Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/21/google-mozilla-and-apple-are.html
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It’s easy to stand up to a market minion.
I’ve re-read that several times and can’t make heads or tails, could you explain?
Certificate signing authority is just one more of those things where the more you know about what’s going on, the more astonished you are that civilization isn’t just in a permanent state of “extremely on fire”.
The most cliché of clickbait headline clichés. The weird thing is, the content is not what is usually clickbait.
I’m curious as to who generated the fraudulent root certificate? was is the Kazakhstan government, or some company that values money more than keeping the certificate roots trustworthy?
Anyone can generate a root certificate and then ask you to install it. Large corps do it all the time for internal use. The “trick” is that the browsers will block the installation of this one in particular.
minnion^^^ minnow?
Standing up to Kazakhstan (minnow) = easy
Standing up to, say, China (!minnow) = well … can you say “dragonfly”?
Google, Mozilla, and Apple are using this one weird trick to block Kazakhstan’s surveillance of its own citizens
I’m surprised you didn’t use an image of somebody putting an onion in their sock.
I too was a little disappointed to see that, hoped it was satirical or something.
Tech companies defer to some governments more than others, but I don’t think that’s the issue here.
Browser makers are not telling the Kazakh government it can’t spy on its citizens – they’re in no position to do that, and it’d be shitty if foreign companies could dictate to governments anyway. What they’re saying is that so long as they’re providing TLS in Kazakhstan, they will act against attempts to sabotage it, even if it’s the government doing the sabotage. I think they might well do the same in the US or China.
Bear in mind, they’re being bold about this because the Kazakh government wasn’t willing to make this spying official policy, but rather used trickery. If a nation legislates that you can’t use encryption, then the most you could expect from any tech company is that they’d refuse to do business there. More likely, they’d object but then comply. They certainly wouldn’t risk shareholders’ money by operating in the open as a criminal enterprise.
Turns out that the root certificate was a Trojan Horse.
Doctor Warns: Stop Installing This Root Immediately
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