this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2024
401 points (97.9% liked)

Technology

58123 readers
3890 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 189 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Fuck this human

Tldr; Asshole used encrypted everything and Tor to create and spread csam. Government isn't disclosing how they caught him

[–] Wilzax 107 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you distribute encrypted materials you also need to distribute a means of decryption. I'm willing to bet a honeypot was used to trick him into distributing his csam right to the government hinself.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

True. Or it could have been a backdoor in his phone, or the full running browser in his sim card, or the backdoor into his CPU chips... Maybe they do old fashioned police work for these cases and only use the pegasus spyware for others?

Pretty silly to do anything illegal on a computer when we know how flawed they are, imo

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Hey, could I get some info on the

Full running browser in his SIM card

Thing?

I'm quite curious and haven't been able of finding anything on the internet about it

[–] [email protected] 96 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Neither Tor nor end-to-end encrypted messengers will cover the endpoints. It's possible that they caught him using good old fashioned detective work. You don't need a software back door for that.

[–] mkwt 11 points 2 weeks ago

Well it probably wasn't a Vic Mackey-style rubber hose attack, because it sounds like this chump is getting hauled into court.

[–] CrazyLikeGollum 82 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

He didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

To be clear, it’s encrypted*.

* If you enable it

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don't have that feature.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

That's what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn't apply to group chats though. I don't use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It's a messaging app so I'm curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago

Telegram groups are not E2E.

Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).

There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.

Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it's not open source, we can't really verify it

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.

That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

It works well in Matrix, and you can restrict who joins on that platform.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If you restrict it, then it isn't public. I'm not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Right, I'm just saying that other platforms give you the option of E2EE group chats, which makes sense if you know your group will remain fixed to a certain size. For truly public groups, yeah, encryption just adds a lot of processing overhead without much benefit.

I, personally, would prefer a platform that gives me the option rather than doesn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

They got it by running a honeypot exit node like they always do

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

my guess is that a large number of tor exit nodes is run by government agencies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

.onions: am i a joke to you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Certainly some are. How many is an entertaining question.

[–] Angry_Autist 2 points 2 weeks ago

It's better they don't disclose it and catch more people doing the same.

I'm all for transparency but if that means less caught child molesters, I'm ok with a little obfuscation, even from the fucking pigs.