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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2023

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  • Yep - I think the best strategy is what Richard Stallman suggested in 2005 - don’t give her money under any circumstances.

    I’d suggest not giving the works any form of oxygen; definitely don’t buy the books or watch the movies for money, including on a streaming site that pays royalties, or buy branded merchandise. But also don’t borrow them from a library (libraries use that as a signal to buy more), promote them by talking about them in any kind of positive light, don’t encourage your kids dress up as a character (builds hype and creates demand), use analogies drawn from the books, or otherwise support them.

    As far as books about wizards and educational institutions, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series is way better anyway - they have more realistic character interactions and social dynamics (despite being a comic fantasy), and it makes for a much better read.




  • bootloader unlocking

    I used to buy Xiaomi products because of the bootloader unlocking, but in practice it is a dystopian nightmare - they have built it so to unlock the bootloader you need a cryptographic signature from them, and they don’t give that out all that easily.

    You have to sign up for an account with them, use a Windows-only tool to request unlocking, and they have a long wait period (deliberately imposed) to unlock, which sometimes randomly restarts. The wait period is different for different models, and can be weeks.

    Their support are unwilling to help unlock immediately even for replacement devices where you want to get up and going quickly - if your device breaks (they are not the most durable phones IMO, as you note) and you get a replacement, you’ll have to wait the time again before you can restore a backup of a phone using a custom ROM.

    It’s possible they have improved, but because of their attitude around what I can do with my own hardware, I’ve stopped buying Xiaomi gear.




  • The FBI pressured Apple to create an encryption backdoor to bypass their security features

    This was more like a hardware security device backdoor - the key was in a hardware security device, that would only release it after receiving the PIN (without too many wrong attempts). But the hardware accepts signed firmware from Apple - and the firmware decides the rules like when to release the key. So this was effectively a backdoor only for Apple, and the FBI wanted to use it.

    Systems would create a public audit trail whenever a backdoor is used, allowing independent auditors to monitor and report misuse of backdoors.

    This has limits. If there is a trusted central party who makes sure there is an audit log before allowing the backdoor (e.g. the vendor), they could be pressured to allow access without the audit log.

    If it is a non-interactive protocol in a decentralised system, someone can create all the records to prove the audit logs have been created, use the backdoor, but then just delete the audit logs and never submit them to anyone else.

    The only possibility without a trusted central party is an interactive protocol. This could work as: For a message (chat message, cryptocurrency transaction etc…) to be accepted by the other participants, they must submit a zero-knowledge proof that the transaction includes an escrow key divided into 12 parts (such that any 8 of 12 participants can combine their shares to decrypt the key), encrypted with the public keys of 12 enrolled ‘jury’ members - who would need to be selected based on something like the hash of all messages up to that point. The jury members would be secret in that the protocol could be designed so the jury keys are not publicly linked to specific users. The authority could decrypt data by broadcasting a signed audit log requesting decryption of certain data, and jury members would receive credits for submitting a share of the escrow key (encrypted so only the authority could read it) along with a zero-knowledge proof that it is a valid and non-duplicate escrow key. Of course, the person sending the message could jury shop by waiting until the next message will have the desired jury, and only sending it then. But only 8/12 jurors need to be honest. There is also a risk jurors would drop out and not care about credits, or be forced to collude with the authority.

    Cryptographic Enforcement: Technical solutions could ensure that the master key is unusable if certain conditions—such as an invalid warrant or missing audit trail—are not met.

    Without a trusted central party (or trusted hardware playing the same role), this seems like it would require something like Blackbox Obfuscation, which has been proven to be impossible. The best possibility would be an interactive protocol that would need enough people to collude to break it.