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Messaging and chat control

patrick-breyer.de

321–330 of 336 posts

Re: Messaging and chat control

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most likely attacker against proton mail are various law enforcement or intelligence agencies. Such agency can force PM to modify login process to derive password from submitted form, or to just switch private keys for non-encrypred ones, because the user won't even notice it. Truly secure entity just wouldn't have private keys on a server at all . Users would have to go through an an uncomfortable process of gen…

You make a poor argument overall. Just because convenience will tend to win out doesn’t mean people shouldn’t choose more secure over less secure. Your argument boils down to “govt can force them to change how they do that”, as opposed to a flaw in their approach.

YOU make a poor argument. All email correspondence with external servers (I believe it to be 90+ percent of all correspondence) is not encrypted at all, and the rest is bypassable if Protonmail wants or forced to decrypt it. This is just a security theater.

True security is when the provider can't decrypt anything under all circumstances, even under coercion.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Child porn" is a smokescreen. It's what every privacy advocate saw coming: find the worst, most repugnant thing possible and use it to backdoor encryption. It's not a dream, and it's really happening, right now.

Yeah. Children are the perfect political weapon. You can use children to justify anything and destroy the reputation of anyone who opposes you. It's reasonable to assume anyone using children as argument is acting in bad faith. I seriously doubt governments actually care about children. They probably care a great deal more about maintaining their own power and control over their subjects. We see countries like Russia…

> I seriously doubt governments actually care about children.

Goverments don't care about children. Twenty-six first graders were massacred and the US government did nothing.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Children are the perfect political weapon. You can use children to justify anything and destroy the reputation of anyone who opposes you. It's reasonable to assume anyone using children as argument is acting in bad faith. I seriously doubt governments actually care about children. They probably care a great deal more about maintaining their own power and control over their subjects. We see countries like Russia…

> I seriously doubt governments actually care about children. Goverments don't care about children. Twenty-six first graders were massacred and the US government did nothing.

[deleted]

Re: Messaging and chat control

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age of consent goes low as 14 in Europe but that doesn't change the definition of CP. Probably they won't prosecute when both parties are underage and such so heavily but consent age doesn't change the fact that nudity is 18+.

Nudity is 18+ in extremist countries like the Emirates or the USA. Sorry but in France, 30 years ago before american culture started to dictate where money come from, you would see genitals from all genders and ages in movies. Nobody found it offensive, because we didn't have a catholic puritan morality to impose its sick twisted vision of the human body on us. Meanwhile we sold car by showing cars, not hot girls. Bu…

Yeah, not a native speaker. Used the word nudity while thinking of pornography.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSAM is still problematic, though. The consensus is that creates a market that incentivizes the abuse of children, because you cannot produce CSAM without CSA. It seems to be the one of the few classes of data that is an exception to the standard of privacy that is applied to almost all other data, to the point that Apple took action against it. Dozens of other countries besides the US also agree, and outlaw that cla…

> Finding actual CSAM (and not just any kind of pornography involving minors, hence the shift in terminology) is supposedly directly tied to finding child abusers, thus preventing future child abuse from taking place. NCMEC and similar groups call all pornography involving minors CSAM.[1] And this system can't detect new CSAM. > Another thing that nobody seems to talk about is that Apple doesn't want to be held liabl…

Since the system can't detect new CSAM, doesn't it actually incentivize the production of new material? This mechanism could then actually increase the amount of abuse going on.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#327
post #98

The scary thing about this is that many people have images that look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as sexting between consenting teenagers. There is no way automatic classification can distinguish these from real child porn, because they look almost identical and thus many private pictures will be shared with the government. This not only infri…

> 40% of CP investigations in Germany are started against minors This in particular seems like such a silly outcome of over-regulation and bureaucracy. Amazing. Research suggests most child sexual abuse does not have much of a long-term effect at all: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/A-replicatio... This (of course!) does not mean it is good or should be done, but it suggests this is not an urgent issu…

You're arguing that child sexual abuse is "no that bad" by citing a guy whose "research papers" include gems like

* The left-liberal skew of Western media

* What Happened to Brussels? The Big Decline and Muslim Immigration

* Mental illness and the left

* Human Biodiversity for Beginners: A Review of Charles Murray's Human Diversity

* Race Differences: A Very Brief Review

* Racial and ethnic group differences in the heritability of intelligence: A systematic review and meta-analysis

* Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability

* Sex Distribution, Life Expectancy and Educational Attainment of Comedians

* Immigrant crime in Germany 2012-2015

* Country of origin and use of social benefits: A large, preregistered study of stereotype accuracy in Denmark

* Inequality in the United States: Ethnicity, Racial Admixtureand Environmental Causes

* Increasing inequality in general intelligence and socioeconomic status as a result of immigration in Denmark 1980-2014

* Criminality and fertility among Danish immigrant populations

He boasts 24 publications in Mankind Quarterly and 20 in OpenPsych, both of which he seems to run himself. Mankind Quarterly according to Wikipedia 'has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", an "infamous racist journal", and "scientific racism's keepers of the flame"'.

There are excellent cases to be made why privacy and encryption should not be compromised in the name of hot button issues like "protecting children" but citing a study by a "scientific racist" and eugenicist, who is a known advocate for legalizing child pornography, to trivialize child sexual abuse is not it.

