[HN Gopher] Messaging and chat control
___________________________________________________________________
Messaging and chat control
Author : kristjank
Score : 565 points
Date : 2021-08-09 11:26 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.patrick-breyer.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.patrick-breyer.de)
| progx wrote:
| Perfect timing, the EU can ask now Apple to search their phones.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| IMHO, it's the other way around: Apple saw that they would
| likely have to implement this in the near future, and decided
| to go ahead.
|
| The paranoid part of me would also entertain the idea of a
| singular force pushing both developments forward, but I don't
| have any evidence for this.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| For a complex issue this document does a really good job of
| listing the various problems with this 'scan everything for CSAM'
| approach. These two points bear repeating:
|
| "You can falsely be reported and investigated for allegedly
| disseminating child sexual exploitation material. Messaging and
| chat control algorithms are known to flag completely legal
| vacation photos of children on a beach, for example. According to
| Swiss federal police authorities, 86% of all machine-generated
| reports turn out to be without merit. 40% of all criminal
| investigation procedures initiated in Germany for "child
| pornography" target minors.
|
| On your next trip overseas, you can expect big problems. Machine-
| generated reports on your communications may have been passed on
| to other countries, such as the USA, where there is no data
| privacy - with incalculable results."
| White_Wolf wrote:
| I'm wondering how long until inconvenient people(or people with
| inconvenient opinions) are targeted for blackmailing material
| with a system like this.
| xtracto wrote:
| What's stopping someone from buying a used computer at the city
| street market, taking it to one public park with internet
| access and sending child porn to a huge list of MEPs[1] or one
| of the countless leaked emails lists (from Facebook and other
| providers)
|
| [1]
| https://www.asktheeu.org/en/request/list_of_meps_and_their_o...
| )
| [deleted]
| Zenst wrote:
| As in send them an email that will trigger the system in a way
| to cause grief or induce further evasive exploration of the
| recipients life. Show me a guarantee that will never happen as
| that is the fear as we all know - any system can be gamed for
| good or bad.
| effie wrote:
| That kind of assassination of inconvenient people is already
| being used for a long time. Just plant the evidence and tip off
| the cops.
|
| This kind of legislation is for a different reason: to
| introduce pervasive surveillance of people activities and
| speech, and normalize the concept.
| ciconia wrote:
| Does anybody have an idea how big child pornography is on the
| internet? Are those measures commensurate with the size of the
| problem? I'm asking seriously.
| st_goliath wrote:
| Hi, you must be new to this game.
|
| Here's the deal: _none of this_ is about, or for the children.
| It 's just a bullshit excuse to label anyone who opposes it a
| pedo. Same goes if "think about the terrorists" is used
| instead, which might come around soon-ish, since we started
| this round with "think about the children".
|
| OT: if somebody does have some statistics, that might actually
| be interesting; don't let me discourage you from responding,
| but I'd still call it _OT_ , given that it's not actually about
| the children.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Furthermore, it does not matter in the slightest what number
| it turns out to be. It's going to be nonzero, it's going to
| continue to be nonzero no matter what legislation you
| introduce, and so you can always use this argument for more
| surveillance because people (especially parents, but mostly
| just everyone, and understandably) get very upset about this
| topic.
| aj3 wrote:
| Nirvana / perfect solution fallacy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
| y04nn wrote:
| On a previous HN submission [1] it's about 0.06%, more than I
| expeted.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28110159
| snakeboy wrote:
| On a website uniquely designed for photo upload and forensic
| analysis, CSAM makes up .06% of uploads. But I'd bet on a
| generic messaging app, the percentage of messages involving
| CSAM is much, much lower.
| nix23 wrote:
| When the EU wants to be like China, but not to control citizens
| but to protect the children's ;)
|
| BTW: The EU wants to implement age restriction to online services
| into the Operating-system, every device that is not verified by
| ID is restricted to lets say content for 8yo's
| effie wrote:
| It's agendas like these when you realize submitting your country
| laws to legislation from Brusel was a fatal error.
| dTal wrote:
| I'm sorry, what country were you from again, that has a human
| rights record so much cleaner than the EU? It sounds like a
| lovely place.
| effie wrote:
| This is not substantive. Please read the HN guidelines.
| dTal wrote:
| Alright, let me spell it out. You contend that "submitting
| your country[sic] laws to legislation from Brusel[sic] was
| a fatal error", on the grounds of a single piece of
| legislation. The same argument can be used to argue against
| _any_ sort of government, since it 's a rare government
| that makes no mistakes at all. The EU is top-tier in a wide
| range of areas spanning from human rights to food safety.
| So I ask again - where do you think is _better_?
| xtracto wrote:
| I wish I could report passive aggressive comments like
| this... as they don't really belong to HackerNews.
| hhlbf wrote:
| This argument is crap and you should be ashamed to use it
| as a personal attack.
| effie wrote:
| > on the grounds of a single piece of legislation.
|
| No, I said "when you realize", not that it is the "single
| piece of legislation".
|
| There are many other reasons for that stance, such as the
| fact that nation's people can influence and check their
| government's laws with more success than it can do that
| to a supernational undemocratic bureaucratic
| organization.
|
| > The EU is top-tier in a wide range of areas spanning
| from human rights
|
| They have full mouth of it, yes. They issued some great
| declarations and legally binding resolutions, I agree. In
| case of vaccines, almost all EU governments act in direct
| violation and EU has no real power/wish to stop them.
| dTal wrote:
| >almost all EU governments act in direct violation and EU
| has no real power/wish to stop them.
|
| This would seem to contradict your original post, no?
| effie wrote:
| No, where is the contradiction?
| dTal wrote:
| The EU is either
|
| - an unstoppable authoritarian juggernaut to which
| countries have foolishly ceded their sovereignty and are
| now paying the price in the form of draconian regulation
|
| - a weak and ineffectual symbolic union which issues
| empty proclamations that countries are free to ignore
| without consequence
|
| Which is it?
| effie wrote:
| False dichotomy. It can be both, depending on the issue.
| This is similar to U.S., although U.S. is much stronger
| on the federal level than EU is.
| dTal wrote:
| Do you regard the ceding of state sovereignty to the U.S.
| federal government to also have been a fatal error?
| snakeboy wrote:
| There is the European Convention on Human Rights upheld by
| the European Court of Human Rights, but from my understanding
| these both predate the European Union, and they're not really
| directly associated.
|
| Could someone more knowledgeable weigh in on what the EU has
| to show as far as a "human rights record" ?
| masswerk wrote:
| However, the problem is usually the European Council and not
| the Commission or the Parliament. Meaning, it's still the
| countries...
| effie wrote:
| Any examples? At least the Council has people with mandate
| from the countries...
| masswerk wrote:
| > At least the Council has people with mandate from the
| countries
|
| Not in every country. More often, the head of the
| government is voted for by the national parliament,
| meaning, only the people having installed them have a form
| of mandate. (Which is also true for the Commission, BTW.)
| The people with the actual mandate are in the European
| Parliament.
| kristjank wrote:
| Right on. Looking into ways of stopping this from happening has
| given me a very real feeling of desperation. There's no real
| way for an EU citizen to stop laws like these from getting
| accepted. No option for a referendum, no option for a veto, the
| best bet is getting the EU court to annul it, but that takes
| decades.
| fabbari wrote:
| EU citizens CAN block this! Make your representative in the
| Council of the EU accountable. If 4 members veto this the
| legislation will not pass.
|
| If you can't move your country representative to veto the
| bill, then the issue is not the EU: it's your government.
|
| As Europeans we have to stop this very sneaky campaign of
| "citizens can't do anything" - it's a self fulfilling
| prophecy and the sharpest tool the lobbies have in the EU.
|
| Your country's government has a say on it, and you have a say
| on your country's government. Make them accountable.
| effie wrote:
| > Make your representative in the Council of the EU
| accountable.
|
| How would I do that? He is already in that position, I have
| zero influence on his decisions.
| Accacin wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the UK government announced it would
| be re-applying to be in the EU just for this new law (I'm
| joking.. I hope).
| fabbari wrote:
| I think that the fatal error is not going and vote for the
| European Parliament elections [0]. You don't get to complain
| when you decide not to participate in the democratic process.
|
| Even if this was passed by the Council of the EU [1] it would
| be passed by ministers representing over 55% of the states -
| and over 65% of the EU population - and could be blocked by 4
| countries. Now - we can discuss if a government is a democratic
| institution, but I guess it's a bit of a stretch to argue
| otherwise.
|
| In other words: democracy requires information and education,
| either at the EU or at state level. That's not the issue here.
|
| Your country is not a passive agent in this: your country has a
| say and you need only four countries to stop this. If you
| believe that somehow you can influence your government when
| it's emanating laws locally, but not when - the same government
| - is voting in the Council, you are just doing some magical
| thinking.
|
| The EU has one main problem: it's local politicians stoking the
| fire of "It's the EU doing this, not us" - while at the same
| time passing legislation in the EU.
|
| <Tyranny of the majority arguments go here>
|
| [0] https://europarl.europa.eu/election-
| results-2019/en/turnout/ [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union
| effie wrote:
| > You don't get to complain when you decide not to
| participate in the democratic process.
|
| You can complain either way. Not participating means you are
| not participating, and is a kind of a vote too. If <50%
| people vote, then the vote is arguably illegitimate.
| fabbari wrote:
| "If <50% people vote, then the vote is arguably
| illegitimate"
|
| That's not how a democracy works. Unless you're forcibly
| prevented from voting - or are denied the right to - that's
| not the case. It is not an illegitimate vote if you decide
| not to vote.
|
| In the EU Parliament elections it's just people deciding
| not to vote. As you yourself said: "is a kind of a vote
| too".
|
| Let me make a practical example: we are having a pizza
| party and we have a vote for what pizza to order, you say:
| "I don't care - you guys decide!". When the pizzas show up
| you may say: "Dang, you got the anchovies pizza - I don't
| like anchovies!", but not "Why did you guys get anchovies?
| I don't like anchovies, you shouldn't have ordered that
| pizza!". They seem closely related, but they are not.
| effie wrote:
| No that is a wrong analogy. The correct analogy to not
| participating in the vote would be: I would say "there
| shouldn't be any pizza party vote, because the options
| all suck, and I do not want any pizza, everybody go
| home".
|
| If more than 50% of people in the room say that, the
| pizza party vote is illegitimate.
| fabbari wrote:
| Nope - that's not correct: saying "there shouldn't be any
| pizza party" is a vote! If more than 50% of the people
| invited at the party say: "We should actually get salad!"
| - then, guess what? You would get salad.
|
| Being silent - not voting - is NOT the same as voting
| against something. Not even close.
|
| If the real reason for why over 50% of the people don't
| vote was because they don't like any of the parties then
| they could join up and create an alternative. But this is
| not what happens.
|
| In the real world when you don't vote you're doing two
| things:
|
| 1 - you're saying you don't care because you find all the
| options not to your liking;
|
| 2 - you're also saying you can't be bothered with
| creating one.
|
| As long as none is preventing you with addressing the
| second part: you are making a deliberate choice to not
| engage in the democratic process. You understand the
| consequences of that (in)action and you accept them. In
| no way that invalidates the choices made by the people
| who engage in it.
|
| Saying that you _CHOOSING_ not participate in the process
| makes it invalid is an offence to the people who fought
| to give you that choice and to the people that - to this
| date - are not given that option.
|
| I'll say this one last time: this defeatist attitude
| towards the democratic process is exactly what the
| political establishment and the lobbies who enrich them
| are counting on, and this is why I considered it one of
| the main issues with democracy today.
|
| The Official Monster Raving Loony Party [0] is doing more
| for the cause of democracy than people who decide that
| nothing is going to change, we are going to get anchovy
| pizza, so why bother with voting.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving
| _Loony_...
|
| Edit: Fixed typo - twice
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Individual countries are equally corrupted by big businesses
| and authoritarian leaning, but you can generally count on
| inefficient flip flopping right-left parties to not do too much
| damage in any direction.
|
| The EU seems to be way more efficient in getting us straight to
| 1984 or Soviet Russia V2.
