WhatsApp, with more than 1.2 billion active users, is one of the easiest ways to send secure information.
“With WhatsApp, it’s as simple as sending a text message — but it’s encrypted,” Mr. Dance explained.
I'm not a security expert but I think this is not exactly the best practice. This may have been true pre-fb acquisition but there has been changes to how WhatsApp behaves, especially server side storage.
Also the departure of WhatsApp founders under uncertain terms, doesn't give me much confidence with usage of that app for clandestine operations.
Perhaps folks here who are well versed with the state of the app can chime in.
And that's how I write extended quote blocks generally.
Some users don't, there is no one unambiguously correct method, and the 2nd- most common variant I see has several obvious detriments.
The fact that the "show us your code" feature seems to be predominantly used for blockquotes, on a generally technological site, strongly suggests a failure to correctly match user expectations and needs.
Though as metacommentary in infotech, SV, and YC, the message couldn't be clearer.
Seems more likely that it's a lack of instruction on the comment page. Discord manages to fit all of its formatting into the whitespace under the chat input....
That would help. Many sites now offer formatting tools or a "help" link or expando. HN elects not to. Some of this may be part of its intentional asthetic. But more proximate hep might, er, help.
It's not HN's job to inspect every code block to determine if it's _actually_ code. If you use the code syntax, it's code. That's the assumption that every markdown renderer makes, and I wouldn't expect anyone to assume otherwise.
Format your posts appropriately - that's the sole burden of the writer, no one else's.
That's what I've included in my own HN Stylus stylesheet for years. Works on Desktop or Firefox/Android, but other mobile browsers don't support it, for lack of extension support.
Updating the HN markup to offer true blockquote support would be a more complete, though less trivial, solution.
I've suggested the first myself repeatedly.
pg asked how to fix this, and was given the solution, on HN, nine years ago:
Make groups of `/^\s+> /` lines turn into a `<blockquote>`. Render it slightly indented and italicized.
I don't think the major problem is that `/^ {4}/` lines don't wrap in a way that's useful for quotes; it's that there's no way to format quotes so people use the only formatting element HN has.
> I don't think the major problem is that `/^ {4}/` lines don't wrap in a way that's useful for quotes; it's that there's no way to format quotes so people use the only formatting element HN has.
It is a standing convention to use the following syntax for quotes here:
Not to mention if they have automatic backup enabled on the phone, it bypasses the E2E encryption and adds another third party to the list that can read the messages. You never know if the other person has it enabled or not.
> This may have been true pre-fb acquisition but there has been changes to how WhatsApp behaves, especially server side storage.
WhatsApp messages are encrypted end-to-end between each person using it. The whole point of end-to-end encryption is not having to trust the server-side storage.
Furthermore, WhatsApp uses the Signal Protocol-- the state-of-the-art for secure messaging protocols.
The worst that WhatsApp can see is "who's talking to who?"
Finally, the adoption of the Signal Protocol in WhatsApp came long after the Facebook acquisition.
Sure, that can be a problem. However, it's completely irrelevant to the problem of server-side storage, as the comment I replied to was citing.
(Server-side storage is a non-issue, due to the encryption protocols in use. It doesn't matter if you distrust Facebook, they aren't going to be able to read your messages. End of.)
As has been pointed out here in the chat already: Scott (and others) have reverse engineered it.
> How do we know it won't happen tomorrow?
Consequences.
Even Facebook seems to realize that is the nuclear option.
That said there is a number of places this can still go wrong, but they are equally true for any mainstream client (edit:) and non mainstream clients have their own issues.
Personally neither like nor trust Facebook at all so I try to minimize contact.
> The worst that WhatsApp can see is "who's talking to who
Not really, given keys are centrally managed, it is fairly straightforward for WhatsApp to setup MITM intercept.
In fact they don't even need to push a malicious client etc, they just need to push a different public key than the sender/receiver's actual ones when contacts mutually add each other and this will quite simply allow MITM interception unless the people do key verification in person. If what the whistle blower is trying to do is stay anonymous - would they physically meet the reporter immediately?