You don't need to be a "left liberal" not to cite Emil Kirkegaard. Being a decent human being or having any appreciation of actual science would suffice.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding actual CSAM (and not just any kind of pornography involving minors, hence the shift in terminology) is supposedly directly tied to finding child abusers, thus preventing future child abuse from taking place. NCMEC and similar groups call all pornography involving minors CSAM.[1] And this system can't detect new CSAM. > Another thing that nobody seems to talk about is that Apple doesn't want to be held liabl…

Since the system can't detect new CSAM, doesn't it actually incentivize the production of new material? This mechanism could then actually increase the amount of abuse going on.

That's just one more argument to the fire: the intent here is not to protect children. The intent is to scan everybody for things "to be determined", and not subject to public scrutiny.

Europe is not immune to this. Jose Manuel Barrosso, the ex-EU-commission-president used to be a member of a communist revolutionary student group ... that has murdered people. He was present at at least three such killings, and it is not clear if "present" is where it stops, but obviously he was never convicted of murder (he was, of other things). When he came to office, there was a witch hunt for material and articles telling this story. And obviously plenty of lower ranking officials wanted to take care of some of their own dirty laundry. This is the real source of the "right to forget" privacy legislation. Makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn't it.

EVEN when it comes to child abuse, the top politicians in Europe just brazenly ignore the rules. Emmanuel Macron's wife ... has publicly confessed to being a pedophile, and having sexually abused at least one child (yes, mr. Macron: she was his French teacher. She blames him, incidentally, as if that matters). Macron has publicly confirmed this (and taken "the blame", which of course doesn't matter: he was a minor). For anyone in France, it is clear: this is a despicable crime, and she would be harshly punished ... but any action against him might bring Le Pen to power, or even tip the balance in the EU parliament to anti-EU parties if we are really unlucky. I bet he has said as much to the public prosecutor.

A child defending a pedophile happens often, by the way, especially to stay out of the hands of child services, and is of course never accepted as an excuse ... except ... when it applies to even pretty low-level government officials.

Re: Messaging and chat control

#329
post #161
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay enough opinions, let's look this up. Wikipedia cites the law saying it's 18 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderpornografie#Wetgeving_in... It even includes people that "appear to be under 18" even if they turn out not to be. ("[...] afbeelding – van een seksuele gedraging, waarbij iemand die kennelijk de leeftijd van achttien jaar nog niet heeft bereikt, is betrokken of schijnbaar is betrokken, [...]") What I a…

Same thing as in my country then. It seems to be the norm in most if not all of the EU these days.

The problem is when you analyze what this means in practice. In Belgium consensual sex is legal IF

1) both parties are 18 and the age difference is less than 2 years

2) both parties are both older than 14 years (used to be 16)

3) there is no "power relationship" between them (this requirement actually drops when one, not both, turns 18)

Unfortunately ... now apply these rules to a sexual relationship between a 14 and a 17 year old.

a) 1st year: legal, any images are not CSAM

b) 2nd-5th year: illegal, any images are CSAM

c) 5th year onwards: legal, images not CSAM

Law sucks. It used to be worse, this is an actual improvement over the previous situation, but ...

What is absolutely not clear to me: does (a) mean sexual images of a 14 year old are now legal in Belgium in that case? The law does not seem to require that the owner of the pictures has to be one of the participants ... but I find it hard to believe this is the actual intent.

And to make matters even more bad, this is not the only way to punish kids. You see while this will prevent criminal prosecution, you DO NOT need a criminal conviction to lock up a minor (and they're trying to extend this). Youth services can and does, without any proof (and in practice by getting 1 social worker to say something like "it is an unhealthy relationship". They can shop around until they find one, btw, and often the one they find has never seen either kid) and in the above example lock up both partners, the younger for up to 7 years and the older up to 4. In practice they will punish the younger kid, almost always the girl.

The fun thing is when a kid is locked up for criminal reasons (bad enough so that he actually goes to prison) schooling CANNOT (and is not in practice) denied to the kid. When youth services locks kids up, they can (and are in practice) denied schooling. But of course the previous point means the police will try to use child services, not criminal prosecutions, if at all possible.

So sadly, if you want a kid's situation to improve over time and they do not want to end the relationship, your course of action is clear: you should let the abuse continue and even (help) hide it. However, if you want to hurt the kid(s) (whether or not such a relationship is actually abusive), you should report them. So here too the net result of the law is: very easy to "abuse" the law to hurt children (esp. if you are a social worker), very hard to use the law to protect children against abuse (or actually help them)

Re: Messaging and chat control

#330
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This got really apparent in the discussions around Brexit. Lots of people saying "I vote in EU elections", assuming that the EU elections work the same as all the other elections they vote in. It really doesn't. The EU is very much an oligarchy controlled by a small number of unelected bureaucrats. They've been very careful to not let the curtain slip too far, and preserve the appearance that popular opinion can chan…

Poland is having an awesome time in the EU. Get all the subsidies and trade, and ignore the rules they don't like: not taking any immgrants, going against EU court of Justic, etc. "The most up-to-date statistics (as of July 2016) show that in 2014 Poland received €17.436 billion from the EU whilst only contributing €3.526 billion. Poland also received nearly €2 billion more in EU funding than any other member state i…

The CJEU doesn't have that much credibility after they ignored written law about ECB rules in a purely political ruling. I think it made a joke of itself and its independence should be thoroughly questioned. It also should restrict its rulings to matters were the EU has a mandate, which is luckily fairly restricted. So Poland has quite a case if they listen to their national constitutional court.
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