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EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

patrick-breyer.de

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Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#441

Post by soulofmischief »

wolvoleo wrote: post #438
soulofmischief wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations. It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.

Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting.

If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and improving such tools, I would love to find a partner to help with such a project. Even if you don't code, there are other duties besides coding involved with successfully promoting such a project and developing a community around it.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#442

Post by wolvoleo »

soulofmischief wrote: post #441
wolvoleo wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this is indeed a problem. But this is even more reason to keep private conversations private. It will stop those LLMs learning your footprint from your private conversations. It's an interesting thing what you're saying. I've been thinking about this happening (I think it's inevitable) and also about using an LLM to sanitise my semantic footprint.

Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting. If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and impr…

Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media.

But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a human, trying to fool it won't work. It really needs an artificial sanitiser. One that really builds a persona and aligns to it deeply (like little colloquialisms from the purported origin of the persona).

And also things like comment posting hours. I have identified several accounts from people who said they were chatting with me and I could prove they were doing something completely different at that same time. Us humans aren't consistent enough for that. Especially if you have multiple sockpuppets.

I don't think I could help much with that though. I'm neither a developer nor a promotor, I'm too much of an introvert for that. But it sounds really interesting.

But yeah I'm sure that within 5 years, if you are still writing comments yourself, it won't matter whether they know your phone number or email address, you will be uniquely identified by just what you write. I wouldn't be surprised if the darker forces in society have this capability already.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#443

Post by soulofmischief »

wolvoleo wrote: post #442
soulofmischief wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's been on my mind since the original transformers paper, because persona and identity management has been a long-time interest of mine. Both offensive and defensive tooling, such as fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting. If you're interested in building an open source persona management suite to distribute as freedom software and level the playing field against State agents who are already building and impr…

Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media. But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a…

There was a thread not too long ago where someone did stylometric analysis on HN, and quite a few users had true positive matches (though there were plenty false positives).

They later pulled the dataset, but antirez recreated it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

https://antirez.com/news/150

You can try the demo here: https://antirez.com/hnstyle

but your account is too young to be in the dataset. You could ask an LLM to recrunch the numbers with a newer dataset, though.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#444

Post by joe_mamba »

GTP wrote: post #421
joe_mamba wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> the longest period in history without a war between European countries.

Yes, THanks to the US military occupation

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#445

Post by wolvoleo »

soulofmischief wrote: post #443
wolvoleo wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I work in cyber and I've always thought about the ability for fingerprinting people by their content. Not really semantically (that was just not really possible until LLMs came up) but more in terms of interests on social media. But semantic analysis adds a whole new level with so much entropy that it's bound to be unique. And LLMs are just ideal for pattern recognition. There's not much we can do about that as a…

There was a thread not too long ago where someone did stylometric analysis on HN, and quite a few users had true positive matches (though there were plenty false positives). They later pulled the dataset, but antirez recreated it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://antirez.com/news/150 You can try the demo here: https://antirez.com/hnstyle but your account is too young to be in the dataset. You cou…

> but your account is too young to be in the dataset.

This is on purpose yes. I've taken to rotating my accounts everywhere on a semi-regular basis as a feeble low-effort mitigation that I'm sure will not hold once this gets into full blown deployment.

I know the HN community frowns on that but it's not like I rotate every day. Probably should for it to be effective though.

Thanks for the link I will try that out! I missed that happening.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#446

Post by palata »

piltdownman wrote: post #437
palata wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not like internet is made of a few select providers In practice it is. Almost all messaging happens on a few apps. > also the most widely available apps already comply to the single police request to access conversations from suspects That is not true: Signal is widely available and doesn't do that. WhatsApp probably doesn't do it either. Don't get me wrong: I am against ChatControl as well. I believe that sec…

WhatsApp already does it for unencrypted messages for about half of the EU under the purview of the rules of lawful interception obligations for NI-ICS, as well as Norway, Switzerland and the UK. When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone and use Cellebrite or similar 3rd Party tooling to gain physical user-level access. No need for cert-pinning or esoteric MITM attacks. N.B. China does not allow…

> When they want to read encrypted messages they seize the phone

That is very, very different from mass surveillance.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#447

Post by wolvoleo »

embedding-shape wrote: post #399
mort96 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the past Exactly. That time is mostly over.

And coming back again: > As part of changing laws in Europe, Meta now offers the option for you to chat with others using third-party messaging apps that have integrated with WhatsApp and that you choose to turn on. - Whatsapp Help Center Currently support is a bit shit, given it's relatively new. Give it 3-5 years and I'm sure this will look very different.

Yes but it's the same EU that mandates this. If they can mandate interoperability they will just mandate their backdoor at the same time

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#449

Post by wolvoleo »

joe_mamba wrote: post #386
throwawayffffas wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration which no one is hiding is a stated goal of the European Union. It's right there in the original treaties `an ever closer union`. If you don't like it leave, but the rest have all committed to that a long time ago. The chat control thing has nothing to do with all of the above, it's just a bit of legislation. The whole "we will vote on it again and again unti…

>All the quotes are clearly talking about closer integration Are you saying "the ends justify the means" of this "closer integration"? With that logic, Hitler's end goal was also closer integration of Europe's countries once he conquered them all. >If you don't like it leave Impossible to leave now when you joined 20+ years ago, when the EU was something completely different, which now grew beyond what you signed up…

> Why is Cuba a bigger issue for Ursula than what's happening in the EU? LAst time I checked Cuba is on a different continent and an insignificant trading partner of the EU.

That's also because of unwarranted American sanctions.

Which for once isn't only Trump's fault, every American president has been happy to let the Cubans suffer for no reason.

Re: EU to legislate about Chat Control behind closed doors

#450

Post by drnick1 »

kalleboo wrote: post #366
drnick1 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you supposed to learn from the banner anyway? It's just an additional annoyance. You should just assume that anything that your browser exposed may be used to track you. The real problem is that most browsers and browser configurations are far too permissive for the sake of avoiding breakage. The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical,…

> The real technical solution to online tracking is standardization of browser attributes so that users look identical As long as the web is an applications platform rather a hypertext document platform there will always be enough small differences to fingerprint. There is never going to be a technical solution, the solution is going to have to be social (legal, e.g. the GDPR).

But the GDPR does not achieve anything in practice. You get annoying cookie/tracking banners that you are effectively forced to accept in order to use the website, and companies keep collecting data. They promise not to misuse the data, but we all know that they still will. Enforcement is very difficult because it is impossible to audit every tech firm out there, so you are essentially relying on leaks and whistleblowers for the truth to come out. A complete ban on data collection not directly provided by the user would have been more effective overall, even though you still face the same enforcement issue.
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