SMH @ activists using techno-fascist platforms for communications during an operation subject to state-actor level interference. I thought we recognised and acknowledged this problem 15-20 years ago already.

https://xcancel.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1965431513320927706

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[–] 2 points 1 year ago

I strongly doubt the organisers of this flotilla used Whatsapp for serious communications - they probably just use Whatsapp for outreach.

I sincerely doubt this is a big deal for them.

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  • 57 comments in c/technology@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 83 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I use WhatsApp cautiously with friends who still refuse to jump over to Signal (let alone Matrix or Session). But it's def mind blowing to read an activist group was relying on it for organizing. Reminds me of FB being used for organizing G20 and BLM demos -_-

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people's minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don't get the nuances of why using it in that specific context -- on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix -- was bad, but that for most people it's still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn't know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn't even realise who the owners are.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I had a friend who heard signal was backdoored and that a regular old cell call was more secure. Had to correct that

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    wasn't it telegram that got hacked?
    also i vaguely remember the signal ceo getting sued or something because they couldn't/wouldn't let some government body read someone's messages, because it's encrypted

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  • [–] 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I mean, based on the source, they're still even on Twitter which is a lot more overtly fascist than WhatsApp. So…yeah…

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  • [–] 51 points 1 year ago

    A sad reality of political activism is the inability of many groups to follow proper opsec.

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  • [–] 35 points 1 year ago

    The number of people who are like "are you on Whatsapp? " fir secure conversations....

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  • [–] 31 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Yeah, that's curious. I'd think they'd be prepared with Signal at the very least and some backup self-hosted channel, as well as cameras and backup cell hotspots.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    they were prepared for the drone hit the other day; so hopefully for this as well.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I'd imagine they could have a few spread out boats further and further behind, each with its own cell hotspot, beaming WiFi all around, so that they have to be jammed simultaneously to stop the livestreams from capturing the attacks.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    it sounds like it would be easier to pick them off one-by-one if they were far apart.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I think the notoriety is the point; since this flotilla is incapable of carrying anywhere near enough supplies to make a dent for the gazans; and also what netantayu desperately wants to avoid so that this can be more easily ignored; like everything else so far.

    Sinking boats filled with famous people and foreign nationals whose gov'ts who would be forced to respond on their citizens' well-being would bring more attention and pressure; which is exactly what netantayu wants to avoid.

    We saw the western govts pressure isreal by pretending to push for recognition of Gaza and the isrealis responded w air supply drops; more pressure might force them to stop slowly killing the Gazans.

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  • [+] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 30 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    This is why you don't use whatsapp

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Meta is complicit in the genocide

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    Did they select Whatsapp as a main communication channel and direct their supporters to it?

    Or did they just start a group chat to reach out to supporters who were already on the app?

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    With all respect to a privacy advocates(I'm one), but blaming them on using WhatsApp is besides the point, these people are not trying to hide their activities, or locations, and many of them are not tech-saavy, the shame is on the cess pool that is Meta, and all the other goons...this is so fucked up on so many levels.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    blaming them on using WhatsApp is besides the point

    WhatsApp admins are explicitly interfering with a public protest in order to satisfy a genocidal foreign government.

    This is at least as big a deal as TikTok censorship of anti-China posters. It's just on behalf of a US ally, so we're defending it rather than threatening to interfere in their business practices in turn.

    the shame is on the cess pool that is Meta

    Who appoints WhatsApp administration heads if not Meta? It's the same picture.

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    [–] 34 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    WhatsApp Supports starving children to death

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    So happy not to be using Whatsapp...

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    100% CIA and mossad were watching those channels realtime.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    All the more reason to use Signal.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    another reason why not to use whatsapp? for all that is good, don't use meta or any corporate technofascist company. there are better options.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    At least they werent organising on discord, maybe its intentional to send a message to people about meta

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Amazing that they weren't using Signal for comms outside their group, but for internal comms it's even more amazing they weren't using something like Meshtastic.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Amazing that they weren’t using Signal

    I wouldn't rule it out. But you can't do public comms over Signal.

    it’s even more amazing they weren’t using something like Meshtastic.