They could even push new keys to existing mutual contacts and get away with it since most people don't display or again verify key change messages.
Lastly, most people turn on message backup in Google drive which is not encrypted - so a warrant or an account hack would suffice.
WhatsApp implementation can protect basically from malicious non state actors. That's a great thing in today's world in itself but be aware of the underlying tech.
In general you cannot be certain of anything in today's world with regards to security. You have to trust someone. Actually, you have to trust a lot of people: hardware vendors, compiler vendors, OS vendors, and application software vendors. Any one of these could, if they chose to, easily introduce a back-door into your "secure" system. The only way to be absolutely certain that no one has done this is to build your own hardware from discrete components and write all your own code from the bare metal on up, and even then you have to trust yourself not to have made a single mistake in a realm where even experts regularly do.
Personally, I don't trust FB, but for a non-technical person there aren't any clearly superior alternatives.
Signal's iOS app is really nothing to write home about (imho) and its desktop app is often downright unusable.
I have not used Wire beyond a test install but it indeed looked promising. In a sense it's even better than Telegram that allows you to just use usernames but you have to add a phone number anyway (also if the other Telegram user by any chance has your phone number in their contacts then your identity is revealed anyway).
But I'd say that Telegram's apps (mobile and desktop both) are superior too all the major IM apps around. I wish they could be more forthcoming about openness.
As far as I'm aware of, Facebook collects and stores all the meta-data WhatsApp generates. Which means, that it can provide a list of phone numbers, IP addresses, or even GPS coordinates(?) of the people who contacted the journalist at any specific time. So, even if the messages are encrypted, a person can still be tracked down.
myth_buster, lisper, & newscracker make interesting points.
In researching WhatsApp a while ago, I came across this in a Quora post "But one more point I want to stress here is that, though whatsapp is allowing end to end communication , it does not necessarily mean they can not analyse the encrypted data. in cryptography we call it Searchable Encryption." (https://www.quora.com/Now-that-WhatsApp-can-no-longer-read-y...)
I don't know whether it is accurate to WhatsApp, but it's certainly food for thought and also made me wonder how many other end-end encrypted systems use it.
I personally don't trust FB. WhatsApp is not open source, so I have to trust what FB says. I don't.
Whether or not it's open source is irrelevant to the trust issue. You would still have to look at the binary to check whether its behavior matches that of the putative source code. Either way, you end up examining the behavior of the compiled code.
Build it yourself and host/use your own app builds and server instances. But then I'll have trust the company I bought my VPS from to host my Matrix instance, isn't it?
It is not irrelevant. If you can't build the binary from code yourself you have no way to know if it is trustworthy. Step one in finding out if it is is to look at the source and then compile it. After that you can look if it does strange things because of something you missed in the code but without step one you might as well not start at all. It will always be at most guesswork.
Virtually no one who uses software compiles it themselves, so this is not a very interesting rebuttal.
Meanwhile, it's not 1994 anymore, and people who know how to look for bugs can (I know this is hard for some people to wrap their heads around) look inside of binaries and draw conclusions about how programs work. There's a name for it; it's a kind of engineering.
You can reverse engineer any Android app in very little time. Professionals use frameworks like Lobotomy, but you can get by with dex2jar and JD-GUI for most of it.
It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one.
EDIT: I ended up doing just that. It took roughly 5 minutes (most of that was making sure I had my PATH for Java set up correctly on this machine) to get decompiled Java code ready to inspect.
"It not being open source is a political argument, not a technical one."
If I can compare the open source to the reverse engineered code to see what I'm really using/getting, that seems like a technical advantage. Also, all of the reverse engineered code I've worked with has been difficult and time consuming to digest (missing var names, comments etc); open source gives me a technical advantage in analyzing and understanding the code. Lastly, looking at a companies open source lets me assess their technical sophistication and practices which also seems like a technical advantage.
I haven't spent much time thinking on this subject, but the political aspect seems to be the line of thinking that says: you will engender trust by making a project open source.
