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

Chat Control Must Be Stopped

privacyguides.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 272 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#161

Post by Waterluvian »

> Chat Control would make it mandatory for all service providers (text messaging, email, social media, cloud storage, hosting services, etc.) to scan all communications and all files (including end-to-end encrypted ones), in order to supposedly detect whatever the government deems "abusive material."

This is buried too far down the page, which is written quite poorly. A lot of meandering and jumping to a CTA and a bunch of anxiety and fear before even stating concretely what it even is. Even the section called “What is Chat Control?” takes five paragraphs before it tells you what it is.

The page talks about wearing people down, but these kinds of pages wear me down too. I want sober, calm presentation of a problem, why I should care, and what to do about it. I have enough frenetic sky is falling anxiety in my life already!

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#162

Post by morkalork »

octo888 wrote: post #136
piker wrote: post #67

It seems like the golden age of freedom is behind us for now, and we’re going to descend for a while back into nationalism and authoritarianism

WW2 was the immense shock that gave us that golden age of the 1960s-1990s. But WW2 is now a distant memory for most.

It's eerie how immediate the regression is right around when the last eyewitnesses are dying. Did their children not listen to their parents at all?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#163

Post by latexr »

dlivingston wrote: post #144
jihadjihad wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

> Any image file or an executable program can be regarded as simply a very large binary number. This had never occurred to me before but is totally obvious in hindsight. An interesting corollary is that, given an infinite natural number space, all programs that have ever and will ever exist can be found as a single point on this natural number plane. The larger the number, the more complex the program. What else is e…

https://github.com/philipl/pifs

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#164

Post by 7373737373 »

mnls wrote: post #95

Don't worry people. If you are not a European let me tell you how it goes. The 'Unofficial' boss of European Union is Germany. If Germany will vote against it, more countries will back off and it won't pass. If Germany wants ChatControl, it's over. It will pass and all other undecided countries will support it. Thankfully, Germany (so far) is against it.

The new German government has not spoken out or acted against this (despite similar efforts having been ruled unconstitutional by its highest court)

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#165

Post by gausswho »

enlyth wrote: post #141
giveita wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would this have been UK/Germany back in the day?

Probably better for you guys that UK is out now, our government would have been salivating at the thought of spying on every citizen without repercussions

The UK got what they wanted. Apple still hasn't reenabled ADP so iCloud backups are available for snooping.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#166

Post by tremon »

nullc wrote: post #93
BoredPositron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fatigue? We are fighting this with different names since 2002. I guess normal people just can't hear about it anymore and that's probably on purpose.

the price of Liberty is eternal vigilance

And periodically washing the streets with the blood of tyrants. People always seem to forget that part.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#167

Post by alisonatwork »

noduerme wrote: post #20

Questions for people who have used phones in China: How hard is it to disable the state spyware on a phone you buy there? Can you buy a phone from outside China, put in a Chinese SIM card, and do everything over a VPN? Or will they shut down your connection?

You're not thinking about it the right way.

Of course there are mechanisms to defeat privacy-invading software (and hardware), but the point is that most ordinary people don't want to. Most ordinary people actually want to hang out on the same social networks that all their friends and family are on, they want to watch the same TV shows, they want to be able to easily make payments at their local restaurants and the grocery store, they want to be able to use public transport etc etc.

When forced to choose, it turns out that convenience beats privacy for almost everyone.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#168

Post by thw_9a83c »

asdff wrote: post #150
thw_9a83c wrote: post #94

As both an EU citizen and a computer programmer, I applaud this article, and I generally agree with its sentiment. But let's be realistic. Chat control is going to happen sooner or later. This is a Hacker News forum. The audience here is very knowledgeable about computer science and fully aware of how technologically impractical the idea of fighting CSAM in this way is. But the general public is somewhere else entire…

Of course the elephant in the room is all of this content and bad behavior predates the internet entirely. The internet is used because it is more convenient than mailing polaroids to a dead drop address. Not because it enables anything that wasn't happening previously. Makes it a little easier perhaps, but even that is arguable given the oversight today.

This "bad behavior" could easily regress into encrypted files stored on CD-R discs and distributed via the postal service at any time. However, we will all suffer from an invasion of privacy due to constant, non-transparent online monitoring. The real criminals won't notice anything, and the rest of us will simply accept that we are being constantly watched by mega-corporations, the police, and the government.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#169

Post by DontBreakAlex »

strbean wrote: post #143
DontBreakAlex wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently that is Anti-social Behaviour Crime and Policing Act 2014. Article regarding the claim: https://adfinternational.org/en-gb/news/guilty-army-vet-conv... > In its decision, the court reasoned that his prayer amounted to “disapproval of abortion” because at one point his head was seen slightly bowed and his hands were clasped. I'm all for women's rights, but that's not how to do it

> The safe zone, introduced in October 2022, bans activity in favour or against abortion services, including protests, harassment and vigils. > During the case, brought by BCP Council, the court heard Smith-Connor had emailed the council the day before to inform it about his silent vigil, as he had done on previous occasions. > On the day, he was asked to leave the area by a community officer who spoke to him for an…

It tells a lot about echo chambers that the first article google showed me for "man charged for praying abortion" is the adf one and you presumably got the bbc one. Anyway, there's nothing to see here, the UK banned vigils in front of abortion clinics, he got charged for keeping a vigil somewhere not allowed, so no thoughtcrime involved.

Freedom of speech and banning vigils/demonstration is a different debate that we already have all the time...

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#170

Post by zamadatix »

zmmmmm wrote: post #57

Of all the arguments presented I'm surprised to see absent the one that seems most obvious to me: encryption is just math, there's no way to actually ban it. If criminals think their conversations are going to be detected they aren't going to just say "oh well let's not crime now". They are going to simply spin up their own e2e encrypted channels. The software is nearly trivial, the technical barriers are very low -…

I'm sure many core proponents of Chat Control would like to also make it illegal to "hide" from scanning by applying your own encryption (and, even if not caught directly, it would add to the list of crimes someone might be charged with) but that large of a change probably puts it too far outside the Overton Window of today in a single push.
Post reply on HN