Enjoy your open source encryption and OS (Linux) - and BACKDOORS!

SirFoxy

peenus

Mumbly

@SirFoxy said:
peenus

nocloud

@Mumbly said:

@nocloud said: Like the OP you seem to be very contradictory in what you say, compared to your actions.

There's nothing contradictory in my writing. I responded solely to your personal attacks against another forum member. You act as if you're something better, but in reality, you're just one shitty personality with personal agenda more.

What personal attack ? Where?

@Mumbly said:
Who cares.
He's around long enough. People make it too personal.

5 posts now, that's a lot for "who cares" type of person. Yes it's quite contradictory to say people take it too personal, then go on to insult me, then you seem to have taken it take it personally. Then.... tell me to stop insulting people not to make it personal.

But no i don't think I'm better than you.

If I'm correct, your main issue with him is that he's Russian (if I'm not mistaken), right? But the fact is, he was Russian even a decade or more ago when he became a member of this forum, and people didn't attack each other based on nationality.

He says he's from Leeds, UK, so am I, not Leeds though but not far.

For the third time, if you have so many personal issues with all those things, please bring them to the https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/177624/the-russia-vs-ukraine-thread-lets-not-derail-other-threads so that the rest of us won't have to read people's personal issues with Russians on every tech-related thread.

Why would i post it there? it would be off-topic. It's related to Linux.

I'm asking him why he has changed his avatar to fusionpbx if Linux has backdoors! simple question

totally_not_banned

@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

SirFoxy

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

@totally_not_bsdguy

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2121825/#Comment_2121825

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

The two of you are lucky.

He threatened to find me and said he will do physical violence to me, and tried to doxx me ( I have proofs), then said he has reported me to my ISP and the police and that they will cancel my internet and put me in jail. I have proofs and gave proofs to mods and he even admit that he try to doxx me but the mods are politically motivated to not take action against him.

DO NOT interact with this psycho.

totally_not_banned

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

@totally_not_bsdguy

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2121825/#Comment_2121825

That's some very strange obsession you have there with a guy that wasn't even really active during your time here. I've actually looked at the post you've linked for a bit now and i'm kinda baffled as to what you're even trying to imply. Not even the writing style matches, let alone the topic.

Seriously, i'd strongly suggest you smoke less of whatever you're smoking and go outside to get some fresh air once in a while. In the long run this isn't going to make you look smart, trust me

SirFoxy

@totally_not_banned said:

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

@totally_not_bsdguy

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2121825/#Comment_2121825

That's some very strange obsession you have there with a guy that wasn't even really active during your time here. I've actually looked at the post you've linked for a bit now and i'm kinda baffled as to what you're even trying to imply. Not even the writing style matches, let alone the topic.

Seriously, i'd strongly suggest you smoke less of whatever you're smoking and go outside to get some fresh air once in a while. In the long run this isn't going to make you look smart, trust me

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
I'd just hope the law doesn't really change in Germany.

Yeah, i'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't go along with this yet. Given all the draconian police laws most (all?) states have passed in recent years i'd have thought making passwords fair game would just be pushed through with little discussion or opposition at all.

From a purely technical angle it's not that big of deal though. All it really means is that one has to take care of guaranteeing plausible deniability. I kind of wonder why there isn't more discussion about this given all the developments but i figure practical cases are probably not that often about disk encryption but rather phones, accounts and such.

Some encryptions software does this, hidden drive/partition but not sure how well this would work in practice. I'm pretty sure regime agents GCHQ/NSA would be able to figure out there is hidden partition and they would just ask you to unlock. If you refuse => Guantanamo/Belmarsh or a black site in Eastern Europe.

Telegram hasn't shared a single byte of userdata if you ignore the times they did, for example not to get banned in the Country wanting the data.

Well, at least that's what they are saying publicly. It's not like i have any evidence that would contradict their statements or want to imply that they did something like that but in general keeping quiet about cooperating could very much be in the interest of all parties involved (aside from the person being leaked/spied on obviously).

Telegram is running custom encryption (something pretty much every cryptography expert will advise against) after all and by default a lot is transmitted (and stored) unencrypted as far as i know, so they could probably get at quite a lot of data if they wanted.

