hmsimha

I think the work you've done with cryptpad, while impressive on many levels and, I'm assuming, motivated by a desire to make secure document collaboration more accessible, is actually putting people at increased risk due to how bad this issue with the share URLs is.

I attempted to disclose the issue responsibly (in other words, not as a github issue), and urged you to make passwords mandatory for documents, or at least default with a prominent warning displayed for users foregoing the password. The response I received indicated that Cryptpad didn't consider this to be a vulnerability, but that you'd welcome changes to improve documentation.

You asked where my PR was: I gladly would submit one if I didn't expect it to be closed based on the response I had received prior, but I don't think documentation changes would cut it.

I wasn't intending to make this personal and I definitely wasn't saying that you (or your team's) motivations were unambiguously malicious or deceptive. My last paragraph was perhaps overly dramatic, but my impression is that Cryptpad positions itself as a general-purpose e2ee document collaboration suite, and one of the use cases I associate with that positioning, one of the less strict ones if I'm honest, would be something like:

> empower laypeople to collaborate on documents with reasonable confidence that nation-state actors won't be able to passively surveil those documents.

which is a much softer use case to satisfy than, say, providing halfway-decent protection from active, targeted surveillance (the space I believe Signal to be in, and also the space I'd love Cryptpad to be in)

So if those aren't among the kinds of things y'all think about when designing Cryptpad, then I'd appreciate if you made your overall project goals and use cases more explicit. Of course there are other valid reasons to desire document security, they're just not ones I tend to spend as much time thinking about.

I've worked with a few orgs which have used cryptpad, and I'm sorry, but Cryptpad doesn't make it possible to share documents securely unless again, everyone in the org is able to follow security protocol to an exceptionally rare degree.

Even you seem to think sharing via identity somehow bypasses the problem, when in fact this just sends them a "notification" with a share link containing the same secret URL (not to mention, as far as I can tell, there's no way for them to add the document to their own drive, so if they want to access it later they either need to save the share link or find it in their notification panel under "notification history" which is super unintuitive).

And again, those secrets are stored in your browser history. In a group I was involved with, the workflow was to create documents and share them with others, or put the share link in a Signal group. Even if one were to try to tell everyone in the group that the link should only be opened in a browser that doesn't share its history with its vendor, clicking the link in Signal will happily just open it in which ever browser is configured as your system default anyway.

Cryptpad effectively gives you the rope and then ties it into the noose around your neck for you, while you're not looking.

Security theater is at best mildly dangerous in a more typical scenario where it's constructed around an application that isn't billed as a secure communication platform. When a tool advertised as user-friendly and privacy-enhancing is the subject of such theatrics, it's even more actively harmful because it instills a false sense of confidence. It would be like a safety helmet that explodes when the user grazes their head.

So to recap, if you care about big tech companies gaining access to your secure documents, the only way to use cryptpad in a remotely secure manner, in a group, is either by password protecting all documents with a strong password, or ensuring no one in your org ever opens a document in a browser with history syncing. And honestly, expecting the latter from 99% of groups that might use cryptpad is unreasonable, which is why I'm saying it's irresponsible of Cryptpad to even allow password-less document creation (without so much as showing users a glaring red danger notice beforehand).

The users are not primarily to blame for incorrect use of a software that's billed as privacy-preserving, when that software drops them off at the happy path and neglects to tell them, "by the way, we've booby-trapped the door to fire a footgun when opened unless you also turn the smaller knob on the far side with your other hand as you open it."

I realize the data exfiltration issues I mentioned are non-trivial to address (though by no means an immense project either), but I can't interpret the link situation as anything other than willful negligence, or worse, a honeypot; consider that users whose adversaries might include nation-state actors (for example, undocumented immigrants sharing resources with one another on how to access services while staying under the radar) are perhaps more exposed, because data brokers are more likely to deny state requests for data that can be seen as overly broad, whereas one specific type of data (browser history) on one domain becomes a pretty tightly scoped request.

Regarding the URLs containing the decryption key, of course a strong password is a big benefit here, but if you're not syncing history that could perhaps eliminate big tech from the loop (though you may also need to turn off all telemetry by your browser)

Using a browser without extensions installed would prevent against extension-based exfiltration.

