EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill • Hacker News Board

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#91

Post by mihaic » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:19 PM UTC

hilios wrote: post #39

seydor wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the EU is a political organization so , yes? having an opinion is allowed , but like i said there is no way to express it somehow. In fact i usually learn about EU regulations affecting my business from hacker news

The EU does public consultations, usually years in advance. If those regulations are affecting your business it might be worthwhile to check their site every once in a while.

Do you know by first-hand experience if these public consultations actually make any difference? I once attended one from the local gov, and everything was already predetermined and the debate was just a dance.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#92

Post by orwin » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:21 PM UTC

mananaysiempre wrote: post #84

seydor wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 'm actually shocked that people are OK with that. People in countries that have had dictatorships recently probably remember that. Snitches everywhere, the police raiding houses again and again for no reason, with no recourse and people were just accepting it.

As a Russian student studying in Paris, it was a terrifying realization that the mayor can, apparently, prohibit any and all mass protests by simply issuing a decree, no higher authority needed. (This was in 2018 IIRC.) This is apparently part of the anti-terrorist law or something? I dunno, and nobody seemed to care except for the participants of the protests that were happening at the time. Compared to the constant…

It cannot. It can refuse an organized protest, and ask the prefect to deploy the police at particular location, but cannot prohibit protests.

Actually, Paris' mayor is the mayor with the less executive power, as they don't have a municipal police. Paris prefect, on the other hand, is the most powerful prefect in France.

But prefects in France have too much power. It would be fine if the legislative and judiciary branch acted as they should in a healthy democracy, but the legislative power is subordinate to the executive, and different presidents over tim choose to reduce the judiciary power. The fact that Macron and ex-Sarkozists claim Erdoğan is going too far with his judicial reform is a joke. A bad one.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#93

Post by evancox100 » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:23 PM UTC

viktorcode wrote: post #59

She maybe don't understand technology, but I get the feeling that breaking or weakening p2p is not what she talking about. The scanning means scanning performed on the end devices, not of the communications. The idea is to force communication messengers providers to perform scan on end user's device. That, obviously, will fail, as many (including child predators) will migrate to messengers that don't do that.

Right, I don’t have a lot of love for EU bureaucrats (thanks cookie law!), but this criticism misses the mark in many places.

You can have E2E encryption, as that term is understood, and scan the communications, you just have to do so locally on the end devices. The example the bureaucrat gave of scanning for a URL and inserting a thumbnail is actually quite relevant and technologically similar, even if the ramifications/scale/difficulty are very different.

Whether this type of forced scanning is desirable or not is another question. We can have the debate, but if you are going to say “wow this politician is so dumb, she doesn’t understand anything technical”, then your takedown better be pedantically correct.

Also, I was really confused about the critique that (I think?) is saying the politician is dumb for thinking that some nude pictures of children are legal. But in fact this IS true, not all pictures of nude children are pornography or illegal (in the US at least). And I don’t mean that in some weaselly, CP apologist way. One famous example is the “napalm girl” photo from the Vietnam war (a Pulitzer Prize winner in fact), another more recent one are the photos those parents sent to their child’s doctor at the doctor’s behest. Or am I misunderstanding the critique here?

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#94

Post by CamelCaseName » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:25 PM UTC

908B64B197 wrote: post #70

dahwolf wrote: post #65

Software is flexible which seems to result in our human rights being equally flexible. Imagine the police regularly raiding your apartment without announcement. The post office opening all your mail. Storage box companies searching your unit. You wouldn't be OK with that. You're innocent until proven guilty and a search requires a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and an approved warrant. Private communication is pr…

Lots of places don't have strong constitutional protections, for anything. Not that long ago, the government in Canada started freezing citizen's bank accounts on suspicions they donated small amounts to a certain peaceful organization organizing protests the government didn't like. They just decided to suspend the constitution (because that's a thing over there?). But what's interesting to see is people from Europe…

"peaceful" is absolutely not the word I'd use for 18-wheeler trucks blaring their horns around the clock in a city center.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#95

Post by randyrand » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

> Above all, she continues to claim that it’s possible to scan end-to-end encrypted communication without breaking the encryption.

This is trivially possible.

1. send an end to end encrypted message to the recipient

2. also send an end to end encrypted copy of the message to the government.

I’m not agreeing with it. But you can clearly send end to end encrypted messages to multiple parties without fundamentally breaking the encryption…

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#96

Post by darkarmani » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

Freeaqingme wrote: post #47

Someone commented something along the lines of 'but then how are we supposed to tackle organized crime'. As I typed the comment below the comment got flagged and I could no longer reply. Still, I think the bit below may contribute to the discussion. TL;DR; I think that as a society we should more often ask ourselves if something is actually worth fighting if it means sacrificing a lot of our human rights. That may no…

I can't tell which logical fallacy that falls under. It's a kind of red herring or appeal to consequences.

