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

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

#141

Post by rdm_blackhole »

crumpled wrote: post #106
mvieira38 wrote: post #75

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.

That is not what the law is about.

It is client side scanning embedded in the apps themselves. Each app will have to deploy their own mechanism to intercept the messages. This is not (yet) an OS level scan so there is no AI bot watching your moves on your device yet. Furthermore the AI part will run on their own servers, not on the device.

Precisely, the way it has been described, is when you hit the send button, it will the send the message in clear text to the authorities and then send the encrypted message to the recipient, hence the stupid narrative from the proponents of Chat control that it does not break encryption because it was never encrypted in the first place.

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

#142

Post by rockskon »

LexiMax wrote: post #55
RegnisGnaw wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They seem to be missing a critical piece - for the horrors that China inflicted on its own population, it also become a preeminent world power and pulled millions out of poverty. What seems to be happening elsewhere is an organized robbery of state institutions by politicians and oligarchs, with oppression and censorship used to keep people from pointing out the obvious. Maybe they're not paying attention to the part…

Becoming a preeminent world power was orthogonal to them instituting mass domestic surveillance, public humiliation, and selective ethnic cleansing.

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

#143

Post by EGreg »

The war on end to end encryption is far bigger and more global than you think, and you’re the boiling frogs. Here is the evolving map:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

It is very unlikely that E2E encryption will be available anywhere except decentralized protocols. You should already have been assuming any centralized actors are just pinkyswearing. The real question is — what do you really need E2E encryption for, in the sense of being resilient against ALL actors?

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

#144

Post by rdm_blackhole »

vaylian wrote: post #52
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #26

Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages. And politicians complain that democracy is losing it's appeal! What's the difference between what the EU wants to do and what is being done in autocracies like China and Russia? Snooping on all messages and conversations, even the Stasi did not have this much power!

> Time to move to self hosted messaging platforms or go back to GPG encrypted messages. That works only if all your contacts are technically educated enough. It's more important to look for political solutions than technical workarounds. We need to protect the communication of everyone by preventing this law from passing.

There is no political solution in sight when even the countries that have been subjugated to the the horrors of communism and the secret police have decided that this is good thing.

If even these states agree that surveilling their entire population 24/7 after 50 years of communist rule is good then where do you see a political solution emerge from?

You would think that Eastern European countries would have learned their lesson but no, it seems that we are just trading one surveillance state for another.

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

#145

Post by elric »

More money for militarization, 5% NATO tax, money towards buying fossil fuels from the US. More moves towards surveillance of its own people. Europe is starting to look pretty unappealing.

I've been fighting for our right to online privacy since the late 90s. And frankly, I feel burnt out. Politicians keep coming up with the same harebrained ideas. Their slippery slope is never as slippery as that of the oppressive regimes of yore. They will always use their powers for good. They will protect us, whereas the evil regimes wanted to control us. Sigh. And who knows, maybe they actually mean well .... but the slope remains just as slippery.

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

#146

Post by ryandrake »

Analemma_ wrote: post #136
sneak wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress proposed a bicameral legislature, where one half needs a 66% majority to pass a law. The other half’s only job is to repeal laws, which they can do with a 50% majority.

This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.

There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone" should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.

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

#147

Post by rdm_blackhole »

ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #97
rdm_blackhole wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CSS in the proposal is implemented on an app level, like Whatsapp or Signal does the detection before sending the encrypted message, not at the OS level. If you use an app that connects to your own xmpp server, there will be no snopping. Same if you encrypt your message and post it in Whatsapp.

I'm worried that as soon as this is implemented, someone will make a patched version of the signal client which doesn't do the scanning, and soon after all the affected apps will be forced by law to use remote attestation like Play Integrity.

Signal said that they will the EU market if push comes to shove, so there won't be a Signal client to patch because there won't be a Signal app.

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

#148

Post by rdm_blackhole »

thrance wrote: post #71
scythe wrote: post #14

Is this an active "undecided" or a "we restarted the count so everyone is undecided again" situation? France flipped, but Macron is more geopolitically mercurial than the average world leader.

He's riding that right wing populism wave like everyone else. If the crazy brown authoritarians from the far right want this, then why not cave in? (I despise him).

The left is pushing for it. The commissioner in charge of the 2024 version of Chat control is/was a communist. I don't mind critizing the far right when it is necessary but this push is not coming from them at all.

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

#149

Post by Arainach »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #95
afarah1 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"...

Plato's "republic" (one of the worst books in human history) and every justification in that book and every book citing it is trotted out to argue for how bad direct democracy is. Now we act like it's not good because Athens got its shit pushed in by Sparta during the Peloponnesian war. Direct democracy is good. One person one vote, on all legislation, actually could work. We haven't even tried at scale in thousands…

It's impossible for people to know about every topic. That was true in Plato's day and is dramatically more true now. People defer to what someone on TV or Tiktok told them and have no time to look into facts or primary sources.

Direct democracy would get you solutions that sound emotionally appealing but do not work. That or gridlock where you can't get 50% to agree on anything.

If you ask people "do you want A, B, C, or D" a majority may well say to do each. If you only have budget for one, getting them to come to consensus is impossible at the scale of direct democracy.

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

#150

Post by Arainach »

ryandrake wrote: post #146
Analemma_ wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a dumb and outrageously anti-democratic idea, and is a much worse cure than the disease it's attempting to fix. If 65% of the population supports a law it's favored by 30 points-- far higher than the margin of most elections-- and yet would not exist under this system.

There's nothing magical about 50%. The bar for "this policy should be inflicted on everyone " should be very high--I'd argue much higher than 50%. At the same time, the bar for "we should stop inflicting this policy on everyone" should be extremely low. I'd argue a 1/3 minority should be enough to repeal a law. If one out of three people feel they are harmed by something, maybe the government shouldn't be doing it.

This doesn't work in practice. Look at how Senate Republicans have weaponized the filibuster in the last 20 years. A 40% veto is conceptually similar to your repeal process and it results in gridlock and nothing getting done.

It is harder to build than to destroy. If laws can be trivially repealed no one will be willing to commit to long term things. We're seeing that right now with the destruction of US soft power, economic power, and global leadership.

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