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ChatControl update: blocking minority held but Denmark is moving forward anyway

isaacremuant 1y ago
Name and shame the clearly corrupt politicians that are being paid by someone who wants to benefit from all the compliance bullshit that will come from it. Disgusting pigs.
hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago
What’s the endgame here, with porn, chat control and age verification occurring globally, when will this end and where will we end up? What are the realistic outcomes?
- nickslaughter02 1y ago
  Do you have a license for this TCP packet?
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    Drink verification can to send a packet.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Taek 1y ago
  The end game is politically controlled speech. First you can't share porn, then you can't share violence, then you can't share police abuse, until it starts to creep into the world of anything unflattering to those in power. And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive
  - nickslaughter02 1y ago
    > you can't share porn, then you can't share violence First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cream-age-verification-bills-are-out-control https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cr...)
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      I'm not seeing the connection to censorship at all with the skincare and diet products. It's illegal to sell certain things to children because they've been deemed harmful. Same with legal (for adults) drugs. If you don't check ID before giving it to a child, that's a crime, and I expect you to be prosecuted, yes. Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18. The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
  - cm2187 1y ago
    We are way beyond that. In certain european countries you cannot legally share privately a sentence that would offend someone else.
    - robin_reala 1y ago
      Which certain ones would those be then? And which laws would it be breaking?
      - cm2187 1y ago
        The hate crime bill in Scotland for instance.
      - uzerfcwn 1y ago
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  The realistic outcome, most likely, is mDL (mobile driver's license) automatically being passed through from your OS, to your browser, to the website. This will make compliance with age verification requirements easy, in addition to making ban enforcement and blocking crawlers/robots/spam much easier. There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials. https://digitalcredentials.dev/ https://digitalcredentials.dev/ https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-origin-trial https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or... On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
  - koolala 1y ago
    The Semantic Surveillance Web
  - isaacremuant 1y ago
    > An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person. It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next. Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
  - phba 1y ago
    From the second link: > The privacy considerations for digital credentials are not static. They will evolve over time as the ecosystem matures, and may be informed by the behavior of other actors in the ecosystem, improvements in other layers of the stack, new threats to user privacy, as well as changing societal norms and regulations. Boil the frog slowly and carefully, and look out for opportune moments that could help to speed up the process.
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
  - therein 1y ago
    Or a small set of supranational entities that are responsible for creating the illusion of national entities are taking advantage of the headless blunder that are nation-states to execute their master plan in lockstep.
    - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
      I mean yes, obviously. I just wanted an opportunity to use my favourite quote from The Cube (1997).
- bogantech 1y ago
  The endgame is to kill independent media
  - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
    If we're going to go this route can we at least re-introduce the fairness doctrine?
- bastawhiz 1y ago
  I think that decentralized solutions to the Web mostly suck because they're worse to use for the majority of people. But if the Web becomes useless for things people actually care about, decentralized solutions will creep in. People won't simply give up, the things that work will become better in the ways that serve prospective users. That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.
  - layer8 1y ago
    The worst case is when only approved hardware and software will be legal, and every level of infrastructure will be enforcing that. You can say good bye to decentralized solutions then. Note how Apple is already a bit like that, banning certain torrenting apps even from alternative app stores [0]. I’m just mentioning that as a demonstration of the feasibility of such closed and controlled ecosystems. Now restrict ISP network traffic to packets signed by approved hardware, and there aren’t that many practical loopholes left. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411
    - bitwize 1y ago
      Brazil's senate has already approved a bill, PL 2628, which is broadly similar to the UK's Online Safety Act, but also requires sistemas operacionais de terminais ("terminal operating systems") to implement age checks in a secure, auditable fashion. The days where you could run whatever OS you want on hardware you own will soon be over. And you know what? There's not a damn thing any of us can do, so may as well just buy Apple gear.
- Traubenfuchs 1y ago
  Full government control of all digital media and digital communication. Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  Residential ISPs will only transmit packets that have a valid device attestation signature from one of the well-known device vendors. "Unsafe" software won't get access to the devices' secure enclave to sign their packets, so their packets will either have to be transmitted in plaintext, or they'll be dropped by the ISP.
  - fifteen1506 1y ago
    Probably. That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
- J_Shelby_J 1y ago
  Without the ability for people to have private conversations and organize politically in private, democracy is impossible. It wasn’t as much of a problem in the times when everything happened IRL, but now online is the default. So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible. Boot stomping on a human face forever.
- logicchains 1y ago
  What happened in Nepal earlier this month proves that a brighter future is possible, if people get fed up enough.
