Alec Muffett Profile picture
Sep 4, 2018 13 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Australia: "The Assistance and Access Bill 2018" - the people of Australia have SIX DAYS in which to register their feelings on encryption back doors: homeaffairs.gov.au/about/consulta… #straya #endtoend
A Bill for an Act to amend the law relating to telecommunications, computer access warrants and search warrants, and for other purposes #otherPurposes
A technical capability notice may require the provider to do acts or things by way of giving help to ASIO or an interception agency in relation to…
Oh my; the ancillary blogpost drips with irony:

To increase the strength of private institutions to attack by foreign surveillance, it is necessary to diminish their resistance to privacy invasion by ourselves or any other party: homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national…
It literally says "Foreign interference threatens […to] interfere with private-sector decision making", from the perspective of wanting to interfere with private-sector software architecture decisions.
"S'right, mate, you get a free choice in -where- you put a backdoor into your software and what shape it is; can't say fairer than that…"

homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national…
Australia: here's your chance to tell the Government why backdoors in software make -everyone- insecure:

** The Government welcomes your feedback. Submit any comments to assistancebill.consultation@homeaffairs.gov.au by 10 September 2018. **
I was architect & team lead for Facebook Messenger Secret Conversations (ie: End-to-End Crypto) — if this perp was using Snapchat, it strongly suggests that he has the operational security nouse of a pineapple.

Snapchat is not an "encrypted communication method"; it's a cesspit.
Disparagement aside, though: Snap have a perfectly decent law-enforcement page and will offer Australian law enforcement help under MLATs, and they can actively "spy" on named users; it would be interesting to know why this was not sufficient: snap.com/en-GB/safety/s…
Given that the Perp was using Snapchat, his use of Messenger was likely equally capable of being subpoenaed under MLAT using the Facebook's law enforcement portal. Again, it would be good to know why Vic police found this insufficient: facebook.com/records/login/
Quote: « Victoria Police was unable to access evidence which would have enabled them to secure a successful prosecution and identify further victims » — incorrect; metadata "fanout" of whom the Perp has been interacting with is known to Facebook in all circs. Just -ask- them.
Reading this, I must ask myself which of the Australian Gov't, or else the Victoria Police, are demonstrating either incompetence (in investigation) or misrepresentation (to seek to shift public opinion) - investigation is entirely possible, potential other victims identifiable:

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More from @AlecMuffett

Oct 5, 2018
Re: @timberners_lee's #Solid / @SolidMit

Hi @robertscammell!

More interesting that Facebook, I used to work on TheMine!Project*, a highly influential, much-plagiarised & ultimately unsuccessful stab at personal information stores, from 2006-2011.

*themineproject.org
If you want to know my opinion of how @timberners_lee's #Solid will impact "tech giants", watch this video (actually, x3) from 2010; the bulletpoints are:

- facebook killers, aren't
- there's plenty of room for alternatives
- first it must grow

The media loves zero-sum, david/goliath stories, and thereby often causes doom ("ello") & even tragically suicidal levels of stress ("diaspora*") to people who are foolish enough to pitch themselves/their platforms as the antithesis of "social media giantism; so do please beware.
Read 7 tweets
Aug 5, 2018
Hey! You remember that piece where I was randomly asked to respond in a 2…3 hour window, about "fixing" Facebook? Well, it's out, and I've found it!
And, of course, like every other Associated Press piece, it is broadly republished in many newspapers, under mostly-the-same-headlines:
You get the same copy at CTV in Canada:
Read 11 tweets
Jul 30, 2018
<pops open bonnet of car>
Mark: "There you go, there's the engine. 4 cylinder petrol engine"
@CommonsCMS: "Where are the horses?"
Mark: "Horses?"
CMS: "We heard it's a 100 Horsepower engine."
Mark: "That's just a metaphor…?"
.@CommonsCMS: "No, we know there are horses. That engine is a black box. You're not being transparent about where the horses are."
Mark: "But that's not how cars really work…"
CMS: "Everyone knows that cars are driven by horsepower. We want to see the horses." #algorithms
Author's Note: this may sound like whimsy, but it's only a few years since I had the following conversation with a member of a London-based "civil society" campaigning organisation:
Read 9 tweets
Jul 27, 2018
HEREWITH: a _different_ argument about why it's easier to put a man on the moon than to have backdoorable cryptography at scale. This fine article got posted by Techdirt a couple days ago…
And it has received reasonable praise, commentary, and dad-jokes from the usual crypto suspects:
And it quotes the highly respectable @mattblaze who as-ever properly demolishes the argument on its own terms of groundless aspiration:
Read 15 tweets
Jul 9, 2018
While we're on the topic of scale: every so often I have the misfortune of having to listen to some politician or former civil servant* demanding that people "NEED TO LEARN THE VALUE OF THEIR PERSONAL DATA, GODDAMNIT!".

*eg: ex-GCHQ
This one can be quite quick:
- Facebook
- About 2 Billion users
- Annual revenue 2017: $40.653 Billion

prnewswire.com/news-releases/…
Here's simple division as a rough guide: your data is worth about $20

About $20 per annum per user.

Let's implausibly assume that you're a heavy user, and are worth double that, so that you're actually worth $40; that means your value to Facebook would be (40/12) = $3.33/month.
Read 5 tweets
Jul 7, 2018
Regards #Article13, I wrote up a little command-line false-positive emulator; it tests 10 million events with a test (for copyrighted material, abusive material, whatever) that is 99.5% accurate, with a rate of 1-in-10,000 items actually being bad.
For that scenario - all of which inputs are tuneable - you can see that we'd typically be making about 50,000 people very upset, by miscategorising them as copyright thieves or perpetrators of abuse:
But let's vary the stats: @neilturkewitz is pushing a 2017 post by very respected fellow geek and expert @paulvixie in which Paul speaks encouragingly about a 1-to-2% error rate; let's split the difference, use 1.5% errors, ie: 98.5% accuracy: circleid.com/posts/20170420…
Read 23 tweets

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