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EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

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Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#131

Post by alkonaut »

voidwtf wrote: post #42
m_a_g wrote: post #3

It is almost impossible to obey this law. It shows how uninformed the EU lawmakers are when it comes to technology.

We need to stop electing people into office who are a generation behind the rest of the world. In the US we’re (re-)electing octogenarians. In the EU it seems the average lawmaker is 10-15 years older than the average citizen. Experience is commendable, but it’d also be great if the people legislating our future lived in our present instead of our past. You can’t buy a house working full-time at Sears anymore grandpa…

The European Parliament (Who appoints the commission) has an average age below 50.

There are certainly problems with electing too old people in some representative bodies. The US congress is one example, while the European Parliament isn't.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#132

Post by kreetx »

hutzlibu wrote: post #124

And ... it is gone from the front page. HN is explicitely not the place for political activism of any kind, however justified the cause, just remember that, than you are not enraged by it. And my general point on this is: I'd like to see them try. It likely will get softened up quite a lot, but if they really go through with it, they will turn lots of technical (or just privacy concerned) people into criminals over n…

Have recently found this to view HN: https://hckrnews.com/, a "chronologic list of items that have made it onto the Hacker News homepage", by homepage I presume the first page.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#133

Post by mort96 »

dalmo3 wrote: post #105
mort96 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't in relation to either the chat control law or the cyber resilience act, I haven't read either proposal in enough detail to have a strong opinion on them. But I want to comment on the "sucking the fun out of professional software development" part. Should we expect professional software development to be fun? There's a lot of laws out there which arguably "suck the fun out of" civil engineering, but I certa…

> Maybe it's not the worst idea in the world to have enforced engineering standards for the digital built environment like we have for the non-digital built environment If you're building infrastructure control systems, sure. But for software that "enable human-to-human communication"? Do we have engineering standards for printing out pamphlets, teaching foreign languages, inventing board games, writing a song?

Obviously the standards should be in concordance with how critical the infrastructure is. I thought that went without saying. I'm just trying to ask if we should expect working on critical infrastructure to be "fun" and not burdened by regulations.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#134

Post by cykros »

DiabloD3 wrote: post #27

No offense, but that just means the EU will no longer be compatible with FOSS. FOSS runs the world, and Europe will find themselves without software to run the majority of their systems. Without FOSS? No Internet. No business. No nothing . You'll have maybe 2/3rds of what ships in Windows and less than half of OSX. Oh, and no Ingenuity, which iirc was a joint NASA/ESA project.

It doesn't seem to actually go this far -- it means however that any repository for this free software, which can be obtained from the open repositories around the world, would need to have age verification in place. Meaning that in order to access all of this FOSS, there would be the cost of providing this filtered redistribution service. However it doesn't seem to suggest anyone would be afoul of the law for using a VPN to access it for themselves, likely undermining whatever funding model that service was providing.

It's frankly patently absurd all around.

The one amusing point though I suppose is the fact that Microsoft owns Github, and so while many repos could go ahead and say fine, we don't do business in the EU, Microsoft itself would be the company most impacted by this, as they would need to add in age verification for Github, not really having the easy option to just write off the EU as a bunch of technocratic lunatics.

Furthermore, it gets interesting when we consider cloud computing -- if a child has an AWS or Azure VPS, does this mean the cloud provider must do age verification before providing access to distribution provided repositories? There aren't many kids that are using text based protocols, and probably even fewer that are using finch's discord plugin to access perhaps a more popular platform among youth, but at the end of the day, these are provided.

And then there's the whole matter of web based IRC or other chat services.

Really, did they think about this at all?

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#135

Post by cykros »

Euphorbium wrote: post #120
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the use of VPNs, it's almost impossible to prevent someone in the EU from accessing a service.

Is there anything preventing the ban of vpns?

Well, an outright ban would make most corporate business in the EU impossible, which is why China hasn't even gone this far. I guess you could go ahead and try to ban VPN's for private use, but frankly my suspicion is that this would not be easily enforceable, and on top of that would be easy enough to get around using a "poor man's VPN", ie, ssh -D. Going down the rabbit hole further, banning ssh would still leave the door open for things like stunnel, socks, or heck, even just http proxies.

At some point you're asking to just change the way networking works in the first place. All to stop kids that can drive a car and meet strangers in person from chatting with strangers on the Internet.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#136

Post by tpoacher »

noduerme wrote: post #71
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #11

It always seems like a bad idea to attempt a technological solution to a legal/social problem. Surely the age of people using services is a purely a social issue - similar to not allowing alcohol to be sold to underage drinkers. This kind of law would be analogous to making a law that alcohol cannot be physically consumed by underage drinkers.

I don't think that's the analog. Nor is checking ID at a pub. The analog would be that any time two people speak to each other on the street or in a cafe, they should first present their ID to a surveillance camera and stand within earshot of a microphone. [edit] The social argument for banning or restricting substances is also limited when it comes into too great a conflict with the social argument for tolerating in…

I have a sudden urge to play Half-life 2 for some reason.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#137

Post by whazor »

FireInsight wrote: post #53
pavlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people. The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost e…

Probably overstated, but it's true that the EU gets arguably less democratic oversight than many governments.

Is it? I would rather say it is maybe too democratic. For an EU law to pass, both the EU parliament and EU council need to approve. So that means people vote for parties, that in turn are the EU parliament. Plus the EU council, which consists of the heads all the EU countries. That is a double layer of democracy.

The only real difference is that EU gets very little media attention.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#138

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

Euphorbium wrote: post #120
ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the use of VPNs, it's almost impossible to prevent someone in the EU from accessing a service.

Is there anything preventing the ban of vpns?

Presumably that would lead to also banning https and encrypted traffic entirely. It's trivial to set up a VPN that looks just like https traffic.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#139

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

lsiq wrote: post #119

"They" are in a dilemma, they either go total global control or they lose control. And it's clear they are going with the former. This is just one more law that makes no practical sense even if the intentions were noble. The WHO treaty, CBDCs, and digital IDs are all in the pipeline doing much the same. With the real-time, global, instant communication network that is the internet, "their" ONLY hope to retain control…

China is far ahead on that curve, and so far nobody is burning data centers or closes bank accounts.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#140

Post by Y-bar »

mjw_byrne wrote: post #110
Y-bar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think GDPR is some boomer with filofaxes thing? I'm young enough to be born at about the introduction of the original Mac and have worked with ecom for a long time now and GDPR from my perspective is an excellent law with the exception of some lacklustre enforcement. Our clients all cleaned out their already collected data, they implemented deletion, and extraction/change-on-request by customers, they limi…

"Why do you think GDPR is some boomer with filofaxes thing?" I handle the GDPR compliance for my company so I've had to get stuck into the topic. Once you start actually trying to apply the various definitions and rules to the real world, they quickly break down. Examples: 1. The core concept in GDPR, personal data, is defined sloppily: "data relating to an identifiable natural person". It doesn't work because "relat…

> so are IP addresses, despite the fact that people do not have IP addresses

And car registration numbers and passport numbers and street addresses are also personal identifiable information despite the fact that people does not have those either. Just like IP addresses. This is a good thing.

> Personal data is not defined in terms of the context in which it appears

This is a good thing because it closes a dozen loopholes and allows good-faith actors to remain on the right side of the law without much effort.

> if you have someone's personal data and you are told to stop processing it, you must stop processing it. But storage, erasure and transmission are all classed as processing, and it's logically impossible not to do at least one of these things

This just shows a poor understanding of the law, or you are just hand-waving things you have no knowledge about. This is not how the GDPR works. At all.

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