>Some of the mobile applications that have been blocked include Crypviser, Enigma, Safeswiss, Wickrme, Mediafire, Briar, BChat, Nandbox, Conion, IMO, Element, Second line, Zangi, Threema, and others.
> While investigating one of these channels, it was discovered that the app did not have a representative in India, making it challenging to monitor activities on the platform.
This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
> This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
Not really. At least, I'm not convinced. Signal for instance does not have public channels like Matrix has, maybe that's the big difference. Signal's code can also be audited if in doubt (well, actually, Signal could always provide altered binaries on the App Store and Google Play Store, you'd have to build it yourself to be sure - though they do have reproducible builds for Android [1]).
How many people are:
- auditing signal source code
- recompiling the signal client to make sure they haven't tampered binaries.
I remember a blog post from signal showing how to build a compilation environment to validate the source but it was itself relying on docker images that you should first rebuild yourself to make sure the compiler and any other dependencies are the same as the upstream ones.
There was this statement that what's happening more or less proves that Signal & co has backdoors.
That's a guess but the good thing is that we can check.
It takes one person to do it. Not everybody has to do it.
If I remember correctly, binaries sent to the Play Store are signed by the developer so Google can't really temper with the binary themselves, or they would need to modify Android so it ignores the problem. But at this point, this means Android itself is backdoored.
(Which I don't exclude, btw - we need to trust a whole host of binaries for the phone drivers, and the hardware itself. At this point the issue is deeper than just signal though)
I believe Google now can do the app signing. They seem to encourage developers to upload keys [0]. The stated reason is to generate dynamic packages based on device details.
I don't remember the details but I believe it is their intention to eventually remove the ability for developers to sign their own packages.
Also, if that were true, there wouldn't be a reason to ban Element or these other apps in the first place.
Reproducible builds, combined with Android's developer-signed binaries, means that you don't _need_ to be super-vigilant to detect backdoors. You can investigate binaries after the fact (especially since virtually every version of popular apps is archived on third-party apk sites), and see that the signed build is not reproducible and at that point you can very easily dig into the binary to see which changes were made.
audited for what? what is this signal fanboyism online when there are competing products doing the same thing? if whatsapp is using signal protocol then by effect isn't it as secure as signal? if whatsapp is introducing attack vectors, then they are not as secure as signal.
But all that is a moot point. Indian government wants a representative in india for all the apps which they can throw in the jail or fine or arrest or beat up if their app is used to disseminate information the ruling party finds unpalatable. There is no terrorism threat. If whatsapp is e2ee, why aren't criminals using it? one would argue that it is being monitored and anyone doing any terrorist activity gets auto reported so where is e2ee in this? what happened to that?
the government wants element/threema/telegram/whatsapp/signal to have a rep who will give them backdoor access and dance to their tune or they will cut off their money supply viz a viz, ban from the huge indian market. Telegram and whatsapp have bowed down to the supreme clown so they are after the rest of the apps now.
reproducibility is nothing if the government can't push down on someone's neck. They want a totalitarian state where any dissent is seen as a criminal offense and people are today in jails for doing that.
public channels is nonsense argument. the boogeyman terrorists wont use public channels will they?
second thing, there is no requirement of using a mobile number with matrix. That is an amazing tool with the indian government. They just need the account holders' mobile which whatsapp and telegram are happy to share to save their asses and it takes a matter of seconds to find the person. They then employ the "xkcd $5 wrench attack" and the game is over.
These apps don't mandate the use of a mobile number so that is what they are after.
> what is this signal fanboyism online when there are competing products doing the same thing?
You are completely misreading me. I actually prefer Element/Matrix than Signal (and I use both). But that does not matter one bit, so I hadn't mentioned it so far.
I'm a fanboy of nothing, that's not how I work. Take it easy.
> if whatsapp is using signal protocol then by effect isn't it as secure as signal?
WhatsApp is closed source. We only have Facebook's words for trusting it. Which is a bit weak if ask me.
i am currently being blocked from accessing element.io because this ban is directly affecting me. That is why i am able to speak on it.
my matrix access has not stopped but i guess it probably will in the next few days. There are thousands of matrix servers so being connected isn't an issue.
The issue is specifically making the government understand that e2ee is necessary for the very reason they do not want it in the first place.
terrorism is never an issue. the target, like china is on dissent and these are just propaganda
It is not banned since years where I live and you can say whatever you want to anyone strange you are behaving like every one in entire country is facing same issues . You should ask someone to visit there and feel the terror. Who can be killed anytime. First learn to stay with others.
> Few years who when India unilaterally changed the status of Kashmir
You must not know how laws work. Kashmir agreed to join India in 1948. It was given a special status, enshrined in Article 370 of the Constitution of India.
Now, that "special status" has always bothered a lot of Indians; what's so special about Kashmir? Why not any of the other 537 states that formed India in 1947?
