Was drinking in a bar in Espoo in 2012 or 2013 and heard this from someone at rovio.
At the time they used Riak db and basho were onsite and we asked why they didn't enable inter server encryption. "Because nsa pay us 10m not to".
Guess nsa pulled the Riak cluster protocol off the aws fibre.
Is there any reliable source for NSA paying Rovio other than this random bar discussion? Not that I don't believe you or that I'm naive about NSA and the power of money, but I looked around news in 2014 and the accusations against Rovio specifically are a bit different flavor. It seems that Rovio was oversharing data to ad networks (Millennial Media comes up a lot), and NSA likely slurped data from the advertising companies. This bar banter is suggesting that NSA had some kind of arrangement with Rovio directly instead, and Rovio willingly went along.
Or alternatively, do you feel the Rovio employee's blabbering was talking about an actual, real NSA deal with Rovio, or was it more like a bar joke and direct NSA co-operation was not really implied? (e.g. "we know our security is bad, but these ad companies pay us $XX million to not use encryption so it's sorta like NSA pays us to keep it that way sips beer").
I'm interested, because if that is an actual thing that happened, then that's an example of NSA paying a Finnish company $$$ to weaken their security, and the Finnish company willingly agreeing to that. Is it in NSA's Modus Operandi to approach and then pay foreign companies to do this sort of thing?
Your comment is describing it in few words, but to me it sounds like it maybe wasn't implying an actual NSA direct co-operation, more like someone doing bar banter and being entirely serious. But that's just me trying to guess tone.
(I'm Finnish. I want to know if Rovio has skeletons in their closet. So I can roast them.)
Ah yeah, I saw the propublica as well, it was one of the first articles I found when looking on the topic. I don't doubt at all that Angry Birds data was used by NSA, doesn't seem controversial.
The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice.
Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.
Here is a nice talk by Byron Tau who has also written a book titled "Means of Control" detailing some of these flows covering ad tech companies, data brokers and how government contractors use them and serve as a key player to provide services to intelligence agencies.
I think they definitely knew that they are embedding code from US based ad agencies who might either be selling it to the NSA or just doing it in an insecure manner (plaintext protocols).
Mostly in such cases, direct involvement and paying dollars is a clear no-go for the intelligence agencies. They could instead be paying the ad agencies.
Also note that we are talking pre-Let's encrypt and TLS everywhere world, a lot of this traffic was also just plain text making it much easier to harvest.
On the other hand it would be a very cheap counter espionage measure if a small stream of such payments was enough to convince China et al that the NSA had not broken encryption.
Earth's oceans contain approximately 1.35 billion cubic kilometers of water. To raise this entire volume from an average temperature of 3.5C to boiling (100 C), we'd need roughly:
1.35 x 10^21 kg x 4,184 J/(kg C) x 96.5C is approximately 5.45 x 10^25 joules
That's 545 million exajoules or about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption.
If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second:
2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256
At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times.
For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans.
ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules
It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over.
Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits.
Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
That's assuming there's no attacks found in a given algorithm. If there is a feasible attack found, the math changes, sometimes dramatically. And we'll never know it because they sure as hell aren't gonna announce it.
Anyway, I'm not worried because governments don't need to crack encryption to do dastardly shit. They have far easier methods to get what they want.
Also just picking constants for encryption algorithms that are supposed to be "nothing up my sleeve" numbers, like the n first digits of pi.
DJB had a good talk about how many degrees of freedom you can still get picking such numbers and how much you can weaken crypto algorithms (even though not outright breaking them), but I can't find it at the moment
You need to account for the heat of vaporization if you plan on boil away and refilling the oceans for your brute force scheme, so you overestimate how many times you will boil away the oceans by a factor of 6 or something.
"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
The "boiling the ocean" argument comes up every once in a while for some time now, just a lot more structured and number packed in the age of LLMs. There are even funny "security" levels based on this [0] like "lake security".
The picture they paint is very useful to help people grasp the scale of "worst case" brute forcing while being completely misleading on the effort needed to break encryption "somehow". Cracking the encryption isn't usually about brute forcing every possible combination, it's all about finding or building a flaw in the algorithm.
Bike thieves don't go through the 10000 combinations on your lock, scammers don't try every possible email password, etc.
Brute forcing a key finds you one answer at a time, hacking the algorithm finds you all answers at once. Without boiling the ocean.
This is an excellent comment, but I think it's worth pointing out some lacunae.
The most important one is that we're assuming that nobody finds a weakness in AES-256, so we have to brute-force it instead of taking some kind of shortcut. Historically speaking, that doesn't seem like a sure bet. (Some slight progress has been made on AES, but nothing practically useful yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#K...) Similar comments apply to factoring large semiprimes and ECDLP; algorithmic improvements could remove many orders of magnitude from these estimates.
Sometimes, even when weaknesses aren't known in the algorithms themselves, there are weaknesses in how they are applied. The Debian OpenSSL fiasco, which seems to have been accidental, may be the best-known example: all secret keys were generated with only 16 bits of entropy. Reusing IVs for OFB or CTR mode is also catastrophic.