    Again, I wouldn't rule it out. But if I'm on a public group that's very likely compromised by the IDF, I'm not going to announce all the other protocols they need to block.

    He's just reporting one avenue that's been closed to the protesters by a corporate entity that is now complicit in genocide.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Can only say a person who has never used meshtastic.

    Source: The struggle.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Not sure what you mean. I use Meshtastic a lot, both as a hobby but also for remote sensor reading and herd tracking. Works a treat.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I know this is off topic, but herd tracking? Critters? I'm always curious about people's lives.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Cows.

    A friend of mine was taking over his family farm with access to open moorland for grazing and as an experiment we wanted to see if we could implement tracking without giving a monthly small fortune to a company for a proprietary product or noisy polluting methods like a helicopter. BLE beacons are cheap and long-lasting so each cow got one, and we bodged together about twenty solar powered Meshtastic nodes with GPS that were small enough to be worn on their collars (since the cows tend to heard together only one in the group needs a node), plus another dozen we could install at choke points on the land (old gates, land bridges, etc) the cows were likely to traverse. The nodes were like this, but smaller and shitter. The nodes were programmed to report every time they saw a BLE beacon nearby, with the mobile ones also reporting their own GPS location, all being fed into Home Assistant for mapping. I just checked and apparently, aside from a couple of storm-damaged fixed nodes and replacement batteries it's still going strong after two years.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Was this their main channel of communication or just a group they had for supporters?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Doesn't really matter, it's the metadata that reveals your connections and locations. Surprisingly big amount of useful (but not necessarily correct or verifiable) intel can be gathered without eavesdropping into the actual conversations. People have been - on other occasions - targeted because they were connected to a person, who's connections may have been suspicious to some state actors.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Huh? I was just curious, because it's quite different if they used this as their main-channel. Using WhatsApp for that would be crazy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    My point was that even one phone with the WhatsApp app itself can mean compromised opsec. No matter if it's used for operational communication or not, or whether or not the messages can be read by 3rd parties or not.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Damn, didn’t know Nitter still existed.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    It was resurrected in February.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Ever since the Nitter matrix server got blasted with CSAM with no moderation I’m hesitant to spin up an instance, cool to see they have resurrected it I suppose.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    So the Trump ass-kissers have given the King of Fools another gift for his pleasure. The cost to freedom is immense

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Totally consistent Meta is joined at the hip with US government and therefore more or less in league with Zionists, neocons and Israel just like every american big tech, bank and media company.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Do not use a centralized service for civil disobedience

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago*

    Sounds like this group is more of a social media vibe group, rather then a group interested in real undermining of Zionism. Maybe stop being pawns for slacktivists with rich parents and try joining the PLO instead?

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  • 27 comments in c/privacy@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 58 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    I'm surprised they were using WhatsApp in the first place. Surely there are better options for something like this

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  • [–] 56 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Several people in the comments suggest Telegram, which doesn't even encrypt group chats. Signal is likely the best option if the group is under 1000 members.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

    Oh, I thought Telegram does encrypt chats, just that you have to enable it rather than it being on be default. Is encryption only available for one-on-one messages?

    Oh well, I can't get my friends and family to use Signal anyway...

    EDIT: My family only uses iMessage + RCS to chat with me (a Pixel), and my school clubs/friends are all on Discord or GroupMe. We don't use Telegram at all. I've been begging my mom to consider switching to Signal since they complain so much about the issues with messaging me, but it's yet to happen. I think I'm whittling her down tho 😉

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I thought Telegram does encrypt chats, just that you have to enable it rather than it being on be default. Is encryption only available for one-on-one messages?

    It's only available for 1-to-1, yes. But why would you rely on a service that hides the option to E2E encryption so well? Next step is to silently remove it.