There were certain conditions on which Article 370 could be removed. Those conditions were met in 2019 and the Central Government took the decision to remove Article 370 to much rejoicing in areas like Ladakh and Jammu. This was challenged in the Indian Supreme Court (the final arbiter of things Constitutional) and found to be valid.
What you are saying seems to be factual true, but for context one should probably add, that the only other option would have been Pakistan. Whose troops were already inside Kashmir.
Independence, which is what most Kashmiris likely would have preferred, was not on the table offered to them, by any of the bigger empires around them. And the Kashmir independence movement in its whole, seems to be considered terrorism by india since day one.
There were many other independent to semi independent nations in India then who agreed to join India due to various forms of pressure. E.g. south Kerala Travancore was a princely state where the king gave up the throne and joined India, Bhutan was a princely state and became an independent kingdom. What makes Kashmir special. It could've stayed independent and gotten destroyed I guess. Who knows, speculative history.
Depends on your definition of destroyed I guess, point was various events and conditions led to nations joining India and Kashmir shouldn't have special status because of whatever conditions at the time. About independence etc, I'm not diving into fantasy territory lol.
This was a very controversial and shady decision.
While legally the conditions were met, according to the Supreme Court, I understood it was only possible because there was no elected government in Kashmir at that moment, and it has been put under direct supervision of the central government. But correct me if I misremembered or misinterpreted of course.
Legally it was defensible. That's what matters. Was it controversial? Sure.
But India has several "union territories". Kashmir is not unique.
On the other hand, citizens of Jammu and Ladakh were overjoyed, so there lots of people who supported it.
Now Kashmir is getting tons of investment. They'll be spending nearly a billion dollars on building metros in Srinagar. Such progress would not have been possible under the old regime.
> People have been arrested for posting dissent, for having VPN apps on their phones.
This is only going to get worse, and spread to other countries.
We need a real, reliable, decentralized solution, but we also need a solution that allows plausible deniability.
So if some cop looks at a phone, they can't see anything that would arouse suspicion.
A custom rom masquerading as an official Android release, with some kind of secret set of actions to launch an app, and a way to instantly hide all traces of it like a boss key.
Did you know TikTok was forced to form a company in America so it could comply with American rules?
And BTW: the reason America does not care as much about these apps is because they have deeper hooks into phones and can get the data without worrying about encryption. They get their hands on the messages before they're even encrypted.
I know, magic, right?
Signal is e2ee. The point of e2ee is that you can not trust the backend code (except for clear data it actually manipulates - which is still an issue indeed - Message contents are encrypted though)
This is the case for any e2ee solutions. For instance my company develops CryptPad [1], which is a full open source office suite with e2ee. The server admins can't access your content and you don't need to trust the backend, which just passes messages and store encrypted messages. This is the whole point. e2ee has drawbacks: it's very difficult, if not impossible, to provide indexed search for encrypted content on the server, the client needs to do it which might be impractical.
That still does not change anything though. The backend is unverifiable, that's a fact. Why talk about E2EE, I wasn't really talking about that.
Signal for a whole year was running a different server code and nobody even could tell that they added some cryptocoin stuff. On top of that, metadata, server connection and anything other than the message content is all at the mercy of the server owner.
Of course it does. Just like PGP works fine over untrusted channels - like if I posted a gnupg ascii-armored message here.
e2ee makes all the difference - if two trusted and mutually authenticated clients are communicating with proper e2ee - the best an attacker can do is traffic analysis and denial of service...?
"the best an attacker can do is traffic analysis and denial of service...? "
That's already a lot. If the evil secret police knows when and with whom you texted, then they don't even need to know the text of the messages, to link you to the opposition. And then just extract you and then the password with force to get the rest.
It certainly is a lot. It's enough for a drone strike.
But almost by definition, if you have a back-end, there will be meta-data.
There's been a few attempts at getting around it, with "one-to-many" (eg opaque PGP posts to Usenet groups), Mixmasters (remailers) or onion routing. None are AFAIK truly practical with a state-level adversary.
e2ee is a good start, that doesn't mean you don't need to analyse the risks.
That's the interesting thing about being E2EE. You don't need to verify the backend. This is a private key and ETH wallet with a separator that is obvious on decryption: YSBwcml2YXRlIGtleSBhbmQgRVRIIHdhbGxldCB3aXRoIGEgc2VwYXJhdG9yIHRoYXQgaXMgb2J2aW91cyBvbiBkZWNyeXB0aW9uCg==
For a while I did run a fork of the Signal Server. Beyond the sheer difficulty getting it to run without the server being updated for a year during the mobilecoin launch, it was extremely disconcerting to see PHONE NUMBERS spread throughout the log messages. It doesn't take much imagination to see how you can build a network of who you are talking to (etc.) from this log information.
While it is quite possible that they had some non-default log configuration (and hopefully the metadata leaking in the logs is fixed), if you can't run the server you can't check what data is being leaked.
Take the E2EE claim with a grain of salt if it is difficult to run a server.
