France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU.
An amendment to the “Narcotrafic” law is moving to the French National Assembly. Remind your legislators that a backdoor for the good guys only is not possible.
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it will be funny when they will impose those backdoors to Matrix... France like Germany use Matrix for their diplomatic communication. If they add these backdoor to the project, it will be like: "Hey world! You know this very strong and very secured app we use to discuss important geopolitic matters that could trigger wars around the globe? Well, because we are soooo stupid, you can access it too... All our most top secrets message at your fingertip... Have fun!"
edit: typos
I had no idea they used Matrix. That's beyond hilarious. Surely they'll just make an exception for themselves or something.
Sounds like it's called "Tchap".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_%28protocol%29
In April 2018, the French Government announced plans to create their own instant messaging tool.[26] Work on the application based on Riot and Matrix protocol—called Tchap [fr] after French scientist Claude Chappe—had started in early 2018,[27] and the program was open-sourced and released on iOS and Android in April 2019.[28]
The Tchap project created a new open source encrypted communication tool for French public agents in order to improve information dissemination and ensure the security of the French government communication network.
At present, only agents of the central administration can create an account on Tchap, but the code source of the application is available for anyone under an open source license. Gradually, its use will be extended to all members of the French administrations, including regional and local administrations. According to Jérôme Ploquin, Tchap Project Manager at the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM), the French administration wanted to “deploy a messaging service which is secure and contains the professional features adapted to the work of a professional organisation or a public administration”.
As far as I know from working in one of those administrations previously, the adoption of Tchap failed because of the bad UX around key exchange and people went back to Microsoft Teams. I couldn't find any recent news about it in the French news. I would be curious to hear about someone using Tchap today.
I think deploying this backdoored version without publishing the code for it would violate elements new agpl
Well, we already did basically that quite successfully in the past. Wikipedia.org – Operation Rubicon
That seems to be closed-source tho
it will be funny when they will impose those backdoors to Matrix
How do you even impose backdoors onto an open source service that can be hosted decentralized?
by saying "accept this MR or we will ban any app using your code"... :/
Yes, but when I am running my own server, what can force me to build a binary that contains the backdoor?
1.5 Millions Euros if you are caught :/
Yeah, I'mma have to see that before I believe that. Otherwise I'd drop anonymous hints left and right for every single bit of IoT that runs against an MQTT or XMPP server hosted and forgotten somewhere back in 2018. That backlash would shake them awake.
Looks like I will have to move away from tedomum.net
I wish I'd known about them earlier. Their services look awesome. Are there any alternatives that you know about?