A somewhat pedantic note is that you seem to be using two conflicting definitions of "boil the oceans" in different parts of your comment: to raise them to the boiling temperature while leaving them liquid, at first, and to convert them to vapor, later, since you talk about "refilling them". Converting them to vapor requires several times more energy than that. Also, you dropped an order of magnitude somewhere; raising the oceans to boiling requires 5.46 × 10²⁶ J, not 5... × 10²⁵ as you say. ("545 million exajoules" is correct.)
I used `cal_mean` from units(1) to do the calculation, which is based on the mean specific heat of water from 1° to 100°. I'm not sure that's correct for salt water, though, and in any case that's a minor error.
"about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption" is wrong. 545 million exajoules is about a million years of humanity's energy consumption, which is only about 18 terawatts, excluding agriculture.
As gosub100 pointed out, on average you only have to try 2²⁵⁵ possible keys before finding the right one, not all 2²⁵⁶, but that's only a factor of 2.
10¹⁸ AES attempts per second does seem like a reasonable upper bound, but it's much faster than currently existing encryption hardware. 10¹⁸ Hz is the frequency of 0.3-nanometer X-rays with an energy of about 4000 electron volts. I feel like any computer hardware that is performing operations that fast probably cannot be made out of molecules or atoms. You might be able to build it on the surface of a neutron star or a black hole. Seth Lloyd's Nature paper from 02000 on the "ultimate laptop", "Ultimate physical limits to computation", explores some of the physical phenomena involved, and how fast they could possibly compute: https://faculty.pku.edu.cn/_resources/group1/M00/00/0D/cxv0B...
If we take 10¹⁸ Hz and 2²⁵⁶ cycles as given, it is true that one computer would need 10⁵⁹ seconds to finish the job (4×10⁵¹ years), which is indeed about 2.7 × 10⁴¹ times longer than the universe has existed so far (13.79 billion years). But it's worth pointing out that the universe's lifetime is not yet over; it is expected to continue existing much longer than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future lists various stages of its future evolution, including the end of star formation in 10¹²–10¹⁴ years, the last star burning out in 1.2 × 10¹⁴ years, 10³⁰ years until all the galaxies fall apart, 2×10³⁶–3×10⁴³ years until all protons and neutrons are gone (if protons decay), 10⁹¹ years until the Milky Way's black hole evaporates, and 10¹⁰⁶–2.1×10¹⁰⁹ years until the last black holes evaporate. If protons are stable, you could definitely build a computer that kept computing for the necessary 10⁵² years.
And (as you point out next!) you could use more than one computer. If you could somehow use 10⁵⁹ computers, you could finish the job in a second, rather than in untold eons. It depends on how many computers you can get!
"10 watts" is a somewhat handwavy estimate. Most of the computers around me, in things like my multimeter and my MicroSD card, use a lot less power than that, often a few milliwatts. (The fact that the MicroSD card doesn't have a monitor and keyboard is irrelevant to using it for AES cracking.) I'm currently working on a project called the Zorzpad, to build a self-sufficient portable personal computing environment on under a milliwatt, something that has become possible recently due to advancements in subthreshold digital logic.
But even a milliwatt may be an overestimate for AES cracking on classical hardware, because reversible logic may be able to drop power consumption by one or more additional orders of magnitude, and as far as we know, there's no lower limit (not even the ones Lloyd's article talks about apply). AES cracking is especially suited for reversible computing, which is why I used it as an example in this comment a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43850835
It may be worth pointing out that 10⁶⁰ joules (which, despite the possible weaknesses above in its derivation, is certainly a plausible ballpark) is a large number not just measured against Earth, but measured against the Sun and indeed the energy output of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
It's even large compared to the available energy in the Milky Way. If you divide it by c² you get 1.2 × 10⁴³ kg. The Milky Way weighs 1.15 × 10¹² solar masses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way) which turns out to be 2.29 × 10⁴² kg, which is 2.06 × 10⁵⁹ J. So even if you converted the entire galaxy into energy to power your AES crackers, you wouldn't get 10⁶⁰ J.
It's probably worth including AES performance numbers on currently available hardware. You'll still get galactic numbers demonstrating that AES-256 is not currently brute-forceable.
Thank you for this correction and additional perspective.
The Debian vulnerability was particularly bad. An AES key with 16 bits of entropy can be broken with the energy used by a single LED for a fraction of a nanosecond.
Reducing entropy covertly is probably the sole purpose of the so-called Intel Management Engine
2¹²⁷ nanoseconds would be only 390 billion times longer than the universe has existed so far (13.79 billion years). If you wanted to crack AES-128 with brute force using one-billion-key-per-second cracking computers and could only wait a year, you would need 5.4 sextillion computers. If each of those computers weighed 100 milligrams, in the neighborhood of many current chips, their total mass would be 539 trillion tonnes (5.39 × 10¹⁸ kg, 539 exagrams).
