After the Vienna terrorist attack, the EU Council wants a general key for encrypted chat communication. Will politicians ever learn that breaking encryption would bring more harm than good?
https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/eu-backdoor-surveillance
@Tutanota We can only hope such a thing would not pass. If it does, I'll put on a tinfoil hat, throw all commercial systems out the window and compile Linux and all my operating systems from source. 😆
@sindastra @Tutanota This particular piece of potential legislation doesn't concern Linux. It only concerns communication platforms that use end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp and Signal. If it does come to pass, I think a more suitable course of action would be to host your own Matrix server. 😃
@sudo @Tutanota I already do host one... And I dislike Matrix. 😆
But what I meant is, Windows is known to spy, and Mac probably does too as Apple is no saint either. But either way, those are big and commercial platforms and they have to abide to whatever nonsense the law requires. So that's why I meant using self compiled FOSS systems only. To avoid hidden backdoors.
But of course, I wouldn't read every single line of code and there are always unintentional backdoors through bugs...
Hmmm...🤔
@sindastra @Tutanota Yeah.... I agree that Matrix still has a long way to go. I myself don't like it very much in its current state. I also dislike the interface of Element. Yet, it does show promise. Hopefully, it will become better as it matures.
Also, I don't think you have to worry very much about unintentional backdoors, unless you are worried about targeted surveillance or something like that. If you kept the software relatively up-to-date, you should be fine. Am I wrong? 🤔
@sudo @Tutanota Well there are known but undisclosed vulnerabilities. I think a famous example was a severe hole in Windows' SMB (I think named EternalBlue?) that allowed to spread malware on a network to all Windows machines that were in it. This vulnerability was supposedly known and used by the NSA but undisclosed. Of course eventually independent parties discovered this vulnerability and used it to spread the infamous ransomware known as WannaCry. A fix was released but the damage was done.