Is your reasoning similar?
Also are there good tools for reverse engineering iOS deployments?
> Also are there good tools for reverse engineering iOS deployments?
There are many; since apps are native on iOS a standard disassembler would work. But there are many more specialized tools, such as class-dump and Hopper.
I know Telegram isn't something truly "open" either (and just to mention, neither is Signal) but I don't need to reverse engineer Telegram app. I actually had its repo cloned and synced and had built and tested it couple of times. Though at the time I ended up not using the Telegram as among my contacts few were using it.
My point is open sourced code is much more readable and hence more accessible and you can build it yourself and use it most of the times.
Even if the message contents is encrypted, doesn't whatsapp still log the source and destination and their phone number and associate these with real persons? It should be trivial enough to figure out who delivered which tip by knowing a particular person sent something to that tip line.
Like lisper said above, you cannot really be certain of anything. Taken to an extreme, you can’t even be certain if the padlock icon on your browser signifying a secure HTTPS connection is truly secure or not. You decide to trust certain things with the assumption that everyone else out there is not out to get you, and that those who’re considered experts in this domain do practice honesty and that there are people who do care more about the rest of the population than their own paychecks.
In the case of WhatsApp, we do have public confirmation of the Signal team working with WhatsApp to implement end-to-end encryption. [1]
They should also add a strong recommendation that WhatsApp and Signal are better used from a burner phone and a disposable phone number. With phone (directory) aggregation platforms like Truecaller that collect many people’s names and numbers and also provide free lookups, certain people who want or need a higher degree of anonymity would end up being inadvertently exposed to the people at NYT.
Does anyone else think that Anonymous tips can sometimes be a two-edged blade if claims are not properly backed up with facts? Sometimes we see a lot of news articles and news regarding X, Y, Z topic from anonymous sources, being passed as legit news and reliable, but when you examine the news in more details, nothing that backs up such claims can be found. How can this be addressed in a way that doesn't expose those who provide the information, but at the same time, it ensures honest, and factual information is being published?
> Sometimes we see a lot of news articles and news regarding X, Y, Z topic from anonymous sources, being passed as legit news and reliable, but when you examine the news in more details, nothing that backs up such claims can be found.
Your implication is that because a story contains no named sources, the information is not legitimate, or not reliable. I would submit to you that this is exceedingly rare at a reputable newspaper like the New York Times, and although all newspapers are sometimes mislead by their sources, or otherwise get things wrong, when this happens at a paper like the Times, it is universally followed by a correction.
In other words, the Times is not going to print a story based on anonymous submissions without any further vetting, or investigation. They're going to seek independent corroboration, they're going to involve other experts, and they're going to ask questions of the principals.
First of all, the premise is wrong. Major corrections usually receive more prominent placement and greater exposure. Minor corrections are printed in the corrections section, with stories updated online and correction notices appended.
Second, the point is not that reputable newspapers perfectly correct their readership's understanding. The point is that reputable newspapers correct themselves. Newspapers reputations are built on that honesty, and astute readers will have an understanding of a paper's track-record of accuracy and corrections. Less astute readers will rely on those that do track such things.
It doesn't matter if they correct it after they've already sold the lie. The damage is done and most people won't read the correction.
After 9/11, New York Times wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's weapons of mass destruction were. MSM just takes Bush/Obama admin + intelligence communities claims at face value. It is supposed to be their job to fact-check govt, but instead they are just a rubber stamp for govt propaganda. The only admin they have been capable of properly fact-checking is Trump admin and that's only because their corporate sponsors & donors are anti-Trump.
When the intelligence community makes a claim, media fact-checks that claim by asking the SAME intelligence community to verify.
If they aren't willing to put in the work to be trustworthy, there's no reason to give them any trust.
I have a suspicion that the mainstream media writers purposely under-resarch their stories so they can get the story out as fast as possible & minimize liability for libel.
Libel laws say that if you write something about someone that you believe COULD be true, it's not libel.
So imagine you are a writer who discovers a sensationalized claim you really want to print. But it could be completely false.
