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Cake day: Jun 07, 2023

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replaced it myself - it’s not actually that difficult to do


I actually replaced the display twice already (got a replacement from Aliexpress for around $16) - first time because the touchscreen failed and second time because I smashed it.


Sony z3c with FirefoxOS and a Samsung A5 with Tizen


Only public keys get exchanged via Meta’s servers, those keys don’t help you with trying to decrypt any messages (you need the corresponding private key to decrypt - and that private key stays on the device).

Sure, they could just do a man in the middle, but that can be detected by verifying the keys (once, via another channel).


Maybe so, but in this case the point was that the protocol used by WhatsApp hasn’t changed in that time and it’s still what they describe in their security whitepaper. If you want to use that software as is or maybe reimplement it based on that is up to you.


Governments, if they want, can decrypt any chat

Any source for that claim?


In a subpoena case in India, that turned out to be not true.

Source please.

WhatsApp admins hold keys to being able to do that under law pressure.

How do they get the keys?

They only guarantee it for 1-1 messages and statuses, and against “generic” actors for group chats…

Who is “they”?


Group chats are also end-to-end encrypted in WhatsApp (so any monitoring would need to be done in cooperation with one of the participants’ devices before encryption or after decryption)


declassified internal FBI document I just linked

don’t see any such link



yowsup is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol. So there is proper end-to-end encryption on the protocol level - that would only leave the possibility of having a backdoor in the “official” WhatsApp client, but none has been found so far. BTW, people do actually (try to) decompile the WhatsApp client (or the WhatsApp Web client which implements the same protocol and functionality) and look what it is doing.

For anyone really curious, it’s not too difficult to hook into the WhatsApp Web client with your web browsers Javascript debugger and see what messages are sent.


It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.

There is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol: yowsup


Not sure if they have only just added a clarification, but it now says

Notwithstanding the above, Zoom will not use audio, video or chat Customer Content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent.


They are seriously suffering from NIH (not invented here) syndrome. So, you can theoretically build your own Telegram client, but you can’t re-use any standard components to do so. WhatsApp on the other hand doesn’t open their clients, but under the hood they are just using mostly standard components (Noise protocol, modified XMPP protocol, Signal protocol), so it’s not actually that difficult to build your own WhatsApp client by just piecing together these components.


Never rely on being able to delete anything that has been published/posted. If you want privacy, don’t post it. Yes, some systems make it easier to delete a post, but you can never rely on it being deleted everywhere (someone could have made a screenshot, etc.).