Imagine the cost of all the compliance procedures that a tech company should implement in the EU: GDPR, Digital Markets Act, and maybe in the future: Chat control. I think that the EU is putting barriers to entry that can backfire and harm its own tech companies, even if the initial plan is limiting the influence of US corporations for digital services.
Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
31–40 of 338 posts
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understand this apparent motive of "elected officials getting power hungry". How would this legislation make the people in the EU Commission more powerful? Am I just lacking imagination?
> Am I just lacking imagination? Yes. The EU is becoming a totalitarian regional government of elites. Originally it wasn't even supposed to have a military presence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_forces_of_the_European... It was supposed to prevent the need of passports. https://www.covidpasscertificate.com/europe-digital-green-pa... All the good things are going out the door and all the bad things are walki…
In the interest in saving peoples time when responding to this: don’t.
It’s trolling at worst and nerd sniping at best. The author of this comment knows this full well. His comment history is full of this kind of “drop bomb” and run crap.
“covid passports” being required is not exactly the fault of the EU, if anything it’s because of the freedoms the EU still has. Anti-covid rhetoric needs to die, anti-EU bad faith propaganda needs to die.
This is a legitimate constitutional crisis, not a time to try to pile on with nonsense.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#33I don't understand who wants this. does any of their actual constituency want it? Or is it literally just the actual elected officials getting power hungry? Stuff like abortion, etc where I don't really understand the other side. I've at least met real people who are pro life. I've never met the people who want these clownish surveillance things but they keep coming up anyways.
> I've never met the people who want these clownish surveillance things but they keep coming up anyways. Try looking past IT-affine circles, there the mindset of "nothing to hide, my info is not worth anything anyway" is shockingly prevalent. Particularly once the virtue signaling starts along the lines of "People who oppose this, support organized crime, terrorism and child abuse!" , once these topics are brought up…
I really hate to fall for zoomer stereotypes but I do get the feeling that this generation is (on average) broadly more open to all forms of authoritarianism. It seems to apply across the political spectrum with the zoomer right being NatCon/alt-right and the zoomer left being what you describe. They also seem comfortable with a lack of privacy in general and with hyper-centralization of businesses and services they use.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#34I really really look forward to a world where internet service providers simply stop bowing to shitty unhealthy demands of sovereign powers.
I (admittedly, a no-one) have no intent to respect this & every intent to eacallate my efforts to help people fight off pernicious piece of shit legislation.
On the plus side, the pushes towards hosting-it-yourself keep going up. The fact that all our rights online are granted by way of vast corporate intermediaries is systematically broken & vile, allows endless encroachment g degredation of base liberies. We can keep fighting battles, but starting to assert more natural rights, making this an ask not against service providers but against private persons, is how to tip this war back against the ever encroaching monstrous survelliance regime.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#35For the longest time I have been treating every communication that's not private, in-person with someone I know as essentially public (iow. this changes almost nothing to me, I consider anything online more-or-less public, under surveillance etc already).
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never understand this apparent motive of "elected officials getting power hungry". How would this legislation make the people in the EU Commission more powerful? Am I just lacking imagination?
I mean, intercepting private business communications about say, factory openings or closings, would put the people with that information in a position to make large amounts of money by buying or selling property in those areas. There are dozens of similar examples that don't require much imagination to envisage. Blackmail material on politicians, insider knowledge on energy transactions and plans, advance warning on…
> I mean, intercepting private business communications about say, factory openings or closings, would put the people with that information in a position to make large amounts of money by buying or selling property in those areas.
Like the US did with Airbus in the echelon scandal even before the pervasive surveillance that came in after 9/11. Just saying this is not a remote "worst case" scenario but a real-world one.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#37This looks like a scare-story.
Firstly, the EU produces directives and regulations; it doesn't produce "laws".
Secondly, the phrase "child pornography" is in quotes, as if there's no such thing. There is such a thing.
Thirdly, the imputed "law" requires service providers to scan encrypted messages. That's impossible, unless the proposal is to ban properly-encrypted messages. If that were the proposal, then surely that's what should be in the headline? Like, I already assume anything that isn't properly encrypted is going to be scanned by someone.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#38What's that "%ef%bf%bc" at the end of the link ?
UTF-8 encoding of U+FFFC ("Object Replacement Character").
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#39I don't understand who wants this. does any of their actual constituency want it? Or is it literally just the actual elected officials getting power hungry? Stuff like abortion, etc where I don't really understand the other side. I've at least met real people who are pro life. I've never met the people who want these clownish surveillance things but they keep coming up anyways.
? I don't get it, it's the easiest thing to understand.
Terrorism, human trafficking, 'high treason' (i.e. nuclear secrets, spying).
Those are very real things and I think it would be relatively easy to convince the population that some degree of oversight is necessary. Because there's legitimacy.
I fully support the idea, nominally, except that I don't trust the bureaucracy at all, and so I'm pretty much against it, other than in careful situations with a ton of oversight. To the point where I think a national committee ought to validate every single surveillance request, not even a local judge.
And FYI the issues is far more nuanced - it's going to be politicized to narrow the range of acceptable behaviour and thought, as various groups try to designate 'the others views' as 'hate speech' etc..
We've always had high common standards of morality, but there were always many escapes - nobody cares what 'the guy said at the beer hall / pub'. It was just some boozing up. It 'didn't count' so to speak. Now we record everything everywhere and context is lost.
Re: Chat control: EU Commission presents mass surveillance plan on May 11
#40What's that "%ef%bf%bc" at the end of the link ?
Some obscure unicode character U+FFFC, represented in the url bar as the %-escaped sequence of the bytes of its utf-8 encoding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specials_(Unicode_block)
No idea where it comes from, but it randomly peppers some people's comments and posts for no obvious reason:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%EF%BF%BC
I'll paste one here between double quotes: " ". To me, it shows up variously as either "[obj]" or as invisible whitespace.
edit: It doesn't work -- HN removes that unicode character. (It filters out large ranges, particularly emojis). So how the heck did it get in those peoples' comments?