  - nicce 1y ago
    Since this is EU level legistlation and blocking minority is already ignored (e.g. going in to the streets does not matter in there), it is much more difficult. Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
    - logicchains 1y ago
      If an equivalent % of the population got in their cars, drove to Brussels and started setting EU government buildings on fire like in Nepal, things would change pretty quickly. The EU can only do soft totalitarianism because it doesn't have the kind of police force that a full-blown totalitarian state has.
      - salawat 1y ago
        Don't worry, they're working on that. Give it a few decades and generations to get personal locomotion automated and legislated out of the commoner's reach and they'll start ruling from highly secured ivory towers partitioned off from the public transit grid. Then resistance won't even be practicable in the numbers sufficient enough to cause disruption to the edifi of power.
  - oytis 1y ago
    And if you have enough young people, which Europe does not.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    Does it? Some parts of the world have revolutions every other week and are still jot as good as anything we have in the west despite our massive flaws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution
- jMyles 1y ago
  On sufficiently long time scales, there is only one realistic outcome: the internet will not tolerate censorship and will not abide state control. It is bigger than people and computers; it's an evolutionary force.
  - quesera 1y ago
    This goes even beyond the delusions that we believed in the 1990s which have been proven embarrassingly naive. But I wish you were right.
    - jMyles 1y ago
      > in the 1990s which have been proven embarrassingly naive. Proven?! It's been 30 years. That's an almost unfathomably small speck in evolutionary scales.
      - quesera 1y ago
        ... and yet it's the entirety of the lifespan of the commercial Internet. Why would you expect different in the future? The Internet met human nature, and human nature won. We hoped for better, but we didn't get it.
- akomtu 1y ago
  IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.
- isaacremuant 1y ago
  The goal is always to suppress the ability to dissent political. It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control. Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
- bapak 1y ago
  Easy. They really like what China is doing, but they can't because of that pesky democracy. China is every wannabe dictator's digital wet dream.
  - holoduke 1y ago
    A political party that is free from lobbyists and actually care for its citizens would be a good thing though. Number one reason of the decline in the west.
BoardsOfCanada 1y ago
Can we see the exact votes somewhere?
- nickslaughter02 1y ago
  Notes are usually leaked by netzpolitik.org a few days after.
richwater 1y ago
Why does Denmark hate citizens privacy so much?
- meindnoch 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - delusional 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - Hamuko 1y ago
    What I have not heard of is the Netherlands joining the Nordic countries.
  - incone123 1y ago
    If you take a look on Google Street view you can see that's generally untrue.
  - jansan 1y ago
    It took me a minute to understand your comment. Well put.
  - CalRobert 1y ago
    NL isn't nordic. We definitely have curtains. They've gotten much more common. NL is also opposing this per https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
  - impossiblefork 1y ago
    Nordic cultures are actually substantially different. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish culture is vastly different. If we include the Dutch or the Estonians the differences become even bigger. As a Swede I'm not afraid of my neighbours seeing into my apartment, because I have order there and I don't see any harm in them seeing into it, and you can of course interpret this as some kind of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear', but it's more that I don't see a need for physical privacy. Letters are completely different matter and in others I am intensely secretive, but you can't learn anything I want to keep from you from looking at my houseplants. If I had disorder in my kitchen and people could see into it I would be very unhappy.
devjab 1y ago
What they should be doing is giving us the ability to use public apps without the apple store or google play. What they are doing is letting Palantir get our data, despite it being from a country that thas repeatedly threantened Greenland.
wewewedxfgdf 1y ago
Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation? Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.
- nicce 1y ago
  For some reason names are sensored because of the ”privacy and security requirements.”
- nickslaughter02 1y ago
  Follow the money. AI surveillance companies like Thorn are shaking in excitement. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
- potato3732842 1y ago
  The state itself. Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
  - hungmung 1y ago
    The state is a lecher.
  - spit2wind 1y ago
    This is a meme I see and don't fully understand. It seems to assume that the state isn't a democracy, yet the statement is usually applied to democracies like the US. Such statements don't make sense to me when it's the people who are the state, not some "other".
    - sunshowers 1y ago
      This is a classic principal-agent problem. The people are not the state in electoral/representative democracies, they merely elect agents that have their own beliefs and motivations.
codeptualize 1y ago
I lost count how many times the "lets get rid of encryption" plans have been tried and failed. It's truly ridiculous how these people don't understand anything about encryption and somehow still think this is a good idea. How is it possible that after years of discussing plans like this, they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety? Makes me really worried about the future. There is a lot going on in the world, and somehow they feel the need to focus on making our communications unsafe and basically getting rid of online privacy. The goal they are trying to achieve is good, but the execution is just stupid and will make everyone, including and maybe especially the people they want to protect, less safe online. The age verification thing is another example. All it does is send a lot of sensitive traffic over cheap or free VPN's (that might be controlled by foreign states). Great job, great win for safety!
