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Chat Control Must Be Stopped

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251–260 of 272 posts

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#251
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

"I don't believe you, so now you're going to be in the locker for contempt of court until you provide law enforcement access to this critical evidence."

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Capping the number of seats is dumb but the way they're apportioned doesn't give any major advantage to small states because the size of the average district and the size of the smallest state aren't very far apart, to the point that some of the districts in states with more than one district have lower populations than some of the states with a single district. Out of the 50 smallest districts, two are state-wide districts; out of the 50 largest districts, two are state-wide districts. The largest district is less than twice the size of the smallest district.

And there is no partisan divide in which states are over or under-represented because of this. Some of the most over-represented districts are currently in Rhode Island and Vermont. Some of the most under-represented districts are currently in Idaho, West Virginia, Utah and Texas. It's basically random because it depends on how evenly the state's population divides the national population, so the only consistent thing is that districts in the biggest states will tend to be of average size and districts in smaller states will tend to be either over-represented or under-represented.

Or to put it another way, California has 52 reps but its population is 71 times the population of the average district in Rhode Island. Except that these are both blue states.

> 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.

In some sense this is strong evidence that the government is bad at representing the constituents, i.e. the principal-agent problem is real. Constituents in safe states like California would be better off if candidates actually had to care about their votes. Even if you're in the state's majority, it's better for you that candidates from both parties have to address your issues rather than taking you for granted. It might even cause a shift in national priorities towards those of the state because both parties would have to do more to appease them. But then the state's representatives have more loyalty to the national party than their local constituents.

If states like California wanted to be clever they would allocate their electoral college votes something like "if a candidate gets more than 50% of the state's popular vote, they get 50% of its electoral votes plus 5% for each 1% over 50%, with the remainder going to the second place candidate". Which means that in the typical case where the Democrats get >=60% of the state's popular vote, they still get all of the electoral college votes -- 50% + 5x10%. But then that 10% difference between 50% and 60% becomes important to both parties, because each vote in that range is worth five times its weight in electoral votes.

And meanwhile if the Democratic candidate was going to get less than 60% of the vote in California they were very likely to lose the electoral college regardless.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#253
post #221

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…

I don't really understand this attitude because clearly if this passes, it will create a (black) market of new communication tools to bypass this and so on and will end up locking down every connected device so we can't run anything that is not government approved. It does not matter there will be ways around this - what matters is they will be illegal. So no, this can't be allowed to happen.

Ehh, the great firewall of China has been in place for a long time now, it's also illegal to evade it, and yet, it has sprouted many great tools that make it so simple to evade, that enforcement becomes impossible.

If anything, technology will always win over the legislation if it happens at scale. It may even lead to some new breakthroughs.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the moment, yes. In the long run, no.

Majority of news outlets have government subsidies of one sort or another, I wouldn't be surprised if those are the things keeping a lot of the legacy outlets in the green.

  > Majority of news outlets have government subsidies of one sort or another
In the US? That's basically NPR and PBS, both of which are not in good graces with the current administration. So I don't think that's really the motivating factor.

Or are you calling ads subsidies? Sure, gov pays these news outlets for ads, but that's because of their size and reach. They aren't spending nearly as much for smaller outlets, though yeah, local outlets get ads for local campaigns.

Either way, I think the argument falls short. I said in the short term yes. That includes ads. But in the long run it is a bad strategy. Lack of quality journalism has been making the public more distrusting of the news. It gives legitimacy to claims of "fake news" even if such a thing is not binary and if those claims are being used liberally.

I'll put it this way. Would you rather have a million dollars now or make $10m per year for the rest of your life? I'd call someone a fool for taking the former option, yet it is the option most take. The only difference is I said the second option out loud.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#255

The only long term solution for this is for people to use more different platforms. Communities should be seeking out new platforms, building their own chat platforms with their own protocols. There is no such thing as a single 'decentralized protocol' - There are incompatible protocols and then there are centralized protocols. When it comes to censorship resistance, incompatibility is a feature. Lack of adoption (un…

I fear we're long past the point of no return. We are exactly one 'policy update' away from not being able to install non-compliant messengers on our phones. Sure, there are still some devices that will let you unlock the bootloader and you can still sideload unverified apps, but let's be honest, most people today barely manage to install an app from the store. If installing a decentralized messenger is more involved…

What about web-based apps which users can access in the browser without download? They can be very user-friendly. Big companies which do surveillance make their browser-based web apps crappy on purpose in order to coerce people into using their app-store app; precisely because it gives them more surveillance capabilities (e.g. location, file access, camera access, ...). A well-intentioned chat app does not need such permissions so a web app is a good medium.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#256

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…

> that's the general public. They want it; they'll get it.

Citation needed?

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/poll-72-of-citizens-oppose-...

That's only one survey, but I'd say it still beats anecdotal evidence.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#257
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)

Sadly, the new German government is comprised of two parties that have consistently voted for more surveillance. I'm afraid this time it's up to the courts to stop this.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#258
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure you can. For example, UK will jail you if you refuse to disclose a cryptographic key for something encrypted that the court wants to see, so long as the judge is convinced that you know it. I could easily see that extending to steganography: "there's no rational justification for you to have this file, and statistical analysis patterns show that it likely has a steganographic payload".

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine"

Then it is reasonable to assume that you can just show us these internet memes?

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#259
post #258
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" Then it is reasonable to assume that you can just show us these internet memes?

Of course, because I can bet on the fact that no one will find anything having just those images.

Again: the signal is below the noise floor. Unless you really know what to look for, you'll just find noise. Whoever seizes these files would have to at least know the specific method used, particularly if the content is also encrypted.

Take for an example JPEG as a vessel for steganographic content: the image is divided into 8x8 pixel chunks. If you encode just one bit of entropy in each chunk, a 320x240 image will yield 1200 bits, so 150 ASCII characters. Mangle it with a one-time pad for good measure so that it actually looks like noise. How did that noise get there? Well, it's lossy compression your honor.

There are so many ways to encode that one bit in such a large piece of information that authorities are better off drugging, bribing or torturing you or whoever was the recipient of that message than trying to decode it.

Re: Chat Control Must Be Stopped

#260
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" The whole point of this technique is that with sufficiently low information density the data is not recoverable unless you know what you're looking for, because it's indistinguishable from noise.

> "Sir, those are just internet memes I've been sharing with a friend of mine" "I don't believe you, so now you're going to be in the locker for contempt of court until you provide law enforcement access to this critical evidence."

"What evidence? This is normal noise associated with lossy compression. Have an expert look at it - they'll confirm what I've said."
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