That's only about a hundred thousandth of the mass of the Moon, and there are dozens of asteroids larger than this. Since it's clearly physically possible to disassemble an asteroid, or even the entire Moon, and build computers out of it, AES-128 should not be considered secure against currently known attacks. However, currently, it is not publicly known that the NSA has converted any asteroids into computers, and it seems unlikely to have happened secretly.
It's worth noting that when the NSA invented DES, they took a cipher from IBM and made it more resistant (to differential cryptanalysis, a technique that at the time wasn't known outside the NSA itself).
I like to tell myself that everyone at NSA is a fine upstanding patriot, and that the agency only ever does what is in the best interest of the American People, but that does feel naive at times. Like when they infiltrate international standards bodies to introduce backdoors.
Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
It doesn't even really matter what character most of them have. Most information is on need to know basis for a reason so the one giving the orders can tell a tale about foreign terrorists while the grunts happily surveil the common man.
Wrong assumption. Lets imagine they could costslessly crack the encryption there. But as soon as they use any information gathered that way they risk leaking that they have this incredibly valuable capability. ... valuable and very fragile since people can easily change encryption schemes.
Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation.
So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology.
And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
But knowing still gives you an advantage, even if you can't use it legally -- because you can still use it illegally.
LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally.
Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party.
Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
It's tricky, because you run the risk that any use risks disclosing the capability. Targets can even set traps. E.g. I caught irc opers spying on PMs by sending trap URLs where I secretly could see the access logs. Because great care was taken to make sure the URLs existed nowhere else when they got loaded it was a confirmation that the traffic was monitored.
Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
I once asked a VP of engineering at a major ISP why they don't add a layer of encryption to their peering and customer connections to prevent spy agencies from tapping their fibre cables. I was expecting him to say it would be too expensive to upgrade all their network hardware given the amount of traffic. Instead he said: "our routers can already do that, but the government regulator stepped in and prevented us from turning it on."
That's pretty wild. Was it an "investment" of some sort, and then the CEO got a hint with a wink, that there is more where it came from if they don't enable any encryption. Anyone from Rovio who got less than $10m in their pocket willing to tell us a story?
If you're the NSA, you can tell Amazon, "Hey here's $1B. You're going to get some fiber outages, and we're also going to buy a bunch of compute from you at an exorbitantly high price you'll charge us. It's fine, we're the NSA. So when the outages happen, don't announce it. Also terrorism."
This is exactly why adversarial countries like China want to block large multinational social media and technology companies from their market. India saw facebook try to meddle in their elections. This is probably why the US should block TikTok, although there are further repercussions on free speech and the free market (something China ideologically doesn’t care about).
And the speech repercussions are more like the entire point of the ban. It's not even about trade or security. I'd be fine if they just said, we're banning this because it's from China.
I still don't quite understand the free speech issue with banning one particular foreign media outlet or platform.
Banning TikTok would do nothing to hinder Americans' ability to say (almost) whatever they want without fear of government retribution. Anything you would have said on TikTok can still be said on Facebook for example, or your own website.
Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions. The ban is the government retribution. They also pressure Facebook etc to hide or downrank what they want.
No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens.
See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
This is all true, but it's not the reason for the ban. Sen. Romney admitted it. The sponsor Rep. Gallagher and other lawmakers pretty much said it too.
> Same reason they can't shut down a newspaper for its opinions
It’s about ownership, not speech. If Bytedance refuses to change TikTok’s ownership, it gets banned for that reason. (Same way a foreign radio station would get banned for violating our ownership rules.)
> bill doesn't cover all apps owned by a foreign adversary. It has to be specifically TikTok or any other eligible app
The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
I apologize for not addressing your comment directly. The free speech issue related to a TikTok ban has to do with limiting the audiences that Americans are allowed to engage with. It's not about what they might say, but about what they might hear. The message it sends is:
> You're allowed whatever speech you want, so long as we have influence over the speakers and microphones that you use to do so.
That's going to have a chilling effect on what actually gets said.
I was using "using USD" as a stand-in for "using platforms run by people we can reliably bully into tampering with your speech if it becomes problematic," and also to suggest a bit of corruption on the side, which seems likely given that Zuckerberg and Trump are now buddies.
TikTok is the main place pro-Palestine viewpoints went viral. I don't know whether this is because of the demographics of users, or because US platforms were putting their thumb on the scale, or because TikTok was putting its thumb on the scale, or just randomly, but it is in fact the case.
So that's one quite mainstream opinion that would be suppressed if the government banned TikTok. No, you wouldn't be arrested for posting pro-Palestine stuff to Facebook (at least not under Biden...) but that's not the only way for the government to curtail speech.
Of course you can shout whatever you want alone in your bedroom — this is true even in North Korea or Iran. If the government goes out of its way to make it difficult to publicize certain opinions, it is widely considered to be an infringement on freedom of speech.
Imagine if they shut down CNN and MSNBC for being the most anti-Trump major TV stations. Wouldn’t you think that was an infringement, even if it wouldn’t stop individuals from speaking their mind on the topic?
