entity deciding that websites cannot be reached without a trial. This makes the US look ridiculous in the eyes of the world, but I guess as long as it makes sure that Universal and Warner Bros. can prop up their profits for a few more years... it's all good.

Filed Under: alternatives, censorship, dns, protect ip