Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 463 posts

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#201

Post by Argonaut998 »

basisword wrote: post #9
bluecalm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like we can do anything. We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues and we (in most countries) can't even vote on people. We just vote on 2-3 non-fringe parties and they choose people and policies. You may formally put an X next to some name but it's just a chosen party official. They need to walk party line and be in good standings with the leadership to even get on the list. There is just nothing yo…

>> We don't have democracy - we can't vote on issues This is how democracy works pretty much everywhere. You vote for parties or people based on their policies.

The problem with the EU is that there are many levels of abstraction, and the more links in a chain the more susceptible to corruption it is.

This becomes immediately obvious when you vote for a party who fails to fulfill, or even go against their policies. Then for the EU there’s an additional level of abstraction for the commission. At this level, the voter is far removed from their initial vote and are completely powerless.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#202

Post by cosmic_cheese »

thegrimmest wrote: post #178
Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world. This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically…

That works better in a less-connected, more local-bubble-centric world. Back then unless you were expressing something really inflammatory or contrary to a narrow slice of government-opposed ideology (e.g. red scare in the US), you could be spread your opinion mostly freely without too much fear of blowback.

In the modern world, we have governments (and politically aligned lackey-citizens) increasingly actively hunting down anything vaguely dissent-shaped and making those who spoke it suffer in some form, whether than be mass harassment and jawboning or outright muzzling or prosecution.

There’s a chilling effect with growing intensity that pressures people to either obediently nod along or shut up, which makes anonymity (even if only the plausibly deniable sort) important.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#203

Post by zelphirkalt »

shevy-java wrote: post #173
Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

It's not just killing privacy though. Democracy is undermined here by big money.

Closely related, I think. Without privacy even demonstrating, a democratic right, becomes risky.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#204

Post by GTP »

m4nu3l wrote: post #156
GTP wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might have a point. But, at the same time, AFAIK the only manufacturer that complained about USB-C (and, coincidentally, making the exact same argument as you're making) was Apple. And they definitely weren't interested in making the lightning connector an industry standard. Quite the opposite.

It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards. The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... It failed to become a reg…

On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand. It's a compromise and, for the time being, I'm happy with this. As another commenter noted, if we feel the need for a new standard the law can be changed in the future. I concede that, depending on the future's situation, this could be difficult to do. But, without such law we wouldn't have had a standard to begin with.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#205

Post by Argonaut998 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #62

So are they going to ban encrypted email? I am rather sure i could cobble together a chat UI whose backend was just email protocol. It would be needlessly complex, but all that ISPs would see is yet more encrypted email going back and forth.

They’ll just criminalise private encryption for communication afterwards.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#206

Post by cosmic_cheese »

consensus1 wrote: post #143
gherkinnn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rubbish. Fighting fascism by implementing totalitarian tools is a ludicrous idea. Start with dismantling the means by which the information cancer spreads. No more targeted ads, no more data harvesting. Increase privacy. Everybody knows about the influence of Russian bots on the net and yet precisely fuck all is being done about it.

And how do you do that? Either you have some government agency able to quickly decide what is a "Russian bot" and censor it or you have a public deliberation process where evidence is required to be presented before censoring the Russian bot. The former is guaranteed to be abused to censor things that the government doesn't like and the latter is too slow to be of any effect.

I don’t think that bot mitigation is nearly the ordeal that the social media giants pose it to be, so long as the desired result is keeping such activity minimized (practical) and not entirely eliminated (impossible), especially in this era of increasingly capable lightweight language models.

Taking Xitter as an example, there are many tells that are visible even to readers with limited info that should be as plain as day to the platform owner. Many are barely even masked. The problem is that for ad supported social media, all incentives align with proliferation of bots, especially if they’re paying you to boost their reach. They’re doing all the hard work of genetically engineering perfectly engaging content for you; who cares about the deleterious effects they’re having on society?

This is why surveillance style adtech must be made into a massive political liability.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#207

Post by d-cc »

Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

If only you knew how bad things really were.

We can't even enforce basic protections of human rights in the United States, privacy does not matter when there are rampant black operations being conducted which violates human dignity in every sense of the term.

The illusion of digital privacy was always, propaganda. There's a pretty good chance your organism is literally compromised.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#208

Post by latency-guy2 »

thegrimmest wrote: post #178
Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world. This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically…

> If every potential mate and employer was able to review everything you've ever posted online, we'd all be much more careful with what we say, much better able to screen out bad actors, and the wold would be a better place for it.

This is stalking and is illegal. Are there any other crimes you want to claim as righteous?

Presuming you want stalking to be repealed and permissible, you have quite a few bars to pass through.

And in that society, are you willing to have me as your enemy who is very willing to push society to its utter limits? I know I'd be good at it, and I know thousands if not millions of people who share this interest. Because, as you say, its any potential mate/employer.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#209

Post by m4nu3l »

GTP wrote: post #204
m4nu3l wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter to me, because even if that's true for Apple (or it was at the time), it still means other companies can't test new technologies. They might as well be OK with that, but it still means that consumers won't get new standards. The first attempt at enforcing such a standard in the EU was made with mini-USB. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... It failed to become a reg…

On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand. It's a compromise and, for the time being, I'm happy with this. As another commenter noted, if we feel the need for a new standard the law can be changed in the future. I concede that, depending on the future's situation, this could be difficult to do. But, without such law we wouldn't have had a standard to begin with.

> On the other hand, USB-C wouldn't have become a true standard if no-one forced Apple's hand

I don't want a state-dictated standard like this. What you're saying is that because some people want iPhones and they want them with USB-C, everyone else must forgo the possibility of having a better type of connetor until "we" (Is it the majority? I don't even think the majority uses iPhones in Europe) feel like having a new one (at which point the progress has been delayed anyway and you'll also get the initial problem again). I find the premise quite capricious.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#210

Post by encom »

thegrimmest wrote: post #178
Havoc wrote: post #58

The global push to kill privacy makes me sad. Feels like I grew up in a golden age and subsequent generations won't care because they never knew a different world

Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity, just as they already do in the real world. This was already the case for all of human history until the information age. If you wanted to say something, you had to physically…

>everyone stood by everything they said online with their real identity

And get Charlie Kirk'ed? No thanks. There are a lot of deranged and demented people out there, and publishing on the internet is rolling that dice billions of times, compared to shouting in the town square.

Post reply on HN