Maybe custom encrypion is a plus. Do we really want providers running state approved/backdoor'd encryption. As long as people able to verify somehow, but I guess this is impossible and will have to have certain element of trust.

My biggest gripe with Telegram is still the phone number requirement though. I understand that it's likely kind of an anti-spam measure but if they were that big on privacy i feel they should have looked into alternatives and not require something, which in a lot of places is not available anonymously unless the user invests some noticeable effort into skirting local regulations.

Most govt are monitoring and archiving your SMS, phone calls, internet browsing history (Echelon/NSA Snowden leaks) so this may be a moot point.

totally_not_banned

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

@totally_not_bsdguy

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2121825/#Comment_2121825

That's some very strange obsession you have there with a guy that wasn't even really active during your time here. I've actually looked at the post you've linked for a bit now and i'm kinda baffled as to what you're even trying to imply. Not even the writing style matches, let alone the topic.

Seriously, i'd strongly suggest you smoke less of whatever you're smoking and go outside to get some fresh air once in a while. In the long run this isn't going to make you look smart, trust me

Yeah, you smoked away your brain too. That much seems to be quite obvious here.

shruub

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
I've never been asked an ID to buy them (in said stores) ever

If they are selling imported SIM cards getting your data would make no sense anyways as they'd have no place to put it. A lot of countries had (and some likely still have) SIM cards requiring zero registration - not even something like the silly German pre-2017 forms where everyone (absolutely truthfully) stated being Alf from Melmac. At worst you'll have to make a random outgoing call after putting it in your phone to activate those.

Edit: I guess it's also possible that those shops get some foreign SIM cards requiring some type of registration similar to the German pre-2017 form and simply mass register these on bogus data to sell as pre-activated.

Nah, I'm talking about German numbers and SIMs. Ofc one can also just go to Czechia or Netherlands etc, but that is less interesting for my usecase which is just practicing alright opsec.

Just to be sure, that was post 2017, right?

Absolutely. The last time i've personally seen this was in 2020, i think.

Alright

Edit: also midly interesting, https://reddit.com/r/AskAGerman/comments/1bhlqim/lebara_sim_card_is_it_scum/ for some background info

Hehe, yeah. That sounds exactly like what those dodgy resellers/partners would do. The guy probably just walked into some little phone shop and asked for a SIM card, just to be handed one registered to who-the-fuck-knows without any further comment.

Yup, totally. As good cash as any.

I don't really think it's a problem specific to Lebara, Lyca, Ortel and so on though. These type of ehno-providers are just really popular with the milieus that tend to operate these kind of shops.

Pretty much yeah. A) because the big Providers tend to have their own store and smoler ones either have none or operate from the respective supermarket and B) because they do usually over fairly good roaming rates for Bosnia, Turkey etc... (non EU-Countries)

SirFoxy

@totally_not_banned said:

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@SirFoxy said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

@totally_not_bsdguy

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/2121825/#Comment_2121825

That's some very strange obsession you have there with a guy that wasn't even really active during your time here. I've actually looked at the post you've linked for a bit now and i'm kinda baffled as to what you're even trying to imply. Not even the writing style matches, let alone the topic.

Seriously, i'd strongly suggest you smoke less of whatever you're smoking and go outside to get some fresh air once in a while. In the long run this isn't going to make you look smart, trust me

Yeah, you smoked away your brain too. That much seems to be quite obvious here.

😲😲😲

totally_not_banned

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

The two of you are lucky.

He threatened to find me and said he will do physical violence to me

Well, according to his buddy "i will find out what happens to people like me" or something like that. Not that i take people being stupid enough to announce stuff like that publicly overly serious but still... There's a fine line between determined and mental.

nocloud

@asterisk14 said:
Sounds like @nocloud has a duplicate account!

@asterisk14 said:
DO NOT interact with this psycho.

Then why did you tag me in this thread?

Then play the victim as usual?

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
There are of course other fairly easy and legal ways to get pretty much any number such as online providers, but that isn't something telegram would think of (only to block them).

