this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Mmmhmm. Apparently the Threadiverse is about to become illegal in Florida.
First, let's generate a strong public-private GPG keypair for myself and some hypothetical other Threadiverse user, anotheruser@lemmy.today:
And show the tal@lemmy.today public key:
long keyblock
$ gpg -a --export tal@lemmy.today -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----And then show an example of someone else importing it, pretending that they're anotheruser@lemmy.today (though in my case, I've already got the tal@lemmy.today public key in my keyring):
another long keyblock
$ gpg -a --import <<EOF -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----And now let's pretend we're anotheruser@lemmy.today and use end-to-end encryption that doesn't have a back door, using
sedto prefix each line with four spaces so that we get nice blockquoted Markdown that we can paste into a Threadiverse comment or direct message to tal@lemmy.today:encrypting message with end-to-end encryption
And let's have tal@lemmy.today decrypt it:
decrypting message
$ gpg -a -d <<EOF -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----I guess the only option will be to lock up instance admins for violating Florida law, as they're operating a social media platform with end-to-end encrypted communications with no backdoor.
EDIT: It'd also probably be nice to have browser and client support to make this more-convenient, no copy-pasting. I haven't used it, so I can't vouch for its functionality, but for users using Firefox, this Firefox extension claims it can automatically detect and decrypt GPG content in a webpage; if it can pick up on encrypted, ASCII-armored blockquoted text in a Threadiverse comment, that would hopefully let one simply read encrypted messages in Lemmy or whatever without any additional copy-pasting effort (though sending an encrypted message would still require copy-pasting some text):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gnupg_decryptor/
Not that I disagree with your point, but Florida law is only relevant within Florida and, to a limited extent, the United States. Admins of US-based instances could likely be subpoenaed and then held in contempt if they refused, assuming they don't pull a PornHub and just block all of Florida.
That said, this is very worrying since subpoenas have a MUCH lower threshold of legal bearing than warrants. I suspect that Apple will likely challenge this in court or they stop selling iPhones there.
And even then only to the extent those with the power to do so choose to enforce it. It might matter if you or I break the law; it will not matter in any meaningful way if Meta does.