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Posted by miroljub 3 hours ago

Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament(www.heise.de)
345 points | 148 commentspage 2
jmward01 1 hour ago|
All new laws should be given a trial period where the lawmakers are forced to live with them for 90 days before the public is subjected to them. At any time during that period lawmakers can change their vote.
mosselman 1 hour ago|
This is an incredibly good idea. 90 days is too short to feel the effects of some things though. Better make it a year.

The downside is "lets try giving everyone basic income of $100k/week". But apart from that great!

sucrosesucrose 1 hour ago||
No one will do anything to stop it, nor ChatControl 2.0 in the future. No one will revolt, or seize the government in response to anything that happens.

The world that Liberal Democracy has built has escape valves (tv/streaming/videogames/entertainment, the illusion of democratic choice, mass media and information overload, public demonstrations) for the anger of the massed which despite in older times caused a government to fall or a revolution to start, today cause nothing and are comfortably absorbed or even assimilated for profit by the system itself.

lukan 1 hour ago||
In your doomed reality maybe, but in this reality it was already stopped a couple of times and chances are good, that it will be stopped again - unless people believe all is doomed.
iamnothere 17 minutes ago||
If this is true, then the system will eventually collapse upon itself, as its governance feedback loops have been broken. No defeat is permanent.
hlieberman 3 hours ago||
Is this Chat Control 1.0 or Chat Control 2.0?
MaKey 2 hours ago||
This is about Chat Control 1.0 (voluntary scanning).
xyzsparetimexyz 30 minutes ago||
If we're gonna be undemocratic, can we at least also get have bullet trains and expanded social programs?
big85 2 hours ago||
The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?
rsynnott 2 hours ago||
Part of the confusion is that there are two things involved here; 'Chat Control 1', an existing (but expiring) derogation to the ePrivacy Directive which allows, but does not require, providers to scan messages. 'Chat Control 2', which you'll likely have heard more about, would _require_ providers to do this. The wiki article is quite poorly written and implies that 1 is an earlier version of 2, which isn't really the case.

Anyway, this is about Chat Control 1.

cucumber3732842 2 hours ago|||
It's probably line item 156/289 on some intern's list of things to check once a week and make sure it "looks good". Politicians engage in just as much publicity management as big corporations do.
miroljub 2 hours ago||
Just assume the worst: all your private messages would be read and shared between all governments and corporations in the world.
big85 2 hours ago||
No, I want to know specifically.
gmueckl 24 minutes ago|||
As I understand it, chat platforms provider will not be held in violation of the data privacy laws if they add automatic detection and reporting of unlawful content to their platforms. E.G. a CSAM detector in a client app for an end-to-end-encrypted messaging service would be lawful.
SpicyLemonZest 38 minutes ago||||
You're looking for an answer that doesn't exist. The term "Chat Control" was coined by the opponents of these proposals to express their worst case assumptions; they reject the idea that the specifics matter, because they fear that any kind of chat scanning can be abused in basically the same ways. Supporters of chat scanning proposals don't call them "Chat Control" or view all such proposals as part of a unified whole.
miroljub 2 hours ago|||
The answer is already specific, but not complete.
sfdlkj3jk342a 1 hour ago||
Part of me wants Chat Control to get passed so that there is more incentive for at least the tech literate to start using more decentralized messaging tools.
Cider9986 19 minutes ago|
They won't.

But afaik Chat Control 1.0 was/is in effect but expired. It's not relevant to Signal or Whatsapp because they're e2ee, it's relevant for eBay, Linkedin, perhaps SMS.

cherryteastain 1 hour ago||
Reminder that EU institutions were designed from ground up to smother democracy:

- Members of EU Parliament cannot propose regulation, only the unelected Commission can, MEPs can only vote yes/no

- EU Parliament is the only parliament in the world where an absolute 50%+1 is needed to reject a bill, ignoring how many MEPs are present/voting. In every other parliament, a quorum requirement plus a majority vote is needed to pass a bill.

gmueckl 28 minutes ago|
This is all fixable by changing the treaties. The first step to fixing it, however, is to give up fundamental opposition to its existence and instead support the underlying ideals and approach the shortcomings from a constructive angle.

The alternative is feeding nationalistic right wing extremism, which we really don't want in Europe.

aquir 2 hours ago||
Hopefully this could be the first good thing about Brexit...this might not get implemented in the UK or there will be a delay!
Havoc 1 hour ago||
The way the uk is legislating online stuff lately I’m expecting UK version to be worse than EU
MyMemoryfails 1 hour ago|||
UK already technically banned encryption, causing Apple to remove the encrypted cloud service for UK customers. Check UK's "Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)"
graemep 2 hours ago||
> Hopefully this could be the first good thing about Brexit

Was having lots of people's lives saved by a much faster vaccine rollout not a good thing?

miroljub 2 hours ago||
Please mark sarcasm as /s
nekusar 3 hours ago|
The cypherpunks were right. Rights to encryption are only a part of what we need.

The other part is steganography, or hiding real messages within a innocuous anodyne message stream. And encryption can be used in conjunction as part of hiding said messages.

It can be within pictures with the lowest bit values. It can be constructed punctuation and spaces. Lots of things.

But hidden and plausibly deniable messaging is the ONLY way to defeat a government(s) that want to invade every communication aspect for humans.

__MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago||
The trouble with pictures is that when you share them online the platform will likely compress them before serving them to others, spoiling your steganography. I think text-in-text is the way to go. Decrypt that recipe for brownies into the actual message. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075
Bender 1 hour ago||
One can host their own private or semi-private forum, chat server, chan board, etc... and choose not to re-encode the images and/or permit .tar .7z .zip archives and so on. Keep the bots away with basic auth to minimize skiddie risk to platform RCE's.

It's unlikely people can move their friends to their own platform but the best way I have found is to call it a "fall-back" platform for when Discord and others are temporarily offline. Get people used to the idea that is the place to share things they do not want leaked when the big platform 3rd parties expose files. The admin can encrypt the storage and periodically zero out files and zero out empty space for privacy.

People with slightly higher opsec may choose to block mobile proprietary devices.

osigurdson 2 hours ago|||
What I don't understand is, what kind of legitimate criminal would not use such techniques? Are bank robbers planning things out on iMessage? If so, presumably they won't be criminals for very long. Therefore these types of initiatives only impact the innocent and inept but still active criminals.
iamnothere 2 hours ago|||
The purpose of these efforts is not to catch criminals, at least not primarily, it’s to map the spread of “dangerous” ideas and the networks behind them. In other words, to prevent effective political change.

Found a new problematic meme? Someone leaked a video of you taking a bribe? Someone published a photo of damage from a missile strike? Add it to the database of forbidden media and quickly track down the source.

cucumber3732842 2 hours ago||
They'll make sure to catch just enough criminals that when you say it's all bullshit some snooty waste of oxygen on HN can say "well akshually" and link you to some cherry picked news story that makes it all look like a good thing because they caught some small time house painter dumping waste paint in the sewer or nabbed someone for selling vapes to teenagers.
mghackerlady 2 hours ago||||
Security is the reason given to us since most of us are too trusting or dumb to look any further into it. It becomes clear security isn't what they're doing it for after giving it more than a few minutes of thought
doublepg23 45 minutes ago|||
Epstein used Gmail
nullorempty 2 hours ago||
That's an excellent take.

Unfortunately, verified devices will close that loophole.

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