Well, aside from getting a foreign SIM card (UK, Romania and so on) the most straight forward way is to just go to a flea market and look for a guy selling cellphone equipment. Often times there's also SIM cards on offer (side business of some little phone shop) and i'd say chances are like 50/50 they'll activate the card for you without even asking your name, let alone any kind of ID. If you tell them that you don't have any identification with you and just provide some bullshit data the probability of you walking away with an anonymous SIM card will likely approach 100 percent. At least that's how it used to be a couple years ago.

It would not make any difference if you buy foreign sim card. Your IMEI number is also transmitted when you connect to cell towers so if you have a foreign sim card but have used that phone in your country with your own sim card in your name then changing SIM cards will make no difference. The telco/state intelligence KNOWS it's your phone with a new sim.

Only way may be to have a totally unused phone (paid with cash) with a foreign pre-paid sim (paid with cash), never top up money by credit card and never call/SMS/visit website
that you normally do with your normal phone. Jason Bourne style.

Chances are the first version probably isn't even illegal (for you) as you did nothing wrong (i mean, hey, what are you supposed to do if you ask for activation and the guy just tells you to come back in 5 minutes?). I'd just be very curious whose name they put those cards under. I don't think just giving a bunch of Xs is going to work as they are using their reseller access with the network provider to activate the cards.

Not sure why laws around buying sim card is so tight?? Is it because of East / West Germany and the need to spy on everyone becuase it seem too anal to need ID to buy sim card.

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:
@Mumbly

See what i mean?

Just let him be. He lacks the capacity to even just realize how fucked he is, let alone basic logic. He is also 200% convinced that i'm Russian because i had the audacity to disagree with him (and in his troubled mind seemingly only a Russian could think that he's an idiot).

You could spend days, weeks, months, ... and he still wouldn't be able to comprehend that at the end of the day he's just being an annoying little pest with a tendency towards psychotic delusions.

The two of you are lucky.

He threatened to find me and said he will do physical violence to me

Well, according to his buddy "i will find out what happens to people like me" or something like that. Not that i take people being stupid enough to announce stuff like that publicly overly serious but still... There's a fine line between determined and mental.

I provide proofs to mods of his attempt to doxx me and he admit it to the mods too but mods did not take any action. I was surprised but then when I saw what angstrom and Arkas behave like in this thread, I am no longer surprised. They are politically motivated is seems to me.

SirFoxy

totally_not_banned

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
I'd just hope the law doesn't really change in Germany.

Yeah, i'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't go along with this yet. Given all the draconian police laws most (all?) states have passed in recent years i'd have thought making passwords fair game would just be pushed through with little discussion or opposition at all.

From a purely technical angle it's not that big of deal though. All it really means is that one has to take care of guaranteeing plausible deniability. I kind of wonder why there isn't more discussion about this given all the developments but i figure practical cases are probably not that often about disk encryption but rather phones, accounts and such.

Some encryptions software does this, hidden drive/partition but not sure how well this would work in practice. I'm pretty sure regime agents GCHQ/NSA would be able to figure out there is hidden partition and they would just ask you to unlock. If you refuse => Guantanamo/Belmarsh or a black site in Eastern Europe.

Yeah, that's the point of plausible deniability. As far as i know TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt had hidden volumes that tried to implement this idea. It's definitely doable. Unless there's some kind of header it's not really possible to tell apart encrypted data and random garbage and there where some clever ways to make the space used for this explainable too i think.

Telegram hasn't shared a single byte of userdata if you ignore the times they did, for example not to get banned in the Country wanting the data.

Well, at least that's what they are saying publicly. It's not like i have any evidence that would contradict their statements or want to imply that they did something like that but in general keeping quiet about cooperating could very much be in the interest of all parties involved (aside from the person being leaked/spied on obviously).

Telegram is running custom encryption (something pretty much every cryptography expert will advise against) after all and by default a lot is transmitted (and stored) unencrypted as far as i know, so they could probably get at quite a lot of data if they wanted.

Maybe custom encrypion is a plus. Do we really want providers running state approved/backdoor'd encryption. As long as people able to verify somehow, but I guess this is impossible and will have to have certain element of trust.