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  I think you're confusing technical encryption with the privacy of encryption. For example, let's say I implemented a CSAM-scanning AI model in my chat app, which runs locally against your message, before communicating the message over an encrypted HTTPS channel. If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities, on a secondary separate connection. At no point, did it leave the device, in unencrypted form. Is that message encrypted? Yes. The way that you want? No. Governments have recognized this distinction, and have figured out they can have their cake and eat it too; the security of encryption with none of the privacy.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Another example of such degenerate-encryption would be having messages "end-to-end" encrypted, but a copy of the key is kept by a service-provider or even sent in advance to a government agency.
  - nicce 1y ago
    > In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. From Wikipedia. They can’t have their cake. You are breaking the concept of information into smaller steps (e.g. message) when that is against the definition.
nickslaughter02 1y ago
> Danish Minister of Justice and chief architect of the current Chat Control proposal, Peter Hummelgaard: > "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services." > Share your thoughts via https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/, or to jm@jm.dk directly. https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498 https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498
- akomtu 1y ago
  The reptile-brained politicians really hate that we can think our thoughts in secret and communicate with each other in secret.
  - twothreeone 1y ago
    More likely they just really enjoy taking the money that private entities hand out like candy as a reward for pushing legislation that will cement their society-eroding business models for ages to come.
- echelon 1y ago
  1984 playing out in front of us. Again. Politicians like Peter Hummelgaard are ghouls. They want their eyes in your home, watching you at all moments. And then they want to control what you do and see and think. Defending our liberties and privacy is a never-ending battle.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- nicce 1y ago
  Denmark has integrated Palantir for the police, so the Minister of Justice is likely the one who pursuits it most. More about Palantir in Denmark: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2410255 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2...
  - 1y ago
alkonaut 1y ago
What exactly is the plan? To mandate some client side checking so that transfer encryption backdoors won't be needed? At what level would you need to do that? E.g. for iOS and then iOS need to comply with every app store app having it or else they can't operate in the EU? Is that the plan?
- miohtama 1y ago
  Every chat application must comply by law and companies which make them without government permission will be made criminals. It's similar as the UK Online Safety Act: 4chan staff will be arrested if they ever touch the UK soil.
jcarrano 1y ago
In the past, we could have made a version of Signal without this spyware, to be installed as an APK (as I would expect the EU to force Google to ban the non-spying version from the app store). With the upcoming Android developer verification, this will no longer be a possibility.
- fifteen1506 1y ago
  Slow heating boils the frog. Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
  - asah 1y ago
    > If you must use Android the reasonable alternative being... ?
    - fsflover 1y ago
      GNU/Linux phones.
      - TeMPOraL 1y ago
        Name three? Unfortunately, "reasonable" generally means "can do the things typically done with smartphones these days", which include things like banking, media streaming, and civic stuff - things mediated by the very systems whose vendors aren't just embracing remote attestation, but actually driving its proliferation. For better or worse[0], this is not a technical problem - it's a social/political one. Technology created it, by making remote attestation possible - but the actual problem is with why companies want to use it. -- [0] - Definitely worse. Technical problems are easy.
        incompatible 1y ago
        Maybe you need two phones then, one for the civic stuff and the other for private communication.
testdelacc1 1y ago
This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that. But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved. In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss. Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all. On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals. Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.
- 1y ago
ThouYS 1y ago
Why risk all of the good the EU has done with such a catastrophic proposal? This would come close to nullifying the entire endeavour.
- zelphirkalt 1y ago
  EU gets infiltrated by corporate interest just like every single country's government does. It's a constant fight against lobbyism and financial interests opposing the citizens' rights. I wish it wasn't so, but greed knows no bounds.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
poulpo 1y ago
No one has really pointed forward a convincing explanation of who is behind this movement. The idea that this is the police is ludicrous to me, I don't know every european country but my overall opinion is that they have very little sway over anything. I am in a group of high civil servants for digital services in France and strangely no one seems to have heard about the project despite these people drafting most of France's position on numeric policies. My view is it is probably more about mass control (avoiding a movement like Gilets Jaunes and the like) than anything else.
casey2 1y ago
If this could possibly work it would have already been implemented for DRM. It doesn't even really work if you have complete control over content distribution. I get that politicians want to be seen as being active in combating crime. But the only proven way to prevent creating and proliferation of CSAM is to educate the masses.
okokwhatever 1y ago
How long till we start sharing encrypted text files? Tic, tac, tic, tac, tic, tac... Mark my words.
00100C000111 1y ago
Well, have you heard of Attaullah Baig? https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov They could just ask Meta, most europeans use WhatsApp anyway. Or we know where WhatsApp sends back ups to, totally unencrypted. So what do we have. TG chats not encrypted by default, Signal works fine to the best of my knowledge. But with physical access to devices MAC with file vault off and most windows machines, its lights out right away.