If you fact-check it, and it turns out to be false, now you know it's false. You could be liable for libel if you decide to print it.
However, if you don't fact-check it, you get to print the claim because you sincerely believed it could be true. Also, you get the advantage of getting the story out quicker, and you can always change it later if someone complains.
As it happens, the relevant case law is New York Times Co vs. Sullivan. According to that case, libel liability still applies when the information published is both untrue, and was published "with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not."
In other words, a policy of publishing without investigation would not limit libel liability. If the information is false, and the publishers did not have a good-faith belief that it is true, then they might still be held liable.
I did a 10 second google. Here's a couple where the NYT issued their little correction as unobtrusively as possible, which happens often, after they enjoy the click-bait traffic the erroneous story give them.
I was just going to add that just based on the articles I read (in the NYT and elsewhere) that are within my field of expertise and how wrong they get basic facts, cause and Effect, etc. I don’t think I can trust them with reporting of other domains either.
News outlets across the board have entertainment value at best, nothing else.
Their business model is that they sell papers (or access to a website, or get ad views).
They can do this by reporting facts, but generally it is easier to do this by reporting stuff people want to read, which includes facts and non-facts and things that may or may not be factual. This also generally involves summaries which aren't factually true as they drop relevant details, but which are close enough that people tend to tolerate them (see any reporting on a scientific paper ever).
Also, an "an anonymous source said X" could be factual, but the implication is that X has some level of truth when the only known fact is that in reference to that X was said by an anonymous source.
Why doesn't the source you cite also have agendas? IME, those who attack everyone else as having an agenda and present themselves as the antidote - that act is propaganda in itself and they the most prone to it.
> the Times is not going to print a story based on anonymous submissions without any further vetting, or investigation. They're going to seek independent corroboration
Citation needed.
Here are some counterpoints to your assertion that they would not print a story not independently corroborated.
Suggesting that the Times “isn’t going to print a story..without further vetting” is based on some idealistic view of the Times, but not necessarily on a reality based on their history. Didn’t they also just print an anonymous op-ed, providing zero opportunity to challenge or verify any of the claims contained therein?
The Times is a reputable as any other news outlet, but Reuter’s they are not. They are laced with a history of subtle bias and outright dishonesty when it suits them.
I read through the top 3 links and would love to hear you elaborate more on how these are counterpoints to the assertion that the Times would not print a story not independently corroborated.
The first link regarding Jayson Blair is the clearest counterpoint, showing a Times reporter fabricating story. This is absolutely an example of the NYT failing. But the same Wikipedia article says that the NYT, on their own initiative, investigated and fired Jayson Blair in a very public manner.
> After internal investigations, The New York Times reported on Blair's journalistic misdeeds in an "unprecedented"[14] 7,239-word front-page story on May 11, 2003, headlined "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception."[2] The story called the affair "a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper."
To me, publishing Jayson Blair's articles is a huge mistake by the Times. But the way they handle it proves that they do hold their journalistic values in high regard.
The 2nd article itself admits that what the Times published is supported by many others in the media. (Their point is that the entire media is lying.) The audio proof that the 2nd article mentions is also not included, so I don't know if I should trust it more than I trust the Times.
The 3rd link is not easy to understand for me since there isn't a lot of context.
Anonymous sources that are quoted directly are known to the journalists; their identity is only concealed from readers. This is about anonymously passing information for further investigation.
They may 'accept the tip' and then try to verify/track it down with other sources (and say "I've heard X, can you confirm that for me?"), but no, a reputable journalist will never publish a quote from an anonymous source with no verification.
Unless they can verify it some other way, I highly doubt any reputable journalist would publish something like that. When a journalists publishes something based on a source that wishes to stay anonymous they are putting their career and reputation on the line.
A tip is just an investigative lead. "Hooker Chemical is dumping massive amounts of toxic waste at Love Canal" would be a tip. It would then be up to an investigative reporter to investigate, and report what the investigation uncovers.