Yeah, the good old rumors in regards to NIST approval. I'm not saying that i'd know how much there is to it but it's pretty much factored into the discussion and the general consensus is still that common schemes are likely safer. I mean common scheme doesn't mean that you can't use any alternate curves or stuff like that if you overly distrust the NIST approved ones.

My biggest gripe with Telegram is still the phone number requirement though. I understand that it's likely kind of an anti-spam measure but if they were that big on privacy i feel they should have looked into alternatives and not require something, which in a lot of places is not available anonymously unless the user invests some noticeable effort into skirting local regulations.

Most govt are monitoring and archiving your SMS, phone calls, internet browsing history (Echelon/NSA Snowden leaks) so this may be a moot point.

How does this make it a moot point? Aside from that i'm quite doubtful how far beyond meta data of phone calls and contents of text messages most governments capabilities really go, getting an anonymous internet connection is still way easier than getting an anonymous SIM (not saying it's extremely hard but doing it somewhat legally requires quite a bit of effort - in any case it's harder than going to the next mall/starbucks/whatever and logging into wifi using a spoofed MAC address).

totally_not_banned

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
There are of course other fairly easy and legal ways to get pretty much any number such as online providers, but that isn't something telegram would think of (only to block them).

Well, aside from getting a foreign SIM card (UK, Romania and so on) the most straight forward way is to just go to a flea market and look for a guy selling cellphone equipment. Often times there's also SIM cards on offer (side business of some little phone shop) and i'd say chances are like 50/50 they'll activate the card for you without even asking your name, let alone any kind of ID. If you tell them that you don't have any identification with you and just provide some bullshit data the probability of you walking away with an anonymous SIM card will likely approach 100 percent. At least that's how it used to be a couple years ago.

It would not make any difference if you buy foreign sim card. Your IMEI number is also transmitted when you connect to cell towers so if you have a foreign sim card but have used that phone in your country with your own sim card in your name then changing SIM cards will make no difference. The telco/state intelligence KNOWS it's your phone with a new sim.

Well, yeah, kind of at least. Noone knows if you sold that phone but in the end anyone who's serious about this will obviously know to get a dedicated phone for such adventures or go %150 illegal and set the phone to a faked IMEI (kids don't do this... it can get you into a ton of trouble).

Only way may be to have a totally unused phone (paid with cash) with a foreign pre-paid sim (paid with cash), never top up money by credit card and never call/SMS/visit website
that you normally do with your normal phone. Jason Bourne style.

Chances are the first version probably isn't even illegal (for you) as you did nothing wrong (i mean, hey, what are you supposed to do if you ask for activation and the guy just tells you to come back in 5 minutes?). I'd just be very curious whose name they put those cards under. I don't think just giving a bunch of Xs is going to work as they are using their reseller access with the network provider to activate the cards.

Not sure why laws around buying sim card is so tight?? Is it because of East / West Germany and the need to spy on everyone becuase it seem too anal to need ID to buy sim card.

Hmm, i don't really get the first part. East or west Germany haven't really been around for about 34 years by now and back then no common person around here had a mobile phone, let alone anything worth calling a cellphone. Regulation actually used to be quite lax up until 2017 as in it was usually just a token procedure where you put your data into an online form noone checked for validity. I'm not sure what actually led to the tightening but given 1 or 2 years later (i think) Austria followed by doing away with their until then fully anonymous SIM cards over some terror incident (again my memory is somewhat cloudy here - at least terror prevention was the officially stated reason) i guess chances are it was something similar.

Basically a token gesture to demonstrate how something was being done to improve security, while anyone with two braincells knew that it would change pretty much nothing. In Germany pre-2017 SIM cards didn't even have to be re-registered so there's probably still 1000s and 1000s of SIMs belonging to Alf from Melmac in active usage. Austria at least forced the old SIMs to prove identity making it into a somewhat believable effort.

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
I'd just hope the law doesn't really change in Germany.

Yeah, i'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't go along with this yet. Given all the draconian police laws most (all?) states have passed in recent years i'd have thought making passwords fair game would just be pushed through with little discussion or opposition at all.