> ...it was extremely disconcerting to see PHONE NUMBERS spread throughout the log messages. It doesn't take much imagination to see how you can build a network of who you are talking to (etc.) from this log information.
The intent of Signal is to provide confidentiality of message content, not any sort of anonymity. This covers like 90+% of user's threat models and it's focusing on one problem makes it very effective at solving that problem. If one also needs anonymity then communication should happen over something like Tor or I2P.
If, as we are saying, the client code is public and one can theoretically analyze the code and prove that messages that go out are indeed only going out encrypted, then that must change something here? At that point at least, you can only be suspicious of the cryptography itself, but I believe that is public too.
> This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
More likely: the government doesn't want to cause 'too much' discomfort among ordinary citizens. The decision to not block popular apps such as WhatsApp is probably purely political.
> the government doesn't want to cause 'too much' discomfort among ordinary citizens
This! I've yet to meet an Indian who doesn't have WhatsApp and we all know that pretty much every Indian with a phone uses it. We're not talking about a little discomfort, we're talking a lot. There's almost half a billion users. Government can't bad WhatsApp without a major freakout, so they're going after small players. It wasn't long ago that even Signal AND WhatsApp were pushing back against these laws and what resulted is more Signal downloads (tens of millions of users in India)
National security trumps "discomfort to citizens" every time ... otherwise all of us would have revolted by now for wasting hours in airport because of the security checks.
> When did you last see offline protests against airport security theater?
Isn't that what I am saying too? We accept the huge discomfort because we feel it is important and in our national interest! However important WhatsApp is, it is just a platform. If it is killed by a ban, people will just migrate to another platform and that's a lot more easier to do than give up on the benefits of flying by air. The only reason WhatsApp is allowed to function is because they are willing to provide a backdoor to the indian government - and that's easy to do when all the communication goes through their server and they handle the keys.
Yes. It is said the Colonial British used to say The sun never sets in the British Empire.
In today's context with WhatsApp, The sun never rises without a billion GOOD MORNING messages and another billion GOOD MORNING TO YOU TOO replies on WhatsApp in India /s
I am an indian who doesn't use WhatsApp or Facebook. It has never inconvenienced me - only WhatsApp users are inconvenienced when I ask them to SMS or email me. If the government bans WhatsApp today, most indians will simply switch to RCS or other platforms.
> This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
Spot the user who thinks the Christian apologist must be on to something because if the story doesn't make any sense that means it must be true...
Is it? Or is it that they’re starting from clients with low usage rates & little to no backing, which would be easier to attack? And / or they’re going at it network bu network?
> This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.
"Monitor activities" can also mean police investigators writing Telegram or whatever "hey, we found evidence that <illegal activity> is regularly occurring in channel ID X, here are the permanent links/IDs of example posts, please consider closing the channel or barring access to it from India or otherwise we will enforce compliance against the legal representative".
It's basically the same stuff that the German NetzDG or the upcoming EU DSA/DMA laws are.
Considering that many posts here just complaining about BJP, I just wisen them up by saying that it's bipartisan, so kinda useless seething over one party.
Hindutva may be more about culture than biology but the best descriptor I can find is "völkisch nationalism" which doesn't have a good English translation ("Volk" being a more abstract idea than ethnicity but more tangible than cultural identity): the idea of Muslims as a residual contaminant of Islamic colonialism that must be excised to restore the purity of a Hindu India strongly resembles the "blood and soil" ideology of Nazi Germany which sought to restore the "birthright" of the "Aryan race" despite the majority of Germans not being considered "pure Aryans" (and declarations of "Aryan-ness" often being more pragmatic than scientific because the entire idea was based on mythology not actual history).
I could have called them fascist as many scholars agree that Hindutva should be considered a fascist ideology in its structure and application despite having no direct lineage from Italian fascism but then someone would have pointed out that "it's not actually fascism" and we could have debated that definition instead.
It's a nationalist populist movement that attempts to displace one cultural and ethnic minority it deems as invasive by empowering another it deems pure while maintaining a pretense of secularism and democracy and it does so by promising to restore an imagined historical greatness and a return to "tradition". Call it ethnonationalist or fascist, either way it would be the obvious bad guy in any piece of historical fiction. That other bad guys exist at the same time doesn't negate this point (after all, we don't need to defend 1930s/1940s Japan, Italy or Spain to point out that Germany was bad or vice versa).
They are going to loose Karanataka because theier administration was bad. As it should be not. Not beacuse of internet or authroization. Governance remember INC guys is what elects people. Now if you guys can convince Rahul to step and appoint some honest good guy we might at last have some opposition. A good ooposition is very very needed in India. What we have is just far-left Islamist and communists. Against those people would prefer far-right hindus. I am still unsure who to vote. No way i am going to vote INC. That leaves me with other options(Really BJP should be punished for their affairs in Kar).
If it were the policies of Congress, then why all the BJP leaders keep giving hate speeches and why all the major "news" channels keep spreading religious venom 24/7? Does BJP realize that it's their government now, and they can try to repair the social fabric now?