| fabbari wrote:
| I am replying to all the posts pushing this defeatist agenda.
| Not only it's wrong, but it's also dangerous.
|
| It is representatives of the countries in the Council of the
| EU voting these legislations through: hold them accountable
| as you would hold them accountable locally.
|
| Don't fall for the narration of the EU as a third party where
| your local representatives have no say. If four countries
| veto the bill, the bill is dead. 4 out if 27 - all done by
| influencing your government representative in the Council.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Every layer you add between who's making laws and who's
| voting diminishes the power of the voter. What ends up
| happening is that laws are not what votes want but what
| people who are skilled at the politic game want - or more
| likely, what the people who sponsor them want.
|
| I don't think a central government for a single country is
| a good solution and I think an entity who can force
| countries to legiferate is even worse. Countries got pulled
| in into Europe because of the trading opportunities, not
| because they wanted a quasi-Federal Government.
|
| We're witnessing a slow decline into dystopia and making
| the 0.1% richer and richer every day. VATMOSS and European
| regulations killed small business favouring Amazon. Covid
| lockdowns killed small business favouring Amazon.
|
| I'm not sure whether the representatives are complete
| idiots who believe to the propaganda or who assume their
| voters are complete idiots (eg: I can't vote against
| protecting children, no matter what or people will think
| I'm a monster; I can't vote against massively complicating
| VAT laws or people will think I'm favouring Amazon) or
| malicious entities who just want more power in the hands of
| the government, but the net results has been always
| negative (not only in Europe).
|
| I don't care how representation works in Europe or anywhere
| else, the facts speak for themselves: most governments end
| up behaving in ways that benefit big businesses.
| emteycz wrote:
| How am I supposed to keep the party that I did not vote for
| (25% did) accountable? Nobody is gonna disrupt the
| government because of "such small issues".
| fabbari wrote:
| So - first of all you're admitting that the issue is not
| the Council of the EU, it's that your own country's
| representative can't be held accountable for his vote in
| the Council by you.
|
| Political activism is about making these "small issues"
| big and visible. It's not easy, it's not cheap and it
| doesn't always work. Yet it's something that can and
| should be done at the local level. And I really mean:
| local.
|
| Your country's representative is of a political party
| that - I am guessing here - also runs in local elections.
| Your town, your province, your region - and that's how
| you start. You possibly can't talk to your ministers, but
| you can talk to your local politicians. Make sure they
| understand that their local power will see the
| consequences of national and EU politics, let them bubble
| up the issue.
|
| Will it work for sure? Probably not, maybe yes. Is it
| better than taking ourselves out of the equation?
| Absolutely yes! Making sure that the local politicians
| understand that their national counterparts will affect
| their local success is a way of making them accountable.
| robarker wrote:
| Many users are not aware of this privacy issue unless they are
| brought up as the topic. The consumers are happy to use the
| platform as long as they receive the expected return.
| Proven wrote:
| Easy solution to this and many other problems: leave the EU.
|
| The UK did it and they're still alive.
| avnigo wrote:
| This report [0] is all I could find. I would have expected this
| to be more widely reported, and I'm surprised to see it isn't.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2021-0319...
| pimterry wrote:
| That link shows the existing legislation, approved in July.
| Today it doesn't mandate anybody to scan anything but
| effectively _allows_ service providers to scan for CSAM, if
| they wish, by defining "combating online child sexual abuse" as
| a legitimate reason to process personal data within the
| limitations of the EU's various privacy & data protection
| directives (GDPR being the obvious one, but there's others
| too).
|
| It's worth noting that this was legal everywhere else in the
| world already (Google are free to scan a US user's Gmail for
| CSAM with no problem, if they want to).
|
| The motivating concern was that service providers who do
| already scan for this kind of abuse material (everywhere in the
| world) were at risk of having to disable such scanning entirely
| for EU citizens due to privacy laws. This is 'temporary', in
| that it's a quick fix to avoid service providers immediately
| disabling all those systems, until more concrete rules on
| how/when/if service providers should scan content for CSAM are
| put in place.
|
| That part is not a big problem (imo). The risk is that future
| legislation goes much further.
|
| The article here seems to be largely lobbying and pushing
| general awareness of the issue, rather than reporting on any
| real news (not that that's necessarily bad). So far, there's no
| concrete proposal AFAICT, let alone a planned vote on such
| legislation. The EU Commission (who propose legislation, which
| is then voted on by the parliament etc) have previously said
| they're looking into mandatory scanning, but given the pushback
| it's unclear whether that's still the plan.
|
| In the end, it's probably not widely reported because the
| mandatory part doesn't appear to have a concrete proposal in
| motion yet. Articles like this are appearing anyway because it
| _might_ be proposed legislation soon (there's mentions of
| Autumn 2021) and it's important to mobilize to inform the
| public and make their opinions visible as early as possible,
| rather than waiting until the last minute.
| zerkten wrote:
| >> The motivating concern was that service providers who do
| already scan for this kind of abuse material (everywhere in
| the world) were at risk of having to disable such scanning
| entirely for EU citizens due to privacy laws.
|
| I'm curious if this was a situation where they might have
| decided that scanning was more important given the
| implications of processing CSAM? It seems like this is a way
| for authorities to influence any data processor.
|
| The Apple news last week seemed to come out of the blue and
| it felt a bit like a trade-off to get out from under the
| authorities to some degree. This is just conjecture though.
| [deleted]
| ignasurba wrote:
| I wonder how this would apply for "privacy first" email and chat
| services? And self-hosted ones too?
| ho_schi wrote:
| I want to cry if is see such dangerous things. Most European
| parties send unknown politicians to Strasbourg and let them vote
| on important topics with low media coverage. Later the local
| politicians - which act mostly in Bruessels - claim that they
| have no way but follow Strasbourgs/Bruessels decisions and write
| even worse state laws upon it.
|
| I think we need a new Europe state with a actual parliament in
| charge, which means the people there are accountable and in
| power. Without the Commission, Council and Presidency of
| Council[1]. Instead one actual parliament and one actual
| government. The Europeans state are integrated part of it, like
| elsewhere. Next the stuff can be fixed: We just need one army.
| And one social-security system with one economic policy. And one
| state department (foreign politics).
|
| Most politicians still think of Europe as a economy council but
| we people expect a sovereign country/state. The former "economy
| council" could solve economy related issues within Europe in the
| 1950s. But I think we have much bigger things to do.
|
| [1] I don't know how somebody can seriously use something like a
| rolling presidency. You can do that with a mediator position or
| referee.
| x2r wrote:
| Ever more centralisation of power is the EU's prime directive.
| If you believe power should rest with the people, you should be
| against the EU.
| anfelor wrote:
| The scary thing about this is that many people have images that
| look like child porn at home: Family photos of naked
| grandchildren playing at the sea or in the mud, as well as
| sexting between consenting teenagers. There is no way automatic
| classification can distinguish these from real child porn,
| because they look almost identical and thus many private pictures
| will be shared with the government. This not only infringes the
| privacy of those people in the most drastic way possible, but
| might also lead to lawsuits that can tear families apart (think
| your father being accused of having CP only for it to turn out
| months later it was an old picture of yourself). The article
| mentions that 40% of CP investigations in Germany are started
| against minors (implied: through sexting), which shows that this
| concern is not purely theoretical at all.
|
| This was not an issue with the old approach of comparing
| checksums against public CP images, but it will increasingly be
| if we use more AI algorithms for this.
|
| EDIT: Probably Apples neural hashes that are currently in the
| news won't be vulnerable to this since they trained specifically
| to only detect changes in color/cropping/rotation. But we can't
| know for sure since the white paper is not that detailed and
| "naked kid on beach" photos all look really similar usually.
| aj3 wrote:
| AFAIK, ML image classification is used for checking user-
| generated content on social networks, forums, etc. Cloud
| storage, email and IM providers will continue using hashes
| (either exact or perceptual) to lower false positives.
| rory wrote:
| Hey, at least we'll be able to "solve" the "problem" of sexts
| between youths by having a bunch of middle aged men rifle
| through them.
| sundvor wrote:
| Jesus, yep. Big "Brother", always watching. What lives can we
| destroy today?
|
| Privacy is being hit hard now, on multiple fronts - it's very
| sad, scary.
| dqpb wrote:
| Child protective services will have a field day with this. Take
| away all the children!
| edanm wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but my understanding is that in the States,
| sending naked pictures of teens is illegal, even if it's a
| picture of yourself. If you send naked selfies to someone, you
| could be charged with distribution of child pornography if you
| are a teenager.
|
| I'm also fairly sure I heard that even _possessing_ naked
| selfies is considered illegal, at least in some states, e.g.
| this article about a teenager facing 10 years in prison for
| having pictures of himself naked at 16 years old on his phone:
| https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/teenager-p...
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > A Fayetteville, North Carolina teenager has reached a plea
| deal to avoid being charged with multiple sexual exploitation
| counts after his cell phone was found to contain nude selfies
| of himself. Seventeen-year-old Cormega Copening, who took the
| photos of himself when he was 16, agreed to the deal in order
| to avoid possible jail time and being registered as a sex
| offender. As part of the plea, the teen agreed to random
| police searches without warrant for one year as well as other
| penalties, Fusion reports. The teenager was listed as both
| the victim and the perpetrator on the sexual exploitation
| charges.
|
| This is quite possibly the most kafkaesque "justice" story I
| have ever heard coming out of America and that really says
| something.
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| The law and morality are often fundamentally opposed. Saudi
| Arabia punishes homosexuality with the death penalty, and
| Apple happily removed the encrypted communications from their
| phones so they could continue selling in that country.
|
| Illegal or not, comparing two teens that sent naked selfies
| to each other is not even remotely similar to involuntary
| child abuse from an adult.
|
| >this article about a teenager facing 10 years in prison for
| having pictures of himself naked at 16 years old on his phone
|
| That anyone would even consider spending taxpayer money to
| lock up a 16 year old for his own picture shows a colossal
| failure of government on every level Legislative, judicial,
| and executive. The DA stacked 5 charges and saddled them with
| up to a decade so the kids would be afraid to even go to
| court. In any sane judicial system that case would be laughed
| out of the courtroom and it's telling that they were
| presumably advised by a lawyer to take the plea bargain.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The article mentions that 40% of CP investigations in Germany
| are started against minors (implied: through sexting), which
| shows that this concern is not purely theoretical at all.
|
| I've read news about this. Teenager sends nude photos to her
| boyfriend, calls the cops after the break up and they proceed
| to nearly ruin his life by threatening lifetime sex offender
| registration. The implication that the girl produced and
| distributed child pornography of herself is never even
| mentioned.
|
| It's completely insane.
| Lammy wrote:
| Why does this need to be gendered?
| Teever wrote:
| Ask the real questions Lammy.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's the story I remember reading on the news article.
| Anything else would be fabrication.
| [deleted]
| honkdaddy wrote:
| That's a terrifying story. Do you have a link or any other
| details?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I'm searching for it but I can't seem to find the source
| anymore.
| longtom wrote:
| > 40% of CP investigations in Germany are started against
| minors
|
| This in particular seems like such a silly outcome of over-
| regulation and bureaucracy. Amazing. Research suggests most
| child sexual abuse does not have much of a long-term effect at
| all:
|
| https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/A-replicatio...
|
| This (of course!) does not mean it is good or should be done,
| but it suggests this is not an urgent issue, certainly not one
| that can justify abolishing privacy, especially when these
| measures only catch the small fish, not the large trafficking
| rings who will probably switch to different means of
| communication once theirs gets compromised.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| > as well as sexting between consenting teenagers.
|
| Good god. I can't imagine the influx of in my view innocent
| teens suddenly labeled sex offenders because they did what all
| teens do, only virtually.
|
| This is going to be a weird time.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It might also turn into a good teachable moment for teens
| about privacy, sharing, and technology. I don't take a
| picture on a smartphone of anything that I wouldn't want to
| make public, and I surely wouldn't share or post it anywhere.
| If it leaves your device, it's effectively public, regardless
| of whether whoever you sent it to tells you they'll keep it
| "private".
| josephcsible wrote:
| > If it leaves your device
|
| Even this is naive with Apple's new plan. How long do you
| really think they'll wait before a software update makes it
| apply to even things that don't leave your device?
| angry_octet wrote:
| This would be a much bigger step though, and any brand
| doing it, even Apple, would face very negative market
| effect.
|
| It couldn't be legislated in the US because it would be
| unconstitutional to do so, almost impossible in the EU,
| possible in the UK/AU, even Canada (with the help of some
| creative rights busting from the Supreme Court, as they
| recently demonstrated).