From a purely technical angle it's not that big of deal though. All it really means is that one has to take care of guaranteeing plausible deniability. I kind of wonder why there isn't more discussion about this given all the developments but i figure practical cases are probably not that often about disk encryption but rather phones, accounts and such.

Some encryptions software does this, hidden drive/partition but not sure how well this would work in practice. I'm pretty sure regime agents GCHQ/NSA would be able to figure out there is hidden partition and they would just ask you to unlock. If you refuse => Guantanamo/Belmarsh or a black site in Eastern Europe.

Yeah, that's the point of plausible deniability. As far as i know TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt had hidden volumes that tried to implement this idea. It's definitely doable. Unless there's some kind of header it's not really possible to tell apart encrypted data and random garbage and there where some clever ways to make the space used for this explainable too i think.

Maybe they will do something like this. You drive is 120GB, you have 60GB visible data (so should have 60GB free), so NSA runs h2testw.exe and it can only write 10GB . A bit difficult to explain that one. If only a few GBs of hidden volume then more plausible but not for a lot and their forsensic will check for hidden volumes for sure if you are a Snowden type person with computer knowledge. Once they believe there is a hidden volume then you have to decrypt or go to jail.

Telegram hasn't shared a single byte of userdata if you ignore the times they did, for example not to get banned in the Country wanting the data.

Well, at least that's what they are saying publicly. It's not like i have any evidence that would contradict their statements or want to imply that they did something like that but in general keeping quiet about cooperating could very much be in the interest of all parties involved (aside from the person being leaked/spied on obviously).

Telegram is running custom encryption (something pretty much every cryptography expert will advise against) after all and by default a lot is transmitted (and stored) unencrypted as far as i know, so they could probably get at quite a lot of data if they wanted.

Maybe custom encrypion is a plus. Do we really want providers running state approved/backdoor'd encryption. As long as people able to verify somehow, but I guess this is impossible and will have to have certain element of trust.

Yeah, the good old rumors in regards to NIST approval. I'm not saying that i'd know how much there is to it but it's pretty much factored into the discussion and the general consensus is still that common schemes are likely safer. I mean common scheme doesn't mean that you can't use any alternate curves or stuff like that if you overly distrust the NIST approved ones.

I would be very suspicious to use anything state/regime approved.

My biggest gripe with Telegram is still the phone number requirement though. I understand that it's likely kind of an anti-spam measure but if they were that big on privacy i feel they should have looked into alternatives and not require something, which in a lot of places is not available anonymously unless the user invests some noticeable effort into skirting local regulations.

Most govt are monitoring and archiving your SMS, phone calls, internet browsing history (Echelon/NSA Snowden leaks) so this may be a moot point.

How does this make it a moot point? Aside from that i'm quite doubtful how far beyond meta data of phone calls and contents of text messages most governments capabilities really go, getting an anonymous internet connection is still way easier than getting an anonymous SIM (not saying it's extremely hard but doing it somewhat legally requires quite a bit of effort - in any case it's harder than going to the next mall/starbucks/whatever and logging into wifi using a spoofed MAC address).

The phone number is not really important i think. The state knows who number belongs to (even if not registered) especially if someone use the sim to call known numbers (family, friends) or used the sim in a phone they already used (IMEI tracked). Even if these things are avoided then they always have software like Pegasus and probably many other softwares for this.

In my country you can get SIM card very easily with cash, no problem. We have very effective state intelligence with high spying power.

asterisk14

@totally_not_banned said:

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
There are of course other fairly easy and legal ways to get pretty much any number such as online providers, but that isn't something telegram would think of (only to block them).

Well, aside from getting a foreign SIM card (UK, Romania and so on) the most straight forward way is to just go to a flea market and look for a guy selling cellphone equipment. Often times there's also SIM cards on offer (side business of some little phone shop) and i'd say chances are like 50/50 they'll activate the card for you without even asking your name, let alone any kind of ID. If you tell them that you don't have any identification with you and just provide some bullshit data the probability of you walking away with an anonymous SIM card will likely approach 100 percent. At least that's how it used to be a couple years ago.

It would not make any difference if you buy foreign sim card. Your IMEI number is also transmitted when you connect to cell towers so if you have a foreign sim card but have used that phone in your country with your own sim card in your name then changing SIM cards will make no difference. The telco/state intelligence KNOWS it's your phone with a new sim.

