News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:WhatsApp puts limit on message forwarding to fight fake news by xpaulbettsx on Monday January 21, 2019 @06:59PM (#18964804)
Facebook has a limited amount of mitigation that they can do because of the nature of WhatsApp. Trying to suppress Fake News is hard when you can't even read the content
Re:WhatsApp puts limit on message forwarding to fight fake news by fipple on Monday January 21, 2019 @07:06PM (#18964833)
You can have a blacklist of message texts that are sent to the apps as hashes
Re:WhatsApp puts limit on message forwarding to fight fake news by Kalium on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @12:01AM (#18966104)
Good idea! That could definitely work.

This seems like it could only be implemented client-side. It also seems like it would require rapid and frequent updates to the ever-growing blacklist. That in turn would require a way to figure out what hashes needed to be blacklisted, which implies either less-than-ideal cryptography practices or the ability to decrypt messages. Neither is desirable for user privacy.

I have a rule I use in computing: whenever you think you want a blacklist, you probably want a whitelist.

Re:WhatsApp puts limit on message forwarding to fight fake news by fipple on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @05:03AM (#18967235)
Well these fake viral messages are usually quite temporary so you could expire the cache after some time and if some messages have particularly long “legs” just re-send them to clients after their TTL expires
Re:WhatsApp puts limit on message forwarding to fight fake news by Kalium on Tuesday January 22, 2019 @06:42AM (#18967581)
Well done! You've elegantly solved the problem of the cache being append-only.