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EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

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

#101

Post by seydor »

pavlov wrote: post #34
agilob wrote: 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…

But the EU is not a government. It only does funding, almost nothing else. They are all administrators, members of committees, managers of members of committees and so on and forth. The EU won't put out the fire in your house or send you a doctor. What's the purpose of comparing it to sweden?

It is a different kind of organization, and there is no mechanism for EU citizens to assign blame to the EU politicians. Practical example: the EU handling of vaccines, with the EU leader still refusing to make public their messaging with Pfizer.

The 60000 people of the EU manages a 1 trillion budget. The budget for the 60000 people is 11 Billion/year. That's average spending 183333/person per year

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm

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

#102

Post by ggm »

miohtama wrote: post #94
ggm wrote: post #59

Hot take, cites no legal opinion. My personal view is, this is a misrepresentation of the proposed act. The act may be bad, but this interpretation looks suspicious and hyperbolic. I'd like to see cites, and counterparts.

You can find them here https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Says nothing relevant to me about software repository legal implications, and free software in general.

Says lots of other things about why it's a bad draft law.

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

#103

Post by jerome-jh »

stormdennis wrote: post #7

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

Thanks for this comment. I would add restricting chat to 17+ people sounds utterly unfeasable considering how its use is widespread by teenagers of all ages.

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

#105

Post by dalmo3 »

mort96 wrote: post #23
narrowtux wrote: post #4

I'm so tired of it all. Countless times it has been tried to enact laws like this. And it's not just this surveillance law that depresses me, reading up on the cyber resilience act just feels to me like it will suck even more fun out of software development, at least in a professional context.

This isn't in relation to either the chat control law or the cyber resilience act, I haven't read either proposal in enough detail to have a strong opinion on them. But I want to comment on the "sucking the fun out of professional software development" part. Should we expect professional software development to be fun? There's a lot of laws out there which arguably "suck the fun out of" civil engineering, but I certa…

> Maybe it's not the worst idea in the world to have enforced engineering standards for the digital built environment like we have for the non-digital built environment

If you're building infrastructure control systems, sure.

But for software that "enable human-to-human communication"?

Do we have engineering standards for printing out pamphlets, teaching foreign languages, inventing board games, writing a song?

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

#106

Post by mort96 »

shapefrog wrote: post #89
mort96 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really correct. The European Commission might not be directly elected by EU citizens, but the members of the European Parliament are elected by EU citizens, and the Council of the European Union is made up of one minister from each EU member state. A law doesn't get passed without support from the democratically elected parliament members and the national representatives in the council. It's also worth not…

> The European Commission isn't very democratic The commissioners are appointed by the democratically elected government of each country, to push the agenda of the democratically elected government of each country.

Thanks, I was editing my comment as you wrote yours to add that detail. It's an important point.

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

#107

Post by cpa »

sendfoods wrote: post #9

I am the first person to appreciate the pro-online-privacy legislation from the EU in the last couple of years. Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Is it a result of the sheer size of the org, with malevolent people reeking their ugly heads? A more cynical "privacy legislation as a smoke screen with totalitarian measures in the backend"?

> How can the same organization be behind this?

That's not specific to the EU. When it comes to national governments, each ministry/department often has conflicting goals. So, when digital issues are tackled by the Interior Minister, you get this type of law proposal, but when it's handled by the Digital or Justice Minister, it's (generally) a different story.

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

#108

Post by aembleton »

Tade0 wrote: post #97
agilob wrote: 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…

> They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote MEPs are voted in by their compatriots.

Can MEPs remove a commissioner?

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

#109

Post by moffkalast »

voidwtf wrote: post #42
m_a_g wrote: post #3

It is almost impossible to obey this law. It shows how uninformed the EU lawmakers are when it comes to technology.

We need to stop electing people into office who are a generation behind the rest of the world. In the US we’re (re-)electing octogenarians. In the EU it seems the average lawmaker is 10-15 years older than the average citizen. Experience is commendable, but it’d also be great if the people legislating our future lived in our present instead of our past. You can’t buy a house working full-time at Sears anymore grandpa…

The Commission isn't elected.

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

#110

Post by mjw_byrne »

Y-bar wrote: post #66
mjw_byrne wrote: post #48

EU tech law seems to be a bit of a rollercoaster. GDPR was conceptually a great thing (although its actual implementation smacks strongly of boomers with filofaxes ranting about FaceTok and Google Siri), the right to repair is good, the USB-C thing is useful. The cookie permission thing didn't work though. It's sad to see the EU now joining the "let's use child abuse as an excuse to steal the internet" bandwagon. The…

Why do you think GDPR is some boomer with filofaxes thing? I'm young enough to be born at about the introduction of the original Mac and have worked with ecom for a long time now and GDPR from my perspective is an excellent law with the exception of some lacklustre enforcement. Our clients all cleaned out their already collected data, they implemented deletion, and extraction/change-on-request by customers, they limi…

"Why do you think GDPR is some boomer with filofaxes thing?"

I handle the GDPR compliance for my company so I've had to get stuck into the topic. Once you start actually trying to apply the various definitions and rules to the real world, they quickly break down. Examples:

1. The core concept in GDPR, personal data, is defined sloppily: "data relating to an identifiable natural person". It doesn't work because "relating to" is a hand-wave. Your name is obviously personal data, but (according to mainstream legal interpretation) so are IP addresses, despite the fact that people do not have IP addresses, network interfaces do.

2. Personal data is not defined in terms of the context in which it appears, which is crucially important. If I have the text "John Smith" in a database in a column called "name" and it actually relates to a person called "John Smith", that's clearly personal data. But what if someone uses my platform to spin up a VM with the hostname "johnsmith" - is that personal data? According to my lawyers, the answer is "maybe". I know lawyers have a tendency to be like that, but the law itself shouldn't leave the question open.

3. The construction of the law is poorly thought-out and leads to silly contradictions, e.g. if you have someone's personal data and you are told to stop processing it, you must stop processing it. But storage, erasure and transmission are all classed as processing, and it's logically impossible not to do at least one of these things.

All that being said, I'll repeat that I fully agree with GDPR's objectives and I think its real-world impact is positive. I just wish more people who understand how computers work had been involved in drafting it.

EDIT: embarrassing punctuation mistake.

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