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Comment by ds | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. As someone who is making a company in the privacy space, I hate when privacy products make huge claims like this. Another big offender is proton mail.

They may not be able to track your stuff as it is today, but one single FISA order demanding they push a update out to just to a few specific IP addresses and it will be all the same.

All things you download and install to your device can screw you if they have any functional way to update or have any serverside includes. (like a analytics JS tracker that can be changed to a JS logger)

We run into this a bit with https://redact.dev , but for people who want to be sure the login information they provide is safe. At the end of the day, you are always at the mercy of the courts AND the founders not doing evil things.

Heres a quick meme to better explain: https://i.imgur.com/Vnerxcb.png

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Disclaimer: I'm making Obscura

True. This is why all client side source code will be released and reproducible builds offered on platforms that support it.

If you don't know what code you're running, yeah you're screwed either way.

> reproducible builds

Nixpkgs please! It's the most successful reproducibility experiment I know of.

Absolutely!

Fun fact: all of the current website's infra is NixOS-based

Fun fact #2: I overhauled Bitcoin Core's reproducible build system to use Guix (a Nix-inspired functional package manager)

Side quest: Would you share the infra stack and how it’s set up?

It's mostly bash scripts (I know I have stockholm syndrome there) and nixos-rebuild: https://www.haskellforall.com/2023/01/announcing-nixos-rebui...

All the nix deployment tools had too much magic and broke, but nixos-rebuild always works and it's part of Nix!

Disko was great for bootstrapping servers: https://github.com/nix-community/disko

You could have no auto-update functionality, and that would go a long way. But then, you are severely crippling your product by doing that. Releasing clientside sourcecode doesnt mean much if the NSA forces you to give everyone else a different binary and sourcode than your target. It means nothing.

Look- the point is, you will go down a endless rabbithole of trying to appease everyone with "bulletproof" security. And the more you go, the more functionality and usefulness you will give up.

The best solution is to be realistic and not make defacto claims. Even things like TOR, which have been open source and audited from day one have had serious issues, and I am sure many TOR developers parroted the "you cant be tracked using us" only to have exploits and code issues pop up multiple times.

NSA is not the world. They don’t have to comply with NSA, just don’t have US as jurisdiction.

Its where the author/founder lives. So, yes its applies pretty much exactly.

NSA doesn't typically hack and persist to watch the devices of US citizens.

Are there examples of such warrants being issued? This was, more or less, the subject of the big showdown between Apple and the FBI some years ago. The FBI maybe could have won legally but decided to back down. If such warrants were being issued, they eventually would be made public in the resulting criminal prosecutions.

Transparency reports from Google[0], Facebook, et al. are strong evidence that these legal processes do in fact get issued.

[0]https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national-...

Of course there’s warrants and FISA warrants issued for Google data. The question is whether they’ve issued a warrant to send a bugged autoupdate, which your link has nothing to do with.

Unless they end up in secretive federal courts, and target a company that doesn't have the deep pockets and media attention of Apple. Then you'd likely hear about it years after your privacy is violated.

You can make that claim about any software. Why would you assume their installers can't be verified publicly? Are they using unsigned installers? Perhaps your OS also is pushing signed updates with an implant based on your IP, much more convenient than fighting with vpn providers for just traffic.

The only claim they made is about the vpn service itself. If FISA orders it, the NSA will break into your house and plant cameras to watch your monitor lol. That's a strawman argument. You shouldn't argue against an claim they didn't make about update security, but even then can't you just use your own wireguard client? You don't have to use theirs right?

Your meme is just a meme. It Chechnya, North Korea and UAE - sure, it applies. But not in first world countries. Massive lawsuits would ensue.

You may enjoy reading about "national security letters", Lavabit, and FISA warrants.

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