Isn't corruption slightly better than potential genocide and religious hate?
I grew up in India. I have seen first hand how shitty INC and the Gandhi family are.
Tell me something: why don't they have democracy in INC itself? Who made the Gandhi family the head of INC? Why isn't there any challenger to them? The last person who challenged them in a tiny fashion was Narasimha Rao, who was cast away like a leper and died unsung, even though he was an ex-PM of India.
The Gandhi family (as in the clique surrounding them) does impact the INC negatively in the electoral field.
Himachal Pradesh - the state a significant portion of my family is from - only got the INC in 2022 because the party grassroots had an internal revolt against having a Gandhi apparatchik made CM (Prabhita Singh) and selected Sukku+Agnihotri instead.
In neighborhing Punjab, Gandhi family meddling to undermine Amrinder Singh+Sunhil Jakkar and attempt to put their lackey Navjot Singh Sidhu in charge lead to the INC losing Punjab to the AAP and grassroots Mazahbi+Punjabi Hindu INC members to join the BJP.
In neighboring JK, where the other half of my family is from, internal bickering between the Gandhi family's clique and their opposition lead the former CM of JK (Ghulam Nabi) to quit the INC and he will probably join the BJP out of spite.
The INC lost the entirety of Northeast India because conflicts with Rahul Gandhi in 2014 caused the current CM of Assam (and current contender for heir to Narendra Modi) - Himanta Biswas Sarma - to defect to the BJP and help organize the BJP in Northeast India to completely decimate the INC there.
Personality clashes between the Gandhi family and mid-level INC members has hollowed out the INC, as members either start their own parties (eg. National Congress in Maharashtra, Tiramool Congress in West Bengal, YSR Congress in Andhra Pradesh, Janta Dal United in Bihar, Samajwadi Party in Uttar Pradesh) or defect to the BJP (eg. Amrinder Singh in Punjab; Bommai, the BJP CM of Karnataka, is the son of a major ex-INC politician who started the Janta Dal after a fight with Sonia Gandhi; etc).
If INC wants to succeed at national elections again, they will need to drop the Gandhi family and bring back internal democracy within the organization. Lots of BJP politicians are half hearted in their support of the party and are only doing it out of spite against the current INC.
Alternatively, INC members are increasingly defecting to the AAP as well now too, but they have no shot at National Elections for 20 years at least.
India needs a healthy multi-party electoral system at the national level to prevent Authoritarian Democracy from taking hold, but the internal bickering within the INC is only enabling the BJP further.
How has the Congress party changed in the last 30 years? Still headed by a Gandhi or a person remote controlled by the Gandhi family. Their pm candidate Rahul's best qualification is being born a Gandhi. We all know how smart he is. The last vote to choose the party president was heavily ridden by loyalty votes rather than people voting on competency.
You can find differences just as well you can find similarities. The Modi party btw is not some revolutionary departure from classic Indian politics either.
We are talking about grey stuff and you claim to see black and white things. There’s no way I or anyone else can convince you otherwise
Honestly it's probably more to do with the weakness, short-sightedness, and incompetence of their opposition. It's a mark against them that they aren't winning landslides considering who they're up against.
Slightly confused - why is this a problem? If the US government asks Twitter to take a tweet down, do you expect them to take it down only in the USA, while leaving it up everywhere else?
That's exactly what Twitter has done for most of its history, if India demanded something be removed, that wasn't against Twitters own rules, then it would be blocked in India but remain visible to the rest of the world. That's why the redaction clumsily says the tweet has been "withheld in Worldwide", normally there would be a specific country there instead of Worldwide.
It should go without saying that enforcing every state-requested takedown worldwide would be a complete shitshow. A social media site where you can't post anything that angers any government, even the most authoritarian, would be unusable for many purposes.
Question is if phone service would bring in more than dish for Starlink given a ban or if Musk would see it more advantageous to the whole X/Twitter concept.
Do you not understand how much you weaken yourself when you allow yourself to believe this?
Legitimate criticism is the cornerstone of improvement. The only people who don't want criticism to be aired are those who are not genuinely interested in making things better, but rather benefit from them remaining bad.
What did Soros say wrong in the video? "India is a democracy but its leader is not a democrat. Inciting violence against muslims was an important factor in his meteoric rise."
I also agree with the second link that you shared. Media is weaponized against democracy. All the mainstream TV channels in India are busy attacking opposition, or dis-crediting any protests against government or promoting Hindu-Muslim hatered. Most of the channels are owned by crony capitalists which have ties to the government.
Ignore him, he seems too brain washed or part of the propaganda machine.
BJP has control of major new channels and controls the media narrative constantly and this guy blabbers on about media being weaponized.
They banned a documentary by BBC because it hurt the feelings of Modi, but had no problems with an ex PM during election time and released a movie criticizing him.
One of the top BJP leaders recently made a statement saying "Muslims are not equals so they don't deserve equal rights". And I'm pretty sure this guy in comments will be the first one to arrive when, more states pass anti-caste discrimination laws in the US, claiming religious persecution.
