A lot of folks in Ireland have an Aunt Aoife.

Please note that the article disagrees with the headline. It states explicitly that there was no request.

In other words, the author feels free to lie to you.

Here’s the original article of which this link is a ripoff.

Fascists lie.

As a reminder, Eich was turfed from Mozilla for joining an anti-LGBT hate campaign (and thus alienating a whole lot of developers, sponsors, and users); and his So Brave browser pushed NFTs and stole money via referral fraud.

1. Backdoors in consumer software cannot in fact be restricted to “legitimate” use. All it takes is one “bad apple” to leak the keys – say, a radicalized police officer leaking them to a fascist group for use in harassing political opponents – and those keys show up on the darknet and are directly available to abusers. This is a much larger threat than (e.g.) traditional landline telephone wiretapping.
2. If secure communication systems are made illegal, the organizations that build those systems (e.g. Signal) will shut down so as not to be prosecuted for “enabling child abuse”. This deprives their current users, including children, of the secure communication systems they are already using today.
3. Sadly, law enforcement officers abuse their power quite often. They also have a higher rate of domestic abuse than the general population. Giving them power to spy on children’s communication is directly enabling abusers.

Taking away privacy makes it easier for children to be abused.

Remember, the most likely abusers of children are not strangers off the Internet; they’re people who have authority over those children: parents, church leaders, teachers, coaches, police, etc.

Private online communication makes it easier for abused children to get help.

In other words, these laws are not “fighting pedophilia”. They are enabling child abuse.

Remember, streaming only has a business model as long as it has a better user experience than piracy. That’s why iTunes took off in the era of Napster. When a streaming service’s user experience drops below that of digging up pirate treasure off a shitty ad-ridden torrent site, that service is not long for the world.

One problem is that a great deal of correct security advice contradicts “common knowledge” security practices. Password character classes – “must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, and symbols” – are a standard example. That idea got rooted in security requirements for banks and such, and it was a bad idea even then.

But getting rid of that idiocy looks, to the casual observer, like “weakening password requirements”.

Another problem is that the biggest security vulnerability that many businesses have is obedience to authority. If you can “social-engineer” someone into thinking you’re the big boss, then of course they’ll turn off all the security for you. And the scarier the big boss is, the more eager the underlings are to please them by doing exactly what the email from bigboss@yourcopmany.com says.

Resistance to phishing is questioning claims of authority; it requires being willing to tell the big boss that no you won’t take the security down in response to an email, even a really convincing one. Which means that the worker has to be safe in doing so.

The big platforms have gotten a lot worse.

Twitter went fascist.
Canadians can’t share news articles on Facebook.
Reddit self-owned.