That’s not some kind of crypto denunciation against cosmopolitan diversity, but it is what it is and I do think there’s a there, there.

Compromise of the secret key is a whole other issue - revocation.

MITM of a key can be solved pretty well via web of trust techniques.

Apologies if the dialog is frustrating to read! As a “recovering cypherpunk”, I find these sorts of discussions animating, as long as they’re polite and technically focused! Much love!

I’ve always been enamored of the idea of DNS as a back end protocol to enable the former largely decentralized solution.

Bob looks up Alice and receives her key from Alice’s namespace within the DNS hierarchy, along with her trust claims. David then looks up Alice’s key within her namespace, sees a reference to endorsement by Bob, and can validate this by querying Bob’s namespace. David can also issue non-authoritative queries about Alice’s key to Bob’s DNS servers, ensuring that there is no mismatch between the query response received by Bob and the one received by David.

If Mallory manages to compromise Alice’s DNS, but not Bob’s, the result is a mismatch in query responses that both Bob and David can thus detect.

At scale, a MITM compromising a system like this would be difficult without compromise of a large number of independent namespaces, increasing the likelihood of detection via the non-authoritative queries.

The missing component in this arrangement is cryptographic security of DNS, which I cynically suspect is why the DNSsec working group was comprised of the usual suspects and eventually produced a protocol without query encryption. It could still be layered on by a protocol extension, however.

While motivating intent is always opaque to some extent, this would appear to be another form of a “flood the zone” approach, in my estimation.

Many officials who certainly know better are involved - let me put the question back to you: why do you think they’re using taxpayer dollars to fuel lies?

Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each other and read off some form of hash of the public key to each other.

A more complex variant would be something like PGP implemented, where Bob and Alice could both sign each others keys after this exchange, ensuring that someone who hadn’t met Bob but did trust Alice could inherit trust in Bob’s Alice-signed key.

You’ve stated unequivocally that I’m wrong, so now, please show your homework.

I think that Meta can afford as much PR as they would need to out-message this sort of BS, again if they were inclined to protect user privacy in the first place. Look at Apple.

Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what used to be entry level knowledge in “our thing” has evidently become so obscure.

What form of accountability are you suggesting is even being leveraged, here? No law could force Meta to backdoor its encryption, afaik. Public pressure would be unlikely to work.

Is Meta afraid of anything real, or is this just blame shifting via ungrounded speculation?

Both parties exchange public keys through the central service. Only the possessor of the respective (on device, Secure Enclave ideally) private keys can decrypt the messages encrypted to the public key. The process can also work in reverse, encrypting with the private key so only holders of the public key can decrypt: this is called “signing”.

Not my area of expertise, I should say!

China’s government is likewise not accountable to or easily fit into the framework of “a market”, for reasons not the least of which include it being explicitly anti-capitalist. Wealth hoarding does not accumulate political power in China, and those who attempt this play can and regularly do find themselves put back in their place - possibly a prison or a crematorium.

As for re-education “camps”, the US imprisons approximately 10% of its population - a huge number by any standards historical or contemporary - and virtually none of these are billionaires or governing elites, who are functionally immune to the systems of authority that “rehabilitate” regular Americans.