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I mean technically that already happens in the UK - you can
| have sex legally at 16, but you can't take any pictures of
| you doing so until you are 18. So 2 consenting 17 year old
| teenagers cannot send indecent images of themselves to each
| other.
|
| I seem to remember a case from a few years back, about a girl
| who got herself on the register for sending her boyfriend a
| picture of her naked or something.
|
| Although it seems that the Protection of Children Act [1] I
| _think_ (I 'm not sure, it's hard to actually read with all
| the brackets ...) let's you do it if you are married (which
| you can also do at 16)
|
| Any sane person would know that teenagers do what teenagers
| do ... having someone potentially going through those photos
| is such a strange and wrong approach
|
| [1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1978/37
| mkl95 wrote:
| Not only that, but child porn seems to mean a different thing
| in every place. The Netherlands and other European countries
| define the age of consent at 16, meaning some things that are
| perfectly legal there will be a ticket to prison in many
| countries. Now you don't just have an engineering problem, you
| will also have to spend a bunch of money to have some lawyers
| review your spec.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| The age of consent goes low as 14 in Europe but that doesn't
| change the definition of CP. Probably they won't prosecute
| when both parties are underage and such so heavily but
| consent age doesn't change the fact that nudity is 18+.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Nudity is 18+ in extremist countries like the Emirates or
| the USA.
|
| Sorry but in France, 30 years ago before american culture
| started to dictate where money come from, you would see
| genitals from all genders and ages in movies.
|
| Nobody found it offensive, because we didn't have a
| catholic puritan morality to impose its sick twisted vision
| of the human body on us.
|
| Meanwhile we sold car by showing cars, not hot girls. But
| this apparently is ok because money.
|
| It's also perfectly alright to show kids image of people
| killing each others in mass. Because this is sane, unlike
| nipples.
|
| And now this Apple crap.
|
| Edit: ok 50 years ago. I'm getting old it seems.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| > catholic puritan morality
|
| Might want to check your terms here.
| angry_octet wrote:
| Indeed. But it strikes me that the places with the most
| rigorous enforcement of theological dominance also have
| the worst child abuse problems. Or, as an AI would
| decide, men in robes can't be trusted.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| > the places with the most rigorous enforcement of
| theological dominance also have the worst child abuse
| problems.
|
| Citation needed. The data doesn't back up that claim,
| contrary to the media's narrative.
|
| _A report which Christian Ministry Resources (CMR)
| released in 2002 stated that contrary to popular opinion,
| there are more allegations of child sexual abuse in
| Protestant congregations than there are in Catholic ones,
| and that sexual violence is most often committed by
| volunteers rather than by priests._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abus
| e_c...
|
| _Catholic clergy aren 't more likely to abuse children
| than other clergy or men in general. The 4 percent figure
| appears lower than school teachers during the same time
| frame, and certainly less than offenders in the general
| population of men._
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-
| thing/2...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Well if you tell people they are sinners for being humans
| (having body parts), you get frustrated humans.
|
| I have been in very rigid religous countries. The men in
| the internet shops were all whatching hardcore porn, and
| my female friends were harassed in the street.
|
| So it's not men in robes, you can be deeply religious and
| have a and loving view of the world.
|
| But puritanism, and sexually frustrated people ashamed of
| even existing, are bound to generate unhappiness.
| lucb1e wrote:
| > nudity is 18+.
|
| You mean like in movies, those "can't see boobies before
| you're 18" labels? Because capturing a nude 13-year-olds is
| perfectly legal, just not in a pornographic manner. E.g. my
| Dutch biology book had nude ~6 and ~11 year old girls
| depicted (as well as an adult) for educating different
| stages of development.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Pretty sure porn involving 16-17 year olds in the Netherlands
| is also very illegal though, but correct me if I'm wrong.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I believe porn involving 16 year olds is still legal in the
| Netherlands. Which doesn't mean it is being commercially
| produced anymore, for obvious reasons. Maybe a Dutch reader
| can provide more insight into this.
| lucb1e wrote:
| Okay enough opinions, let's look this up. Wikipedia cites
| the law saying it's 18 https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind
| erpornografie#Wetgeving_in...
|
| It even includes people that "appear to be under 18" even
| if they turn out not to be. ("[...] afbeelding - van een
| seksuele gedraging, waarbij iemand die kennelijk de
| leeftijd van achttien jaar nog niet heeft bereikt, is
| betrokken of schijnbaar is betrokken, [...]")
|
| What I also found interesting is:
|
| > Het voorontwerp Wet seksuele misdrijven stelt niet
| langer strafbaar degene die een visuele weergave van een
| seksuele gedraging of een gegevensdrager bevattende een
| visuele weergave van een seksuele gedraging, waarbij
| hijzelf of een andere persoon die de leeftijd van
| achttien jaren nog niet heeft bereikt is betrokken, in
| het kader van een gelijkwaardige situatie tussen
| leeftijdsgenoten uitsluitend voor privegebruik
| vervaardigt, in bezit heeft of met die ander deelt.
|
| Short translation: sending or owning pictures of sexual
| acts involving an <18yo is not illegal if it concerns
| private use between persons of similar age in an
| 'equality situation' (I interpret this as
| meaning/implying 'consensual').
| mkl95 wrote:
| Same thing as in my country then. It seems to be the norm
| in most if not all of the EU these days.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| What obvious reasons? If it was legal to make porn with
| 16 year olds, you can bet that it would be made and sold.
| (It's illegal of course.)
| cvwright wrote:
| In Apple's defense here, there seems to be a reason they're
| using the longer acronym CSAM. It means not just pictures of
| people without clothes on, but actual images/video of children
| being abused. Stuff that would likely provoke you or me or
| other normal people into acts of extreme violence against the
| perpetrators if we ever got the chance.
|
| The real danger with Apple's system is that there's zero
| accountability in the list of "bad" hashes. So there's no way
| to know whether it's really all CSAM, or if it also includes
| rare Pepes, Bernie memes, or pictures of politicians doing
| embarrassing things.
| [deleted]
| pseudalopex wrote:
| > It means not just pictures of people without clothes on,
| but actual images/video of children being abused.
|
| Who said that?
|
| They're the same legally. People have said NCMEC's database
| includes entirely legal images. And groups like NCMEC have
| tried to rename child pornography for years.
| azinman2 wrote:
| But the point is there's an existing database. Either you
| have a photo in that database, or you don't. So your kids
| naked photos don't get triggered. And even if that photo is
| legal, not only is there human verification and minimum
| quantities required, it would be very strange for you to
| have in your iCloud photos that were part of CP collection
| sets regardless of content.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Their point was CSAM means especially bad CP. Your points
| were different.
|
| It's a perceptual hash. Matches don't have to be exact.
| And people have engineered collisions for other
| perceptual hash algorithms. What a computer sees and what
| a person sees can be very different.
|
| People have said the human verification just involves the
| visual derivative of the suspect image. Apple didn't
| explain what that is really. And human verification
| doesn't reassure people who object to anyone viewing
| their private photos without their consent for any
| reason.
|
| People have said any images collected during an
| investigation go in the database. Do you think people who
| collect explicit photos of 17 year olds don't collect
| explicit photos of 18 year olds?
| azinman2 wrote:
| Sorry. Either the posts got updated or I got the thread
| confused as others were trying to say that (re: hash
| versus classifier).
|
| Re hashing, Apple claims 1:1 trillion likelihood of a
| collision. These kinds of systems are not rolled out
| lightly, and even if that number is wrong, it's feels
| unlikely to me that it's too far off. If it is and it has
| too many false positives, this will get noticed and the
| system pulled until it's fixed and at the required false
| positive rate.
|
| Ultimately beyond Apple if you're getting arrested and
| confront a judge, you'd expect humans at that point to
| look at the evidence. In fact, I'd expect the DA or
| whomever to similarly look at the photos at that point.
| You can't be sentenced without evidence in the US legally
| (how all of this works in another country is another
| matter).
|
| If there is legit porn that's 18+ mixed in this database,
| and someone ends up being charged because of it, fights,
| and wins, I'd expect a number of counter lawsuits to
| follow. To me it seems incredibly unlikely that non-CP is
| not only going to be a significant part of that database
| (including 17 year olds versus the more likely 7 year
| olds), but you'll be saving it to your iCloud photo roll.
| There's so much legal porn out there, in such vast
| quantities, this hypothetical situation you describe I'm
| not sure will ever actually occur.
| camgunz wrote:
| "Child porn" is a smokescreen. It's what every privacy advocate
| saw coming: find the worst, most repugnant thing possible and
| use it to backdoor encryption.
|
| It's not a dream, and it's really happening, right now.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| CSAM is still problematic, though. The consensus is that
| creates a market that incentivizes the abuse of children,
| because you cannot produce CSAM without CSA. It seems to be
| the one of the few classes of data that is an exception to
| the standard of privacy that is applied to almost all other
| data, to the point that Apple took action against it. Dozens
| of other countries besides the US also agree, and outlaw that
| class of data as well. Finding actual CSAM (and not just any
| kind of pornography involving minors, hence the shift in
| terminology) is supposedly directly tied to finding child
| abusers, thus preventing future child abuse from taking
| place.
|
| There appear to be few to no studies that give statistical
| evidence for the market hypothesis or that the spread of CSAM
| causes CSA. But even if they existed, I still think the
| argument would ultimately become "letting one more child
| abuser get away because we preserved our privacy instead."
| How can such an argument be challenged, given that the
| prevention of CSA is a legitimate problem on a global scale?
| Even so much as mentioning an argument that takes into
| consideration the nature of CSA appears to be taboo - and for
| good reason, as it carries a risk of being labeled many kinds
| of terrible things oneself. That seems to be why a lot of
| threads here are reducing the issue to "think of the
| children" or lambasting the potential slippery slope of
| authoritarian surveillance, instead of discussing why CSAM is
| outlawed to begin with, and thus the reasons why Apple came
| to this decision in the first place.
|
| Another thing that nobody seems to talk about is that Apple
| doesn't want to be held liable for CSAM stored on their
| servers, either. Within that context, this change is Apple's
| way of addressing that issue, which also happens to erode
| individual privacy. Apple's values appear to dictate that the
| tradeoff is worth it in the end. About the only people that
| have pushed back on this change come from technology or
| privacy-conscious circles. Nobody else seems to care. That is
| the status quo, and I'm not sure how it's going to change
| with general public sentiment the way it is surrounding CSA.
| UnaDavidson wrote:
| UnaDavidsonVKw@yahoo.com
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah. Children are the perfect political weapon. You can use
| children to justify anything and destroy the reputation of
| anyone who opposes you. It's reasonable to assume anyone
| using children as argument is acting in bad faith.
|
| I seriously doubt governments actually care about children.
| They probably care a great deal more about maintaining their
| own power and control over their subjects. We see countries
| like Russia and China using the tools of surveillance and law
| enforcement to silence political opposition and dissent.
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| And, they referred to us as the "screeching minority".
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes, given all the burgeoning authoritarian states where
| phones are sold it's clearly population control.
|
| Regardless of country, scanning for material critical of PRC,
| Lukashenko or Erdogan is the exact same tech you might want
| to scan for copyright violations, union organizing, political
| party opposition, cryptocurrency, or any other dissent your
| local burgeoning authoritarian wants to pay for.
|
| Both phone OS vendors have over and over proven eager to
| satisfy every authoritarian, no matter the human impact.
| We're screwed.