You may be thinking of "unnamed sources" or "anonymous sources". Those people may be quoted on a factual basis, but the reporter has an obligation to obtain the same kind of confirmation of their information as any other investigative lead.
> A tip is just an investigative lead. "Hooker Chemical is dumping massive amounts of toxic waste at Love Canal" would be a tip.
Actually, that's not a tip by the NY Times definition:
A strong news tip will have several components. Documentation or evidence is essential. Speculating or having a hunch does not rise to the level of a tip.
That’s the job of (real) journalists. I would imagine the vast majority of content submitted to the Times via these channels never appears in print because it doesn’t pass scrutiny and/or isn’t relevant.
Somebody illustrious and learned once said something to the effect that “if somebody tells you it's raining outside, and somebody else tells you the sun is shining, your job as a journalist isn't to report that some people say one thing whereas others say something else, your job as a journalist is to go look out the window and report what the weather is actually doing”.
What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows roughly passed off as genuine journalism, but really it's pretty obvious that it's the lowest common denominator kind of gossip-spreading.
If you look at 24 hour cable news, I'm sure that's what you see. It's entertainment passed on as journalism. There's still good journalism going on if you know where to look. The New York Times, the Washington Post, for example, are incredibly informative and useful sources for news.
Neither the NYT or Washington Post questioned the Bush admin and intelligence communities claims about why the USA was going to war with Iraq even though it was public knowledge that the 9/11 attackers were all Saudis and it had nothing to do with 9/11. But the media helped them spin the Iraq war as part of the war on terrorism, even though Iraq was not exporting terrorism to the West, not until after they destabilized the region by taking out Saddam.
Instead, the NYT wrote an article about how dangerous Saddam's WMDs were and how he was supporting terrorism, even though it had nothing to do with 9/11. Nowadays they defend themselves by saying "everyone agreed at the time". It's not true.
Mainstream media is a rubber stamp for corporate and state interests, just propaganda. They rubber stamped Bush's war's just like they rubber stamped Obamas, they will probably rubber stamp Trump's too. Yes, they also contain true information, but they are still just corporate/state propaganda.
If they aren't willing to fact-check the govt for an issue as serious as going to war, especially with all the red-flags that were out there, like the fact that Colin Powell, a year prior to holding up anthrax in congress as "proof" that Iraq had WMDs, was giving speeches a year earlier claiming there was no evidence Saddam was making WMDs. Like the fact the Bush admin certainty about WMD was far greater than the actual intel communities claims. No one fact-checked them.
Your talking point is old enough to have finished high school by now, maybe it’s time to come up with a second example?
And, by the way, the NYT fired the reporter and an editor over that mistake, wrote numerous articles on how it happened, and instituted new rules to prevent similar things happening in the future.
I heard another version of this the other day, a great line that's apparently some newspaper's motto: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out first."
>What we have now is (mostly) talk-shows roughly passed off as genuine journalism, but really it's pretty obvious that it's the lowest common denominator kind of gossip-spreading.
And the problem is compounded in that the internet, for all of its glories, has also taught folks that their opinions/beliefs/dogma are just as valuable as actual facts.
I don't know what, how, or why. But the only two things different now to, say, the 80's in terms of bullshit journalism is its ability to reach people directly in a 'one-on-one' setting and its ability to be echoed with no challenge in online forums and the like.
> Sometimes we see a lot of news articles and news regarding X, Y, Z topic from anonymous sources
Those sources aren't "anonymous sources," they're more accurately called confidential sources.
You may see an story backed by no public sources. You then have to make a decision about whether you trust the publisher to have adequately checked the story using private sources.
If the newspaper gets information from a truly anonymous source (say a classified military memo), they need to verify that it's authentic before they publish. They may do that by checking as much of the memo's content as they can and calling up people in the Pentagon and asking if they've seen that particular memo. Those people may not be willing to confirm the memo publicly (because that may open them up to legal problems), but if if their identity is kept private it's less risk to them so they may be willing to confirm it.
Tough problem to solve upstream, particularly in a "first-to-publish" news environment.