Name and shame the clearly corrupt politicians that are being paid by someone who wants to benefit from all the compliance bullshit that will come from it. Disgusting pigs.

hsbauauvhabzb 1y ago

What’s the endgame here, with porn, chat control and age verification occurring globally, when will this end and where will we end up? What are the realistic outcomes?

nickslaughter02 1y ago
Do you have a license for this TCP packet?
- whatevaa 1y ago
  Drink verification can to send a packet.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
Taek 1y ago
The end game is politically controlled speech. First you can't share porn, then you can't share violence, then you can't share police abuse, until it starts to creep into the world of anything unflattering to those in power. And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive
- nickslaughter02 1y ago
  > you can't share porn, then you can't share violence First Porn, Now Skin Cream? ‘Age Verification’ Bills Are Out of Control (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cream-age-verification-bills-are-out-control https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/03/first-porn-now-skin-cr...)
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    I'm not seeing the connection to censorship at all with the skincare and diet products. It's illegal to sell certain things to children because they've been deemed harmful. Same with legal (for adults) drugs. If you don't check ID before giving it to a child, that's a crime, and I expect you to be prosecuted, yes. Actually the California bill seems absurdly weak, and it seems to be enough to just ask if they're 18. The Washington bill is stupid for restricting creatine supplements, which the evidence indicates provides physical and cognitive benefits with no real drawbacks. It's the one muscle building supplement that's actually known to work, and should be excluded like protein powder. But otherwise restricting people from selling dubious dietary supplements to children doesn't seem terribly wrong on its face.
- cm2187 1y ago
  We are way beyond that. In certain european countries you cannot legally share privately a sentence that would offend someone else.
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    Which certain ones would those be then? And which laws would it be breaking?
    - cm2187 1y ago
      The hate crime bill in Scotland for instance.
    - uzerfcwn 1y ago
gjsman-1000 1y ago
The realistic outcome, most likely, is mDL (mobile driver's license) automatically being passed through from your OS, to your browser, to the website. This will make compliance with age verification requirements easy, in addition to making ban enforcement and blocking crawlers/robots/spam much easier. There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials. https://digitalcredentials.dev/ https://digitalcredentials.dev/ https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/ https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/ https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-origin-trial https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or... On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.
- koolala 1y ago
  The Semantic Surveillance Web
- isaacremuant 1y ago
  > An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person. It's 1984. Surveillance in your home so you only speak the government speak. If you criticize the government or the genocides commited by them you're "doing hate speech/wrong think" and you'll receive the cops at your door to be disappeared without recourse The populace will be told you were evil and no one dares question too much or they will be next. Or we can tell them to fuck off and stop buying into every little crisis and fake right v left fight they try to sell.
- phba 1y ago
  From the second link: > The privacy considerations for digital credentials are not static. They will evolve over time as the ecosystem matures, and may be informed by the behavior of other actors in the ecosystem, improvements in other layers of the stack, new threats to user privacy, as well as changing societal norms and regulations. Boil the frog slowly and carefully, and look out for opportune moments that could help to speed up the process.
MarcelOlsz 1y ago
Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.
- therein 1y ago
  Or a small set of supranational entities that are responsible for creating the illusion of national entities are taking advantage of the headless blunder that are nation-states to execute their master plan in lockstep.
  - MarcelOlsz 1y ago
    I mean yes, obviously. I just wanted an opportunity to use my favourite quote from The Cube (1997).
bogantech 1y ago
The endgame is to kill independent media
- MarcelOlsz 1y ago
  If we're going to go this route can we at least re-introduce the fairness doctrine?
bastawhiz 1y ago
I think that decentralized solutions to the Web mostly suck because they're worse to use for the majority of people. But if the Web becomes useless for things people actually care about, decentralized solutions will creep in. People won't simply give up, the things that work will become better in the ways that serve prospective users. That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.
- layer8 1y ago