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| When I was in school, it was mentioned often during the
| school's programs on why sexting was bad that sexting was
| technically child pornography distribution. I don't understand
| what consent has to do with it. Children's consent is not
| legally valid for anything sexual.
| AtticHacker wrote:
| If it becomes mandatory for email providers to screen emails,
| will services such as Protonmail become illegal in the EU? Since
| they don't have access to their users' email content because of
| encryption.
| thefr0g wrote:
| > If it becomes mandatory for email providers to screen emails,
| will services such as Protonmail become illegal in the EU?
|
| Protonmail should already be illegal in the EU because they
| operate under swiss mass-surveilance laws and cooperate with
| US-American law enforcement. Both of which violates the GDPR if
| they do business in an EU state.
|
| > Since they don't have access to their users' email content
| because of encryption.
|
| They still have access to all the unencrypted mail their users
| send and receive and to all the metadata of the enrypted
| communications.
| mikeyjk wrote:
| > Protonmail should already be illegal in the EU because they
| operate under swiss mass-surveilance laws and cooperate with
| US-American law enforcement.
|
| :O Seriously? Wow, off to research this I go... That's really
| disappointing as a paying user. I can't believe I wasn't
| across this.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| You can choose which narration you would believe. It is
| neverending story.
| upofadown wrote:
| They could conceivably add screening to the javascript client
| downloaded to the user that does the end to end encryption.
| Don't know how practical that might be.
|
| I think the more interesting question involves something like
| Mailvelope. It is a stand alone OpenPGP based encryption system
| based on the ProtonMail code that provides encryption for
| webmail. It can be hosted somewhere physically and politically
| far away from the EU and is an open source project. How will
| the EU approach the ancient PGP dilemma this time around?
| juniperplant wrote:
| I'm wondering the same. I suppose they will have to implement
| some way to scan the emails, or else they will be forced out of
| business.
|
| That said, I wouldn't bet on it.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Does the EU have some kind of firewall with ISPs to block
| domains and IP addresses?
| q3k wrote:
| No. There are some per-country implementations, but nothing
| EU-wide.
| effie wrote:
| That is the probable reason why this is being pushed through.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| > Since they don't have access to their users' email content
| because of encryption.
|
| Regular emails (i.e. without home-brewn encryption that
| Protonmail provided - and I'm yet to receive such email from
| any of my contacts who use Protonmail), or any inbound email
| received from third-party servers are _of course_ not encrypted
| and Protonmail has pretty easy access to their contents.
| tedcrilly wrote:
| Protonmail uses PGP and not "home-brewn encryption" and
| encryption is on by default between Protonmail users.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| False.
|
| Even when it does use PGP, it is meaningless, explanation:
|
| I just created a spare protonmail account. It asked me to
| pick a username and password, and my account is created.
|
| Next, I send there a message from my other account. Yes, on
| the receiving end it does write "End-to-end encrypted and
| signed message", but encrypted and signed by what exactly?
| I have never created a PGP keys and loaded the public key
| to Protonmail on either account (and never used my private
| key to decrypt anything. This can mean only one thing: even
| if there is some kind of encryption happening, Protonmail
| themselves generate keys, and uses it for encryption-
| decryption, never asking you for anything but your
| password. And if they can uses these keys to decrypt the
| messages for you, they can decrypt it for anybody.
|
| Protonmail also gives a user an option to export his
| private keys. Yeah, right. Your _private_ keys.
| karmanyaahm wrote:
| afaik isn't it encrypted using your password or something
| when before it goes out of the browser
| smarx wrote:
| That experiment shows that whatever is stored on
| ProtonMail's servers _plus your password_ is sufficient
| to decrypt your emails. This could be explained by the
| private key being derived from or encrypted with your
| password. ProtonMail 's documentation says it's the
| latter (https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-
| base/how-is-the-pri...):
|
| > Your ProtonMail private key is generated in your
| browser. Before sending the private key to the server for
| storage, we encrypt it with your password (or mailbox
| password if you use two-password mode). This ensures that
| you and only you can use your private key.
|
| So the only remaining question is whether ProtonMail has
| access to your password. If they do, they can decrypt
| your private key and then decrypt your emails. Often,
| passwords are sent in plaintext to a server for
| authentication. But ProtonMail uses the Secure Remote
| Password (SRP) protocol so they never see your password:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Remote_Password_prot
| oco.... (source: https://protonmail.com/blog/encrypted_em
| ail_authentication/)
|
| Of course, there are other threats to worry about, such
| as ProtonMail changing their client-side JavaScript to
| exfiltrate your password. But the system as they've
| documented it does not appear to have any way to decrypt
| your email server-side short of guessing your password.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| The most likely attacker against proton mail are various
| law enforcement or intelligence agencies.
|
| Such agency can force PM to modify login process to
| derive password from submitted form, or to just switch
| private keys for non-encrypred ones, because the user
| won't even notice it.
|
| Truly secure entity just _wouldn 't have private keys on
| a server at all_. Users would have to go through an an
| uncomfortable process of generating and uploading keys to
| clients, but they would be _truly_ safe.
|
| To sum it up, you can't really have security and
| convenience at once. besides skipping a proper key
| management process, PM also mail skips such important
| steps as verification of email partner identify and key
| verification, so you have to trust PM that you are really
| talking to a person you think you are talking.
| smarx wrote:
| > Truly secure entity just _wouldn 't have private keys
| on a server at all._
|
| They don't. They have your _encrypted_ private key, but
| there 's no need to keep that secret. (The decryption key
| is derived from your password, so the password needs to
| be strong and secret.)
|
| > Such agency can force PM to modify login process to
| derive password from submitted form, or to just switch
| private keys for non-encrypred ones, because the user
| won't even notice it.
|
| Yes, definitely. It's hard to trust self-updating
| software (like JavaScript in the browser), particularly
| if you're concerned about targeted attacks. But creating
| your own private keys and then entering them _in the
| browser_ wouldn 't help you at all against that sort of
| attack. You would instead need a different type of client
| that could be trusted somehow not to leak your private
| key.
|
| It's not uncommon for services like this to offer a
| downloadable version of the web client so you can pin a
| version and audit the code as needed. I think maybe
| https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClient is that for
| ProtonMail? If so, you should be able to verify that code
| and then use that. The fact that an encrypted copy of
| your private key will live on ProtonMail's servers
| shouldn't bother you.
| topranks wrote:
| You make a poor argument overall. Just because
| convenience will tend to win out doesn't mean people
| shouldn't choose more secure over less secure.
|
| Your argument boils down to "govt can force them to
| change how they do that", as opposed to a flaw in their
| approach.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Someone once explained to me that any webmail service is
| inherently able to read your mail: otherwise it could not
| display your mail to you. True end-to-end encryption
| means keeping your private keys client-side and the
| client on a computer over which you have full physical
| control.
| hesk wrote:
| AFIAK, Protonmail private keys are kept client-side. They
| are decrypted by the password inside the browser UI.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| No. I just logged in to that very same account using
| different browser on a different computer. The email was
| displayed just fine.
|
| Protonmail keeps generated public and private keys on
| their servers.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| You are absolutely correct, with some caveats. Browser
| client _can_ generate keys on clientside and allow to
| offload them as a file to be used on other devices. Our
| own web XMPP client does that. But Protonmail does not
| work like this.
|
| Verification is very simple: if you log in on a new
| device and see all your content while using only login
| and password to authenticate yourself, then the content
| stored on a server is NOT encrypted and is readable by
| server owner.
| jayjader wrote:
| > if you log in on a new device and see all your content
| while using only login and password to authenticate
| yourself
|
| What about if the encryption key is derived from your
| password? This is common enough for "encrypt file with a
| password" services, I've personally implemented it in-
| browser as part of a small project.
|
| Now, having your account password be the same as the
| email decryption password is also probably a bad idea,
| but we're far from the server owner being able to read
| your emails.
| q-rews wrote:
| Looking forward to the 2050 Asshole Control Act that will mandate
| daily colonoscopies in case someone is hiding a pendrive with CP
| on it. Just in case. You wouldn't be opposed, would you? What are
| you a nonce? Arrest the downvoter.
| effie wrote:
| Citizen, show me child protector greenpass on your phone. You
| don't have it? We will have to search your phone _and_ your
| cavities.
| aj3 wrote:
| Try stuffing pendrive there and going through airport securiyt.
| We're already checking for this (effectively).
| collaborative wrote:
| As the developer of an E2EE chat system, how could this affect
| me? Would I be forced to do something? I fall under a non-EU
| jurisdiction, and my servers are also outside of the EU. Would
| this apply to me or my users in the least? Thanks
| ailef wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but I suppose it will apply in the same way
| GDPR applies to anyone who wants to access the EU market
| (regardless of where you/your servers are). That is, if you're
| fine with your system not being accessible from the EU because
| of non-compliance you should be fine?
|
| Don't take my word for it though, I'm just assuming. Maybe
| somebody with more knowledge chan chime in.
| fulafel wrote:
| Systems don't become inaccessible from the EU because of
| GDPR, there's no great firewall of europe that would make
| that happen. But depending on circumstances, you could still
| get fined for violations even if you aren't situated in EU.
| rednum wrote:
| > there's no great firewall of europe
|
| Not yet, but it seems someone is thinking about one, see: h
| ttps://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2020/6487
| ...
| collaborative wrote:
| According to https://www.enforcementtracker.com only EU
| companies get fined for GDPR violations. I assume a private
| citizen can sue a foreign company for violating their GDPR
| rights (??), but am I right in thinking that the EU can only
| prosecute its own entities? Therefore, unless an EU
| individual sues me for "violating" his right to be spied on,
| I should be fine? Or would the blame fall on the EU
| individual for having used a comms channel that doesn't allow
| the EU to spy on him? I probably am totally wrong, just
| trying to understand how this works
| petermcneeley wrote:
| "It's more than Europe they plan to unify" - jc Denton
| mark_and_sweep wrote:
| I'm surprised to read about this now. I feel like this issue has
| received no media coverage.
|
| Quick search for "Chatkontrolle" on the websites of some of the
| biggest German newspapers confirms this suspicion:
|
| - spon.de: 2 articles
|
| - sueddeutsche.de: 1 article
|
| - welt.de: 0 articles
|
| - faz.net: 1 article
| 7373737373 wrote:
| You'd think they would be even capable of journalism that
| notified people _before_ shit like this turns into legislation
|
| Instead I see storywriting
| effie wrote:
| You can't rely on big media to report on important things, and
| even when they report on it, often they push some one-sided
| narrative.
|
| One other example recently are the anti-covidism protests -
| they never talk to the protestors, instead they just show the
| reporter in safe space with cops and let him narrate how these
| protesters are just a bunch of extremists and conspiracy
| wackos.
|
| You need to listen also to smaller, less captured sources f
| news, and preferably several of them.
| stinos wrote:
| Really curious: how and by which layer (ISP? email/chat
| providers?) does this get implemented practically, on the
| software level?
| bartread wrote:
| I voted Remain in the EU referendum here in the UK but, in 2021,
| a few things have happened that have caused me to question
| whether that was the right choice and whether, with Brexit, we
| have the right outcome (albeit for very much the wrong reasons
| seen through 2016 eyes):
|
| 1. Ursula von der Leyen and the EU Commission bullying companies
| and non-EU countries about vaccine production and provision. A
| wider point here is that the undemocratic nature of the
| Commission is something that I have always viewed as a problem.
|
| 2. The generally shambolic and inconsistent handling of vaccine
| procurement and rollout within the EU (which does now at least
| appear to be running much more smoothly; the UK government did
| well here but, overall, has handled the pandemic with majestic
| ineptitude).
|
| 3. This[0]. Chatcontrol 2.0 isn't the first ill thought out piece
| of legislation to get approval in the EU, and it won't be the
| last, but it is certainly one of the more sinister, and a
| significant violation of privacy amongst the majority of law-
| abiding citizens.
|
| Overall I would still probably prefer to be in the EU than not,
| but I'm simply not as certain about that as I used to be.