Dude stop with your propaganda and post links to direct sources which say against something, don't make BS statements out of thin air.
You are all over this thread with this BS.
Not exactly. They banned VLC because a bunch of Chinese companies were spreading illegitimate versions of VLC disguised as the real package, and installing spyware alongside the media player.
Not the best way to tackle the problem, but I think it's important to know exactly what happened. Also - I think the ban's gone - I just downloaded VLC yesterday. Probably because VideoLAN took the government to court.
That is exactly what the clown show is about. Say, some Russian hackers are spreading malicious versions of Chrome, so do you go about banning the legitimate Google Chrome. If the government doing that is not a clown I don't know what is.
This is a foolish argument, the government always try to contact the local representative of that organization so if this were to happen they would get in touch with Google and ask them to investigate why there is malware in Chrome, that would certainly be Google's responsibility and if not handled properly, deserves a ban.
The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
"clown show" means something not organized well, so it's not exactly a foolish argument. Why would you hold VLC creators responsible if there are third parties spreading fake versions of it, and what can VLC do about it, and how does it help banning the original version? Why they need to contact the "local representative of that organization" instead of catching/banning other illegal websites?
So if someone creates few fake currency notes, will they ban all the original currency notes instead of catching the culprit?
Oh well, on that note, I remembered they did ban all currency notes of Rs.500 denomination to fight corruption, and then released new notes of "Rs.2000 denomination".
I can understand how people who are not in the security domain might get confused by this.
The legitimate application's developer cannot do anything if their application is being trojanized by malware authors. Even if Modi himself releases a piece of software, anyone can just create a malicious version of that and distribute it on various platforms.
> The most important thing country needs to do is to protect it's citizens and that is what India is doing.
The important thing the country had to do was to sensitize people about the malicious versions being distributed and urge them to use only the application from the legitimate VLC website. Instead, they went ahead and banned the legit VLC website which just makes people to go to shadier websites to download VLC.
I agree politicians would not have this level of knowledge, but for the officials who assist the policy makers, this should be a basic 101 in security. Now what would you call the official in Cert-IN who issued the VLC ban ? A clown? definitely.
Very valid point! They banned all VLC impersonators alongside VLC, I believe. Again - definitely not how you solve the problem. I was simply clarifying what had actually happened.
I'll never get tired of saying it: politicians are the same as the citizens that vote them in. In India they won't vote out corrupt politicians because the citizenry is corrupt itself.
Give the country and its democracy some credit (Indian here).
We’ve voted out charismatic leaders, we’ve voted in huge coalitions, we’ve ignored sympathy waves after political assassinations, power transfers have been uniformly peaceful since we gained independence.
If this cultural/endemic corruption at work, I think most people in most countries would prefer this to whatever oligarchy, junta, theocracy, ruler-for-life-god-on-earth-ocrasy they suffer under.
Sure, blame the corruption on the people; It certainly has nothing to do with a system based on extortion, with no incentives to perform the functions it was allegedly established for, and every incentive to extract as much revenue from the citizenry as possible without a rebellion.
Has it ever been demonstrated that these bans actually hinder terrorists or criminals?
It does feel like they would just move to the next app/protocol or even roll their own or use VPNs... so why are governments still penalizing 99.9% of the population which use these only to communicate normally (and use privacy protocols because they don't like the idea of being surveilled)?
Are governments trying to funnel non-criminal people towards apps they can surveil completely to be able to control them even more? To what end?
When a government goes on banning certain apps/protocols/etc., you know that these didn’t provide what would compromise their users. It also indirectly implies that other apps indeed are either compromised or willing to provide any data, apps like whatsapp, signal, etc., funny part is I did say before -and got downvoted- that any app still uses a phone number as a form of identity/authentication should never be trusted, now you know why.
I don't know about all the apps but Briar works P2P, you do not really need to connect to internet to send encrypted messages. And the apk is officially available on their website anyway.
A rite of passage for Element/Matrix. Apparently it does it's job so well that gov'ts are afraid on one end (India in this case), and adopting it on the other end (the German govt trying to not be spied on by the US).
Element/Matrix is growing up. Element/Matrix is making a dent in the universe. Congratulations!
No, these bans (as I understand it) usually happen under IT Act that apply to service providers and ISPs, not citizens. For example, TikTok is blocked by ISPs and taken off from app stores, and TikTok might itself be fined if they continue to provide service but it’s is not illegal for a citizen to use it. There are very few cases where it’s illegal for a citizen to access some things, but those things are illegal just about everywhere.
That would make no sense for Element. That client it not bound to any specific network - you have to specify which matrix server you connect to when using it, so ISPs can't control that without some active probing of all possible endpoints.
Thats the beauty (/s) of Indian IT legislation, it doesn't have to make sense technically. It just needs to make sense to ministers who have no idea how the Internet works. It was funny a decade ago, but now it has become frustrating.
