What’s up today? (Part 1)

WhatsUpToday

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I’m liking this a lot! :sunglasses:

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:stuck_out_tongue:

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Don’t be evil

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I want a SAFE Hacks!

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Nice idea but not much in it yet. And what’s the Solid Data Browser?

CoinDesk: Binance Reveals Plan to Launch Crypto Exchanges on Almost Every Continent.

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https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3062910/lenovo-companies-working-in-china-may-have-to-install-local-backdoors

SAFE Network in China is becoming less effective I suppose, once everybody has a backdoor installed in their operating system and/or bios.

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The OS isn’t really a problem, although a vast majority of people still choose to run the likes of Windows where there is not way of knowing what it actually does. There are alternatives that are very easy to install yourself. The BIOS or UEFI is more problematic, but e.g. Purism https://puri.sm delivers their hardware with Coreboot.

I think the hardware is the biggest problem. E.g. Intel’s chips have stuff running on them below the BIOS level.

Purism has apparently managed to disable that part of Intel’s chip, but it’s no walk in the park.

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The attractiveness of SAFE is that it is a solution for the masses. Grandma can install it and be safe. But Grandma and other normals will be using the OS and bios that comes on their PC/phone. If their friendly local government is corrupting those at the manufacturer, like Lenovo implies, most people will be vulnerable, even with SAFE.

That’s not to say all is lost. I doubt they will be turning on these backdoors for every single PC/phone. I suspect they are there only for use after the person has already drawn the gaze of government to themselves for some other action, social media post, or organization membership. The more people use SAFE for social media, news, etc, the less likelihood that their actions will draw the gaze of their government to have those backdoors activated.

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If their is a back door in our hardware how useful is SAFE??

That was sort of the point of my discussion. I believe it is still useful, since backdoors are not efficient data hoovers. If you stay under the radar with SAFE, your backdoor won’t have reason to be activated. But it is sad, none-the-less. Definitely we are engaged in an arms-race.

Those people who are engaged in high risk activities will purchase hardened hardware. The masses will have non-hardened hardware but still be more protected from data hoovering if they use SAFE than if they did not use SAFE, since with SAFE, they are less likely to draw government attention.

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Whose to say what will become a high risk activity with the way things are going. Wouldn’t surprise me if using SAFE was a high risk activity in years to come. Let’s say a back door was activated what would they be able to access?

Did you watch this video? Looks like many things may become high risk activity in the eyes of these megalomaniacs. Just trying to get myself as secure as possible.

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They couldn’t access anything on SAFE without your id and secret key. But if they can install software onto your computer, they can theoretically “watch” everything you type (including that secret key).

But again, they won’t be keyboard logging billions of people. You’ll have to draw their notice first.

High risk type folks will take steps to not be key-logged, perhaps using dongles of some sort to log in. But again, I’m talking about regular folks.

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I am just a regular folk (whatever that is) but maybe just being associated with an associate of a non regular folk would be enough to get me put on that list so I will not be taking any chances.

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I agree with @thc, it’s the bulk surveillance with the possibility of cross matching multiple datasets to infer behaviour (see this very scary video ^^ What’s up today? (Part 1) - #561 by 19eddyjohn75) that’s the really dangerous thing. This won’t be possible on SAFE to nearly the same degree. Even if some government could hack every endpoint, extracting each users data and piecing it all together into the same sort of giant datasets just wouldn’t be feasible. That’s the real strength of decentralisation - all data is held in its own self-contained bubble rather than stored in a few central repositories.

That said, this wouldn’t surprise me either, particularly somewhere like China where using a VPN can land you in jail. For this reason it’s important that SAFE traffic remains indistinguishable from other traffic.

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These really are frightening times we are heading into. How long before a ministry of truth is constructed somewhere around the world? Or is it already here with the “jail” city mentioned in @19eddyjohn75 video

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