|
| _[0] This whole assessment is of course contingent on the UK not
| simply falling into line with this legislation, a la GDPR,
| anyway. I 'm on board with the spirit of GDPR and related
| legislation but the way every organisation seems to comply has
| certainly made the web suck more._
| andreime wrote:
| m8, to me it seemed like all the news I read in the last years,
| about England and the road to surveillance state, put your
| country ahead. I'm sure Boris will soon announce they'll do the
| same.
| bartread wrote:
| Maybe. I think it's actually pretty hard to predict. He's so
| populist... although that could of course punt him in either
| direction.
| anfelor wrote:
| Also, one wonders if EU states would have been better at
| closing their borders at the start of the pandemic (like
| Australia or New Zealand did) if it wasn't for the EU. Maybe
| not, because there are always big trade networks on a landmass
| on this size, but I do think that the 'free movement' ideology
| played a part as well. (Free movement is wonderful in general,
| but why in a pandemic??)
| bartread wrote:
| > Also, one wonders if EU states would have been better at
| closing their borders at the start of the pandemic (like
| Australia or New Zealand did) if it wasn't for the EU.
|
| It's a fair question. OTOH, here in the UK, we were extremely
| slow to close our borders (in fact we've _never_ closed our
| borders fully in the way that say Australia or NZ did, nor
| anything close), with the justification being that the UK is
| an international hub.
|
| The real reason, of course, is that our government is too
| spineless and inept to take such decisive action, and has the
| collective intellect of a colony of woodlice.
|
| I don't know enough about the EU decision making process
| around closing borders to know if their bureaucracy was a
| problem. I know Italy introduced restrictions fairly early on
| (back in February, or maybe early March 2020), but I do
| remember being surprised that people were still allowed to
| cross the border between Switzerland and Italy for work
| purposes even whilst the pandemic was raging in Italy.
| (Switzerland isn't in the EU, obviously.) I also remember
| being surprised that ski resorts such as Aprica, in Italy,
| were still open as late as the beginning of the second week
| of March in 2020.
|
| The UK is very densely populated, particularly in south east
| England, compared to many countries, so risk of accelerated
| transmission is and always has been considerably higher. We
| also have an ageing population with a history (at a
| population level) of making poor lifestyle choices who have
| accrued a significant burden of pre-existing medical
| conditions (not unlike the USA), with the distribution across
| the whole of the country not entirely mirroring population
| density. Again, this increases the severity of COVID for
| those who fall into affected demographics.
|
| With that being said, I have no doubt that more decisive
| measures earlier in the pandemic, more consistently applied
| _throughout_ the pandemic, would have led to a significant
| reduction in both the human and economic costs of the
| pandemic in our country.
|
| I would like to see Boris Johnson and his cadre of fawning,
| useless imbeciles stripped of their citizenships and banished
| to a frozen wasteland to endure an existence of hard labour
| for the rest of their natural lives. Their abject failure to
| step up and lead in the face of the greatest challenge we
| have faced since WWII - to discharge their most basic
| responsibilities to the people of this country - absolutely
| disgusts me.
|
| I accept that I am likely to be disappointed.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I wonder how much people there actually are who don't yet know
| child porn is a classic bullshit excuse governments use every
| time they want more control over the Internet. It's so classic,
| so blatant it feels cringy already. Not even for a second I would
| believe they do this to actually protect children.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Whenever a politician invokes "think of the children", ask them
| about their funding of Child Protection Services.
|
| Any political action that's said to be under the umbrella of
| "think of the children" that doesn't provide additional funding
| to existing Child Protection Services is for reasons other than
| child protection. Additionally, it's actively working against
| helping children because the funds for "this new thing", if the
| goal really was for actually protecting vulnerable children,
| would be better spent on improving the coverage that existing
| Child Protection Services provide.
|
| A close friend of mine is in a position that requires
| "mandatory reporting" training, and they say it's relatively
| pointless because Child Services only has the resources to
| investigate cases in which the child's life is in immediate
| danger. This may be somewhere along the scale of hyperbole, but
| I doubt it's too far from reality.
|
| Of course, removing children from danger is often removing them
| from their parents / legal guardians, which comes with its own
| set of risks.
|
| Either way, funding boots-on-the-ground work with leads from
| local social workers, early childhood educators, teachers has
| to be the best way to actually protect at-risk children.
| dqpb wrote:
| > Of course, removing children from danger is often removing
| them from their parents / legal guardians, which comes with
| its own set of risks.
|
| What number of false positives would you tolerate?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I genuinely do not know the answer. But also, what would
| you define as false positive?
|
| It's blurry definitions all the way down, and that's part
| of the reason politics doesn't like this problem and would
| rather argue technology and punishment after-the-fact than
| actual protection / prevention.
|
| Nuance is expensive and doesn't play well to the crowd.
| dqpb wrote:
| If I take a picture of my adorable toddler playing naked
| in a sprinkler in the backyard and CPS calls that child
| porn and takes him away from me, that's a false positive.
|
| I don't know much about abusers, but my hunch is that
| they know they are abusers and will more-or-less accept
| being caught. But what I know about non-abusive parents
| is if you take their kids away, it's war.
| y04nn wrote:
| True, it even has a name "Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse". If
| it was about protecting the children there would be more
| prevention toward the children to make them aware and report
| any inappropriate act to a teacher, parent, relative that they
| can trust.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
| kecupochren wrote:
| The news are pretty depressing these last couple of days. We're
| marching towards very dystopian future.
| toxik wrote:
| We have had unprecedented growth and development in the world,
| it's just that bad news sells more papers. Don't let it bring
| you down!
| ekianjo wrote:
| So as long as some KPIs are positive, let's ignore the loss
| of fundamental freedoms?
| toxik wrote:
| "Some KPIs are positive"? I had no idea HN was this
| backwards. More people have moved out of poverty than ever
| before. Quality of life is improving in so many places,
| just not around /you/. Amazingly cynical point of view.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > More people have moved out of poverty than ever before.
|
| Erm, you are answering with this argument to the wrong
| person. I am the first person to point out this kind of
| things.
|
| This does not mean you can ignore the erosion of civil
| liberties.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| There is not much to rejoice if all that growth will go in
| the hands of the few friends of the government, leaving a
| richer 0.01%, a broken middle class and unstable societies.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Should we celebrate setting our house on fire to stay warm
| when the furnace went out?
|
| Yes, the house fire is very very hot. Good job.
| ailef wrote:
| I guess this is sarcastic?
| rapnie wrote:
| > unprecedented growth
|
| .. at unprecedented cost
| cm2187 wrote:
| It is astonishing that most liberal democracies are looking at
| the Chinese system of control on society with envy. In a way,
| mandatory covid passes to do anything are already a form of
| social credit system. And with so many people obsessed with
| virtu signalling, an actual social credit system would likely
| get some traction.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Socialism won here, time to move to Mars.
|
| The more I think about it and the less distant China and
| western countries look like. We all drifted towards
| socialism.
|
| China is just a tiny bit more into it that we are and we
| still like to tell us we have elections to control things.
| marton78 wrote:
| This has absolutely nothing to do with socialism.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| This has everything to do with socialism. Socialism is
| about trading individual liberty, power, and ability to
| consent for centrally-managed services provided with
| government authority. This is exactly what's happening
| here.
|
| The ease and comfort with which this trade is made speaks
| exactly to the trend GP was referring to.
| shigawire wrote:
| Socialism is not about centralized authority. That is
| just how it ends up when you have oligarchs needing a
| better brand than naked kleptocracy.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| It's basically about surrendering individual
| power/consent to collective decision making, isn't it?
| jq-r wrote:
| That's actually called living in a civilization.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| Your statement is true only because in the present day
| socialist governments control most of the desirable
| space.
|
| The Vikings in the middle age moved to Iceland exactly to
| avoid kings and lords (not that far from our democracy)
| and they built a decentralised society which lasted 300
| years.
|
| They had private courts and private law enforcement.
| Strategic decisions were happening at the local level
| with local leaders.
|
| I believe a decentralised society is possible - but there
| is just no interest in doing so and dismantling the
| status quo.
|
| First, you need money to get elected in a position where
| you can do that. Your sponsors will likely want something
| in return. If you throw away all the power after getting
| it and create a decentralised society, you won't be able
| to return any favour or reap any benefit.
|
| You may just as well become the next corrupted leader and
| get rich from the politics scam.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Strong disagree. Living in a civilization means you have
| agreed to peacefully coexist with other members, and
| resolve disputes via due process. From there, whether you
| can opt out of military service or health insurance
| varies quite a bit within civilizations. This is where
| the question of "within your civilization, how free are
| you?" (vs. how obligated) starts to become relevant.
| xtracto wrote:
| The other commenter mentioned it, but I'll reinforce it:
| This is completely unrelated to Socialism. If anything,
| whatever "Socialism" exists in China is one of the few
| things to applaud to them. Similarly to "Socialism"
| practiced in Norway, Finland, Sweden and even Germany to a
| certain degree.
|
| What you are thinking of is either "Communism" or, in the
| case of what is being discussed here more like
| Authoritarism and Oligarchy. Both of those two are
| definitely present in China, and more and more present in
| Western countries who push methods of mass survelliance of
| the population to further advance their goals.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You may have things switched up.
|
| From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism
|
| > Communists agree on the ultimate withering away of the
| state but disagree on the means to this end, reflecting a
| distinction between a more libertarian approach of
| communization, revolutionary spontaneity, and workers'
| self-management, and a more vanguardist or communist
| party-driven approach through the development of a
| constitutional socialist state.
|
| I think communism is the ultimate utopia and it is
| unlikely to be ever achieved because people are generally
| unhappy to have the surplus they produced to be
| redistributed. Without coercion of a socialist state you
| won't get redistribution.
|
| At the same time, a government is not an abstract entity.
| It's just other people who make decision in your place
| and often get some extra privileges on top because of it
| - negating the communist goal of achieving a classless
| society.
|
| That said, I understand your point of view. Socialism is
| an economic philosophy based around social ownership and
| doesn't dictate anything about privacy.
|
| That said, the centralisation required to achieve
| socialism (similar to what we see in our society: you
| need a taxman to forcefully steal profits from all the
| citizens and build some roads) implies the creation of a
| strong state who has all the interests in surveilling
| citizens.
|
| Socialism and redistribution imply authoritarianism. All
| the socialist libertarian and left wing anarchists
| doctrines can't work unless you have perfect, not greedy,
| law abiding and honest citizens happy to give away
| exactly the surplus they produce. Which is to say, it
| will never work in a normal society, it may work in a
| small village with like minded people.
| mikeyjk wrote:
| Take solace that we have failed to address climate change as a
| civilisation.
| kristjank wrote:
| I think this isn't getting nearly enough traction, especially
| considering how undemocratic EU's legislative procedures can get.
| Considering the lack of direct democracy in the European Union,
| exposure and public protest is the only viable way to oppose this
| legislature. There's also an ongoing petition against the
| legislature:
| https://www.openpetition.eu/petition/online/preserve-eprivac...
| suction wrote:
| The lack of direct democracy in the EU is the only thing that
| keeps it from becoming the UK.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Most major democratic governments don't have direct
| democracy.
| dmos62 wrote:
| You sure are throwing words around. Undemocratic, lack of
| direct democracy. Are you confusing the two, or are these
| different complaints? Sounds like you're trying to say that any
| representative democracy isn't really a democracy.
| zibzab wrote:
| Hold your horses, put down the pitchforks. You realise the
| author is a _member of the European Parliament_??
|
| And at least in my corner of EU we vote on who to send to EU
| parliament. You can vote on whoever you want in the national
| elections and then vote for the pirate party for the EU seat.
|
| Edit: from your comment history I guess you vote far right,
| which is usually the part of EU pushing hardest for these
| measures??
| herbst wrote:
| It's still no and far from a direct democracy.
| toxik wrote:
| Direct democracy is not a panacea. In fact, it can be quite
| the opposite. Fair and effective governance is a very
| difficult thing to achieve, tending either to be
| subvertible, or totalitarian.
