Live data from Hacker News

Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

digitalcourage.social

101–110 of 377 posts

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world realized that now that the Internet has killed off all of the third places / IRL meetings, and social media killed off the decentralized Internet, it's quite easy to fully control the discourse around any topic, since only a few social media organizations effectively decide what everyone sees (even if you're independent, Social Media decides which ideas/content gets traffic). Question is, how do we g…

My solice is that it’s all temporary, as climate catastrophe will bring down whatever system they’re building before too long

When will you nuts finally realize that the many headed hydra of capitalism regains 2 heads for every 1 you cut off?

Boom-bust cycles, including environmental ones don't do anything to harm capitalism. Rather, they just make it stronger. AI systems have locked in existing power structures forever and guarantee that we will technologically advance fast enough to solve for or at least adapt to climate change.

I'd argue that the whole climate movement for the last 20 years stymed and significantly harmed the left as a result. The anti-nuclear and some anti-vax positions taken by parts of the green left in particular were anti-scientific and have cost that portion of the party the support of many scientist types.

Scare porn about what will happen if you don't de-develop society and reduce your CO2 footprint just makes folks want to eat even more burgers. Same reason why the majority of non cyclists hate cyclists.

It's the same thing when you show a ton of kids how a chicken nugget is made. They all go "eww" for a moment, then you ask them "who wants chicken nuggets?" and literally every hand goes up[1] . We want our slop. We don't care that it's slop, and these days, emotions of cruelty, subjugation, and schadenfreude are political dominant and in the zeitgeist.

[1] https://youtu.be/mKwL5G5HbGA?t=148

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#102
post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

It's equally difficult to support it, no?

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#103
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right sorry the topic is very exhausting and I extrapolated my frustration, assuming you are interested, it came back in 2015 and was canned again in 2019: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorratsdatenspeicherung_in_Deu... I am tired of Germany needing constant chemos because unconstitutional laws grow back. They pass faster into action, than you can excise them in Karlsruhe. The mechanism for Germany to self-heal is ve…

As I understand it, the pressure for a surveillance state comes from the EU, right? While Germany and countries in their cultural sphere like Austria are fundamentally opposed to that. If that's the case, it won't ever change unless the EU changes

I'm afraid Germany ('s government) is not opposed at the moment and there is enough internal pressure as well. We had our fair share of moments getting surveilance like that and fighting it. I bet my ass off, that Ursula von der Leyen, the c... who tried to make it German law had her hands in that as well.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has shown the world the way and most countries likes it.

No, people don't like this.

A lot of people feel they have nothing to hide and don’t feel strongly one way or the other on privacy, but they do like feeling safe and secure from crime and “bad things”.

It’s a dangerous and destructive worldview, because they benefit immensely from the small percentage of society that absolutely does need privacy.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#105
post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

This, I believe, is the only issue with our form of gov. Lack of referendums. In the US, much of the current unpopular issues (Abortion ban, support for Israel's genocide using American taxpayer's taxes, lack of regulations on data harvesting) could be circumvented. I believe the optimal way to avoid these is 1) an educated populace and 2) referendums. The people who were given objective facts, free of propaganda and…

> an educated populace

Wherever someone attacks public education or free libraries, you know where they stand on government by the people.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#106

Selfhosting Matrix might be a solution if this passes. The surveillance is to be installed at the app level, imposed on the distributing companies (say, the Signal front-end), this is not a ban on. But if you're booting up your own application, it might at the very least be a legal grey area whether or not you need to implement chat control, so you could just not and the data will still be E2EE in travel for now. Eas…

It's not a solution if it passes with "Client-side scanning". Basically a AI bot watching your screen all day. You're gonna need a whole secure deviant device.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#107
post #50
post #30

They make it really difficult to fight any of this. You have to, individually - find a representative, their contact info, state your case, hope it's the correct person, hope your mail doesn't go unnoticed, hope that it will be properly read, hope it changes their mind. This is "lobbying" by the people in a disorganised way, trying to fight organised lobbying. This is a barrier that puts lots of people off, even if t…

Same for any legislation piece. A law that costs 100M people $1 and benefits 100 people with $1M. Would be, as you noted, costly to oppose, not worth the $1 nor the time. And at the same time, very profitable for the 100 to spend hundreds of thousands and great effort lobbying for. It's just the power structure of any representative legislature. "In vain do we fly to the many"...

This is the case for so many things… it is why every attempt to make filling out your taxes in the United States fails completely.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#108

Leaked record of a meeting on 11/07/2025: Original: https://netzpolitik.org/2025/internes-protokoll-eu-juristen-... Translated to English: https://netzpolitik-org.translate.goog/2025/internes-protoko...

I am Danish and I fucking hate my government for this. Nationally, the minister of justice Peter Hummelgaard is also pushing for a law which gives the police intelligence agency (PET) the right to basically do mass surveillance of everyone without prior suspicion of any criminal activity. If passed, they will be allowed to build a database of everyone which correlates social media activity with health care data and a…

> This will be a machine for automatically generating suspects.

According to proponents, this is untrue. The intent of that database is that looking into it will still require a warrent, and will thusly require the suspect to already have been identified.

I'm no expert, but that sounds reasonably similar to how we treat other investigative means.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#109
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's against the German constitution No one cares. Like anywhere in the world.

I think your comment was taken as "no one cares about Germany"/being snarky. But it can also be read as "those who should do not respect the constitution, like anywhere in the world". I assume the latter, am I correct?

'Constitution' arguments are used by ones in power only to server their agenda. Constitution argument won't save us from the surveillance. Most of the time western countries play 'national security' and 'think of the children' to circumvent the constitution and have ~100% success rate.

Re: Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in America, a classic go to for Republican and democrats alike for opposing legislation is "that's unconstitutional!"

Sure, I’m from the US as well. In our case, I think this stems from multiple problems—the popular understanding of the constitution and the letter of the thing have diverged, and also the Supreme Court has gone in a third totally unrelated direction. So it becomes a convenient rhetorical meme. (IMO, we should the thing once a generation and have the populace re-ratify it with a high consensus, so we’re all on the sam…

as the constitution doesn't have that high of a place in our identity it's more something for constitutional lawyers and higher courts. I think there's more tension between our constitutional law and that of the EU's law. for most people that's background noise I guess.
Post reply on HN