  The worst case is when only approved hardware and software will be legal, and every level of infrastructure will be enforcing that. You can say good bye to decentralized solutions then. Note how Apple is already a bit like that, banning certain torrenting apps even from alternative app stores [0]. I’m just mentioning that as a demonstration of the feasibility of such closed and controlled ecosystems. Now restrict ISP network traffic to packets signed by approved hardware, and there aren’t that many practical loopholes left. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45098411
  - bitwize 1y ago
    Brazil's senate has already approved a bill, PL 2628, which is broadly similar to the UK's Online Safety Act, but also requires sistemas operacionais de terminais ("terminal operating systems") to implement age checks in a secure, auditable fashion. The days where you could run whatever OS you want on hardware you own will soon be over. And you know what? There's not a damn thing any of us can do, so may as well just buy Apple gear.
Traubenfuchs 1y ago
Full government control of all digital media and digital communication. Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.
meindnoch 1y ago
Residential ISPs will only transmit packets that have a valid device attestation signature from one of the well-known device vendors. "Unsafe" software won't get access to the devices' secure enclave to sign their packets, so their packets will either have to be transmitted in plaintext, or they'll be dropped by the ISP.
- fifteen1506 1y ago
  Probably. That's why you need to diversify software ecosystems now.
J_Shelby_J 1y ago
Without the ability for people to have private conversations and organize politically in private, democracy is impossible. It wasn’t as much of a problem in the times when everything happened IRL, but now online is the default. So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible. Boot stomping on a human face forever.
logicchains 1y ago
What happened in Nepal earlier this month proves that a brighter future is possible, if people get fed up enough.
- nicce 1y ago
  Since this is EU level legistlation and blocking minority is already ignored (e.g. going in to the streets does not matter in there), it is much more difficult. Maybe we should schedule a day in the future where everyone travels to Strasbourg/Brussels for a demonstration.
  - logicchains 1y ago
    If an equivalent % of the population got in their cars, drove to Brussels and started setting EU government buildings on fire like in Nepal, things would change pretty quickly. The EU can only do soft totalitarianism because it doesn't have the kind of police force that a full-blown totalitarian state has.
    - salawat 1y ago
      Don't worry, they're working on that. Give it a few decades and generations to get personal locomotion automated and legislated out of the commoner's reach and they'll start ruling from highly secured ivory towers partitioned off from the public transit grid. Then resistance won't even be practicable in the numbers sufficient enough to cause disruption to the edifi of power.
- oytis 1y ago
  And if you have enough young people, which Europe does not.
- lm28469 1y ago
  Does it? Some parts of the world have revolutions every other week and are still jot as good as anything we have in the west despite our massive flaws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepalese_revolution
jMyles 1y ago
On sufficiently long time scales, there is only one realistic outcome: the internet will not tolerate censorship and will not abide state control. It is bigger than people and computers; it's an evolutionary force.
- quesera 1y ago
  This goes even beyond the delusions that we believed in the 1990s which have been proven embarrassingly naive. But I wish you were right.
  - jMyles 1y ago
    > in the 1990s which have been proven embarrassingly naive. Proven?! It's been 30 years. That's an almost unfathomably small speck in evolutionary scales.
    - quesera 1y ago
      ... and yet it's the entirety of the lifespan of the commercial Internet. Why would you expect different in the future? The Internet met human nature, and human nature won. We hoped for better, but we didn't get it.
akomtu 1y ago
IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.
isaacremuant 1y ago
The goal is always to suppress the ability to dissent political. It was trialed during covid and people absolutely cheered for this type of control. Now it's only a matter of time unless people accept that it's never acceptable. Not even with "perceived threats". Covid passes and social scores to do activities where absolutely a wet dream for govs and corporations alike. The corporations that benefit from government mandated tools love getting free money and governments love control. They know the tools never spy on them, and that's why everytime they're the ones committing crimes or ignoring their rules it's "a mistake or nothing to see here".
bapak 1y ago
Easy. They really like what China is doing, but they can't because of that pesky democracy. China is every wannabe dictator's digital wet dream.
- holoduke 1y ago
  A political party that is free from lobbyists and actually care for its citizens would be a good thing though. Number one reason of the decline in the west.

