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EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

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51–60 of 201 posts

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#51
Something worth thinking on. It’s oversimplifying to say that this is merely a case of bureaucratic greed for power (which seems to be the main theme amongst comments).

Kids are being harmed and are harming others online. Parents (imperfect as they may be) have far less ability to intervene than they do in physical spaces. Technologies (and technologists) are a major cause of this autonomy.

If we build technology that leads to harm, it increases the chances that a law like this is passed. Doesn’t matter if we meant to. The primary role we have to prevent legislation like this is to think creatively on how what we build can help create a better world in many aspects that are largely overlooked. Otherwise we’re feeding the political capital of bills like this.

Want to preserve the current internet? Don’t settle for the current societal impacts. They’re unacceptable and politicians will have to respond, and will do so the only way they know how.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#52
post #33

Not a very good interpretation of the law, but I'm sure it gets a lot of traffic. The EU definition of online intermediation services specifies that a contractual relationship must exist. It's focused on businesses. RPM repositories, apt repositories, pkgsrc, and so forth are therefore completely unaffected, as there's no contractual relationship between the providers and users. Elementary OS, Flatpak, and Canonical'…

Exactly my thought. It is hard to correctly read and understand laws (whether proposed or not). Especially if one is not a lawyer, any such commentary should be done extra carefully.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#53
post #34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safet…

I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people. The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost e…

Probably overstated, but it's true that the EU gets arguably less democratic oversight than many governments.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#54
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as? I can't think of any examples apart from possibly child-proof caps on medication, but that is serving a slightly different purpose - safety rather than authoritarianism.

I think they were thinking of illegal drugs, which you generally can't possess. Maybe the act of consumption is not illegal per se, though, I'm not sure.

See side comment. As best as I can see, consumption is not "illegal", except that there are extremely severe legal consequences if any evidence turns up that you've consumed them. It remains to be explained in what sense that fails to constitute being illegal.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#55
post #34
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safet…

I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people. The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost e…

> The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages.

Any reference on that? I used to work for EU and I never had this impression while there or never read about how lean the EU is.. would be interesting to know more about it.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#56

I'm curious to know how likely this is to pass. EU laws are proposed by the council, but passed by the (much more representative and democratic) parliament. The EU has fairly good form in terms of passing common-sense tech laws (see; GDPR) so I'd be skeptical that this is any more than a dumb proposal destined for failure.

Laws are proposed by the Commission, not the Council.

The Council and Parliament work like different chambers in the EU system, kinda like the Senate and the House in the US, but it's the prerogative of the Commission to propose new laws.

Elections work similarly in any European parliamentary system. Prime ministers are also indirectly elected in those systems.

The main difference is that the executive (the Commission) is the only one that can propose laws in the EU, but the other EU lawmakers can still amend legislation.

(just stating this for people reading the comments, not specifically for you)

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#57

"The proposed Chat control EU law will" If it's a proposed law then it should read "The proposed Chat control EU law would"

The EU is not very democratic - if they want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#60
post #29
post #5

It seems that application stores would only be a tiny fragment of what would be affected by the law. Basically everything involving facilitating communications between users would be subject to draconian surveillance and reporting requirements. This is not the way a free or open society progresses.

EU is neither free nor open. I'm saying this as a citizen of EU member. It's getting more and more pro-big-business and pro-big-government day by day. While citizen self-governance is crushed over and over. Good example is Poland vs EU conflict for political control of judges. Meanwhile nobody bats an eye for existing political control of judges in my country. Here higher level judges have to be approved by parliamen…

Where are you from, if I may ask?
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