Maybe a bit of Argument from incredulity and appeal to emotion? "i can't see any other solution, so this is the only way."

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#97

Post by t0bia_s » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:29 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #82

gizmo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you trust your bios? Your usb stack? Your network card firmware? I get the desire to control the entire chain, but nowadays you’re surrounded by cameras and microphones 24/7, every smart device is a surveillance sleeper agent waiting for the magic word. Certificate chains are the least of your worries.

> Do you trust your bios? Yes, it's Coreboot with disabled and neutralized Intel ME. > Your usb stack? No, it's isolated in a dedicated, hardware-virtualized VM on Qubes OS. > Your network card firmware? Same as above. And it's FLOSS. > surrounded by cameras and microphones For those, I have hardware kill switches. On the phone, too.

Your devices are not only one around you.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#98

Post by greiskul » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:30 PM UTC

voxic11 wrote: post #54

jll29 wrote: post #50

Don't believe vendors' lies about "end-to-end" encryption. If caught red handed, they will always say it depends on how you define where both "ends" begin. Do not trust a cloud service that you have not developed and deployed yourself. You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content, but only if you have given it your content pre-encrypted by yourself, not trusted a third party to encrypt it on your beha…

> You may trust untrusted hardware with your encrypted content Couldn't someone still capture them from the untrusted hardware, wait until quantum computer technology is available, then decrypt them?

Quantum computing is theoretically able to attack many of the public key encryption algorithms we use. Hardware encryption of HDs doesn't use those algorithms, it uses symmetric-key algorithms, that are not vulnerable to quantum attacks.

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#99

Post by mananaysiempre » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:32 PM UTC

orwin wrote: post #92

mananaysiempre wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Russian student studying in Paris, it was a terrifying realization that the mayor can, apparently, prohibit any and all mass protests by simply issuing a decree, no higher authority needed. (This was in 2018 IIRC.) This is apparently part of the anti-terrorist law or something? I dunno, and nobody seemed to care except for the participants of the protests that were happening at the time. Compared to the constant…

It cannot. It can refuse an organized protest, and ask the prefect to deploy the police at particular location, but cannot prohibit protests. Actually, Paris' mayor is the mayor with the less executive power, as they don't have a municipal police. Paris prefect, on the other hand, is the most powerful prefect in France. But prefects in France have too much power. It would be fine if the legislative and judiciary bran…

The prefect was also involved at some point, I might well have mixed that up. The structure honestly seems quite convoluted from the outside, but the responsible party seemed to be a part of the executive. (I tried to check whether a tribunal of some sort belonged to the judiciary, because it looked like it didn’t, and gave up. No deep knowledge here, sorry.)

> [The mayor] can refuse an organized protest [...], but cannot prohibit protests.

What’s the practical difference? I’m not sure I see one, having seen years of “oh no you can’t have your rally here, there’s extremely unfortunately some other thing nobody’s heard about happening in your primary location and renovations at your alternate one and you’ll have to move to a place two hours from city centre and by the way we sat on your notification for a month and the deadline to resubmit was two days ago”.

(Legally, the Russian system is that of affirmative notifications, not of requests for permission, so you have to manufacture a conflict or a threat to public safety of some sort to really refuse, as well as offer an alternate location. The ECHR had a field day dismantling those excuses with about a decade’s latency, before Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering and activists were left to maybe possibly write to the OHCHR in the godsdamned UN and hope it works? I heard they’ve literally sent out more complaints now than the office has handled over the entirety of its pre-2022 history. I guess even the UN needs to have its joints greased from time to time.)

Re: EU Commission doesn't understand what's written in its own chat control bill

#100

Post by denton-scratch » Tue, Mar 28, 2023, 10:33 PM UTC

I simply can't believe she's as ignorant as she comes across; even if she doesn't know that you can't "scan" an encrypted file, she's a damned EU Commissioner; she has a large staff of educated people to advise her.

I think she simply doesn't care about the reality, she wants to bang a "protect the children" drum for political reasons.

It's odd; she seems to be a pedagogy graduate, who was once (1988) elected to the Swedish parliament as a communist, then worked as a teacher, and was later (1994?) appointed a social-democrat minister. So since her first parliamentary term, she has not been an elected representative, but an appointed functionary. So I guess her "political reasons" amount to pleasing her boss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ylva_Johansson

Former commies who repent don't lose their contempt for ordinary people. They continue to think they are "the vanguard". I reckon she just thinks ordinary people are too dim to notice that her sayings are nonsense.