Well, I think email has a very weak default, and socially, it is almost impossible to secure.
OK.
It is like HSTS.
For email.
You need to build the equivalent of Let’s Encrypt for email?
I am aware of that.
Yeah, I am aware of that.
Or you can trust Cloudflare for everything…
That is the alternative. [laughs]
Do not get me wrong, I have good friends working at Cloudflare. It is just that Cloudflare and Google – it is good that they are implementing these DNS alternatives – but if they themselves does not scale out, it is not really peer-to-peer yet.
Wow. Free money, free code! [laughs]
We care a lot about the end-to-end encryption as well. Anyone that holds a gov.tw domain name or edu.tw is required to have SSL Labs-approved end-to-end encryption over HTTP. The instant messages here, many people in the social sector and private sector use a product called Line, which is an end-to-end encrypted messenger, according to them, but it is not Open Source, so not independently verified.
It looks like end-to-end, it seems, except for the stickers, because they sell the stickers. In any case, but for our work, for example, in my office, and so on, we use Sandstorm, which is a sandboxed communication/encryption product.
Sandstorm has been penetration-tested by the white hat hackers you mentioned, and it is open source – for half a year.
They filed three CVEs and said it is good enough, and so we start rolling it out, enabling citizen developers and public servant developers. It basically take all the open source packages that we were already using and sandboxify them into Sandstorm and start using it. For example, Rocket.Chat is introduced this way. And Rocket.Chat, of course, has its own…
…its own OTR implementation – its own E2E layer, which requires people memorize and type in on each device. So it is kind of crude, but it is serviceable. It is also E2E. I mean, you cannot argue with that.
Right? If you piggyback on Sandstorm, on Rocket.Chat, or any of those communication devices, then you find your way into our internal working end.
We power our gov tech on top of the civic tech, and it is all Open Source, anyway. We can contribute also back upstream, as well as co-maintaining projects.
You just set up a GNU system, right? [laughs]
Oh, z/OS?
That is a fun thing.
Does Java run on z/OS?
Back then, we used Perl always as a portable Unix, so write everything in Perl, because it would run there.
Of course.
Of course, Java runs everywhere.
Including Makefiles?
It will be fine. Makefiles!
Shell scripts for the Makefiles. Write once, run away! [laughs]
Interesting times!
I have five minutes more.
Whaaat? [laughs]
Yeah, the pirate mayor of Prague decide not to do that. We’ll be sending the Prague Zoo pangolins instead of pandas, because the PRC refused them pandas. And the mayor said, “I prefer pangolins, anyway.”
The wind is changing, actually.
I thought Snowden chose Hong Kong because at that time Hong Kong seemed safer?
Really.
So that was a transit station.
I am aware of that. I was not aware of the Hong Kong part being unintentional…
Political asylums?
Well, it is decided on a case-by-case basis. We do not have a refugee act yet.
It is, like, hard to accidentally arrive to Taiwan.
It is physically very difficult, I mean.
Indeed. We have TECROs, which are de facto embassies. The TECRO head representatives are ambassadors. They carry diplomatic passports. They get diplomatic privileges.
You can treat them as an embassy. They will be happy because they are being treated as an embassy. That depends on, of course, how good the bilateral relationship is. Some countries, for example, the US with the Taiwan Relation Act, it basically enacts by law that the TECRO should be treated as an embassy. Their counterpart, the AIT in Taiwan, has the State Department seal. It is all but the name.
It is actually a full diplomatic, government-to-government relationship. In some countries, there are petitions going on – for example, in Germany right now, that want the German government to do something like the TRA. Of course, we are not thinking that this will happen just because of the petition. Nevertheless it is good to have a public discussion about it.
Because, indeed, with something like TRA, you can recognize Beijing as representing China while actually offering de facto full ambassadorial relationship with Taiwan. That is not mutually exclusive. I do not know about the Swiss’ own politics but there also are countries like Bhutan, which specifically did not recognize either but do de facto with both. That is possible, too.
Where? In Geneva?
Zurich? OK.
Maybe when there is a more firm timeline. Yeah?
