cross-posted from: https://monyet.cc/post/153506
The U.K. Parliament is close to passing the Online Safety Bill, which threatens global privacy by allowing backdoors into messaging services, compromising end-to-end encryption. Despite objections, no amendments were accepted. The bill also includes content filtering and surveillance measures. There’s still a chance for lawmakers to protect privacy with an amendment preserving encryption. A recent survey shows the majority of U.K. citizens want strong privacy on messaging apps.
Galaxy brain idea: Just encrypt your messages manually. Agree on an algorithm and trade keys in-person, then send each other encrypted files that you decrypt with a separate program (and for added privacy, on a separate device that doesn’t have network access). It’s not convenient at all but the idea is hilarious.
There’s an urban myth at my university that two students did this to test rumors that the school emails were being monitored, and after a few weeks later IT emailed them asking them to stop.
As in, run GPG like you already do on important emails? mind == blown
You can go a step further and do Diffie-Hellman on a pocket calculator for key agreement. Authentication is left as an exercise for the reader tho.