    Signal is private by default.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It does not have the option to encrypt group chats last I checked, and even the one-to-one encryption is not particularly well-liked among security experts.

    This isn't about casual chats with friends and family, but political activism against the actions of a country. People doing that should be willing to put at least a trivial amount of effort into security.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Telegram is owned by Russian Elon Musk and the FSB. Avoid it if you can.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Durov only founded Telegram after he left Russia over Maidan. He was, however, recently arrested by the French, so...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    He left it performatively. Since then, he's secretly visited Russia, one time just around its unblocking in Russia, while pretending to be a fugitive.

    Edit: Here's an article on that.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Generally, the issue is that services want to blend the data into a single stream, otherwise you end up with having to make a separate connection to and from each client, each at full bandwidth called full mesh. It becomes easier to just have the encryption to the server, then decrypt all the streams from all the participating clients, and merge them into a single stream outbound. Adjust and re-encrypt that single stream and send it. That also allows for more control to make low bandwidth or dynamically changing bandwidth clients work better as you can adjust one stream rather than hundreds of outbound to each client. But that means the server has access to unencrypted streams to analyze and record. This is called server mixing.

    Previous software generally only supported one or the other of those options. Signal is one of the few that have developed the technology to allow for selective forwarding which is the third option. Their website details how this works and it's open source so some others have adopted it or have come up with similar approaches.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    And they expected anything different???

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago

    Fuck were they using a compromised platform for :/

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It's not Whatsapp, it's Facebook/Meta.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's a distinction without a difference. It's clearly risky to rely on that company for important communications.

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  • [+] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Not sure if you realize how derogatory this comes across.

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  • [+] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • The comment seems to directly correlate being "run by a jew" as a reason the corp would be loyal towards Israel, when quite a few jews know exactly what's happening there and know it's fucking terrible. The fact that the CEO is rich and managed to succeed in the corporate tech world is more evidence of inclination for bias for western-aligned genocides, much much more than them being Jewish.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What is "freedom flotilla" ? Seasteaders or torrent pirates ? something else ?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's multiple boats, from multiple countries and locations on aid missions, all converging to deliver humanitarian supplies to Gaza. The Italian dock workers have threatened to shut down the entirety of Europe if their boats or any boats in the flotilla is fired upon. Which will be interesting because that has happened, a drone has struck one boat so far, nobody has been harmed yet.

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  • 6 comments in c/palestine@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    whatsapp is a company operated by zuckerberg, a zionist scumbag. All zionist products support war crimes and should be boycotted

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Why were you even using whatsapp instead of a proper platform you fucking muppets?

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    @AnUnusualRelicPeople Are so annoyingly stupid, it . makes me mad.I have tried to tell people on Facebook, Instagram and WA, that it's not safe using Israeli controlled app.But sadly, they all thought I'm crazy anti American conspiracy nut.@rcbrk

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    They're not Controlled by Israel. However that group is facing a nation-state surveillance and potential threat level. Making things easier for them by using a commercial platform is downright stupid. Of course I suppose most of them to be completely ignorant in those matters, but there ought to be a few people versed in technical things in the group.
    Also using, say, Signal, won't keep Israeli spooks out for sure, but it will at least make it a bit more complicated for them to be a nuisance.

    P.S. tagging you as anti-american conspiracy nut, just in case.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Use Signal or Telegram?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Go to telegram

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  • 6 comments in c/demeta@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 23 points 1 year ago

    Should have used Signal

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    nObOdY cAn ReAd YoUr PrIvAtE coNvErSaTiOnS, nOt EvEn WhAtSaPp

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    [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    fr, WhatsApp is only good for keeping in contact with, I dare say, normie friends. Other then that, keep it the hell away from me.

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  • 2 comments in c/privacy@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    ah ok, so they can do something about all the misinformation and bullshit, but don't want to. great.

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  • Did they move over to Signal?

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