Better fact-checking tools in the hands of the publisher is critical here. It's ultimately on the them to decide if it passes the smell test.
I'll give publishers the benefit of the doubt that they at least attempt to corroborate anonymous tips with other sources. Perhaps some more accessible forms of anonymous expert networks with a trust/reputation system built-in can help, though the cynic in me sees how easily platforms like that can be manipulated.
Harsher consequences for publishing false news is a slippery slope. It's necessary at a certain level, but quickly runs up a slippery slope that can end up with tightly state-controlled media like in other countries.
A strong news tip will have several components. Documentation or evidence is essential. Speculating or having a hunch does not rise to the level of a tip.
I would argue that people giving their names are inclined to only say certain things given the situation they are in. That would seem to outright eliminate a great deal of things that it would be good to know.
Usually good anonymous tips are the sort tell the journalists where to look, who to ask, what questions to ask, etc. Allegations that there's a conspiracy to turn everyone into commies by putting fluoride in the water aren't taken seriously unless they include some way for the journalists to validate the claims (official documentation, for example).
The NYTimes should be the last company anyone should be telling secrets to. We have social media. People should post it anonymously to social media than an establishment organization like the NYTimes.
Hell post it on HN. I trust HN and the mods here more than I trust the editors at the NYTimes.
Sure, social media isn't perfect. But lots of real news spread through social media too. Real news like the weinstein story that the nytimes squashed. That's the difference between social media and the nytimes. You can't silence truth on social media. You could spread lies, but you can't silence truth. Whereas news companies can silence truth and spread lies.
Also, news companies aren't immune to "fake news". The news industry have spread their fair share of "fake news". And their fake news causes wars and the suffering of millions of innocent people.
If you really cared about fake news, then you should be more worried about the news companies than social media. It's odd you are not. But I guess you trust a couple of highly biased editors tied to the establishment more than an open platform like HN. I frankly trust HN far more than the nytimes. HN isn't perfect, but you are far more likely to get the truth here than in the nytimes. Certainly the mods here do a better job of keeping things even-keeled and less biased.
>You can't silence truth on social media. You could spread lies, but you can't silence truth. Whereas news companies can silence truth and spread lies.
News outlets never had the ability to silence truth, just limit how easily it could spread. You could still self publish your truth or tell everyone you know, the same thing social media allows.
>If you really cared about fake news, then you should be more worried about the news companies than social media. It's odd you are not
Media companies are perfectly capable of using social media to spread their propaganda. It's likely easier, as it allows them to craft separate versions that appeal to different people.
> But lots of real news spread through social media too. Real news like the weinstein story that the nytimes squashed.
The Weinstein story was researched heavily by reporters for (years?) and published by the New Yorker and the New York Times, for which they jointly won the Pulitzer Prize.
For sources and journalists looking for more advice on how to manage both digital and physical security on the go. We built an open source app with simple lessons on it. Big update and iOS on the way.
What in the what. Oh come on, how can you go through all this effort writing how share secrets with them, and there's zero mention of an actual public key?
That's good to see they have it then! Shame they don't call it out on the actual article page.
To the user downvoting me: yeah sorry the original comment still stands and is 100% accurate. If you have something meaningful to add to the conversation actually add it.
They mention it indirectly on the article page, as they do mention encrypted e-mail, and on their tips page, PGP is the only method suggested for encrypted e-mail.
Edit: I do see the sub-linked page now, easily missed with it just being a hyper link on the phrase "tips page". But as my original comment mentioned, it's not on the article page (directly) at all.
To the user downvoting me: yeah sorry the original comment still stands and is 100% accurate. If you have something meaningful to add to the conversation actually add it.
Yeah, your original comment is 100% accurate. But is it so hard to click another link? You are technically correct but you are just doubling down to preserve your "correctness" instead of admitting you didn't look hard enough.
Also the departure of WhatsApp founders under uncertain terms, doesn't give me much confidence with usage of that app for clandestine operations.
Perhaps folks here who are well versed with the state of the app can chime in.