Significantly overblown. Most of the opened github issues were by the same person. Seems someone doesn’t like it and is trying to spam the issue and frame it as a bigger deal than it really is.
In a trailblazing new study, researchers have discovered bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated — nanoparticles so infinitesimally tiny they cannot be seen under a microscope....
You can install the Jellyfin app for Android TV and it works really well. Additionally, if you use YouTube, you can sideload SmartTube, which removes ads and auto-skips sponsored segments on some videos.
I have this setup for my parents, if that gives you an idea of how well it works for “non-technical” people. At home I have a similar setup except I’m using the Nvidia shield, which is pricier, but I would recommend it if you have a 4k TV - it uses “AI” (ML, really) to upscale content to 4k and it works really well.
If you’re on Firefox on desktop/laptop, check out Bypass Paywall [0]. It was removed from the firefox add-on store due to a DMCA claim [1], but can be manually installed (and auto updates) from gitlab. The dev even provides instructions on how to add custom filters to uBlock Origin [2], so you don’t have to add another extension but still get some benefit.
Although completely believable and in-line knowing Meta/Facebook’s history, is there any evidence to support this claim? I’m sure it’s, unfortunately, just as easily deployed to specific targets so it may be hard to replicate, but this is pretty huge.
Maine barred Donald Trump from the primary ballot Thursday, making it the second state in the country to block the former president from running again under a part of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office....
I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?...
And while they wait for RCS, they can just install Signal. Signal works and is funded by a non-profit who puts in more work to know as little as possible about you than any other company/org out there.
Used to but not anymore. Anything sent over Signal is guaranteed to be secure. SMS/RCS doesn’t provide any guarantees as SMS is not encrypted by default and RCS clients are all closed-source.
same here, but I suspect there’s a significant amount of people that will be put off. She could have just supported the campaign financially without announcing anything, that would have been great.
Tl;Dr: Beeper has rolled out a new app, Beeper Mini, just for iMessage. It claims that the new app is a privacy improvement over the standard Beeper app (now called “Beeper Cloud”)...
Gonna repeat myself since iMessage hasn’t improved one bit after four years. I also added some edits since attacks and Signal have improved.
iMessage has several problems:
iMessage uses RSA instead of Diffie-Hellman. This means there is no forward secrecy. If the endpoint is compromised at any point, it allows the adversary who has
a) been collecting messages in transit from the backbone, or
b) in cases where clients talk to server over forward secret connection, who has been collecting messages from the IM server
to retroactively decrypt all messages encrypted with the corresponding RSA private key. With iMessage the RSA key lasts practically forever, so one key can decrypt years worth of communication.
I’ve often heard people say “you’re wrong, iMessage uses unique per-message key and AES which is unbreakable!” Both of these are true, but the unique AES-key is delivered right next to the message, encrypted with the public RSA-key. It’s like transport of safe where the key to that safe sits in a glass box that’s strapped against the safe.
The RSA key strength is only 1280 bits. This is dangerously close to what has been publicly broken. On Feb 28 2023, Boudet et. al broke a 829-bit key.
1280-bit RSA key has 79 bits of symmetric security. 829-bit RSA key has ~68 bits of symmetric security. So compared to what has publicly been broken, iMessage RSA key is only 11 bits, or, 2048 times stronger.
The same site estimates that in an optimistic scenario, intelligence agencies can only factor about 1507-bit RSA keys in 2024. The conservative (security-consious) estimate assumes they can break 1708-bit RSA keys at the moment.
(Sidenote: Even the optimistic scenario is very close to 1536-bit DH-keys OTR-plugin uses, you might want to switch to OMEMO/Signal protocol ASAP).
Under e.g. keylength.com, no recommendation suggest using anything less than 2048 bits for RSA or classical Diffie-Hellman. iMessage is badly, badly outdated in this respect.
iMessage uses digital signatures instead of MACs. This means that each sender of message generates irrefutable proof that they, and only could have authored the message. The standard practice since 2004 when OTR was released, has been to use Message Authentication Codes (MACs) that provide deniability by using a symmetric secret, shared over Diffie-Hellman.
This means that Alice who talks to Bob can be sure received messages came from Bob, because she knows it wasn’t her. But it also means she can’t show the message from Bob to a third party and prove Bob wrote it, because she also has the symmetric key that in addition to verifying the message, could have been used to sign it. So Bob can deny he wrote the message.
Now, this most likely does not mean anything in court, but that is no reason not to use best practices, always.
The digital signature algorithm is ECDSA, based on NIST P-256 curve, which according to safecurves.cr.yp.to is not cryptographically safe. Most notably, it is not fully rigid, but manipulable: “the coefficients of the curve have been generated by hashing the unexplained seed c49d3608 86e70493 6a6678e1 139d26b7 819f7e90”.
iMessage is proprietary: You can’t be sure it doesn’t contain a backdoor that allows retrieval of messages or private keys with some secret control packet from Apple server
iMessage allows undetectable man-in-the-middle attack. Even if we assume there is no backdoor that allows private key / plaintext retrieval from endpoint, it’s impossible to ensure the communication is secure. Yes, the private key never leaves the device, but if you encrypt the message with a wrong public key (that you by definition need to receive over the Internet), you might be encrypting messages to wrong party.
You can NOT verify this by e.g. sitting on a park bench with your buddy, and seeing that they receive the message seemingly immediately. It’s not like the attack requires that some NSA agent hears their eavesdropping phone 1 beep, and once they have read the message, they type it to eavesdropping phone 2 that then forwards the message to the recipient. The attack can be trivially automated, and is instantaneous.