They were so busy spreading a political message that they forgot to help the users. Sure, it sucks that Element was banned but they would highlight the fact that affected users can use other Matrix clients.
> We assume that this ban on Element is a result of a misunderstanding around decentralised and federated services such as Matrix (an open standard for real time communication). The Element app is just one of many apps that give access to the Matrix network. A simple parallel is that banning Element because it gives access to the Matrix network is the equivalent to blocking Google Chrome because it gives people access to the web, or Gmail because it gives people access to email.
> The Element app is just one of many apps that give access to the Matrix network. A simple parallel is that banning Element because it gives access to the Matrix network is the equivalent to blocking Google Chrome because it gives people access to the web, or Gmail because it gives people access to email.
Outlook would have been a better example than Gmail for email.
Wow, the rest of world should ban everything that comes out of India if they don't have representation/offices in 200+ countries I guess.
Did these clowns miss the memo on how the internet works & what sort of business/applications can be made without needing to be physically present anywhere Jesus.....
My understanding of the issue is that the government of India required executive presence as an insurance of sorts, so that the stick of throwing the local executive in jail can be wielded to get some measure of control.
Now, whether that is good or bad is a different matter altogether
Good luck doing business in China without local representative and or for that matter doing the same in the US. Everyone large economy has similar criteria more or less.
This is so hilarious and disconnected from reality. Democracy doesn't happen on Signal. The biggest sign that democracy is well and good in India is that we have well-run elections and orderly change of elected officials, and we have strong laws on books and more sensible laws get passed as well and all this is done in the open in broad daylight (and broadcast on YouTube). Taxes are paid and collected and spent – yes, there is corruption but that's not a strike against democracy. Also, we are in a vibrant multi-party system and quite a large part of the population identifies themselves with one party or another and volunteer to do party-ideology building work. These are signs of a healthy functioning democracy. Whatever happens to those 13 apps or Signal, it won't matter much to the citizenry of India.
What an incredibly pessimistic definition of democracy. By your standards, even the People’s Republic of China could be considered very close to a functioning democracy, albeit with the caveat that they don’t allow multiple parties.
If free speech, independent media, lack of corruption, the right to privacy and the right to fair treatment by the law are not requirements to call something a democracy, then you are just making up your own definition of the word.
I’m not saying India isn't a democracy, but it’s not black and white, it’s a scale.
The Economists 2022 Democracy Index ranks India at #46 as a “flawed democracy”, together with countries like Poland and Italy. There’s no shame in that. Don’t let your own pride in your country blind you to the problems it has — no country is without them.
How does multi-party politics with vastly different ideologies across extremely diverse and regional electoral constituencies and massive well-run elections with orderly change of power happen? Free speech and free media are very much alive and well in India. Yes, corruption still exists and we can't wait to cut it down by another ten times soon – digitization has already helped in big ways.
Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old. And I definitely don't have believe what ranking Economist gives India. The trust in old media is at an all time low.
Really? Rahul Gandhi (Opposition) was jailed for free speech? Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi? Jailed comedian for free speech? Journalist visiting victim was jailed for 6 months is free media/free speech? Thretening to jail twitter employees if they don't remove tweets critical of this government is a free speech?
> Corruption
Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Did anything happened to Adani?
Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
> Really? Rahul Gandhi (Opposition) was jailed for free speech?
No he is being prosecuted for a law his party created. He looses the MLAship by a law created by his party. He has been tried in a court of law. He wasn't plucked from the clutches of his mother and thrown in jail.
> Governemnt banned BBC documentary and raid their offices in Delhi?
It was a propaganda piece. Modi was tried in court by opposition and you should read the remarks by supreme court on the nature of the allegations against him.
Not commenting on the others since I don't know about it.
> Didn't this government bought as many as MLAs as previous 5 government combined?
Yes along with residential plots on Venus.
> Did anything happened to Adani?
What should happen to him?
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
No?
I guess you don't understand free speech. Fighting a defamation case with powerful lawyers besides you in a court of law and losing it and then appealing it in a higher court, all while being out on bail and able to plan and campaign actively in an ongoing state election is the definition of justice system working fine in a democracy.
> Demonetization? 5G Spectrum? PM Cares? are not scams?
Explain please. I'm genuinely curious to know what these scams are.
PM Cards - Government told the court that they do not want under RTI.
5G Spectrum sold for as much as 2g. But 2g was a huge scam. Since 2g, Indian wireless usage increased by 10 folds. So either 2g was not a scam, and genius or 5g auction was a bigger scam. You decide.
Demonetization - UP had a state election. Gujarat had panchayat election. Since Modi/Shah knew about it, they converted their cash. It wasn't about the black money. It was about reducing oppositions cash holding during the election. I was in India, and I saw how BJP was able to distribute liquor & money in the villages while everyone was standing in line.
Thanks for agreeing with me about the all the other issues.
During Covid, Modi created a fund with the name "PM Cares" pretending that it was a government fund by using national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation. And it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities. They took money from government organizations, and their staff salaries. The government banks showed banners on their websites to asking people . On demands of an CAG Audit, they backtracked and said this is a private fund and not subjected to government oversight.