BoardsOfCanada 1y ago

Can we see the exact votes somewhere?

nickslaughter02 1y ago
Notes are usually leaked by netzpolitik.org a few days after.

richwater 1y ago

Why does Denmark hate citizens privacy so much?

meindnoch 1y ago
[flagged]
- delusional 1y ago
  [flagged]
- Hamuko 1y ago
  What I have not heard of is the Netherlands joining the Nordic countries.
- incone123 1y ago
  If you take a look on Google Street view you can see that's generally untrue.
- jansan 1y ago
  It took me a minute to understand your comment. Well put.
- CalRobert 1y ago
  NL isn't nordic. We definitely have curtains. They've gotten much more common. NL is also opposing this per https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
- impossiblefork 1y ago
  Nordic cultures are actually substantially different. Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish culture is vastly different. If we include the Dutch or the Estonians the differences become even bigger. As a Swede I'm not afraid of my neighbours seeing into my apartment, because I have order there and I don't see any harm in them seeing into it, and you can of course interpret this as some kind of 'if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear', but it's more that I don't see a need for physical privacy. Letters are completely different matter and in others I am intensely secretive, but you can't learn anything I want to keep from you from looking at my houseplants. If I had disorder in my kitchen and people could see into it I would be very unhappy.

devjab 1y ago

What they should be doing is giving us the ability to use public apps without the apple store or google play. What they are doing is letting Palantir get our data, despite it being from a country that thas repeatedly threantened Greenland.

wewewedxfgdf 1y ago

Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation? Who proposes it and drives it and lobbies for it? It doesn't come from nowhere.