If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else? The whole thing is unverifiable because we have no test/control, but it seems implausible that the platform was the only avenue for this particular speech.
> If TikTok didn't exist, wouldn't you expect those Pro-Palestine viewpoints to appear somewhere else
Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.
Social media platforms rank content based on how profitable it is to them. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Maybe it would be unprofitable to resist censorship requests on behalf of US government, but the exact same pressure would be applied to TikTok.
If the pressure is a direct bribe, then TikTok could get in hot water with China for accepting that bribe. With a US corp, the US government can make any criminal liability go away.
Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to BBC research - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
The companies themselves have free speech. It doesn't really matter how those viewpoints ended up highly-ranked on TikTok, it's their right to choose what they want to display, same with Facebook. And given what happened here, I don't expect Facebook to allow this stuff high-up even if they wanted to before.
Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
TikTok has different censorship than Meta and Google platforms. More news about the genocide Palestine reached people through TikTok than other platforms that actively banned activitists and journalists reporting on Israel's warcrimes over the past 18 months.
TikTok used to be one of the few big platforms that didn't censor Israel criticism, though that has changed since Trump imperially overrode the law and unbanned them. It's insane the levels of 1st amendment violation and corruption that is OK now.
First amendment violations have always been accepted as long as they were inline with current administration. Since the administration has changed, so has the direction of those violations which just makes it appear like it is new now.
Any one company moderating speech isn't a first amendment violation though. The first amendment is entirely focused on the right to sleek freely without risk of government intervention, it says nothing of private corporation interventions.
I don't defend the practice, but it's a lot easier to hide "adversarial" bot armies on a foreign social network. We have bot armies on US social networks but they are well known and controlled by US interests.
What do not armies have to do with the first amendment though? My right to free speech isn't impeded by someone else standing up a bunch of bots online.
Banning TikTok would be so much more effective than any of the other products. The people that would see the same content on Facebook is a different audience than what is using TikTok. Planting those seeds of confusion on the younger TikTok audience will have a much better ROI than sowing those oats with the old farts left reading FB feeds.
The first amendment doesn't have anything to do with reach OE impact though.
The whole point is that a citizen can say whatever they want without the government stopping them, it has nothing to do with how many people can hear it or where it can be said.
Makes me wonder if the best inroad into influencing china is just direct bribes to government officials. You can’t do it the old fashioned way of propagandizing the population directly given restrictions on third party content, but I’m sure there are plenty of palms for want of greasing in the east same as there are here. Usually such restrictions on action are specifically to force a greasing of a palm anyhow in order to achieve that action than any outright ban.
Engagement-driven personalized “algo” feeds need to be banned in general, by any countries that don’t want to continue swinging rightward. I would feel a lot more confident about the future of liberal democracy if this were under serious discussion in at least some countries, but, afaik, it’s still not even now (it should have been years ago!) which is worrisome.
Rather than going through 1000s of app companies, why not go directly to the 100s of third party analytic companies?
From my research most all apps use some SDK which tracks users. Many apps use 3 or 4 for various marketing / product / business use cases. I've been tracking this on https://appgoblin.info/companies if anyone wants to check. Try looking at the "no analytics" found groups, which are just apps I haven't found evidence of 3rd party trackers, almost certainly they do use them.
I would like to see world where Angry Birds data at least stays on Angry Birds servers and have been working on building a part of that with OpenAttribution (https://openattribution.dev) to let app/game companies build their marketing pipeline with at least one less tracker in the app.
I think as compute is getting cheaper a lot of this should/can be self-hosted by at least larger companies so they have full control of their BI tools and the data underlying it.
2014? this is really old news, and there's no smoking gun in here. it's not like they are looking through your camera or listening to your mic, it's just "who is using this app" type stuff, and the NSA denies they target people who they are not seeking for other reasons
i'm not saying "believe the NSA" or the Five Eyes, but you already know how you think about that
They deny they target people they aren’t seeking for other reasons (uh, duh? This basically doesn’t say anything at all) but don’t deny mass collection, nor using your data to try to target others (or you, if “other reasons” come up!) or to build a general spying-on-everyone surveillance system.
But sure, I do believe them that they don’t bother to look at it unless they want to. Like… yes, that’s how looking works.
They absolutely did deny mass collection (among other things).
The most charitable interpretation of the claims would be that what NSA calls "collection", every other English-speaking human would call "analysis" (or -maybe- "post-collection preprocessing"). This horseshit was reported in many places at the time, but here's the first vaguely-reputable place I could find talking about this sort of thing today [0]:
> Take, for example, the definition of the term “collection.” What qualifies as intelligence collection is critical to the scope of intelligence activity because it determines when intelligence gathering begins. Although it never provides its own definition, EO 12333 repeatedly refers to collection as the beginning of the intelligence gathering cycle. The agencies themselves elaborate on EO 12333’s general guidance by defining collection in their internal procedures. As we chart in greater detail in our article, the Defense Department’s and the NSA’s definitions of collection vary significantly, even though the NSA is a subordinate agency of the Pentagon.