Well, yeah, kind of at least. Noone knows if you sold that phone but in the end anyone who's serious about this will obviously know to get a dedicated phone for such adventures or go %150 illegal and set the phone to a faked IMEI (kids don't do this... it can get you into a ton of trouble).

This is the Jason Bourne stuff I talk about. Normal person will have difficulty and the ones that do have knowledge and are planning something will probably be under surveillance themselves or their friends will make mistake with opsec and make it possible to spy on the friend with fake IMEI.

Only way may be to have a totally unused phone (paid with cash) with a foreign pre-paid sim (paid with cash), never top up money by credit card and never call/SMS/visit website
that you normally do with your normal phone. Jason Bourne style.

Chances are the first version probably isn't even illegal (for you) as you did nothing wrong (i mean, hey, what are you supposed to do if you ask for activation and the guy just tells you to come back in 5 minutes?). I'd just be very curious whose name they put those cards under. I don't think just giving a bunch of Xs is going to work as they are using their reseller access with the network provider to activate the cards.

Not sure why laws around buying sim card is so tight?? Is it because of East / West Germany and the need to spy on everyone becuase it seem too anal to need ID to buy sim card.

Hmm, i don't really get the first part. East or west Germany haven't really been around for about 34 years by now and back then no common person around here had a mobile phone, let alone anything worth calling a cellphone. Regulation actually used to be quite lax up until 2017 as in it was usually just a token procedure where you put your data into an online form noone checked for validity.

I have old friend in Germany who lived there during east/west germany and he tells me that you always had to have identity papers with you and make sure your address is accurate because was common to be stopped by police during cold east/west germany time. If problem with papers then police take you to police station. I thought maybe because of this experience then germany is strict with security and wants ID for buying SIM card.

totally_not_banned

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@asterisk14 said:

@totally_not_banned said:

@shruub said:
I'd just hope the law doesn't really change in Germany.

Yeah, i'm actually kind of surprised that they didn't go along with this yet. Given all the draconian police laws most (all?) states have passed in recent years i'd have thought making passwords fair game would just be pushed through with little discussion or opposition at all.

From a purely technical angle it's not that big of deal though. All it really means is that one has to take care of guaranteeing plausible deniability. I kind of wonder why there isn't more discussion about this given all the developments but i figure practical cases are probably not that often about disk encryption but rather phones, accounts and such.

Some encryptions software does this, hidden drive/partition but not sure how well this would work in practice. I'm pretty sure regime agents GCHQ/NSA would be able to figure out there is hidden partition and they would just ask you to unlock. If you refuse => Guantanamo/Belmarsh or a black site in Eastern Europe.

Yeah, that's the point of plausible deniability. As far as i know TrueCrypt/VeraCrypt had hidden volumes that tried to implement this idea. It's definitely doable. Unless there's some kind of header it's not really possible to tell apart encrypted data and random garbage and there where some clever ways to make the space used for this explainable too i think.

Maybe they will do something like this. You drive is 120GB, you have 60GB visible data (so should have 60GB free), so NSA runs h2testw.exe and it can only write 10GB . A bit difficult to explain that one. If only a few GBs of hidden volume then more plausible but not for a lot and their forsensic will check for hidden volumes for sure if you are a Snowden type person with computer knowledge. Once they believe there is a hidden volume then you have to decrypt or go to jail.

Not really realistic. A hidden volume could be pretty much located anywhere. From unallocated space over empty partitions to even unused blocks of some filesystem. It's obviously possible to destroy it by overwriting parts of the disk that should really have no meaning but you can't prove that it was there in the first place and asking something like "Why did you only put so few files on drive X?" is about as conclusive as asking "Why do you like black t-shirts?".

Telegram hasn't shared a single byte of userdata if you ignore the times they did, for example not to get banned in the Country wanting the data.

Well, at least that's what they are saying publicly. It's not like i have any evidence that would contradict their statements or want to imply that they did something like that but in general keeping quiet about cooperating could very much be in the interest of all parties involved (aside from the person being leaked/spied on obviously).