Petitions filed under the Right to Information Act 2005 by the Indian Express to 32 public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India indicated that a total of ₹21050 million had been transferred to the PM CARES Fund, primarily from their corporate social responsibility budget allocations for 2019-20 and 2020–21. A petition for the same information that was made to the Prime Minister's Office was denied, with the Government of India stating that the Fund was not a public authority and did not have to account for the funds under the Right to Information Act. In December 2020, the Indian Express reported that a total of 101 public sector units had transferred ₹2,400 crore (US$300 million) from their corporate social responsibility funds, and a total of ₹155 crore (US$19 million) from staff salaries, to the PM CARES Fund.
I am getting "403 Forbidden" error for 2 out of 3 audit statements from the link that you shared.
It is indeed one of the biggest scam by Modi BJP government where they siphoned off over 10,000 crores of money on the name of providing coronavirus relief.
1. Why they used national emblem of India in the Fund's documentation while it is illegal for the national emblem to be used for private entities?
2. If it was a private fund, why they took thousands of crores of money from government organizations?
3. If it was a private fund, why they forced donations from government employees' salaries? [1]
4. Russian arms firm to donate $2 million to PM CARES Fund [2]
5. Instead of getting it audited by "Comptroller and Auditor General of India" why they are auditing it through a private Chartered Accountants firm that is closely linked to BJP? [3]
I am pretty sure criminal defamation is a jailable offence, no matter if you are the Leader of Opposition or not.
Mr. Gandhi was convicted by a court of law, not the executive or the legislature.
If you call all Modis criminals, be prepared to backup such a statement.
It is after all a reasonably large thing to be called a thief and a criminal if you are a merchant yes?
Trust in media is low because authoritarians and their apologists know how important it is to undermine anyone who can hold them to account for their crimes against the public good. They have learned to aggressively demonise journalists who come from a tradition of fact checking and responsible reporting, in favour of sycophantic hacks who will happily spew the authoritarian position in exchange for a few ducats or an invitation to the annual Despots' Gala.
Why do you think I'm pick-and-choosing anything. Old media with their kingmaker mindsets is just as free, alive and well as before to spew their BS opinions as news. But like never before, every individual has access to huge amount of social-proofed realtime information and communication – thanks to cheap smartphones armed with cheapest 4G data plans in their hands. This has led to everyone with a brain experiencing the gel-mann amnesia effect stronger than ever. And so, the trust in old media has dropped like a rock to the bottom of the ocean.
>> Free speech and free media are very much alive and well in India.
where :) ? They have become zombies.
>> Btw, I don't have to agree to your definition of democracy. India has its own culture and history of citizen representative governance that is thousands of years old.
This reminds me of the dialogue from Swades, which is so apt. Be proud but don't hide behind the ancient past. You are not living in the past, but here and the now, and that culture is once again being shackled not by outsiders this time but people you have anointed yourself.
please ignore. this is BJP cybercell doing blogspam. this looks copypasta, some carefully crafted text. I bet it would be searchable because it must've been used elsewhere already. let me try
You're a formidable commenter who has contributed a great deal to HN, often with minority views and that's fine. But we need you to take a few steps into the intended spirit of the site, because your comments have been trending in very much the inflammatory direction. Can you please review the guidelines and recalibrate?
Up until the Soviet Union split up, Western academics praised the USSR as the best thing in the world since sliced bread. I remember a story by Solzhenitsyn where he says a journalist came to their gulag and interviewed them. Since they were right before camp guards, they praised the Soviet system of 'correction through labor' since they liked breathing.
He assumed the journalist knew it was a scam and wouldn't dare publish it.
Years later, after Solzhenitsyn left the gulag, he moved to the West and he saw that interview was published word for word and the journalist wrote a piece praising the 'humane' Soviet system over America's 'cruel & evil' prison system!
Another example: during the Holodomor (Stalin's engineered famine) that killed 6 - 8 million in Ukraine, New York Times' Moscow Bureau chief Walter Duranty privately acknowledged to British intelligence that as many as 10 million folks had died. Publicly, he praised the Soviet system and said everything was abundant [0].
I could go on and on, but whether it's the USSR, Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba, there's a pattern of Western academics & media personalities praising brutally violent regimes.
Now, I'm not saying Putin's Russia is Christian & right wing; I'm simply pointing out how Western media never misses a chance to support the wrong guys.
It’s completely nuts how you’re being downvoted. My family wasn’t in America for all the anti-communist stuff, and indeed my home country was more Soviet aligned. But it’s apparent even to me that america media covers communism with kid gloves compared to any sort of right wing government.
Article titles include “how to parent like a Bolshevik” and “why women had better sex under socialism” and “why George Bernard shaw had a crush on Stalin.”
Unlike in US, fascist supporters in India are everywhere in STEM. I would give this person some credit though because usually they are very open in their support.
