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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

#141

Post by OJFord »

pmontra wrote: post #24
closewith wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And it's not just this surveillance law that depresses me, reading up on the cyber resilience act just feels to me like it will suck even more fun out of software development, at least in a professional context. God forbid people who love to use the title engineer will have to apply the rigour and standards of actual engineering to the work they do.

Or get a degree in engineering.

An unlettered colleague 'engineer' doesn't really bother me, but my electricity supplier or dishwasher manufacturer sending one out...

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

#142

Post by OJFord »

trashburger wrote: post #6

As usual, people who aren't familiar with the culture of software write laws that restrict software. I sincerely hope this will just be a scare like Article 10 was, but it'd be much better that whoever these insane proposals are coming from could be stopped.

Even the intention won't get any traction though - even if enacted defiance would be so widespread, if not total, (16 year olds no longer able to digitally communicate, come on) that it would be retracted or at least irrelevant.

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

#143

Post by goodpoint »

closewith wrote: post #15
narrowtux wrote: post #4

I'm so tired of it all. Countless times it has been tried to enact laws like this. And it's not just this surveillance law that depresses me, reading up on the cyber resilience act just feels to me like it will suck even more fun out of software development, at least in a professional context.

> And it's not just this surveillance law that depresses me, reading up on the cyber resilience act just feels to me like it will suck even more fun out of software development, at least in a professional context. God forbid people who love to use the title engineer will have to apply the rigour and standards of actual engineering to the work they do.

And be held responsible when implementing spyware, tracking and emission defeat devices?

That would be the day HN starts a revolt.

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

#145

Post by goodpoint »

api wrote: post #61
pmontra wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or get a degree in engineering.

If software dev had been licensed and regulated this way we’d have only a tiny fraction of what we have now in terms of languages, OSes, tooling, etc. There are specific areas where it makes sense but doing it broadly will just halt all innovation.

> If software dev had been licensed and regulated this way we’d have only a tiny fraction of what we have now in terms of languages, OSes, tooling, etc.

It's starting to sound like a very good idea.

> There are specific areas where it makes sense but doing it broadly will just halt all innovation.

Or speed it by focusing efforts on well designed software.

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

#146

Post by vladoski »

mort96 wrote: post #81
jeoqn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EU is not very democratic - if they want to do something they will and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

That's not really correct. The European Commission might not be directly elected by EU citizens, but the members of the European Parliament are elected by EU citizens, and the Council of the European Union is made up of one minister from each EU member state. A law doesn't get passed without support from the democratically elected parliament members and the national representatives in the council. It's also worth not…

In my opinion, the EU to be really democratic, the Parliament, that we elect directly, should be able to have the same "right of initiative" (i.e. write laws, not just to approve them) as the Commission/Council.

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

#147

Post by vladoski »

mort96 wrote: post #121
jeoqn wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those two layers of abstraction make all the difference. Directly elected officials are particularly bad, imagine that.

Let me say it again: EU citizens elect members of the European Parliament, there is no extra layer of abstraction. And it's precisely the European Parliament which can do something about it if the Commission is proposing a bad law.

The main problem is that the European Parliament can't write new laws. There's no way to directly elect members that write laws. In every democratic country, you do.

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

#148

Post by M95D »

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…

> 1. The core concept in GDPR, personal data, is defined sloppily: "data relating to an identifiable natural person". It doesn't work because "relating to" is a hand-wave. Your name is obviously personal data, but (according to mainstream legal interpretation) so are IP addresses, despite the fact that people do not have IP addresses, network interfaces do.

No, it's not, unless you have logs or database records that links the IP address to a person (such as a login from that IP). And I bet you do, that's why it bothers you.

> 2. Personal data is not defined in terms of the context in which it appears, which is crucially important. If I have the text "John Smith" in a database in a column called "name" and it actually relates to a person called "John Smith", that's clearly personal data. But what if someone uses my platform to spin up a VM with the hostname "johnsmith" - is that personal data? According to my lawyers, the answer is "maybe". I know lawyers have a tendency to be like that, but the law itself shouldn't leave the question open.

Users can leave data that identifies them in various places. Sometimes they do it intentionally, sometimes not. It's your job to warn them and obtain consent.

3. The construction of the law is poorly thought-out and leads to silly contradictions, e.g. 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.

In this case, removing data is a legal obligation you have. Processing data (by deleting it) to obey law is one of the exceptions in GDPR (art.6/1./c, and also art.17/3./b). https://gdpr-info.eu/art-6-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr/

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

#149

Post by yywwbbn »

willyt wrote: post #112
bigDinosaur wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the biggest issue with having an executive which isn't formed by the actual members of parliament, particularly if that executive has powers that the parliament either cannot challenge by design or can't really challenge in practice. The EU commission really isn't democratic at all, and this is by design because of both the origins of the EU as a technocratic-economic project but also the EU parliame…

It's arguably still democratic in that each country, through its EU commissioner, gets one vote and the power to veto unless they've given up that veto for a specific issue which is done at a summit of all the national leaders of EU countries by signing a further treaty. If a country doesn't like what is happening they tell their elected national government to do something about it then the commissioner acts on the i…

The house of lords doesn’t actually have any meaningful role when actual decisions are being made.

And the supreme court justices have to be approved by the senate. Of course you do have a point about them serving for life.

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

#150

Post by hutzlibu »

pavlov wrote: post #122
hutzlibu wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"National governments are responsible for implementing almost everything agreed by the Union members. " Well, so maybe the EU is not fairly lean, since they don't do any of the work the national governments are doing? At least it is not an argument, that they have less employes than sweden.

Well, ok. Let's consider the total number of employed people in the EU, around 190 million. In the entire Union, about 16% of all employees work for the governments. That's 30.4 million people. 60,000 people work for the EU directly, which is 0.2% of the total. To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker. Is this the tail wagging the dog? 0.2% is not even the dog's tail,…

Every month, the whole parliament is moving fron Straßbourg to Bruessel and then back. That is not a sign of an efficient organisation, despite the fact that the numbers could be worse.

"To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker."

And they simply don't have the same scope at all, so any direct comparison doesn not make much sense.

The actual work is done at the national level. They work on coordination, which is important, but very vague.

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