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

EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

cointelegraph.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 230 posts

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#101

Post by [deleted] »

JimDabell wrote: post #65
Cartoxy wrote: post #3

This seam like a hopeless endeavor. If circumvention takes little to no effort the people that are already committed to CSAM are going to CSAM. And everyone else will just hate the burdensome bloat, etc. If you know your not a theif having your bags checked after paying is an annoyance

> If circumvention takes little to no effort the people that are already committed to CSAM are going to CSAM. Meta made 1.8M CSAM reports to authorities in 2024 Q4 alone. An awful lot of these people aren’t taking any steps at all to avoid detection – they are posting it to social media. You can argue the ethics of this scanning all you want, but if you’re arguing that it won’t be effective then you’re wrong.

[deleted]

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#102

Post by p0w3n3d »

captain_coffee wrote: post #52

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how tech-savvy people will go out of their way to make sure they communicate with as many people as possible exclusively using End-to-End-Encrypted services exclusively. (that do not scan your messages even locally / on device before sending / after receiving them) In the UK a massive surge in using VPNs happened in the last 2 weeks and the adoption only keeps rising. Call me Nostra…

The problem is it will be to late. We must not allow politicians pass laws that will be irrevocable and later find our workarounds, because (1) of complications (making our lives hell) and (2) allowing politicians to go further, e.g. forbid us from using phones where you can install arbitrary software, or another example - putting people to jail for encrypting their messages

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#103

Post by sunshine-o »

> Instead of weakening encryption, the plan seeks to implement client-side scanning, meaning software embedded in users’ devices that inspects content before it is encrypted.

That sounds worst to me.

That would make illegal any non official Signal client for example. Or worst does that mean it will be outside of the messaging app in the OS itself?

In the end, we need to take a step back and look at the situation:

- We know since at least Snowden the US listen to whatever they want

- China and Russia probably have advanced capabilities like this but maybe more limited geographically

- The EU is so incompetent they haven't figured it out. So now they are gonna force us to have some back channeling malware that is gonna slow and crash my phone every hour?

How low can we go?

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#104

Post by chii »

dylan604 wrote: post #78
sackfield wrote: post #32

This pops up every few years, and I bet once it gets in it never goes away. It seems asymmetric that one side only has to win once to win permanently while the other side has to win constantly. Is there any mechanism to stop this in the EU and make this kind of legislation explicitly barred?

It's funny to me that in the cops vs robbers scenario, it is the bad guys that have to be perfect to avoid getting caught while the good guys only have to get lucky once to catch the bad guys. Your use of this then would translate to the governments wanting to read all the mail to constantly stay informed would be the bad guys where the other actors only have to get lucky once by having a mission complete would be th…

that analogy is drawing similarities when there is none. The "bad" guys in the cops vs robbers scenario is one where the bad guys have already done something worthy of needing to be caught.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#105

Post by jjani »

Nowadays the biggest EU parties are ones that are effectively against the EU, so they're using the most effective way to kill it: make their citizens hate it by passing such laws. If you create a diagram of "pro-EU" and "pro-Chat scanning" EU parliament parties, 90% will be in the two quadrants: "pro-anti" and "anti-pro".

Yes, this proposal has been around since long before those parties got as big as they are now, but even back then the quadrants were roughly similar, and as such the level of support (including now looking to pass, unlike before) has also roughly been in step with the growth of those parties.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#106

Post by CJefferson »

nemomarx wrote: post #29
integralid wrote: post #25

I'm against any kind of censorship, chat scanning and privacy violations. Nevertheless: >Telegram founder Pavel Durov warned that France risks societal collapse if it continues down a path of political censorship and regulatory overreach. Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 after being accused of failing to moderate his app to reduce criminality Telegram is the messenger of choice for cybercriminals (not sign…

I think the post office screening letters to be sure terrorists aren't sending them would also be pretty bad

While the post office didn't screen all letters, it was possible to get a warrant to read all the mail going to a certain address, and police often did that.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#107