So with iMessage the problem is, Apple chooses the public key for you. It sends it to your device and says: “Hey Alice, this is Bob’s public key. If you send a message encrypted with this public key, only Bob can read it. Pinky promise!”
Proper messaging applications use what are called public key fingerprints that allow you to verify off-band, that the messages your phone outputs, are end-to-end encrypted with the correct public key, i.e. the one that matches the private key of your buddy’s device.
EDIT: This has actually has some improvements made a month ago! Please see the discussion in replies.
When your buddy buys a new iDevice like laptop, they can use iMessage on that device. You won’t get a notification about this, but what happens on the background is, that new device of your buddy generates an RSA key pair, and sends the public part to Apple’s key management server. Apple will then forward the public key to your device, and when you send a message to that buddy, your device will first encrypt the message with the AES key, and it will then encrypt the AES key with public RSA key of each device of your buddy. The encrypted message and the encrypted AES-keys are then passed to Apple’s message server where they sit until the buddy fetches new messages for some device.
Like I said, you will never get a notification like “Hey Alice, looks like Bob has a brand new cool laptop, I’m adding the iMessage public keys for it so they can read iMessages you send them from that device too”.
This means that the government who issues a FISA court national security request (stronger form of NSL), or any attacker who hacks iMessage key management server, or any attacker that breaks the TLS-connection between you and the key management server, can send your device a packet that contains RSA-public key of the attacker, and claim that it belongs to some iDevice Bob has.
You could possibly detect this by asking Bob how many iDevices they have, and by stripping down TLS from iMessage and seeing how many encrypted AES-keys are being output. But it’s also possible Apple can remove keys from your device too to keep iMessage snappy: they can very possibly replace keys in your device. Even if they can’t do that, they can wait until your buddy buys a new iDevice, and only then perform the man-in-the-middle attack against that key.
To sum it up, like Matthew Green said[1]: “Fundamentally the mantra of iMessage is “keep it simple, stupid”. It’s not really designed to be an encryption system as much as it is a text message system that happens to include encryption.”
Apple has great security design in many parts of its ecosystem. However, iMessage is EXTREMELY bad design, and should not be used under any circumstances that require verifiable privacy.
In comparison, Signal
Uses Diffie Hellman + Kyber, not RSA
Uses Curve25519 that is a safe curve with 128-bits of symmetric security, not 79 bits like iMessage.
Uses Kyber key exchange for post quantum security
Uses MACs instead of digital signatures
Is not just free and open source software, but has reproducible builds so you can be sure your binary matches the source code
Features public key fingerprints (called safety numbers) that allows verification that there is no MITM attack taking place
Does not allow key insertion attacks under any circumstances: You always get a notification that the encryption key changed. If you’ve verified the safety numbers and marked the safety numbers “verified”, you won’t even be able to accidentally use the inserted key without manually approving the new keys.
Memos - Easily capture and share your great thoughts. Open Source and Free forever (www.usememos.com)
Check out the live demo at demo.usememos.com
Organic maps which claims to be ad-free was marked by F-Droid as “Containing ads”
Here is their pull request (with plenty of users negative comments)...
Bottled water contains thousands of nanoplastics so small they can invade and damage the body’s cells, study says (www.cnn.com)
In a trailblazing new study, researchers have discovered bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated — nanoparticles so infinitesimally tiny they cannot be seen under a microscope....
is Jellyfin worth it if you have a DLNA server set up already?
I guess its as the title asks, is it worth hosting Jellyfin if you already have a DLNA server set up?
What are some things that Linux can't do, but Windows can?
African elephant populations stabilise in southern heartlands (www.theguardian.com)
13 Feet Ladder (github.com)
A site similar to 12ft.io but is self hosted and works with websites that 12ft.io doesn’t work with....
Heads up. Facebook keylogs your passwords. (midwest.social)
Chinese speaking Lemmy instances?
Does anyone know any Chinese speaking Lemmy instances?...
Saints Row – free to keep today on Epic Games Store (store.epicgames.com)
Donald Trump removed from Maine primary ballot by secretary of state (www.washingtonpost.com)
Maine barred Donald Trump from the primary ballot Thursday, making it the second state in the country to block the former president from running again under a part of the Constitution that prevents insurrectionists from holding office....
What search engine do you recommend that isn't Google or Bing?
I’m still trying to de-Google my life, little by little. I don’t trust Bing for similar reasons. DDG is feeling shady of late. What’s the search engine you all recommend that I can inject into my daily life? Is there perhaps a search engine that is focused on code, or have we just all moved on to AI for searching?...
Today was Christmas Day. Did you leave the house? Which establishments were open today? Which were closed?
Beeper ready to wave white flag if its latest iMessage fix gets shut down (www.androidauthority.com)
Delfin: native Jellyfin client for linux (merv.news)
flathub.org/apps/cafe.avery.Delfin
House votes to formalize impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden with floor vote (www.cnn.com)
Romanian court rejects influencer Andrew Tate's request to return assets seized in trafficking case (apnews.com)
Helmond-based solar car maker Lightyear suspends car production, switches to building solar roofs (siliconcanals.com)
She’s with him: Hillary Clinton steps out as a key player in Biden’s re-election effort (www.nbcnews.com)
Beeper makes big privacy claims for its newest app (blog.beeper.com)
Tl;Dr: Beeper has rolled out a new app, Beeper Mini, just for iMessage. It claims that the new app is a privacy improvement over the standard Beeper app (now called “Beeper Cloud”)...