nicce 1y ago
For some reason names are sensored because of the ”privacy and security requirements.”
nickslaughter02 1y ago
Follow the money. AI surveillance companies like Thorn are shaking in excitement. https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/ https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...
potato3732842 1y ago
The state itself. Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.
- hungmung 1y ago
  The state is a lecher.
- spit2wind 1y ago
  This is a meme I see and don't fully understand. It seems to assume that the state isn't a democracy, yet the statement is usually applied to democracies like the US. Such statements don't make sense to me when it's the people who are the state, not some "other".
  - sunshowers 1y ago
    This is a classic principal-agent problem. The people are not the state in electoral/representative democracies, they merely elect agents that have their own beliefs and motivations.

codeptualize 1y ago

I lost count how many times the "lets get rid of encryption" plans have been tried and failed. It's truly ridiculous how these people don't understand anything about encryption and somehow still think this is a good idea. How is it possible that after years of discussing plans like this, they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety? Makes me really worried about the future. There is a lot going on in the world, and somehow they feel the need to focus on making our communications unsafe and basically getting rid of online privacy. The goal they are trying to achieve is good, but the execution is just stupid and will make everyone, including and maybe especially the people they want to protect, less safe online. The age verification thing is another example. All it does is send a lot of sensitive traffic over cheap or free VPN's (that might be controlled by foreign states). Great job, great win for safety!

gjsman-1000 1y ago
I think you're confusing technical encryption with the privacy of encryption. For example, let's say I implemented a CSAM-scanning AI model in my chat app, which runs locally against your message, before communicating the message over an encrypted HTTPS channel. If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities, on a secondary separate connection. At no point, did it leave the device, in unencrypted form. Is that message encrypted? Yes. The way that you want? No. Governments have recognized this distinction, and have figured out they can have their cake and eat it too; the security of encryption with none of the privacy.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  Another example of such degenerate-encryption would be having messages "end-to-end" encrypted, but a copy of the key is kept by a service-provider or even sent in advance to a government agency.
- nicce 1y ago
  > In cryptography, encryption (more specifically, encoding) is the process of transforming information in a way that, ideally, only authorized parties can decode. From Wikipedia. They can’t have their cake. You are breaking the concept of information into smaller steps (e.g. message) when that is against the definition.

nickslaughter02 1y ago

> Danish Minister of Justice and chief architect of the current Chat Control proposal, Peter Hummelgaard: > "We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone's civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services." > Share your thoughts via https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ https://fightchatcontrol.eu/, or to jm@jm.dk directly. https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498 https://mastodon.social/@chatcontrol/115204439983078498

akomtu 1y ago
The reptile-brained politicians really hate that we can think our thoughts in secret and communicate with each other in secret.
- twothreeone 1y ago
  More likely they just really enjoy taking the money that private entities hand out like candy as a reward for pushing legislation that will cement their society-eroding business models for ages to come.
echelon 1y ago
1984 playing out in front of us. Again. Politicians like Peter Hummelgaard are ghouls. They want their eyes in your home, watching you at all moments. And then they want to control what you do and see and think. Defending our liberties and privacy is a never-ending battle.
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nicce 1y ago
Denmark has integrated Palantir for the police, so the Minister of Justice is likely the one who pursuits it most. More about Palantir in Denmark: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2410255 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2...
- 1y ago

alkonaut 1y ago

What exactly is the plan? To mandate some client side checking so that transfer encryption backdoors won't be needed? At what level would you need to do that? E.g. for iOS and then iOS need to comply with every app store app having it or else they can't operate in the EU? Is that the plan?

miohtama 1y ago
Every chat application must comply by law and companies which make them without government permission will be made criminals. It's similar as the UK Online Safety Act: 4chan staff will be arrested if they ever touch the UK soil.

jcarrano 1y ago

In the past, we could have made a version of Signal without this spyware, to be installed as an APK (as I would expect the EU to force Google to ban the non-spying version from the app store). With the upcoming Android developer verification, this will no longer be a possibility.