| herbst wrote:
| Not saying that is not true. Yet living in one of the few
| direct democracies it is the very best we have in terms
| of democracy. On a bigger scale liquid democracy may is
| more interesting.
|
| Edit:// the EU or even the US has shown multiple times
| that it will act against the majority of they can.
| t0bia_s wrote:
| Democracy cannot work without free acces to information.
| However, most people wont care about it. Especially
| nowadays when public opinions are shaped by social
| networks with censorship and sensations. We can implement
| all kind of ideologies on masses very fast. So direct
| democracy could be more dangerous than you can imagine.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| I think representative democracy specifically does not
| work to stave off totalitarianism. When the issue under
| consideration is about increasing the power of
| politicians over the citizenry, many politicians will
| switch from voting as representatives of citizens, to
| voting as politicians. A binding referendum that can only
| retract proposed laws, like we have/had/will have (sorry,
| I don't know exactly) in NL, seems like it could largely
| solve this issue, provided it gets sufficient traction.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Direct democracy is best when the amount of people voting
| stays small. Think local government.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| > far from a direct democracy.
|
| And?
|
| Direct democracies are far worth than representative
| democracies in practically everyway. The Covid crisis
| should have made clear to all that people are not policies
| experts.
|
| Given than no country in the UE significantly uses direct
| democracy (referendums are pretty much never used and
| always devolve into a ridiculous race to who can say the
| most outrageous thing in front of the media), I don't see
| how that can be leveraged against the institution.
| herbst wrote:
| You realize that Switzerland hasen't voted to wear masks
| and get restrictions? Having a direct democracy does not
| mean the gov can't make their own decisions at times.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Yes, I do realize Switzerland doesn't actually use direct
| democracy for things that matter and when they do they
| often end up with xenophobic laws. I don't even want to
| talk about town assemblies voting on naturalisation
| decisions.
| hhlbf wrote:
| So if they want to be xenophobic, what's the problem?
| It's their country and they can do whatever they want
| with it.
| epidemian wrote:
| I'm not sure if this comment was troll bait; i'm going to
| reply as if it weren't.
|
| > if they want to be xenophobic, what's the problem?
|
| One of the problems is that even if the majority of
| people within a country are xenophobic and they get to
| decide the lays on a majority basis, there will still be
| people form other countries living there, or people who
| in general will be disadvantaged by xenophobic laws.
|
| It's nice for laws to not be dictated only by a majority,
| but by a plurality. Instead of thinking "what benefits
| >50% of people is the right thing" we can think "what
| benefits the most people, including minorities", or "what
| _avoids hurting_ the most people " to be the right things
| :)
| MauranKilom wrote:
| "So if they want to kill all the Jews, what's the
| problem? It's their country and they can do whatever they
| want with it."
|
| Creating laws based on popularity makes populism rule.
| Hence why democracy usually has an explicit legislative
| branch abstracting over individual sentiments. That helps
| prevent policy from being devised through an overly
| greedy algorithm.
|
| That is not to say it prevents all these problems. But it
| evidently helps.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Well, the difference is that you're within your rights
| when you vote on whom to admit to your
| house/town/country. You're not within your rights to
| round up people already there and gas them. Let's not
| compare the two.
| scrollaway wrote:
| The parent comments are talking about direct democracy
| and its tendencies in Switzerland. Not specific policies
| (for you see, such extremes haven't come up for voting
| there lately). Perfectly comparable.
| loriverkutya wrote:
| Can you please be sensible? Direct demoracy is not working
| with 445 million people.
| effie wrote:
| It could work, just do referendum in every country and
| then implement the result. It would require that people
| in power in all countries wanted to give power to their
| people, and implemented it securely. Which is why it
| won't happen.
| lwn wrote:
| In my opinion it's impossible for a small group of
| people/ politicians to determine what's good for 445
| million people.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Mathematically it's not more difficult to determine the
| majority vote among 400 million people, than among 10
| million. What would prevent it from working for you?
| tchalla wrote:
| > it's not more difficult to determine the majority vote
| among 400 million people
|
| Democracy is not majority voting.
| thegrimmest wrote:
| _" a system of government by the whole population or all
| the eligible members of a state, typically through
| elected representatives."_
|
| Basically it is. You don't need representatives to be
| democratic.
| herbst wrote:
| Yes? Any data for that?
| loriverkutya wrote:
| No direct democracy existed in known history with 445
| million people.
| kristjank wrote:
| It's not my fault that I was too young to vote at the last EU
| elections. That's changed since and you bet your ass that
| I'll vote for the right people when I'm able to. Also raising
| awareness and promoting a petition about an issue isn't the
| same as raising pitchforks. I'm thinking there's a subtext
| here...
| dmos62 wrote:
| I chuckled when you said "the right people". Like, there's
| the right people, and then what's left. Get it? Right and
| left. Puns.
| Zenst wrote:
| The whole polarization of political issues into right and
| left is and always will distract from the issues being
| debated and more so, ends up derailing any debate and
| discourse about the issues as they get drowned out by the
| labels.
|
| Very easy to label something right wing or left wing to
| distract from the issue at debate and it has become very
| much a political tool in much the same way the "think of
| the children" card is played.
| dmos62 wrote:
| You get no argument from me. I just really enjoyed the
| pun.
| cjfd wrote:
| The EU parliament has far too little power to come anywhere
| close to the EU being a democracy. The problem being that in
| second reading there has to be a 2/3 majority to approve
| amendments.
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Please keep name-calling and personal attacks out of your
| comments here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| zibzab wrote:
| Exactly where is this name calling? Please unflag this so
| we can continue the discussion.
| dang wrote:
| "Hold your horses" and "put down the pitchforks" count as
| name-calling in the sense that the HN guidelines use that
| term, because they are swipes that don't reply to the
| actual argument. Ultimately they're just putdowns. Please
| omit those from your posts to HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| tomxor wrote:
| > we vote on who to send to EU parliament.
|
| You are describing a representative democracy, the parent
| pointed out the lack of direct democracy in the process. And
| I would tend to agree that there needs to be more direct
| democracy involved at some point in the policy making process
| to accommodate just such a scenario where it's clear the vast
| majority are not happy with the result.
|
| Representative democracy has it's place, but the reality is
| that you cannot pick and choose - most people want privacy,
| but most people are also aware of the wider issues and
| concerned if the fringe parties are competent enough in
| making decisions in other areas. Perhaps a good compromise is
| to be able to shoot down their propositions, so that even
| though they may not further the ideals the majority want in
| all areas, they will at least be prevented from eroding them.
| But as the parent pointed out, there is no mechanism in place
| to do this currently, so people are limited to protests and
| petitions.
| tremon wrote:
| "direct democracy" is a no-true-scotsman type fallacy, as
| you can use it to keep moving the goalposts indefinitely.
| Even Switzerland, the much-touted example of "direct
| democracy" has a parliament of elected representatives.
| tomxor wrote:
| You will note I did not suggest a "true democracy"
| replace the entire process, that would be completely
| impractical, rarely does it work at scale.
| toshk wrote:
| Even a representative democracy is a far fetched idea with
| the EU.
|
| Nobody really understand how the EU works, except for a few
| bureaucrats.
|
| There are too many proxies. You vote for a local party,
| then you find out they go into a coalition because the
| parliament is huge: over 700 seats. And those parties in
| one coalition have very different agenda's.
|
| Then you look deeper, and the parliament's power is very
| limited, and most of the power lies with the council and
| commission.
|
| Both are not chosen in an election but in negotiations by
| the governments, which tends to mean certain countries like
| Germany and France have a very big say. Of course in a very
| indirect way these are somewhat chosen by certain part you
| of the people in the EU.
| buran77 wrote:
| After seeing the plumbing of the EU more up close and
| personal than most people ever will I can say this is a
| good characterization. I'd call it "democracy through
| obscurity" with less balance than one would expect from a
| union. Many of the countries are just along for the ride
| with no real (or even expected) power from their
| representatives.
|
| France and Germany do get a special status by virtue of
| the power of their economies and because they conceived
| this "baby". Coincidentally this was also a huge part of
| the reason the UK never felt comfortable in the union.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| This got really apparent in the discussions around
| Brexit. Lots of people saying "I vote in EU elections",
| assuming that the EU elections work the same as all the
| other elections they vote in. It really doesn't. The EU
| is very much an oligarchy controlled by a small number of
| unelected bureaucrats.
|
| They've been very careful to not let the curtain slip too
| far, and preserve the appearance that popular opinion can
| change policy. But there's no legislative connection.
|
| This kind of legislation is an interesting case in point.
| Who wants this? Who benefits from this? Is it actually
| going to make a dent in child abuse? Generally the EU is
| keen on privacy, so what changed that for this? Are there
| any states really pushing for this so they can read their
| citizens' mail (Poland, maybe, I guess, but they're not
| having a great time in the EU at the moment so probably
| not)? As TFA says, this is not a popular move, and
| there's no popular wave of anti-pedo sentiment at the
| moment, so why now?
|
| The suspicion of palm-greasing (sorry, "lobbying")
| remains. Reading our messages means more data for the AI,
| means better ad targeting.
| toshk wrote:
| Poland is having an awesome time in the EU. Get all the
| subsidies and trade, and ignore the rules they don't
| like: not taking any immgrants, going against EU court of
| Justic, etc.
|
| "The most up-to-date statistics (as of July 2016) show
| that in 2014 Poland received EUR17.436 billion from the
| EU whilst only contributing EUR3.526 billion. Poland also
| received nearly EUR2 billion more in EU funding than any
| other member state in 2013 (France being second highest).
| " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland_in_the_European_Un
| ion
| olodus wrote:
| Yup. Have done and will continue to do exactly this. While I
| don't find the Pirate party's policies comprehensive enough
| for my national government, I do find the EU parliament the
| perfect level of government for the issue they address to be
| handled at.
| ant6n wrote:
| You realize a single or even multiple MPs cant block the
| passing of laws in parlaiment, since laws are passed by
| majorities, not consensus/unanimiusly. So please do get out
| those pitch, especially since this is the next level of
| surveillance.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| What you are in effect saying is, since your (our)
| positions have not the majority in parliament, we need to
| resort to violence?
|
| Can we try other established democratic ways, like voting,
| petitioning, demonstrating, etc. before that?
| playguardin wrote:
| I won't argue with you that democracy sucks.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I wish people understood the origins and structure of the EU.
| It grew out of a trade association (ECSC) and has very little
| to do with direct or even representative democracy in the
| standard sense of the word, i.e. representative of the
| populace. It is an external political class with only
| tangential connections to individual citizens.
|
| This is an issue, because it gives opponents of European
| integration a fairly legitimate position to be critical.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Apple come out a few days ago,
|
| then there is a thread <<Canberra asks to introduce detection
| capabilities in encrypted communication (zdnet.com)>> at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28112827 ,
|
| then this one.
|
| All of these at the same time?