Post by rc_mob »

efitz wrote: post #44

Do citizens in the EU actually want this? If not, how are EU politicians so disconnected from their citizens? How did this state of affairs come to be? Is it reversible? In the US, our politicians don’t diverge quite as much, but when they do, the reason is money, and when it gets bad, we throw the bums out and elect populists. It’s not pretty and it’s messy but it self corrects with the next election if it doesn’t w…

The USA elected a fascist and will be lucky to have fair voting ever again. So we're not really qualified to comment on any other country doing anything.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#108

Post by hintklb »

shafyy wrote: post #94
hintklb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EU citizens have way too much trust in their government and elected officials. A lot of people here just assume officials act in the interest of the population and most people don't really check or care to understand in detail those type of proposals. And unlike the US, very few people are going to push back based on "freedom" and "my rights" which is unfortunate in my opinion. This lack of pushback is why those type…

That's not true. The issue with EU is that it's not really representative, and this is being critised for a long time and I hope should change in the near future. The EU parliament (the only directly elected body of the EU) does currently not have enough power.

I'm a European citizen and I disagree.

Compared to the US and a lot of places in the world, Europeans generally care less and have more trust in their government. There is a general sense that elected officials generally do what is best for the people. This leads to less scrutiny and push back in general. Definitely way less than in the US.

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#109

Post by okucu »

kurthr wrote: post #98
azmodeus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vote them out and never vote for their parties in your general elections If your Member of European Parliament supports chat control stop voting for their parties and politically support their opposition

Vote for an opposition which promises mass deportations? Certainly, they will never go back on their word to create a surveillance state?!? Asking your politicians to lie to you is not a substitute for changing their incentives. The key point to make is that once you're spying on your own people, you've created the single weakest point of entry for your geopolitical opponents spying on you and manipulating the popula…

Can only speak for Germany and the mass deportations here are done by liberals. They also let 40k+ people drown in the Mediterranean, support literally every single war, support multiple genocides and export weapons to all dictatorships known to man. At this point I'm not sure the actual Nazis would be worse than liberals.

Also very weird how whenever "liberals/centrists" are in power the (ultra) right gain lots of momentum. Must be the weather

Almost forgot: we're also in our third year of recession and the only investments are made in the military industry to prep for starting the next world war

Re: EU proposal to scan all private messages gains momentum

#110

Post by Bender »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #68
Bender wrote: post #49

The first mitigation steps that come to mind: - Keep casual conversations on mainstream crap to be reachable by the masses and give the appearance of being monitored . - Send friends to a tiny URL that redirects to a tiny ephemeral private anonymous chat instance running entirely in RAM with an IP certificate [0] once available to remove domain name ownership from the picture. When done with that chat edit redirect t…

Technology has been there for decades. The real problem is convincing people you want to chat with that this it's important and worth all inconveniences (no chat history, no multi-device sync, no group chats, etc.) and the network effect is working against it. Would be great if regulators understood that serious criminals will have a way of communication that is not traceable with this regulations.

The real problem is convincing people you want to chat with that this it's important and worth all inconveniences

During peace time I would agree but when the screws are tightened enough and one makes a zero-friction anonymous chat instance it might just get some use. Zero friction or near zero meaning click a URL, enter a temporary name and hit the "Start" button. [1] Channels do not really matter in this example as private chats would be the primary use case.

Set up a simple IRCD on the backend that cloaks IP addresses. ngIRCD [2] takes 5 minutes to set up and one second to mask all IP's. There are many web front-ends [3] to make it happy-clicky. All of this can run from a ram-disk and deployed with automation and/or containers to low memory and low CPU servers.

    CloakHost = temp.chat
    CloakHostModeX = temp.chat
    CloakUserToNick = yes
    MorePrivacy = yes
[1] - https://web.libera.chat/#hackernews [this instance does not cloak IP addresses, use a VPN]

[2] - https://github.com/ngircd/ngircd/

[3] - https://ircv3.net/software/clients#web-clients

Post reply on HN