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A federal agent said WhatsApp's encryption is a lie. Then the investigation was shut down
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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No. Shit.
People who say Facebook (now Meta) paid $21 billion (with a B) for WhatsApp to be charitable. Even though the original creators have distanced themselves from it after the acquisition.
Fun fact: every forum running phpBB, Invision, or vBulletin (as in, traditional Internet forums) can read your DMs in plaintext. They're unencrypted in the SQL database. However, the forum's Admin Control Panel (ACP) does not provide this functionality. All three have mods that add it in. So imagine you run a forum. You have a hidden forum where only your mods and admins can interact. No one else can even see it. You could have a whole other one that is just all the DMs. I'm not sure about social networks. But I know if you have command-line access to the SQL database, you can query a user and see everything that user has put in the database. Public messages... and private ones. So a lot of the forums started saying "Personal messages" or "Direct messages" instead of "Private messages" because they were never private.
Disbelieve anyone who says they can't see your private or personal messages.
I can't see your private or personal messages.
I can confirm this, I used to run several phpbb and (pirated) vbulletin juggalo forums and when I found out this was possible I read everyone's DMs for funzies.
Lotttts of requests for noodz.
Since you are a self proclaimed professional, what percentage of nude requests were answered positively, and is it as close to zero as I expect?
Pirated vBulletin. I sure didn't have the sack for that. I figure, pirated software running on a server, especially if it's not your hardware (and self hosting wasn't an option for me back then) is kind of dangerous.
When I found out I could get at the DMs in an Invision board I was running for a minute, I made a post letting everyone know, and worked it into the thing you agree to when you sign up. I made it clear that I wasn't good with SQL and it wasn't easy to read them, but that I did have that access and to not use our DMs for anything you wouldn't want someone to be able to see.
I assume most of the noods requests were from the juggaloes to the juggalettes exclusively? Or did it go both ways? Never cared much for ICP, though "The Amazing Jekyll Brothers" had some cool songs on it ("Everybody Rize," "I Stab People," "Mad Professor," and maybe a couple others)... but the fandom? Absolutely wild. Even if I thought ICP straight up sucked, I'd have to admit the fandom is awesome.
I sorta recently (couple years ago) learned that some US states actually brand juggaloes a gang. Like it's illegal to be one. That's wild to me. I don't think Deadheads ever got the same treatment, and, same thing, different genre.