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| I wonder if all of this (Apple, Chatcontrol, etc.) will spark a
| backlash against computing devices. The government can't rifle
| through your physical photos to search for [bad thing], at least
| for the moment. Will we see a resurgence of Instamatic cameras
| and other offline-first devices?
|
| Depressingly, I'm sure most people won't care. But hey, I can
| hope.
| aj3 wrote:
| Analogies between IT and physical world are often less than
| helpful but before digital photos most people would be
| developing photos in specialized studios. If these studios
| noticed what they thought was CSAM they would report it to
| police. One could of course develop photos themselves (like one
| can selfhost everything today), but as soon as other parties
| get involved they can (and should) report problematic material
| to police.
| ceilingcorner wrote:
| Polaroids have been around for quite some time and don't
| require a photo studio.
| thefr0g wrote:
| > Depressingly, I'm sure most people won't care. But hey, I can
| hope.
|
| I'm afraid you're right. Nobody cares about their photos being
| searched for whatever by shady organisations and corrupt
| agencys.
|
| - Facebook: 2.8 billion active monthly users
|
| - Google Mail: 1.8 million users
|
| - iCloud: >850 million users
|
| - Google Drive: about a billion users
|
| - Dropbox: >600 million user.
| tpxl wrote:
| > The government can't rifle through your physical photos to
| search for [bad thing], at least for the moment.
|
| I mean they can, it just takes effort making it not worthwhile.
| This will make it easy and omnipresent.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| It's the same people who believe in medical apartheid that are
| bringing this in. All under the guise of the greater good. Who is
| it good for because it's not for the publics. Law enforcement
| brutality exists online too and all over the world. It's not
| simply a US phenomenon. Sickens me that they use children as an
| excuse. If they really gave a crap about kids there is so much
| that could be done right now.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > _It's the same people who believe in medical apartheid that
| are bringing this in._
|
| Regardless of what you call your antivax rhetoric, this is
| utterly wrong. It's not the same people. There's no fucking
| correlation here beyond "politics is brought to you by
| politicians" so stop using an issue HN is upset about to try to
| prop up your pet peeves.
|
| I too can start saying that this shit you're upset about is
| brought to you by car drivers and people who indent with 2
| spaces.
|
| There's a special place in hell for issue-parasites who do what
| you're doing here.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| First of all I'm vaxed. Second of all it is in fact the same
| people. I live in an EU country and it's the EU political
| establishment and their allies that are doing this.
|
| The fact you had to call out my grammar shows how weak your
| argument is. You are a literal grammar nazi. With language
| like "parasite" you really are showing your facist side
| aren't you.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > The fact you had to call out my grammar shows how weak
| your argument is
|
| What on earth are you talking about? I don't call out
| people's grammar.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Sorry misread your message. You aren't a grammar nazi.
| czzr wrote:
| Medical apartheid? What's that referring to?
| slickrick216 wrote:
| EU covid pass and medical discrimination now in Europe but
| also world wide.
| argvargc wrote:
| Various European countries are mandating vaccination or face
| the following consequences:
|
| - unable to shop/buy food
|
| - unable to use public transport
|
| - no concerts/movies
|
| - no restaurants
|
| - unable to _go to hospital_
|
| Along with bankrupting fines and jail time for businesses
| that do not comply.
|
| France, Italy, Germany, Greece, the UK and others are
| experiencing widespread protest - some in the millions - and
| unilaterally across some of those countries, in many cities
| and small towns, as a result. Protestors are unified as
| vaccinated and unvaccinated - scenes have emerged of
| vaccinated burning their vaccine passports en masse in
| solidarity for example.
|
| Most of this is barely reported in world or US news, along
| with radio silence on the extreme police brutality that often
| meets such protests.
|
| Search on odysee or other uncensored video platforms, and
| you'll find countless examples of massive protest and
| egregious police-instigated violence even just from over the
| past few weeks.
|
| Figure out the language-specific hashtags for them, and you
| can find many threads with live video etc on social media in
| the weekends.
|
| Several organisations and unions are also striking/walking-
| out against such measures, and this is also not being widely
| reported, though they can be found in regional, language-
| specific news.
|
| Most people outside of Europe have no idea what is happening
| within it right now regarding these issues, because of
| widespread big-tech and government-supported censorship. This
| of course also fuels more protest as protestors can see they
| are not being reported on despite their huge numbers - which
| then causes more to join as they agree with the injustice.
|
| These protests have apparently only increased in numbers
| since beginning many months ago, and continue to do so
| despite increased police violence against them.
|
| One of the central claims of protestors is "medical
| apartheid", forced segregation etc. Typically, those
| enforcing such measures are denounced as "Nazi's", and this
| opinion appears to be widespread and volatile.
|
| It's unsurprising given the history of many of those
| countries that they would react strongly to what they
| perceive as a recreation of prior national shame.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > France, Italy, Germany, Greece, the UK and others are
| experiencing widespread protest - some in the millions
|
| Germany's largest drew just short of 40k people, that was
| when they tried to storm the Parliament (https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Protests_over_COVID-19_policie...).
| "Querdenken" is loud but entirely irrelevant.
|
| And in France, the protests are (as usual for the French)
| not just Corona containment measures, but general social
| issue protests.
| the-dude wrote:
| > some in the millions
|
| Sources? From what I have seen, marches of 100k max.
| argvargc wrote:
| Country-wide. It's typically in the 100k's per major
| city. The last Yellow Vest protest in France was
| organised in 80 cities & towns.
|
| For an example of underrepresentation, "160k" was the
| "official" figure for the totality of France recently in
| the few mainstream media reports. Most "official"
| figures, if they report at all, are multiple factors low,
| or in same cases orders of magnitude too low.
|
| Eg, just the single public square in Paris (place de la
| concorde) protestors have occupied in most protests,
| easily holds much more than 160k, on its own. That was
| just one square in one (albeit the biggest) city that
| day.
|
| Find drone shots or timelapses to make estimates, for
| example: odysee.com/@alltheworldsastage:0/Aug-7th-Paris
| ---Montpellier-France-Massive-Anti-Vaccine-Passport-
| Protests-Libert%C3%A9-Manifestations:2?
|
| (Absolutely don't endorse this channel or anything - but
| this bit of content in this case is largely unedited or
| editorialised, and is sourced.)
|
| If you find a good visual source, use one of various free
| crowd estimator tools to see for yourself. Draw lines on
| the map and drag a slider for crowd density - eg the
| above-mentioned square in Paris is 50k for a light crowd,
| up to 200k+ for a packed crowd - and the protests meet
| the definition of packed.
|
| There are no easily-accessible, centralised and vetted
| sources of indisputable information during times of
| widespread censorship - you simply have to go look and do
| the work of vetting it yourself. Beware sometimes it's
| mislabelled/misinformation, eg, actually shots of a world
| cup celebration (likely intended to discredit). It's not
| hard to be discerning however - if absolutely everyone is
| holding the countries flag and there are no signs, it's
| likely a sports or other national celebration. If some
| are holding flags and others are holding signs saying
| "liberte" it's a protest. You need to learn the foreign
| words for freedom and vaccine passport at least.
|
| In Italy it's easy as the word for "no" is the same as
| English and the word for vaccine passport is "green
| pass": so "no green pass", as various members of
| parliament ambushed the center of a parliament session
| and held up signs saying so recently.
|
| You can bet if multiple members of parliament are
| flooding the central chamber of government of a major
| European country with protest signs, then protests are at
| least in the millions.
| chess_buster wrote:
| It's reported in the main government news source, the
| tagesschau, in Germany all the time and (at least for
| Germany) its also blown waaaayy out of proportion. For
| example, in my home-town of 170,000 the demo was 30
| people...
|
| The "police brutality" used against the QAnon, Nazis, and
| the so called "Querdenker" demonstrators here in Germany is
| laughable, when you compare what the police does against
| left-leaning demonstrations here in Germany on a regular
| basis.
|
| So please stop spreading this FUD.
| the-dude wrote:
| > in my home-town of 170,000 the demo was 30 people
|
| This is consistent with my home town in NL.
| thefr0g wrote:
| > its also blown waaaayy out of proportion.
|
| Can confirm, media likes to report on it because it gets
| a lot of clicks. It's a loud minority that knows how to
| use (online) media for their means and profit.
|
| > The "police brutality" used against the QAnon, Nazis,
| and the so called "Querdenker" demonstrators here in
| Germany is laughable, when you compare what the police
| does against left-leaning demonstrations here in Germany
| on a regular basis.
|
| Initiators of (not only) left demonstrations like to cry
| about the oh-so brutal police but there is definetely
| truth to this. I've never seen protesters get away with
| so much bullshit in germany.
| the-dude wrote:
| Another question : Ruptly is reporting live on these
| protests in Paris and Berlin on YT weekly now.
|
| Are they part of the censorship? Is there something they
| are not showing?
| argvargc wrote:
| They exclusively follow the edge of the police line and
| mostly focuses on them throughout. Typically therefore,
| coverage shows limited numbers of people, and most of any
| violence that occurs.
|
| But, it's better than nothing, and at least documents who
| started what. In the case of Berlin recently, it was
| particularly shocking.
| the-dude wrote:
| I see them walking embedded in the crowds in Paris. They
| tend to follow the action if a particular place 'dies
| out'.
|
| > it was particularly shocking.
|
| Why so vague?
| argvargc wrote:
| Have I not typed enough?
| the-dude wrote:
| That is entirely up to you.
| hhlbf wrote:
| Ruptly is Russian media, so I suppose they have the
| freedom to report these things that local media doesn't
| have.
| the-dude wrote:
| From what I have understood is that the Ruptly crews are
| safe because they are trusted and known to publish a
| factual non-editorialized stream.
|
| The traditional media? Not so much.
| bserge wrote:
| Well, people of a certain background get treated like shit by
| the supposedly universal healthcare systems in Europe, so
| there's that.
| the-dude wrote:
| Could you please specify 'certain' instead of hinting?
|
| Sources would be great too.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| I think he's talking about anti vaxers. Which I'm not.
| Have the J&J one and doing quite well. Just believe it's
| a choice. They also quite often use it to invoke being
| from a working class background. Which I am actually.
| the-dude wrote:
| How are they treated like shit?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Presumably they're referring to requirements for vaccinations
| to attend large public gatherings.
|
| I think it's an absurd hyperbole, myself.
| the-dude wrote:
| > large public gatherings.
|
| In some counties it is much broader than that. Painting it
| as hyperbole sounds hollow if you are downplaying it
| yourself.
| petre wrote:
| If the gathering is large enough they can't stop it and
| will back down. See the yellow vests movement.
| the-dude wrote:
| That only works for gatherings not associated with a
| legal entity.
|
| For example a sports club ( football? ) can't ignore the
| rules or it will be fined / closed.
| petre wrote:
| It depends. In France unoins will organize public
| gatherings and won't be fined or closed because they have
| real power to shut down a whole sector of the economy and
| the ability to negotiate with the government.
| kristjank wrote:
| Is it really, though? Both child abuse and the pandemic are
| serious issues with real world victims, and both are
| riddled with privacy, anonymity and personal integrity
| issues. If we don't act against them, people will die/get
| hurt, and if we act against it in a Macchiavelian manner,
| democracy and quality of our life suffers enormously.
|
| My observation is that in the name of: a) Covid b)
| Counterterrorism c) Child abuse almost everything can be
| presented as justifiable, at least to the mainstream media.
| The burden of questioning the rulers' decisions remains on
| us, and the limitations of personal freedom, both digital
| and physical, set a dangerous precendent to anything that
| might happen in the future.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Yes it's absolutely hyperbole to compare the racist
| policy of apartheid to reasonable restrictions on people
| who _voluntarily choose_ to avoid vaccines for mostly-
| nonsense reasons.
|
| Do you also oppose driver's license restrictions? Or
| existing pre-covid vaccine requirements? I struggle to
| see how these new restrictions are so onerous.
| slickrick216 wrote:
| Equating drivers licenses to vaccine passports is a false
| equivalency.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Why? Drivers' licensing makes people safer on the roads,
| vaccines make people safer in crowded indoor spaces.
| aww_dang wrote:
| The abuses rationalized by the War on Terror, such as
| mass surveillance and profiling haven't been walked back.
| Yet many somehow believe vaccine passports won't be
| similarly result in mission creep and abuse. More
| recently it has been suggested to expand the designation
| of terrorist to include those who have concerns about
| this process.
|
| When has government willingly returned liberties taken
| under emergency pretenses? Once Pandora's box is
| opened...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > When has government willingly returned liberties taken
| under emergency pretenses?
|
| How about the dozens of times already since the start of
| this pandemic? Every time case rates drop even slightly,
| they've rushed to re-open businesses, eliminate mask
| rules and limitations on gatherings.
| aww_dang wrote:
| There have been some outliers like Florida's Ron
| DeSantis, but for the most part lockdowns have been on
| and off. The CDC now recommends masking for vaccinated
| individuals. Restrict, loosen restrictions and then
| tighten restrictions further. Repeat as necessary. Say
| what you will of some of the temporary restorations of
| freedom of movement, but they've normalized putting
| people on house arrest.
|
| The goal in my view appears to be getting people onboard
| with the vaccine passports. Once implemented it will be a
| stepping stone towards CBDC, UBI and social credit
| scores.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-23/dig
| ita...
