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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

421–430 of 463 posts

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#421
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before the formation of the European Coal & Steel community, the direct predecessor to the EU, we literally had a millenium of non-stop slaughter.

Yes, and the European Coal & Steel community didn't stop the slaughter, the nuclear powered US stopped did. The stopped slaughtering wouldn't have continued without the EU. Everyone in Europa couldn't have kept doing it even if they wanted to with 80 US military based on the continent. You give the EU too much credit for peace. In fact, there's way more tensions between EU countries now as EU members than in the past…

You can say what you want, but take any history book and you will see that what we got now is the longest period in history without a war between European countries. They don't fully trust each other? OK, but this is still a great improvement over the past.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no obligation to put a banner of you don't sell your users' data to third parties. The law is very clear that your don't need it for period technical cookies, so it's really always and every time solely about tracking and advertisement money.

You do need it for analytics though, or any other non-essential purpose. You could probably argue self-hosted, privacy-preserving analytics is a "legitimate business purpose" so doesn't need consent. AFAIK it's because you're sending user data to Google that you normally need consent for GA.

[dead]

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#423
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". That's what ever closer means, definitionally. Nobody was duped into anything, countries exercised their sovereignty to come to an agreement. The rest of your concerns is just how literally any legislation and treaty ever works. When did you sign on to your country's constitution? What about the treaty of Bern establishing the Universal Postal Union in 1874? Key concept h…

>There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is. Aren't we already fully unified? Nor have you disputed the vagueness of the "ever closer union" which is used to undemocratically bully countries in the union to do what unelected corrupt Brussels bureaucrats want them to do. >Key concept here is legal succession. Which is not set in st…

"Ever" can never be fulfilled. That's what the word means.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do understand it but what they want is not just criminals' data but all of us.

They want to pick the easy fruit. The dumb criminals that would do that sort of thing over whatsapp.

Yes, but this easy fruit has a flavor of the week:

https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/ben-werdmuller-signal-z...

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun...

> Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

Like, you can get 30 years in prison now for moving some boxes with zines in them, just because you are anti-fascist.

Yes, this is American politics; but don't think that the benevolent overloads of the EU don't plan for this same outcome: Already in many European countries, I can go to prison for just saying, "Free Palestine". They want it so that people cannot even say that in private.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#425
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of end to end encryption is that providers cannot comply with police request to access conversations. A properly secured system would make it impossible without compromise of your device. Now i don't know what signal does, but I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection.

> Now i don't know what signal does That makes me question how much you know about end-to-end encrypted messengers, because Signal is the gold standard. > I am almost certain WhatsApp can just lie about your contacts keys and man in the middle the connection. The problem there is that WhatsApp is not open source, so you can't check. So obviously you have to trust. But there are many, many employees who have access to…

> But there are many, many employees who have access to the WhatsApp sources, so if it was not implementing what it says it is, chances are that someone would have said it.

No one in Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, or Apple said anything about PRISM. We had to wait for the NSA whistleblower. So the argument someone would say something does not really stand up to historical precedent.

I looked a bit into it and yeah they have a key transparency mechanism where they store a blockchain on s3.

So supposedly they can't just add a key for a user in secret. But still what if they do it in public does the client refuse to send messages to new keys?

It's not like we are all spending all our time going over a random s3 bucket to say `Aha, I am sure Bob didn't add this new key because he logged in from his desktop. It has to be a man in the middle`

Can they just siphon keys of your device? Can they just deploy a special version to just your device without the vast majority of engineers in meta even knowing about the compromised version? No one knows. Well no one in public.

The gold standard would be personally managed keys, exchanged and signed by your contacts in person, open source software that is not auto-updating, distributed over a channel that does not know your identity.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#426
post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". That's what ever closer means, definitionally. Nobody was duped into anything, countries exercised their sovereignty to come to an agreement. The rest of your concerns is just how literally any legislation and treaty ever works. When did you sign on to your country's constitution? What about the treaty of Bern establishing the Universal Postal Union in 1874? Key concept h…

>There's no boundaries to "ever closer union". Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is. Aren't we already fully unified? Nor have you disputed the vagueness of the "ever closer union" which is used to undemocratically bully countries in the union to do what unelected corrupt Brussels bureaucrats want them to do. >Key concept here is legal succession. Which is not set in st…

> Aren't we already fully unified?

Clearly we are not fully unified. We still have 27 different budgets for example. We are still mostly borrowing as 27 different independent sovereigns for example.

> Ok, but you haven't told me what exactly the end goal of that "ever closer union" is.

That's what the legislative process of proposals, rejections and counter-proposals is all about figuring out what the end goal looks like, that's why we don't have an EU constitution and instead have the Treaty of Lisbon. The constitution was rejected in popular processes in France and the Netherlands withdrawn and an alternative proposal was made that actually made it into agreement.

You can frame that as they went around our back to do evil things. Or you know as a negotiation where both sides of an argument compromise. The key clue that this is a compromise between two sides is that no one is actually happy with the result.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#427
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people are surprised of the rise of far right, especially anti EU one

The right is a massive supporter for all of these authoritarian pushes, so what exactly are you trying to say?

Creating a problem, positioning yourself as the solution, and using any power you are given to exacerbate the problem, is an unfortunately-viable strategy. In theory, journalism can let the air out of the strategy, but someone's been going 'round killing or suborning the journalism organisations, so that's a bit tricky at the moment.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want to pick the easy fruit. The dumb criminals that would do that sort of thing over whatsapp.

Yes, but this easy fruit has a flavor of the week: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/ben-werdmuller-signal-z... https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun... > Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards thos…

Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them.

The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years.

If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have noted too. So you know I see antifa tor services run out of servers in Europe in your future.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but this easy fruit has a flavor of the week: https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/ben-werdmuller-signal-z... https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/coun... > Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards thos…

Listen I agree, but the solution to this problem is not social media mediated pseudo-anonymity the operators know who you are and they are working with them. The solution is keeping fascists of the levers of power which America has done an incredibly bad job at for the last 10 years. If you really want to have free speech, you need to be in your own domain and that is going to be increasingly dangerous as you have no…

I totally agree, the problem is difficult however because even if we create a perfectly anonymous system for registering with social media, modern LLMs make semantic analysis trivial. It's going to be impossible to remain anonymous without also using an LLM to strip the unique footprint of your text. Which leads to a very strange and monotonous culture for internet discussions. Might be unavoidable, though, at least for certain kinds of discussions.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#430
post #147
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even if it's a 1eur phone case (1eur + 3eur customs + That's the fucking point for fuck's sake! Pardon my language, but the entire point of the tariff is to stop people from buying masses of trivial things from the other side of the world, with all the externalities that it entails. This tariff tries to cover at least some fraction of said externalities. People on HN should not be this clueless about basic economy.…

This is obviously not the point if the surcharge disappears on packages with total price over 150 €.

It is, because (one of) the big problem(s) is people impulse buying individual cheap things in large numbers, taking advantage of free shipping when the shipping is obviously not free. These stores exploit the fact that international postage and customs agreements were never written with a giant volume of small parcels in mind, making it artificially cheap (for the sender) to spam the system with them.
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