> The Defense Department defines collection as intelligence gathering at a much earlier point than the NSA’s. Under DoD 5240.01, the department’s current manual, “information is collected when it is received by a Defense Intelligence Component,” regardless of how that information is “obtained or acquired.” By contrast, the NSA’s current version of USSID 18 states that collection “means [the] intentional tasking or SELECTION of identified nonpublic communications for subsequent processing aimed at reporting or retention as a file record.” As a result, collection for the Defense Department’s purposes appears to involve no processing or action; information is collected as soon as it is received. For the NSA, however, collection begins only once the information has been “selected” and put to further use.
> ...Under the NSA’s attorney general guidelines, for example, vast amounts of intelligence could be gathered without technically being collected. This means that, on paper, none of the guidelines’ subsequent protections for or limitations on the use of that intelligence apply when the information is first received. In theory, the NSA’s guidelines might permit the agency to gather significant amounts of unprocessed intelligence and then store it indefinitely.
"who is using this app?" sounds like an innocent enough question until that person dies a moment later for reasons that surely had nothing to do with the app.
What possible good is it to know who is using Angry Birds for an intelligence agency? Your explanation makes zero sense. The idea that they’d use it for spying is the only logical explanation.
"There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
>It wasn't clear precisely what information can be extracted from which apps, but one of the slides gave the example of a user who uploaded a photo using a social media app. Under the words, "Golden Nugget!" it said that the data generated by the app could be examined to determine a phone's settings, where it connected to, which websites it had visited, which documents it had downloaded, and who its users' friends were.
Sounds like those apps weren't using SSL, and NSA could eavesdrop on whatever API calls or telemetry it was sending? There's no real evidence that those apps are complicit, even though the article tries to imply that.
Is "Angry Birds" just a game — or a gateway to state-level surveillance?
The Snowden leaks serve as yet another wake-up call: the everyday apps we casually use — maps, social media, even mobile games — may have long become treasure troves for intelligence agencies. From a simple “tap to play” to revealing your exact location, political leanings, and even sexual orientation, this isn’t sci-fi — it’s reality unfolding in our hands.
Under the banner of national security, the boundaries of digital life are being redrawn. The real question is: do we still have the right to opt out? Are app developers unknowingly becoming data proxies? And further — is today's AI training quietly built on this same invisible stream of harvested personal data?
Are we playing with our phones — or are our phones playing us?
Or alternatively, do you feel the Rovio employee's blabbering was talking about an actual, real NSA deal with Rovio, or was it more like a bar joke and direct NSA co-operation was not really implied? (e.g. "we know our security is bad, but these ad companies pay us $XX million to not use encryption so it's sorta like NSA pays us to keep it that way sips beer").
I'm interested, because if that is an actual thing that happened, then that's an example of NSA paying a Finnish company $$$ to weaken their security, and the Finnish company willingly agreeing to that. Is it in NSA's Modus Operandi to approach and then pay foreign companies to do this sort of thing?
Your comment is describing it in few words, but to me it sounds like it maybe wasn't implying an actual NSA direct co-operation, more like someone doing bar banter and being entirely serious. But that's just me trying to guess tone.
(I'm Finnish. I want to know if Rovio has skeletons in their closet. So I can roast them.)
- Rovio sold data to ad companies (ad companies primarily based in the US)
- They used AWS (to which of course NSA has legal access)
- Data is not end to end encrypted, all metadata sits on servers in plain text and within AWS even moves from server to server in plain text
How much insight metadata can grant to someone like NSA is still wildly underrated.
- https://www.propublica.org/article/spy-agencies-probe-angry-...
The specific question I am interested in is: Did Rovio knowingly and willingly accept $$$ from NSA (directly or indirectly) to weaken their security? I.e. were they acting as a willing accomplice.
Because that part would be unusual for Finland (well, at least as far as I know). For US companies I wouldn't bat an eye at news like this.
- https://www.interface-eu.org/events/background-talk-with-byr...
Mostly in such cases, direct involvement and paying dollars is a clear no-go for the intelligence agencies. They could instead be paying the ad agencies.
Also note that we are talking pre-Let's encrypt and TLS everywhere world, a lot of this traffic was also just plain text making it much easier to harvest.
Some interesting insights from this piece: https://web.archive.org/web/20180719081149/https://theinterc...
If you tried to brute-force AES-256 with conventional computers, you'd need to check 2^256 possible keys. Even with a billion billion (10^18) attempts per second: 2^256 operations / 10^18 operations/second is approximately 10^59 seconds. You'd need about 2.7 x 10^41 universe lifetimes to crack AES-256
At about 10 watts per computer, this would require approximately 10^60 joules, or roughly 2 x 10^34 times the energy needed to boil the oceans. You could boil the oceans, refill them, and repeat this process 200 trillion trillion trillion times.
For RSA-2048, the best classical algorithms would need about 2^112 operations. This would still require around 10^27 joules, or about 20 times what's needed to boil the oceans.