You seriously underestimate how many fascist supporters there are in STEM in the US (and Europe for that matter). Contrary to what you might assume from the public focus on DEI from big tech companies, there's a vast underbelly of reactionaries. Not to mention very influential people like Peter Thiel, who is openly hostile to the concept of democracy.
They also happen to often fall into the exact demographics right wing fringe theories cater to. Men in tech who grew up on a diet of nerd culture with sexist tropes will find it easier to believe evopsych nonsense that "women are just not biologically capable of achieving greatness in tech", white and Asian guys will find it easier to believe that they just lucked into being racially predisposed to being smarter. Worse, the discrimination perpetuated by these ideas may even be misinterpreted as evidence (because after all, they don't think sociology is a field that has any merit).
This is incorrect. You're not allowed to download TikTok onto a government issued device if you're employed by the government, but it is absolutely not banned in general.
They banned it for gathering data they are not supposed to just like India. But Element & other secure communication services are being banned for a tangential reason
Does that mean there was no democracy in India before Signal existed? It does seem like a big exaggeration to mark the "beginning of the end of democracy" just because a single app gers banned. I am curious how many people in India use Signal.
its funny how element wrote the blog and i was unable to access the page 3-7 times during today. the site doesn't work, then it works 10 minutes later.
This article: https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2023/05/01/14-messaging-ap... suggests that the ban has to do with some specific terror plot(s). If this is the true reason and the terrorists used neither Telegram nor Signal, that would be a good reason why one is banned and the other is not.
What does their legal department being stationed in the UK mean when the UK passes anti-encryption laws? I hope this isn't a mistake that damages the project.
As for banning things in practice: forcing ISPs to do IP and DNS level blocking as a start, combined with fining companies or imprisoning their legal representation if they do not comply with national laws. If IP blocking doesn't work, there are things like SNI inspection that can do the trick.
If the business in question has no legal representation within the country, blocking payment providers and other services operating within the country from doing business with them is often an easy way to cut off access. This is probably not going to affect Element much, but if such restrictions come from a more economically influential trading bloc (USA, EU, etc.) international companies may be in more trouble.
An example of this is trade with Iran; in many countries there aren't many noticeable sanctions, but doing trade will put you on the naughty list of the USA and that can be a significant problem with the American influence on things like payment providers and the internet.
Actually we live in 2023 with all kinds of DPI / Great Firewall so every government considers citizens with an internet access as naughty children, with the corresponding appeal.
Governments make these things called laws. If you don't follow them they have people with boots and clubs that can take your money, lock you away and/or just rough you up a little when they take your phone to look what's on there.
They don't have to make it impossible to get the app, they might not even want to make it impossible! Because now instead of surveillance or not, dissidents (well, everyone) have the choice between surveillance and being a criminal that they can Protect and Serve(tm) at their discretion.
This is what the politicians mean when they say the laws of mathematics are below the laws of the country, and they're absolutely right. Don't bring tech to a legal fight, you will lose.
Edit: this seems to be a peer-to-peer alternative chat client. I'm not sure you'll want to use peer-to-peer messengers under a government that issues such bans as the peer-to-peer nature exposes exactly who you talk to and how often. I think the federated model is a lot stronger in preserving privacy (though the Matrix team is running experiments on running peer-to-peer, which would create a very similar model and a similar threat).
So the official from Element are indirecting telling users to find a hack in their statement "As much as people in India will be able to trivially circumvent the blocking of the 14 messaging apps ...." ? That won't help their case, just might get a permanent ban from one of the largest countries in the world.
My view is that it's not my business the form of government that another country takes for its internal affairs. I have standing to object when (sadly, not if) my government becomes too authoritarian, when another country breaks a treaty, invades a neighbor, etc, but what they do inside their borders is not my business.
What does this have to do with Element - the reference client for the Matrix protocol, but still one amongst many - Briar - a peer-to-peer messaging app - or Mediafire, one of the oldest file hosting websites?
India is hosting G20 event in Kashmir but Pakistan doesn't want it to happen peacefully. There's already a terrorist attack [0] in which 5 army personnel lost their lives. As per intel more attacks are being planned in near future. The ban is related to this as per my reading. Not a perfect solution IMO.
What a stupid way of making connections when they don't exist.
Did terrorism start in India since e2ee became available?
Was there no terrorism 5 years ago? 10? 20? 30? 40? Years ago?
G20 meeting is scheduled for september so what does a random action months ago mean anything?
Wasn't there such things last year or 2 years ago?
So you are saying Pakistan is suddenly relying on the generosity of element to orchestrate their terror plots? Why are they using off the shelf products and not their own?
Your reading is flawed because its painted by the propaganda machinery of the state wanting you to think in that way.
> While investigating one of these channels, it was discovered that the app did not have a representative in India, making it challenging to monitor activities on the platform.
This is basically an indirect validation that most non listed messaging apps supposedly offering e2e encryption such as Whatsapp or Signal have backdoors with access from any government asking for access.