| jsnell wrote:
| Why exactly are we believing the author's claims? The link on the
| supposed "2.0" announcement on mandatory CSAM scanning leads to
| no such annoucement. Nor does any of the other 50 links on the
| page, as far as I can tell.
| prof-dr-ir wrote:
| If you have been following this site for a while then you know
| that it is a truth universally acknowledged (well - on HN),
| that the EU wants to "ban encryption".
|
| I keep having the same question as you, and will refrain from
| joining the pitchfork party until I see actual proof.
| toadi wrote:
| Question is always what is suspicious ?
| contravariant wrote:
| Surely everything is suspicious until proven otherwise?
|
| Although if something is 100% without a doubt not suspicious,
| that's also somewhat suspicious.
| 1337shadow wrote:
| For those of us who need more security, which most of us expect
| from the state, mass surveillance will surely help. For those of
| us who insist on breaking the law this will become a problem.
| throwrqX wrote:
| Is this sarcasm?
| effie wrote:
| How many people need more security coming from the state in EU?
| /rhetorical question
| 1337shadow wrote:
| I, for one, have been assaulted with my children, by a guy
| they took a year to hopefully catch and put in jail, where he
| currently stays, I even have videos of the guy on youtube if
| you want to see him, he really looks like a nazi except
| without the teeth which he lost consuming crack.
|
| I hope this won't be your case, living in fear with your
| children for a year is a bad experience, not to mention the
| hospital and sequels. I wish "hope" was more that we could
| do, this new security systems are an answer.
|
| If you don't thrust your government with this, perhaps you
| should apply to work on it in defense - surely, this will
| create quite some tech jobs - so that you be in charge.
| Actually, if you have experience working in defense, you
| might already know that there's plenty of work catching
| criminals, there's definitely no time for anything less
| critical, despite whatever grounds you build fear of dystopia
| on.
|
| We are not in a George Orwell dystopia but actually have real
| lives to save and really dangerous criminals to stop despite
| what you may think. And I'm really glad that you live in a
| place where you feel safe and I hope this stays this way, and
| I'm really happy for you that you have not lost a child to
| criminality, or a friend to terrorism, but keep in mind it's
| not the case of everyone.
|
| We can't all be like famous french leftist Mathieu Kassovitz
| and look at a mother in the eyes and tell her that the event
| of the death of her child is just "a miscellaneous event" and
| that there's nothing to do about it, that's it's the way it's
| supposed to be. I mean, go ahead and be my guest, explain to
| her that mass surveillance will put her into more danger than
| not. Her dystopia is probably very different than yours, and
| much more real. I'm sorry, but I'm siding with the victims
| here, from CP to whatever.
|
| If we can save even just 1 child, shouldn't we because you
| are scared that a government employee would be reading your
| flirts? I don't understand how you people not only can just
| be against more security, but also willing to sacrifice
| children to protect your "privacy" (flirts, dickpics) which
| nobody working in defense actually gives a flying f** about.
|
| And Patrick Breyer, if you're reading me, next time you want
| to make an argument about "minors sexting", I would suggest
| you find a way that does not make you look like a pervert who
| wants to keep it easy for minors to send him nudes, cause it
| kind of looks like that from where I'm standing.
|
| What kind of congressman in their sane mind would vote
| against this? None. Does that mean it is perfect? No, but
| it's a start, and I believe we will improve from our
| mistakes, we have to start somewhere. This is the start of
| new era of security, which many of us pay taxes for, we
| deserve this, and hopefully it's not some "pirate party", or
| "pedo party", or "criminal party", or "human rights defender
| party" who is going to stop us from getting there.
| kleiba wrote:
| Privacy is something that people usually only care about on a
| theoretical level. Practically speaking, they're often happy to
| not care so much at all if they get something more tangible in
| return.
|
| ---
|
| _Company: Excuse me, would you mind us profiling you through an
| accurate survey of most of your everyday purchases?_
|
| _Customer: Heck no!_
|
| _Company: What if we let you collect "points" that will maybe
| someday safe you a little bit of money on one of these
| purchases?_
|
| _Customer: Sign me up!_
|
| ---
|
| _Company: Excuse me, would you mind us recording everywhere you
| go all day every day and store that information for at least six
| months?_
|
| _Customer: Heck no!_
|
| _Company: What if you get a pocket computer with fast mobile
| internet connection in return, the corner stone of modern life?_
|
| _Customer: Sign me up!_
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The choice and position of Average Joe and Median Jack should
| not impact (compromise) the rest.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think it's counterproductive to frame the discussion in terms
| of privacy. The real term is spying, how much spying do you
| want your <company|state> to do
| thegrimmest wrote:
| Regardless, robbing people of the ability to consent, even if
| 90% of them would anyways, should be intolerable.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That's fine. My privacy has a price and I'm happy to sell it
| when I think it's convenient for me.
|
| What's happening here is that a state actor is forcing
| providers to let the state spy on me.
|
| That's an authoritarian policy which I strongly oppose.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| How much of a rebate on your taxes would you be happy selling
| it for?
|
| What about a discount on your purchases, which was funded by
| the government, who would then buy the data?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| That depends on what are we trading.
|
| I would definitely trade my privacy with the government for
| any tax discount (and I think I'll have the longer stick,
| I'm no Indiana Jones) but whether I have an alternative or
| not is important.
|
| A better question would be: would I move to a country where
| encryption is illegal if it had 0% tax? No, I would shop
| for another country. For a similar reason, I don't live in
| Dubai (0% tax but policies I don't approve of).
| thegrimmest wrote:
| The important question is: do you have a choice? Is your
| consent requested or respected?
| c01n wrote:
| > Privacy is something that people usually only care about on a
| theoretical level. Practically speaking, they're often happy to
| not care so much at all if they get something more tangible in
| return.
|
| Because not everyone is a Programmer. Most people I know have
| never even heard about Snowden.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I know lots of people who are tech savvy, care about privacy,
| but use a gmail address nevertheless.
|
| I have my own contradictions. I think the disappearance of
| payments in cash is a problem, it is not good to give the
| state too much control on a society. But I hardly use any
| cash myself.
|
| Convenience is unfortunately a big factor.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| There's a difference between me _opt-in_ to give private data
| in exchange for points, and that being unilaterally imposed.
|
| It's also kind of harder to abuse information on my shopping
| list, whereas there's plenty of ways to abuse having total and
| complete access to all communication between private parties.
| kleiba wrote:
| Think of it this way: what is more important to you, the
| convenience of exchanging text messages with your friends, or
| keeping these conversations private?
| thegrimmest wrote:
| This wasn't always a choice. Before electronic
| communication people exchanged letters sometimes very
| frequently (mail service in London peaked at 12x/day). The
| privacy of these letters was however protected by law, with
| a warrant being required for police to open and read them.
|
| I don't quite see why our packets and devices shouldn't
| have the same protections.
| thealienthing wrote:
| Are you saying that these things must be mutually
| exclusive? It is entirely possible to have completely
| private and convenient conversations between two parties.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| What is your point, given that many will reply "what is
| more important is dignity, so the choice is for privacy"?
| avsteele wrote:
| Yes, users are price sensitive when it comes to selling their
| privacy. They also have a different sensitivity upon
| consideration of who the other party is and their
| perceived/intended use of the data.
|
| To me, this isn't so surprising and is fully consistent with a
| greater willingness to give personal info to e.g. Amazon than
| e.g. the government.
| kleiba wrote:
| _They also have a different sensitivity upon consideration of
| who the other party is and their perceived /intended use of
| the data._
|
| Except once their data is out, they have no control over
| where it will end up. Profiling data is regularly sold to
| third parties.
| kristjank wrote:
| True. Although nothing-to-hiders will chime in quickly, stating
| that their shopping history isn't really _that_ important to
| their sense of privacy.
| dylkil wrote:
| They wouldn't like their neighbors knowing their shopping
| history, the principle should be the same.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But their neighors do not know it, and if amazon or the
| government knows it(pr their browser histpry, emails, ...)
| it has the same effect to them, that god knows it all.
| Can't do anything about it. Too distant to care. Thats my
| conclusion of privacy discussions with "normal" people.
| lholden wrote:
| Politicians really like to use "child pornography" as a wedge
| issue for surveillance as it's a topic that people overwhelmingly
| see as "a bad thing". This screams slippery slope.
| Zenst wrote:
| Oh I think you will find that the "think of the children" model
| has been abused more than most emotional heart-string pulling
| for agenda.
| kahlonel wrote:
| Exactly. Just like "terrorism" is used as an excuse to take
| control of oil fields.
| tacocataco wrote:
| Just like the drug war is used as an excuse to empower
| fascists in government, strip citizens of their
| constitutional rights, and disrupt leftist and minority
| communities.
| peppermint_tea wrote:
| this is exactly why I created a chat service you can host on your
| home pc... I believe centralization by big corporations plus laws
| passed with various objectives made by various governments is the
| end of the internet as we know it. A tool meant to connect the
| humans from different countries, culture and religions to
| exchange ideas, discuss, share knowledge and empower people
| against corrupted governments.
|
| I believe peer to peer is the way to go and we tech people have a
| duty to inform and vulgarize technologies and outcomes to our
| close relatives.
|
| This is the digital legacy we will leave to future generations.
| cwizou wrote:
| Assuming this is correct (I only followed a couple of links, but
| it would be the EU _planning to mandate_ content scan for CSAM on
| all e-mail and messaging platforms, after making it legal
| /optional already to do so earlier this year), I guess this
| answer the question of _why_ Apple released their tech.
|
| While it made little sense on iCloud Photos, they can add the
| exact same client-side scanning to iMessage and keep it (mostly)
| e2ee.
|
| Certainly not judging the merits of this, such mandates would be
| the end of e2ee via third party companies (there seems to have
| been a concerted worldwide effort around that), but at the very
| least, I can see the impetus from Apple's point of view to
| release this right now.
| sneak wrote:
| iMessage has an e2e backdoor on by default in the form of
| plaintext escrow via iCloud Backup (not e2e).
|
| iMessage is, in practice today, no longer e2e.
|
| Apple knows this and intentionally preserves this backdoor for
| the FBI:
|
| https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1ZK1CT
| bkm wrote:
| Just like WhatsApp 'conveniently' integrated Google Drive
| backups by default. That is why it's funny to see the fake
| outrage of WhatsApp's team over this.
| cwizou wrote:
| This is why I wrote mostly. Both iCloud backups and Messages
| on iCloud either keep plain backups or a decryption key.
|
| But if you don't use iCloud backups your end is still, as far
| as we know, encrypted.
|
| What happens on the other end is out of your control in all
| cases.
| foerbert wrote:
| For a little more context, see
| https://www.howtogeek.com/710509/apples-imessage-is-
| secure.....
|
| For those unfamiliar, as I was, it appears iCloud backup is
| enabled by default. I think the above statement about
| iMessage not being e2e in practice is very fair.
| aj3 wrote:
| This option is transparent to the user and easy to change.
| Also, anyone who has done IT support will appreciate that
| yeah regular users actually want / need backups enabled by
| default, it's often a life saver for them.
| sneak wrote:
| Note that even if you disable iCloud/iCloud Backup, all of
| your iMessages will still be leaked unencrypted to Apple
| via the phone on the other end of the conversation that
| still has iCloud Backup enabled.
| aj3 wrote:
| Meh. Compared to 10 years ago we still live in a bright
| future where e2ee is available to everyone who needs it.
| Yeah, you might need to enable some options (like in
| Telegram) or disable some other options (like iCloud in
| iMessage), but it's still there.
|
| Even with this on-device CSAM thingy, Apple knows less about
| you than they did 10 years ago and random staffers at FAANG
| can't just go and spy on their spouses (the way they could
| not that long ago).
| sneak wrote:
| Disabling iCloud doesn't enable e2e as the other end of
| your conversation still has iCloud on by default and is
| escrowing your chat plaintext to Apple.
|
| Apple has access to all of the plaintext iMessages for
| almost all devices/conversations and can turn them over to
| the USG at will.
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