thebardingreen

I actually did some consulting for Meta and had to attend a mandatory all company video call where Zuck unironically said "Privacy is central to our culture at Facebook. It's in our DNA."

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as brain, is in fact, GNU/brain, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus brain. Brain is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many humans with the Neurolink chip run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “brain”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really are brains, and these people are using them, but it is just a part of the system they use. Brain is the kernel: the organ in the system that allocates the body's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Brain is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with brain added, or GNU/brain. All the so-called “brain” distributions are really distributions of GNU/brain.

One thing I've used to get really thoughtful responses out of people who "don't care" is "Yeah, things may be fine now (they're not) but what if some future fascist regime comes to power in 8 years? 12 years? All these records of your information will STILL exist."

3 things I learned from getting these reactions:

1. These people (mostly) actually DO care. They just don't think they can do anything about it / have the skills / time / energy to do anything about it / think they will lose access to the services they rely in if they take steps to protect themselves. So they justify not taking any action or changing their behavior and say they don't care because it makes it easier to live with the toxic data harvesting they actually DO KNOW is going on and just don't really want to think about too hard.

2. On some level, they have decided to "pay the price" for convenient access to things like Facebook, Insta and Google Maps. They may not LIKE the pricetag, not really, but they've decided it's worth it and because they don't really like the price tag they embrace psychological tricks to avoid thinking about it, worrying about or stressing about it (like telling yourself and others "why do I care? I have nothing to hide.")

3. The most discouraging thing I learned from this is that, short of proof of immediate, existential danger from their existing usage patterns, they probably won't change, even when you crack their defences with an angle they haven't thought of. They've already decided there's no escape for them and oh well, it's worth it. They'll stay there EVEN THOUGH they're bothered by the same things you are.

Schaaaaaaaadenfreude.

I'm running my own instance, JUST so I can be in control of my own Lemmy experience (and in control of my own archive of my Lemmy activity). I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

Yes, my instance was down for three days last week. I had trouble with an update and didn't have time to troubleshoot it. But I wanted my Lemmy so I DID get around to it and got it working again. And yeah... I never did get email working properly so when my ONE friend who's not me joined my instance I had to command line into the database and approve him manually. But so what?

And yeah, eventually the internet ecosystem may shift again, or I might get hit by a bus or who knows?

But if you WANT to join a tiny instance that's 99.999% (bus factor) not going anywhere for a while, I'd probably let you join mine.

I don't 100% agree with the poster that said it's all hype. Is it a very young technology? Yes. Is more testing needed? Yes. But while some new algorithms have been found to be vulnerable, as per @Platform27's linked article, others have been heavily tested.

That same year, NIST actually selected an encryption method called Kyber CRYSTALS, which is so far, a safe algorithm. One implementation of Kyber has been found to be be vulnerable to side channel attacks:

https://therecord.media/a-key-post-quantum-algorithm-may-be-vulnerable-to-side-channel-attacks

IF you have a big ass neural network and time / expertise to spend training it. But that was just that one implementation. Other people are trying to attack this algorithm (and there are rewards / bounties out there to incentivize research) and so far it's solid. Cloudflare offers it as an encryption option, and Microsoft has build an OpenVPN implementation that can leverage it (my company is planning to offer it to our customers as part of a VPN solution as well).

I think the Quantum Skeptics are going to be right until they're wrong, just like the people who thought something like GPT-4 was 5-10 years away... until suddenly it wasn't and I applaud you thinking about it at this stage.

So, let's answer your question. Is Matrix's encryption quantum safe? The answer is... Maybe. Or at least "partly."

Matrix uses something called a "double ratchet" encryption solution, which is interesting in that it starts with asymmetric encryption, using a variant of your standard Diffie Hellman PKE (which is EXACTLY the kind of encryption that is vulnerable to Shor's algorithm - aka NOT quantum safe) but then it uses that to "ratchet" to a symmetric encryptions scheme (which are NOT KNOWN to be vulnerable to quantum algorithms). I emphasize the "not known" because who knows what kind of witchy magic nonsense is hiding in quantum enabled mathematics (and might be too complex for humans to handle and only uncovered by future LLMs leveraging quantum processors). We just don't know. We DO know that some post quantum crypto schemas specifically cannot be cracked by quantum processors (but then they might turn out to be vulnerable to conventional processors lulz).

So Matrix is sort of quantum safe (but only because it leverages symmetric encryption, NOT because it leverages true post quantum asymmetric encryption). And it has to fall back on regular old, quantum vulnerable Diffie Hellman exchanges as to negotiate the initial key exchange... and if you can crack those, you might be able to extract the symmetric keys and then decrypt the symmetric encryption layer... IDK how feasible that would be, we'll need an ACTUAL professional cryptographer to weigh in on that question... I'm just a netsec guy.

Bro, do you even FOSS?

All of my personal machines are Autobots.

At work we use space probes (Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, etc). We're a small satellite communications company.

That explains why he's so old in Picard.

Klingons must hover in youth / middle age for around 120 years, then undergo a rapid decline.

EDIT: In all seriousness, they should release an updated edit where they refer to him as Colonel Mogh.

I'm running my own instance with 2 users. I'm not noticing any slowdown.

I was thinking of editing mine to be links to information about Lemmy.