Chat Control Must Be Stopped • Hacker News Board

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#191

Post by Nursie » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:58 AM UTC

alisonatwork wrote: post #167

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…

Add to that - most normal, everyday people are entirely in favour of invasive government monitoring if it can be painted as being 'for the children' or 'to catch terrorists'.

So it's not a case that convenience beats privacy, AFAICT they're largely in favour of giving up that privacy anyway.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#192

Post by AnthonyMouse » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 1:59 AM UTC

bongodongobob wrote: post #81

icameron wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"According to data from Nielsen, Fox News — from the period spanning June 20 through Sept. 1 — finished as the no. 1 network in all of broadcast television during the primetime hours of 8-11 PM. During those hours, Fox News averaged 2.43 million total nightly viewers in primetime — topping ABC at 2.38 million, NBC at 2.21 million, and CBS at 2.03 million. It is the second time in the network’s history they accomplish…

Exactly. Come to the Midwest and you'll see Fox News on in bars, oil change waiting rooms, dentist offices, etc. The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes.

> The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes.

Except that it's the opposite. The Dakotas are over-represented in the electoral college but getting them from 60% Republican to even 99% Republican wouldn't gain them a single electoral college vote. Meanwhile states like Michigan and Ohio where changing minds could change outcomes are under-represented in terms of electoral college votes.

But the vote allocations are the least impactful part of the electoral college. If you got rid of the +2 electoral college votes for each state independent of its population, votes in Arizona would still matter more than California. The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#193

Post by Nursie » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:01 AM UTC

jonaharagon wrote: post #63

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 -…

> They start outlawing encryption altogether? This is the direction places like the UK have gone in, yes. Can't decrypt something? Then we assume it is illegal content.

I mean, not just the UK - it eventually changed in the US, but anything deemed too strong to crack was classified as a munition for a while in the 90s and 00s, and some things are still banned from being shipped to some places -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

"It's just math, you can't ban it" has never been true.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#194

Post by Nursie » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:03 AM UTC

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 -…

People have been selectively "banning math" for decades -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#195

Post by BrenBarn » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:07 AM UTC

nine_k wrote: post #138

tormeh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean enshrine a right to messaging privacy in a constitution? That's going to be difficult.

The US constitution already has a provision against unreasonable search properly enshrined, and well tested in courts. Things like KOSA can be rejected as clearly violating it. The EU does not seem to have such simple and ironclad norm.

Other commenters already mentioned that the current situation in the US shows how fragile this "ironclad" norm is. Aside from that, though, the fourth amendment wouldn't necessarily prevent a law that requires companies to scan the data and creates certain liabilities if they don't. The weakness in the US's version of such "rights" is that none of them are actually guarantee that any individual rights are to be protected against all comers; they restrict the government from doing certain things but allow private actors to do those same things.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#196

Post by poly2it » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:07 AM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #87

Sometimes I think if this stuff ever got really bad, abandoning smart phones altogether wouldn’t be so bad. I’m already taking most photos with a dedicated digital camera and they are so much better than phone captured images. I hate social media these days and am waiting to give myself a reason to delete all the apps and my accounts entirely. The internet is a shithole, most my search is done through LLMs and my int…

Enlightening, I'm already looking forward to the next ten years of civilisation!

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#197

Post by BrenBarn » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:09 AM UTC

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #56

01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to reach normal people, too. At least here in America the right wing has consolidated a lot of propaganda power into cable news like Fox

Cable everything is dead. FOX is doing relatively well, but they reach maybe 1% or 2% of the population, and presumably that's almost all already unshifting right-wing people. I'm not saying it's impossible that it's a propaganda power center, but I don't personally know how that would work. It feels like a leftover enemy from the early 2000s that just doesn't make sense post-internet.

But what about all the re-presentations of the same content in YouTube clips, etc.? It's true that cable as a delivery mechanism is declining but that doesn't necessarily mean stuff like Fox as a content source is declining in influence.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#198

Post by asdfasvea » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:13 AM UTC

jonaharagon wrote: post #58

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.

Totally. This is exactly the problem with things like Chat Control in the EU and KOSA in the US. They will just introduce the same bill over and over and over again until they get the desired result. What we need is for legislatures to pass "NO Chat Control" and "NO KOSA" bills that specifically block this behavior, but unsurprisingly governments don't seem to be too keen about limiting their own rights, only those o…

You've not been paying attention. Laws can be undone easily with laws.

Pass your 'no KOSA' law. And then when they want KOSA, they just pass KOSA with a sentence that says this KOSA law supersedes prior 'No KOSA' laws.

You need to limit their power to do that and the only way is constitutionally.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#199

Post by Nursie » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:23 AM UTC

petermcneeley wrote: post #155

The people of europe need to stop pretending that whatever controls europe is interested in democoracy, free speech, justice or freedom.

Why?

Democracy is being served. People want this stuff. HN people maybe not, but let's not pretend we represent anything but a noisy minority. It's entirely democratic AFAICT, "think of the children" and "think of the terrorists" won the argument some time ago.

Free speech is not held as an absolute in many countries as it is in the US, and never has been. It is in a bad state in some places (the UK seems to be performing poorly on this measure) but a lot of places feel the right to spew whatever toxic lies spring to mind without consequences might not be entirely healthy either.

Justice? I think justice is performed better in many European nations than most of the rest of the world.

And freedom... lots of people like to claim the US is the most free place on earth, but it's really not clear that's true. There are freedoms in other countries not enjoyed in the US. Here in Australia for example, I am free to collect the rainwater and filter it for my drinking-water supply, something that's not true in every state.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#200

Post by BrenBarn » Tue, Sep 09, 2025, 2:26 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #192

bongodongobob wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Come to the Midwest and you'll see Fox News on in bars, oil change waiting rooms, dentist offices, etc. The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes.

> The other thing to keep in mind is that thanks to the electoral college, that percentage of viewers translates to a higher percentage of electoral votes. Except that it's the opposite. The Dakotas are over-represented in the electoral college but getting them from 60% Republican to even 99% Republican wouldn't gain them a single electoral college vote. Meanwhile states like Michigan and Ohio where changing minds co…

> If you got rid of the +2 electoral college votes for each state independent of its population, votes in Arizona would still matter more than California.

There's a bit more to it than the +2 electoral votes from the senate, because even within the House the representations are skewed due to the strange decision to cap the size of the House at 435 seats while guaranteeing each state at least one seat. Thus California has 52 times as many reps as Wyoming although its population is about 67 times greater.

> The primary thing the electoral college does isn't to give red states slightly more power than blue states, it's to give swing states dramatically more power than safe states.

Strictly speaking this too could be changed to some extent without changing the electoral college itself, namely by states switching to allocate their electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, instead of winner-take all. That is entirely possible now and two states already do it, but it has minimal effect because those states are tiny. But if, for instance, you could win 20 EVs in CA by winning ~40% of the popular vote, you can bet that some campaign dollars would shift to CA from, say, Ohio, because Ohio doesn't even have a total of 20 EVs. You could win more EVs in California while losing the election than you could by winning in Ohio! But most states will not do this because usually the party that wins all the EVs is also the party that controls the state government, and they don't want to give away half their EVs to the other party.