ECC with a 256-bit key would need roughly 2^128 operations to crack, requiring approximately 10^31 joules It's enough to boil the oceans about 2,000 times over.
Quantum computers could theoretically use Shor's algorithm to break RSA and ECC much faster. But to break RSA-2048, we'd need a fault-tolerant quantum computer with millions of qubits. Current quantum computers have fewer than 1,000 stable qubits. Even with quantum computing, the energy requirements would still be astronomical. Perhaps enough to boil all the oceans once or twice, rather than thousands of times.
Anyway, I'm not worried because governments don't need to crack encryption to do dastardly shit. They have far easier methods to get what they want.
DJB had a good talk about how many degrees of freedom you can still get picking such numbers and how much you can weaken crypto algorithms (even though not outright breaking them), but I can't find it at the moment
"... brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170802160910/https://blogs.ora...
>highlights Particularly good comments from over the years
https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)
The picture they paint is very useful to help people grasp the scale of "worst case" brute forcing while being completely misleading on the effort needed to break encryption "somehow". Cracking the encryption isn't usually about brute forcing every possible combination, it's all about finding or building a flaw in the algorithm.
Bike thieves don't go through the 10000 combinations on your lock, scammers don't try every possible email password, etc.
Brute forcing a key finds you one answer at a time, hacking the algorithm finds you all answers at once. Without boiling the ocean.
[0] https://asecuritysite.com/blog/2018-08-05_Boiling-Every-Ocea...
The most important one is that we're assuming that nobody finds a weakness in AES-256, so we have to brute-force it instead of taking some kind of shortcut. Historically speaking, that doesn't seem like a sure bet. (Some slight progress has been made on AES, but nothing practically useful yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard#K...) Similar comments apply to factoring large semiprimes and ECDLP; algorithmic improvements could remove many orders of magnitude from these estimates.
Sometimes, even when weaknesses aren't known in the algorithms themselves, there are weaknesses in how they are applied. The Debian OpenSSL fiasco, which seems to have been accidental, may be the best-known example: all secret keys were generated with only 16 bits of entropy. Reusing IVs for OFB or CTR mode is also catastrophic.
A somewhat pedantic note is that you seem to be using two conflicting definitions of "boil the oceans" in different parts of your comment: to raise them to the boiling temperature while leaving them liquid, at first, and to convert them to vapor, later, since you talk about "refilling them". Converting them to vapor requires several times more energy than that. Also, you dropped an order of magnitude somewhere; raising the oceans to boiling requires 5.46 × 10²⁶ J, not 5... × 10²⁵ as you say. ("545 million exajoules" is correct.)
I used `cal_mean` from units(1) to do the calculation, which is based on the mean specific heat of water from 1° to 100°. I'm not sure that's correct for salt water, though, and in any case that's a minor error.
"about 10,000 times humanity's annual energy consumption" is wrong. 545 million exajoules is about a million years of humanity's energy consumption, which is only about 18 terawatts, excluding agriculture.
As gosub100 pointed out, on average you only have to try 2²⁵⁵ possible keys before finding the right one, not all 2²⁵⁶, but that's only a factor of 2.
10¹⁸ AES attempts per second does seem like a reasonable upper bound, but it's much faster than currently existing encryption hardware. 10¹⁸ Hz is the frequency of 0.3-nanometer X-rays with an energy of about 4000 electron volts. I feel like any computer hardware that is performing operations that fast probably cannot be made out of molecules or atoms. You might be able to build it on the surface of a neutron star or a black hole. Seth Lloyd's Nature paper from 02000 on the "ultimate laptop", "Ultimate physical limits to computation", explores some of the physical phenomena involved, and how fast they could possibly compute: https://faculty.pku.edu.cn/_resources/group1/M00/00/0D/cxv0B...
If we take 10¹⁸ Hz and 2²⁵⁶ cycles as given, it is true that one computer would need 10⁵⁹ seconds to finish the job (4×10⁵¹ years), which is indeed about 2.7 × 10⁴¹ times longer than the universe has existed so far (13.79 billion years). But it's worth pointing out that the universe's lifetime is not yet over; it is expected to continue existing much longer than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future lists various stages of its future evolution, including the end of star formation in 10¹²–10¹⁴ years, the last star burning out in 1.2 × 10¹⁴ years, 10³⁰ years until all the galaxies fall apart, 2×10³⁶–3×10⁴³ years until all protons and neutrons are gone (if protons decay), 10⁹¹ years until the Milky Way's black hole evaporates, and 10¹⁰⁶–2.1×10¹⁰⁹ years until the last black holes evaporate. If protons are stable, you could definitely build a computer that kept computing for the necessary 10⁵² years.
And (as you point out next!) you could use more than one computer. If you could somehow use 10⁵⁹ computers, you could finish the job in a second, rather than in untold eons. It depends on how many computers you can get!