Telegram is running custom encryption (something pretty much every cryptography expert will advise against) after all and by default a lot is transmitted (and stored) unencrypted as far as i know, so they could probably get at quite a lot of data if they wanted.

Maybe custom encrypion is a plus. Do we really want providers running state approved/backdoor'd encryption. As long as people able to verify somehow, but I guess this is impossible and will have to have certain element of trust.

Yeah, the good old rumors in regards to NIST approval. I'm not saying that i'd know how much there is to it but it's pretty much factored into the discussion and the general consensus is still that common schemes are likely safer. I mean common scheme doesn't mean that you can't use any alternate curves or stuff like that if you overly distrust the NIST approved ones.

I would be very suspicious to use anything state/regime approved.

Well, one probably should be but cryptography is complicated and the common idea is that it's better to have 100000s of people working on something / testing it while having malicious actors trying to subvert the process than have like 10 or something people work on it undisturbed.

My biggest gripe with Telegram is still the phone number requirement though. I understand that it's likely kind of an anti-spam measure but if they were that big on privacy i feel they should have looked into alternatives and not require something, which in a lot of places is not available anonymously unless the user invests some noticeable effort into skirting local regulations.

Most govt are monitoring and archiving your SMS, phone calls, internet browsing history (Echelon/NSA Snowden leaks) so this may be a moot point.

How does this make it a moot point? Aside from that i'm quite doubtful how far beyond meta data of phone calls and contents of text messages most governments capabilities really go, getting an anonymous internet connection is still way easier than getting an anonymous SIM (not saying it's extremely hard but doing it somewhat legally requires quite a bit of effort - in any case it's harder than going to the next mall/starbucks/whatever and logging into wifi using a spoofed MAC address).

The phone number is not really important i think. The state knows who number belongs to (even if not registered) especially if someone use the sim to call known numbers (family, friends) or used the sim in a phone they already used (IMEI tracked). Even if these things are avoided then they always have software like Pegasus and probably many other softwares for this.

Yeah, mapping out social relationships to the point where taking pretty accurate guesses is possible is probably quite real but there's still no magic method of map-hardware-to-person

In my country you can get SIM card very easily with cash, no problem. We have very effective state intelligence with high spying power.

It's pretty much common knowledge that SIM card regulations don't make a lot of difference (like more or less laid out here getting an anonymous card is maybe annoying to the average person but far from hard and anyone with a strong inclination is sure to get it no matter what). Like i've said in my opinion it's pretty much a symbolic gesture to show people that something is being done (admittedly probably along with technically naive politicians believing it would actually make a difference).

Edit: To be fair, i very much also think that if state actor X is determined to get you they probably will sooner or later but then how many people will really be deemed overly relevant in the grand scheme of things?

asterisk14

I've been following state spying for a while. Here are Some interesting stories from my previous knowledge/posts:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/11/crypto_ag_backdoored_german_swiss_news_allegs/

The encryption machine maker was secretly bought by a Liechtenstein front company that was 50/50 owned by the CIA and German spy agency the BND. The two nations agreed to let Swiss spies in on their secret, while only a tiny handful of top Crypto AG personnel knew about the intentional weakening of its products.

Operation Rubikon, as the Swiss and Germans called it, "was one of the boldest and most scandalous operations, because over a hundred states paid billions of dollars for their state secrets to be stolen," Warwick University political science professor Richard Aldrich reportedly said.

Quoting from secret documents it says it obtained, ZDF said: "Certain people [at Crypto AG] knew something about the role that the Germans and Americans played in Crypto AG and were ready to protect this relationship."

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/are-you-being-watched-finfisher-government-spy-tool-found-hiding-whatsapp-skype-1640263

Legitimate downloads of popular software including WhatsApp, Skype and VLC Player are allegedly being hacked at an internet service provider (ISP) level to spread an advanced form of surveillance software known as "FinFisher", cybersecurity researchers warn.

