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EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

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Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#371

Post by EGreg »

Dahoon wrote: post #338
EGreg wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It all comes down to distribution. We need actual software like https://Matrix.org or https://qbix.com/platform to be good enough that people will install it. Like the Web Browser did killed AOL and MSN. Otherwise we will live with Facebook Google etc. and this is moot. But that is just the beginning. Secondly, we need open source hardware. We are nowhere close to competing with Apple and Android. But as we have seen…

>Just today I read that Android doesn’t let you take a screenshot of your own phone. Not many seemed to care to click the link in that thread. If one did one would know that it was to a bug report and a fix was even posted in the same link. Screenshots work just fine.

Fine. But I can name a ton of things that were in fact closed down due to “think of the starving artists” copyright laws in US or 自我约束；自律 “self-censorship” in China for political speech [1]

I have written a far more extensive post just now on HN that fleshes out the overall argument against focusing on encryption - please read it here and we can discuss:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030085

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#372

Post by skissane »

Arathorn wrote: post #308
SheinhardtWigCo wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for Matrix. This proposal seems to address general abuse, spam, propaganda, filter bubbles, and so on. While these are worthy issues to tackle, the authors of the 7-eyes statement are not really interested in them. What they say they want is for terrorism and child pornography to be detectable or meaningfully reduced. Do you think a relative reputation system will solve that problem?

Yes, we think it will help meaningfully help detect and reduce abuse - mainly because it's shamelessly mimicking the way society works in real life. Many (most?) abusive communities are at least adjacent if not overlapping with publicly visible communities. Simply put, they need a way to advertise and recruit. So, just as in person you might stay away from a given political party / religious institute / youth club be…

> Unrelated: one particularly dark dystopian outcome we've been wargaming is: what if someone (not us!) used decentralised rep to seed a GPT-3 style bot to locate abusive communities, and then automated the process of infiltrating & investigating them... only to then end up ascending the ranks while preserving its cover and accidentally triggered some atrocity. So, um, let's not do that.)

I think you greatly overestimate the abilities of GPT-3. GPT-3's writable memory is short-term only – its long-term memory is read-only – so by the end of a conversation, it has permanently forgotten what the topic was at the beginning. Given its lack of writable long-term memory, it is completely incapable of succeeding at any tasks involving long-term planning, such as the infiltration and investigation of a social group.

Of course, you said "GPT 3 style bot", not GPT-3, but the AI you have in mind has significantly greater capabilities than GPT-3 has, so isn't fairly said to be "GPT 3 style" at all.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#373

Post by karmakaze »

How practical is any declaration of law?

Wouldn't it be feasible to say, have a video streaming site hide messages it its streams and also in its control data? More sophisticated methods are of course possible. Basically "outlawing encryption means only outlaws have encryption."

The only use from any such laws is surveillance of the public at large.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#374

Post by GekkePrutser »

romanoderoma wrote: post #122
yogthos wrote: post #5

I was told that this only happens in authoritarian regimes like China. Turns out that while everybody was talking about China exact same things were happening here in the West. It's as if the whole focus on China was specifically designed to distract people from what's happening in their own countries.

You were told a lie. USA has been doing it as long as the second war started and never stopped. And they consider strong encryption a weapon. Are you familiar with the Zimmermann case?

It's also big in the Netherlands.. In the 90s they had the biggest number of phone taps in the world, and this is not per capita, but the absolute number! With a population a mere fraction of the US's.

However the Netherlands is a fairly honest country when it comes to statistics, so I wouldn't be surprised that the US still came out on top, but they just didn't report most of their taps for 'national security' reasons.

But something has really changed in the past 20-30 years. Before this there was no way to literally monitor everyone. It was too labour/storage intensive. You really had to be a 'person of interest' for some kind of (usually legitimate) reason.

Whereas now in this digital age (and with everyone carrying a portable listening device in their pocket) this is totally feasible and thanks to Snowden we know it's actually being done too.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#376

Post by GekkePrutser »

ben_w wrote: post #170
romanoderoma wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehm... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/03/edward-snowd...

North Korea is rather a lot worse: https://insinuator.net/2015/07/redstar-os-watermarking/

I would bet a guess that privacy in NK is actually better when you're purely looking at a digital point of view.

After all, many people there won't have access to such technology. They'll be off the grid unlike most of us.

Of course that doesn't actually give them privacy, I'm sure that there's plenty of 'friendly' neighbours spying on each other for a few bucks, basically stasi style.

And also this watermarking isn't all that different from our browser fingerprinting and mega data collection. It's just a cultural difference. The NK government wants their citizens to know they're being spied on. Whereas ours is trying to hide it. Thus more focus on the endpoint device rather than the cloud side.

Re: EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]

#379

Post by scrollaway »

throw0101a wrote: post #275
scrollaway wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if you put it that way, assumption of innocence is also a scary concept; being the police and having to let someone you know is a murderer or terrorist go because you can't prove what they did is routinely touted as a genuinely terrifying prospect in plenty of TV shows. Privacy is a human right in Europe. I don't think it's a pipe dream to give encryption some good PR, especially when it powers the internet,…

> being the police and having to let someone you know is a murderer or terrorist go because you can't prove what they did "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state." — https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Touch_of_Evil > as a genuinely terrifying prospect in plenty of TV shows. Probably for a reason: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda

I don't know if you're trying to make this a "gotcha", but this is the point I was making.
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