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EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

mullvad.net

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Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#91

Post by jonathanstrange »

mjw_byrne wrote: post #48

EU tech law seems to be a bit of a rollercoaster. GDPR was conceptually a great thing (although its actual implementation smacks strongly of boomers with filofaxes ranting about FaceTok and Google Siri), the right to repair is good, the USB-C thing is useful. The cookie permission thing didn't work though. It's sad to see the EU now joining the "let's use child abuse as an excuse to steal the internet" bandwagon. The…

The problem with these directives is that they have to be codified into national laws. This takes a long time and is a complicated process. It seems much easier to enact them than to take back mistakes.

That alone seems to guarantee an authoritarian future or, at least, a bureaucratic nightmare in the long term. A small mistake here or there might appear to be harmless (e.g. cookie permissions), but what about the cumulative effects 50 years in the future?

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#92

Post by DiabloD3 »

worldofmatthew wrote: post #79
DiabloD3 wrote: post #27

No offense, but that just means the EU will no longer be compatible with FOSS. FOSS runs the world, and Europe will find themselves without software to run the majority of their systems. Without FOSS? No Internet. No business. No nothing . You'll have maybe 2/3rds of what ships in Windows and less than half of OSX. Oh, and no Ingenuity, which iirc was a joint NASA/ESA project.

It will mean every server will have to use Microsoft Windows..... Thus, handing over all control over the EU networks to 1 American company.

Nope, Windows Server would be illegal in Europe. Microsoft ships too much non-trivial FOSS software in Windows now.

There is no major OS that they can run, nor can they develop for it (the act of installing GCC or LLVM would now be illegal, for example).

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#93

Post by pavlov »

pelasaco wrote: post #55
pavlov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people. The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost e…

> The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. Any reference on that? I used to work for EU and I never had this impression while there or never read about how lean the EU is.. would be interesting to know more about it.

I'm not saying there isn't waste. It develops in every large organization, public or private. (I sometimes wonder about people — Americans mostly — who want the government to vanish, but also complain loudly about how their phone operator, insurance company, etc. are the worst. What do they expect to happen if the private sector took over everything?)

The relative leanness of the EU is a result of its unique structure. It has almost no executive authority on its own except in specific transnational cases like antitrust where it can fine large corporations. On the level that citizens interact, everything is delegated to national institutions. It's nothing like the federal states that exist elsewhere. For example the US federal government employs almost 50 times more people than the entire EU system, yet EU population is 30% larger.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#94

Post by miohtama »

ggm wrote: post #59

Hot take, cites no legal opinion. My personal view is, this is a misrepresentation of the proposed act. The act may be bad, but this interpretation looks suspicious and hyperbolic. I'd like to see cites, and counterparts.

You can find them here

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#95

Post by sam_lowry_ »

pavlov wrote: post #34
agilob wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safet…

I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people. The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost e…

Also, they can not grow by 400%. There are rules in place that limit the budget and the maximum change per budget chapter that can be executed at once. These rules are made and by member countries.

BTW, EU budget was available in XML format for a while. Easy to parse. The first years they did not publish it, a FOI request would get you an electronic copy rather quickly.

IIRC, there was little interest in the machine-readable budget because the published version does not go too far into the details of budget lines and one has to have specialized knowledge to read it.

Still, one could make some interesting conclusions, e.g. that the Ombudsman had much higher HR budget per head that the rest of the pack, the Commission included.

This created internal tensions, but no substantial change in the follow-up.

It's a pity there is so little interest in EU Budget that they can just stop publishing machine-readable copy and get away with it.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#96

Post by Semaphor »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #54
cpa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they were thinking of illegal drugs, which you generally can't possess. Maybe the act of consumption is not illegal per se, though, I'm not sure.

See side comment. As best as I can see, consumption is not "illegal", except that there are extremely severe legal consequences if any evidence turns up that you've consumed them. It remains to be explained in what sense that fails to constitute being illegal.

> except that there are extremely severe legal consequences if any evidence turns up

This is a bit of a sidebar, but what consequences? DUI, sure. But in Germany, where consumption (but nothing else, including possession; IANAL, not sure if someone holding a joint to your face to drag on counts as possession) of weed is legal I know of no direct consequences you’d face for having consumed marijuana.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#97

Post by Tade0 »

agilob wrote: post #21
sendfoods wrote: post #9

I am the first person to appreciate the pro-online-privacy legislation from the EU in the last couple of years. Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Is it a result of the sheer size of the org, with malevolent people reeking their ugly heads? A more cynical "privacy legislation as a smoke screen with totalitarian measures in the backend"?

>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safet…

> They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote

MEPs are voted in by their compatriots.

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#98

Post by miohtama »

azalemeth wrote: post #73

The right way to respond to this is to launch a detailed EU petition about it – the EC parliament is fairly open and previous petitions with a large number of signatures have, unlike perhaps other countries, effected a change in policy, e.g. on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides ("save the bees") which are banned in the EU after much action [1]. Mullvad – or someone similar – should therefore really create one. I ca…

Most of the EU is against chat control. You can find some polls here

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Re: EU chat control law will ban open source operating systems

#100

Post by shapefrog »

Y-bar wrote: post #66
mjw_byrne wrote: post #48

EU tech law seems to be a bit of a rollercoaster. GDPR was conceptually a great thing (although its actual implementation smacks strongly of boomers with filofaxes ranting about FaceTok and Google Siri), the right to repair is good, the USB-C thing is useful. The cookie permission thing didn't work though. It's sad to see the EU now joining the "let's use child abuse as an excuse to steal the internet" bandwagon. The…

Why do you think GDPR is some boomer with filofaxes thing? I'm young enough to be born at about the introduction of the original Mac and have worked with ecom for a long time now and GDPR from my perspective is an excellent law with the exception of some lacklustre enforcement. Our clients all cleaned out their already collected data, they implemented deletion, and extraction/change-on-request by customers, they limi…

GDPR is a light turned on that illuminated all the shitty behaviour that was "best practices" taking place in the darkness.

Its no surprise that Zuck and co spent billions opposing it

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