fifteen1506 1y ago
Slow heating boils the frog. Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
- asah 1y ago
  > If you must use Android the reasonable alternative being... ?
  - fsflover 1y ago
    GNU/Linux phones.
    - TeMPOraL 1y ago
      Name three? Unfortunately, "reasonable" generally means "can do the things typically done with smartphones these days", which include things like banking, media streaming, and civic stuff - things mediated by the very systems whose vendors aren't just embracing remote attestation, but actually driving its proliferation. For better or worse[0], this is not a technical problem - it's a social/political one. Technology created it, by making remote attestation possible - but the actual problem is with why companies want to use it. -- [0] - Definitely worse. Technical problems are easy.
      - incompatible 1y ago
        Maybe you need two phones then, one for the civic stuff and the other for private communication.

testdelacc1 1y ago

This thread is going to be 400 comments of people talking about how stupid this is, how it won't work and never will, how no sane person could possibly want this. And you know what, I agree with all of that. But there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces who are pointing out that they're unable to track the activities of criminal organisations. For example, in the UK sophisticated gangs steal cars and phones and ship them around the world where they're resold. They locate a buyer anywhere in the world who requests a specific car, find that car, steal it and have it in a shipping container within 24 hours. It's impossible to know who's done it, or track any of the communications involved. In previous eras it wasn't possible to create international criminal organisations of this level of sophistication because it was harder to communicate securely. Now it's possible and we all pay the price of increased criminal activity. Everyone's insurance premiums go up, making everyone poorer. UK car insurance premiums are up 82% between 2021 and 2024 and insurance providers are still making a loss. Just to drive this point home - watch/rewatch The Wire (2002-08), except make it impossible to tap the communications of the drug gangs because they're all using encrypted messengers with disappearing messages. Immediately the people running the organisation become untouchable. The police likely can't even figure out who the lieutenants are, let alone the kingpin. At best you can arrest a few street level dealers and that hardly disrupts the criminals at all. On HN everyone is going to say "everyone has a right to private communication, even criminal empires". And sure, I'm not going to disagree. I'm merely pointing out that private communication allows criminal networks to be much larger, more effective and harder to disrupt. And all of society pays the price when we're victimised by criminals. Edit: I'm not saying breaking encryption is a good thing or that it will work, I'm only pointing out why police forces want access to communication records. They're unable to do their jobs and are being blamed for the rise in crime. To prove that you've actually read my comment till the end, please mention banana in your comment.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.
1y ago

ThouYS 1y ago

Why risk all of the good the EU has done with such a catastrophic proposal? This would come close to nullifying the entire endeavour.

zelphirkalt 1y ago
EU gets infiltrated by corporate interest just like every single country's government does. It's a constant fight against lobbyism and financial interests opposing the citizens' rights. I wish it wasn't so, but greed knows no bounds.

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poulpo 1y ago

No one has really pointed forward a convincing explanation of who is behind this movement. The idea that this is the police is ludicrous to me, I don't know every european country but my overall opinion is that they have very little sway over anything. I am in a group of high civil servants for digital services in France and strangely no one seems to have heard about the project despite these people drafting most of France's position on numeric policies. My view is it is probably more about mass control (avoiding a movement like Gilets Jaunes and the like) than anything else.

casey2 1y ago

If this could possibly work it would have already been implemented for DRM. It doesn't even really work if you have complete control over content distribution. I get that politicians want to be seen as being active in combating crime. But the only proven way to prevent creating and proliferation of CSAM is to educate the masses.

okokwhatever 1y ago

How long till we start sharing encrypted text files? Tic, tac, tic, tac, tic, tac... Mark my words.

00100C000111 1y ago

Well, have you heard of Attaullah Baig? https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov https://youtube.com/shorts/33Cm88Dazoo?si=Eb1CfOZB6Ri34Dov They could just ask Meta, most europeans use WhatsApp anyway. Or we know where WhatsApp sends back ups to, totally unencrypted. So what do we have. TG chats not encrypted by default, Signal works fine to the best of my knowledge. But with physical access to devices MAC with file vault off and most windows machines, its lights out right away.