"10 watts" is a somewhat handwavy estimate. Most of the computers around me, in things like my multimeter and my MicroSD card, use a lot less power than that, often a few milliwatts. (The fact that the MicroSD card doesn't have a monitor and keyboard is irrelevant to using it for AES cracking.) I'm currently working on a project called the Zorzpad, to build a self-sufficient portable personal computing environment on under a milliwatt, something that has become possible recently due to advancements in subthreshold digital logic.
But even a milliwatt may be an overestimate for AES cracking on classical hardware, because reversible logic may be able to drop power consumption by one or more additional orders of magnitude, and as far as we know, there's no lower limit (not even the ones Lloyd's article talks about apply). AES cracking is especially suited for reversible computing, which is why I used it as an example in this comment a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43850835
It may be worth pointing out that 10⁶⁰ joules (which, despite the possible weaknesses above in its derivation, is certainly a plausible ballpark) is a large number not just measured against Earth, but measured against the Sun and indeed the energy output of the entire Milky Way galaxy.
It's even large compared to the available energy in the Milky Way. If you divide it by c² you get 1.2 × 10⁴³ kg. The Milky Way weighs 1.15 × 10¹² solar masses (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way) which turns out to be 2.29 × 10⁴² kg, which is 2.06 × 10⁵⁹ J. So even if you converted the entire galaxy into energy to power your AES crackers, you wouldn't get 10⁶⁰ J.
It's probably worth including AES performance numbers on currently available hardware. You'll still get galactic numbers demonstrating that AES-256 is not currently brute-forceable.
The Debian vulnerability was particularly bad. An AES key with 16 bits of entropy can be broken with the energy used by a single LED for a fraction of a nanosecond.
Reducing entropy covertly is probably the sole purpose of the so-called Intel Management Engine
it's very unlikely you'd have to check the entire keyspace before you found it. On average it would be about half.
That's only about a hundred thousandth of the mass of the Moon, and there are dozens of asteroids larger than this. Since it's clearly physically possible to disassemble an asteroid, or even the entire Moon, and build computers out of it, AES-128 should not be considered secure against currently known attacks. However, currently, it is not publicly known that the NSA has converted any asteroids into computers, and it seems unlikely to have happened secretly.
2^10 / 2 = 512
512 is 2^9
So when dividing powers like this you decrement the exponent.
So no it's not 2^64 but more like 2^127
Dividing a loooong number with a small number has virtually no impact on the number.
https://therecord.media/nsa-to-cut-up-to-2000-roles-downsizi...
Is downsizing the NSA something we're upset about?
There still seems to be a time factor, if not energy factor to computation.
Shor's algorithm for factoring prime numbers is at best O(log(n)^2 * log(log(n)))
Better to pay every party you need to to have boring vulnerabilities and security shortcomings, so that any information leak doesn't need a capabilities revealing explanation.
So I think this gives you no information on their capabilities beyond bribing commercial players, which isn't exactly new. In the past (and presumably now) our intelligence apparatus has outright owned crypto/security companies in order to distribute backdoored technology.
And of course they have, they're not prohibited, it's highly effective, they'd be incompetent not to.
LEO and Prosecutors will use "parallel construction" to construct a narrative about how information was obtained in a legal way even though it was clearly obtained illegally.
Or you could choose to only act on 5% (e.g.) of the information gleaned -- and that which could clearly be shown to be leaked by a third party.
Or say if you were tapping the information of a mob boss, you could leak the information to a competitor and let justice work it's way through the streets instead of the courts.
Now perhaps a somewhat safer tool is to just use the cracking to determine the best targets to bribe or backdoor, but only allow the group with the cracking power to give the names of services to monitor at any cost.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/538/
Banning TikTok would do nothing to hinder Americans' ability to say (almost) whatever they want without fear of government retribution. Anything you would have said on TikTok can still be said on Facebook for example, or your own website.
No it isn't. China has already admitted they hacked us all the major US telecoms to spy on American citizens, and shown no indication that they intend to stop doing that sort of thing. We simply can't trust them to install applications on devices that store the most sensitive secrets of our politicians, military leaders, and citizens.
See Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon for more information. China admitted that Salt Typhoon was them, and Volt Typhoon is relatively obvious. It's worth also noting that they used the backdoors that were put in place for CISA requests, which is a perfect example of why government mandated backdoors are a bad idea.
It’s about ownership, not speech. If Bytedance refuses to change TikTok’s ownership, it gets banned for that reason. (Same way a foreign radio station would get banned for violating our ownership rules.)
The law (not bill) requires an interagency process for identifying further targets. It starts with TikTok. It does so because of TikTok’s ownership. Not speech. I say this as someone who worked on and whipped for the bill.
> You're allowed whatever speech you want, so long as we have influence over the speakers and microphones that you use to do so.
That's going to have a chilling effect on what actually gets said.
I was using "using USD" as a stand-in for "using platforms run by people we can reliably bully into tampering with your speech if it becomes problematic," and also to suggest a bit of corruption on the side, which seems likely given that Zuckerberg and Trump are now buddies.