The only way to prevent against a malicious server would probably be to build the frontend yourself and use it with the server (I haven't tried doing this)

I think there are some issues with cryptpad, most significantly that documents which are shared via their share link (default way of sharing) will effectively be shared with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. I think this is dangerous because some users may be under the impression that Cryptpad secures their documents from the prying of big tech's eyes, but since it's guaranteed that at least some document collaborators will be using those companies' browsers, and browser history is synced, the URLs (which contain the key to decrypt the document after the fragment) to any document which is shared with more than handful of cypherpunks will certainly end up shared with the main browser vendors

Additionally, they've failed to make some architectural and delivery decisions which would protect users from various attacks like a server compromise (for example, a server seized by an adversary may send malicious client code that conducts a document exfiltration), as well as document exfiltration via a malicious browser extension. Both of these can be mitigated somewhat by delivering the frontend as a desktop app or signed browser extension, and setting reasonable CSPs in the decryption modules. This is exactly the reason Signal doesn't offer a web app.

Cryptpad does offer the ability to additionally encrypt documents with shared passwords, and this offers a fair modicum of greater protection against document interception. But this isn't the default document mode, so I doubt most documents are password-protected in practice.

I did share all of the above with the Cryptpad team, and was told they don't intend to address the above issues, so I'd recommend against putting to much faith in them for the time being.

I don't think it will work hosted with local video files.

It works locally reading the video file from the file:// url (though strangely needs http for the subtitle track)

I think it'd be better to create an open-source platform to power one "subreddit" that can be hosted and deployed by the mods.

Then the content can be exported from reddit into each of those platforms.

The instances could be federated. Reddit users could redeem their account across the federated network by proving they control the same account on reddit (either send a message to a bot on reddit, or by generating a one-time password then posting its hash to reddit)

Indeed, the book itself is not going to be a current source on web APIs. However, the section about the history of the <img> element is still interesting.

As the tweet which was shared here today mentions, it's now the 30th anniversary of this announcement by Andreessen, but I thought the content here had more depth than the previously-shared tweet, as a meditation on the formation of standards in the wild west web. I specifically liked this assertion by the author (after visiting all the proposed alternatives):

> But none of this answers the original question: why do we have an <img> element? Why not an <icon> element? Or an <include> element? Why not a hyperlink with an include attribute, or some combination of rel values? Why an <img> element? Quite simply, because Marc Andreessen shipped one, and shipping code wins

More immediately (2023-2024):

Housing bubble in major U.S./Canada cities will 'collapse'. Not catastrophically so, but prices will begin to ease as the city centers become less relevant. Hardest hit will be owners of office real estate, as it becomes apparent white-collar industries are being gutted from both sides: remote work/offshoring results in less need for office real estate, and automation/AI reduce staffing needs overall.

Cities built around blue-collar industry, as well as those which are more desirable to people working from home (cities with good weather, hiking/climbing/skiing access) will continue to see residential real estate prices rise.

Slightly more long-term (2023-2027):

More jobs will be automated, or heavily assisted by automation.

Most of these will be jobs which are done at a computer, not manual labor.

As more jobs are automated, but while we're still in a capitalist society, lots of people will be forced to survive by suing the AI makers.

E.g. AI does most of the coding, but laid-off programmers can sue the company with a claim that some code it was trained on was recognizable in the output, in a way that violates license.

Artists who no longer have work can similarly sue the AI art programs.

Courts will be increasingly sympathetic as we enter an economic and labor crisis where more is being produced, but people have less work. Humans having published work prior to 2022 (which was then used in AI training sets) will be crucial to keeping the masses of laid off people from starving as competition for blue-collar jobs becomes more intense. Only so many people can be Uber drivers and taskrabbiters.

Eventually, once the AI has written software and schematics for robots which can also automate the blue-collar jobs, the situation will be so out of hand that lawmakers will introduce UBI which affords people at least the bare minimum living wage, and take the money from the AI makers who are now the producers.

Surprisingly to everyone, driving will be one of the last things to get automated, due to the regulatory hurdles, liability, and lack of consensus on how the trolley problem should be solved.