FinFisher is sold to global governments and intelligence agencies and can be used to snoop on webcam feeds, keystrokes, microphones and web browsing. Documents, previously published by WikiLeaks, indicate that one tool called "FinFly ISP" may be linked to the case.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/supreme-court-asked-to-decide-if-us-has-right-to-data-on-foreign-servers/

The Justice Department on Friday petitioned the US Supreme Court to step into an international legal thicket, one that asks whether US search warrants extend to data stored on foreign servers. The US government says it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/Advanced_CIA_Firmware_Has_Been_Infecting_Wi-Fi_Routers_for_Years/59172/0/38/38/Y/M.html

Home routers from 10 manufacturers, including Linksys, DLink, and Belkin, can be turned into covert listening posts that allow the Central Intelligence Agency to monitor and manipulate incoming and outgoing traffic and infect connected devices. That’s according to secret documents posted Thursday by WikiLeaks.

SirFoxy

Breaking news: The US has an intelligence program just like every other developed country.

totally_not_banned

@asterisk14 said:
I have old friend in Germany who lived there during east/west germany and he tells me that you always had to have identity papers with you and make sure your address is accurate because was common to be stopped by police during cold east/west germany time. If problem with papers then police take you to police station. I thought maybe because of this experience then germany is strict with security and wants ID for buying SIM card.

Well, it's not like i can really comment on that. I was a little boy when the wall came down (i was there shortly after though - very chill with lots of makeshift flea markets at the wall and zero tension) but at least from my personal impression that seems hard to imagine.

In general you are not even mandated to carry an ID and as long as you're supposed place of residence matches the police's database (the practice of having to register your address is actually very real and gets taken - at least these days - somewhat seriously, while a couple years back you could have basically just walked into any local administration to claim you live at this or that address and even today all it would take is putting some illegible signature on a form noone really validates) that's no big deal during checks (which i can still count on one hand after multiple decades) but then customs change with times and i could very much imagine that the actual location could make quite a difference there. Somewhere down in central Germany suspicions would probably have been way lower than in some place right at the border.

asterisk14

deleted

MGarbis

@SirFoxy said:
Breaking news: The US has an intelligence program just like every other developed country.

Also developing countries, like Russia, have their own intelligence programs.

nocloud

@asterisk14 said:
I provide proofs to mods of his attempt to doxx me and he admit it to the mods too but mods did not take any action. I was surprised but then when I saw what angstrom and Arkas behave like in this thread, I am no longer surprised. They are politically motivated is seems to me.

What could I have doxed you with apart from the IP address itself? Which I didn't, nor did i threaten to do so either.

You already told us all you're with Virgin Media fibre.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3431674#Comment_3431674

@asterisk14 said:
UK
50MB down/5MB up
£16/m (~$20)

Only Virgin Media has this ratio up and downstream which is a DOCSIS fibre network. Also the price is correct for Virgin Media.

You said you were from Leeds after I suggested you were in Halifax a city that is very close to Leeds, so you revealed your location.
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3683283#Comment_3683283

@asterisk14 said:
I am in Leeds, please come and arrest me. Putin is here with me too so you get bonus

You were all joking and happy until you realised it was real and you had been reported.

It wasn't a threat, 1 virgin media IP address was collected after you clicked a link to my private server from the Leeds area, you accepted terms & conditions and the cookies policy. So I knew everything matched, I got your IP address and I reported that IP to Virgin Media for a breach of terms and conditions, what they decided to do with this info was up to them and I also passed the IP to the cyber hate team so you're probably on some list somewhere.

https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3687679#Comment_3687679

@nocloud said:
Are you joking? I know you clicked the link to my domain and have already seen it. I'm not as stupid as you. Cookie consent notified, your IP logged for future and your ISP notified for breach of terms and conditions. Of which they informed me they can not terminate your agreement yet while a police investigation is ongoing, and once it's completed your connection to your ISP may be reviewed again for breach of terms and conditions.

I didn't dox you or threaten to do so you happily revealed your location willingly along with your ISP, I deleted your IP address after you requested me to do so, and the mod team requested I keep no record of it.

And BTW there is no such thing as an attempted doxing, you are either doxed or not.

Arkas

@asterisk14 said: I was surprised but then when I saw what angstrom and Arkas behave like in this thread, I am no longer surprised. They are politically motivated is seems to me.

Yes, everything is about politics with you.
Thread closed.