So that's one quite mainstream opinion that would be suppressed if the government banned TikTok. No, you wouldn't be arrested for posting pro-Palestine stuff to Facebook (at least not under Biden...) but that's not the only way for the government to curtail speech.
Imagine if they shut down CNN and MSNBC for being the most anti-Trump major TV stations. Wouldn’t you think that was an infringement, even if it wouldn’t stop individuals from speaking their mind on the topic?
Not necessarily. It depends why they were primarily successful on TikTok, which we don't know. If it's because American platforms tend not to highly rank content that goes against the US's geopolitical ideology, then no, I wouldn't expect that.
Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43655603
Meta: Systemic Censorship of Palestine Content - https://text.hrw.org/news/2023/12/20/meta-systemic-censorshi...
Facebook has severely restricted the ability of Palestinian news outlets to reach an audience during the Israel-Gaza war, according to BBC research - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c786wlxz4jgo
Another thing we know is that the White House under Biden was pressuring FB and others to downrank anti-covid-vaccine content until a judge ordered them to stop.
Kind of quaint in 2025.
Do you also think it's impossible to convict anyone for murder because it was the bullet killing the victim, not the person holding the gun?
Half of America's exports is media to foreign countries, you're opening a can of worms.
The whole point is that a citizen can say whatever they want without the government stopping them, it has nothing to do with how many people can hear it or where it can be said.
From my research most all apps use some SDK which tracks users. Many apps use 3 or 4 for various marketing / product / business use cases. I've been tracking this on https://appgoblin.info/companies if anyone wants to check. Try looking at the "no analytics" found groups, which are just apps I haven't found evidence of 3rd party trackers, almost certainly they do use them.
I would like to see world where Angry Birds data at least stays on Angry Birds servers and have been working on building a part of that with OpenAttribution (https://openattribution.dev) to let app/game companies build their marketing pipeline with at least one less tracker in the app.
I think as compute is getting cheaper a lot of this should/can be self-hosted by at least larger companies so they have full control of their BI tools and the data underlying it.
i'm not saying "believe the NSA" or the Five Eyes, but you already know how you think about that
But sure, I do believe them that they don’t bother to look at it unless they want to. Like… yes, that’s how looking works.
The most charitable interpretation of the claims would be that what NSA calls "collection", every other English-speaking human would call "analysis" (or -maybe- "post-collection preprocessing"). This horseshit was reported in many places at the time, but here's the first vaguely-reputable place I could find talking about this sort of thing today [0]:
> Take, for example, the definition of the term “collection.” What qualifies as intelligence collection is critical to the scope of intelligence activity because it determines when intelligence gathering begins. Although it never provides its own definition, EO 12333 repeatedly refers to collection as the beginning of the intelligence gathering cycle. The agencies themselves elaborate on EO 12333’s general guidance by defining collection in their internal procedures. As we chart in greater detail in our article, the Defense Department’s and the NSA’s definitions of collection vary significantly, even though the NSA is a subordinate agency of the Pentagon.
> The Defense Department defines collection as intelligence gathering at a much earlier point than the NSA’s. Under DoD 5240.01, the department’s current manual, “information is collected when it is received by a Defense Intelligence Component,” regardless of how that information is “obtained or acquired.” By contrast, the NSA’s current version of USSID 18 states that collection “means [the] intentional tasking or SELECTION of identified nonpublic communications for subsequent processing aimed at reporting or retention as a file record.” As a result, collection for the Defense Department’s purposes appears to involve no processing or action; information is collected as soon as it is received. For the NSA, however, collection begins only once the information has been “selected” and put to further use.
> ...Under the NSA’s attorney general guidelines, for example, vast amounts of intelligence could be gathered without technically being collected. This means that, on paper, none of the guidelines’ subsequent protections for or limitations on the use of that intelligence apply when the information is first received. In theory, the NSA’s guidelines might permit the agency to gather significant amounts of unprocessed intelligence and then store it indefinitely.
[0] <https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-does-collection-me...>
Vogon detected
"There's no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now."
“And why we need to stop you from supporting terrorists” but not because we are against your freedom to speak.
Sounds like those apps weren't using SSL, and NSA could eavesdrop on whatever API calls or telemetry it was sending? There's no real evidence that those apps are complicit, even though the article tries to imply that.
The Snowden leaks serve as yet another wake-up call: the everyday apps we casually use — maps, social media, even mobile games — may have long become treasure troves for intelligence agencies. From a simple “tap to play” to revealing your exact location, political leanings, and even sexual orientation, this isn’t sci-fi — it’s reality unfolding in our hands.
Under the banner of national security, the boundaries of digital life are being redrawn. The real question is: do we still have the right to opt out? Are app developers unknowingly becoming data proxies? And further — is today's AI training quietly built on this same invisible stream of harvested personal data?
Are we playing with our phones — or are our phones playing us?
EMDASH SPOTTED ON LINE 3
INITIALIZING GPTZERO.EXE
OUTPUT: “DON'T EVER USE AI AGAIN.”