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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

If you can just say in a commit message "we have received a voluntary enquiry from a state authority that included a requirement for confidentiality" surely the whole song and dance about canaries is pointless, right? Or did the committer fuck up and ruin their plausible deniability?

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This losing the whole point of a canary reminds me of Dr. Strangelove's quote

> Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?

This is an absolutely unbelievable Baader-Meinhoff coincidence. I was, less than 5 minutes ago, searching the script for this line so that I could send it to my father.

As proof, this is the only line returned when you search the text for the string "tell the". https://www3.nd.edu/~dlindley/handouts/DrS.htm

I was really surprised to see that commit message. I wonder if they had that cleared? I'm guessing the committer didn't fully understand the concept.

I guess they figure they can say they've received the inquiry, but can't say what the inquiry is about.

But then as the parent poster mentioned, what's the point of the whole canary concept

My cynical side wonders if they were just looking for an excuse to get rid of it so they can continue their process of sheding off the final remaining shreds of the original cypherpunk culture of crypto.

They might have anticipated receiving a more restrictive gag order when they originally put the canary in place.

I wonder if the NSA should have a team that just goes around organisations that have warrant canaries and sends them baseless confidential messages, just enough to trigger the canary. The fact that they don't do this suggests they don't think canaries are much use.

Most organizations which post warrant canaries use phrasing that would be less vulnerable to this "attack", such as making the canary conditional on the compelled disclosure of information.

Or they were just giving a finger to The Man. But yes, to the extent that a "we have never" canary would have protected them (which is a little questionable to be honest), this commit message taken alone absolutely opens them up to whatever penalties exist in whatever jurisdiction sent the demand.

I think anyone can still say they they have NOT been contacted by a given agency?

That given, they are not going to "waste" their canary if it was a simple request for information. Best guess, this is the beginning of the end for Ethereum and they have been compromised just like Blockstream and BitcoinCore were previously.

It is best to assume that from now on Ethereum is no long a decentralized application but its development is being directed by a governmental agency, again, same as BitcoinCore.

Most important next step for Cryptocurrency is to make it development resistance. Every notable attack on crypo the last few years has not been hackers but developers like Greg Maxwell, Peter Todd and Adam Back who attack the code base out in the open, acting as useful idiots for three letter organizations. It seems ETH is next on the chopping block.

Ethereum (the protocol) is not only developed by Ethereum Foundation; and further, the several client implementations are all open source and run by independent organizations.

Seems like wild speculation.

Selectively choosing to not trigger a warrent canary defeats it's intended purpose - to communicate when you receive a gag order.

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