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Comment on Simplifying warrant canaries - Purplix canary

stifle867@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

This is a great idea! I wish more websites did warrant canaries, and those that do often fail to maintain them or plan for the case when a gag order prevents them from updating an existing canary. The only thing I would suggest is making it more clear that being in an alpha stage means that the product should not be relied upon in critical situations.

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CameronDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
A failed warrant canary is effectively a triggered warrant canary. If its triggered, you have to assume the company has been issued a warrant, and is therefore vulnerable.

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- stifle867@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  What do you mean by a failed warrant canary? In most cases there is no clear failure because there’s no clear plan in place to maintain them.
  
  For example, if a website has a statement “we have received 0 warrants”. When was that published? Yesterday? A year ago? More? Even if it has a date, say 6 months ago. What does that mean? That they only update it every year? Or maybe there were meant to update it they just forgot, maybe they aren’t allowed to update it due to a gag order.
  
  Due to the way each website does things differently with no clear guidelines, there isn’t actually a defined failure case.
  
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  - CameronDev@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They typically have a date for the message and the date for the next update. If they miss their update, they have failed.
    
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    stifle867@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    While you can find examples of companies doing it correctly, it’s also easy to find companies who do not. Also, some update theirs seemingly daily but don’t actually state this. Sure, you can check and see that it was updated “today”, but what if it doesn’t get updated and you don’t know its “typically” updated daily. Again, no date for the next update.
    
    These are all examples of companies who do not explicitly specify when the next update will be: kagi.com/privacy nordvpn.com/security-efforts/ cloudflare.com/transparency/
    
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totallynotfbi@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Maybe it was updated after your comment, but the demo site has that notice prominently at the top for me

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