This is the worst thing in ages. I’m 50+, very good with IT, and I understand that we MUST act against it.
But I’m tired, boss.
Surrounded by lemmings and sheep that love Facebook and WhatsApp. People are stupid. I don’t have the energy to fight so much ignorance and stupidity - willful or otherwise.
I’m overwhelmed by this stupidity and collective ignorance all the time. Not just in data privacy regards.
Some days I just want to give up and say “screw it”. But damn, I can’t. And a lot of others will not stop. If you do, thats alright, it is okay to rest.
Thank you, kind stranger.
The provided link will let you contact MPs with just a few lazy clicks.
Just a few years older, in IT as a career, and absolutely the same.
You know what though, when encryption was first developed in the form of pgp, the whole point was that it was to sidestep the government being able to spy on you.
Perhaps we just need to accept that we need to take encrypted communication into our own hands and not rely on messaging apps to protect us
The issue came down to ease of usability. PGP simply wasn’t plug-and-play, hell it wasn’t even easy to set up. And most importantly, it absolutely depended on the other person having the same configuration.
As messaging platforms like Signal has shown, security and encryption needs to be transparent and unnoticeable. It needs to be totally frictionless and thinking-free in order for the average Joe to want to use it.
And that is even before other issues such as platform stickiness, which Signal has issues with.
Oh shit - I thought they dropped this! JFC, EU! What TF are you doing?
Any Dutch people here? Follow nerdvote.nl, to help decide who to vote for this election. They are suggesting technical minded people should unite and form a block in elections, so that parties will try to cater to us. If you want our vote, come up with plans an proposals to create digital sovereignty and freedom. As a member of PVDA/GL I am probably voting Barbara Kathmann , as she is fighting for digital sovereignty. Without preferential votes she probably won’t make it in so your preferential vote matters!
Operation Rubicon!
This is such a bad idea that even the US stopped doing it to all their enemies (i.e. their allies). Of course they have PRISM instead now which can’t be cracked by their enemies (i.e. their enemies and allies).
Ok how do they plan to enforce that?
By banning HTTPS at the ISP level?
Edit: and then how do they enforce GPDR? Because you better believe everyone and their mother is going to snoop on every communication made.
Blocking HTTPS would be frighteningly hilarious. My employer is one of thousands of websites that utilizes HSTS, which tells web browsers to use HTTPS. Our implementation of HSTS, like lots of banks etc. is also listed with HSTSpreload, which means browsers like chrome will only ever use HTTPS with our site.
What if they just do MITM with a Trusted root? Does HSTS provide a method to do cert pinning?
HSTS just enforces HTTPS over HTTP.
I seriously doubt Chrome or Firefox would ever be coerced into trusting a cert like that. If they did then you would see a very rapid shift away from those browsers to one or more of the open source alternatives.
And any CA that issued such a cert that allowed for wholesale MITM access like that would be blacklisted by all the browsers very quickly as well. That would put the CA out of business very quickly.
Don’t need to ban encryption, just control top level certificate authorities and have access to private keys.
I’d like to see them try to get mine lol.
And any CA doing so would lose their certificate authority status pretty damn quickly.
By banning HTTPS at the ISP level?
I think you might not be aware of it but big institutions like governments and such can basically already circumvent HTTPS encryption by supplying fake root certificates and forcing the ISP to redirect traffic through their own servers.
That is why End-to-End encryption is such a big deal. Because it cannot be circumvented by the government alone. If done right (proper key exchange), it cannot be broken by anyone but the legitimate recipients. The way WhatsApp does it today, Meta could technically break it too, though i’m not sure whether they do.
That’s not necessarily very easy. These certs would have to show up in public certificate transparancy logs for most browsers to accept them. If this happens on a government scale it would surely get noticed, though the question remains what you’re left to do if the government forces it anyways…
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency section “Mandatory certificate transparency”
not necessarily very easy
admittedly, but i still assume that the CIA could do it if it tried.
edit: thanks for the link though, this seems very interesting :D
One point of hope is that they mandated cross platform chat compatibility too, and every platform is just… Ignoring it and not doing it with zero consequences.
Maybe this just also won’t happen.
Feeling hopeful about giant tech companies ignoring attempts to reign them in is unwise, even when it occasionally lines up with something you personally want. And I even say that as someone with permanent distrust of the big power structures doing the regulating.
Of course chat control would be practically infeasible. But it’s not even about that. It’s about the simple fact that the EU commission ignores the will of the people, when the people have already clearly said NO. It’s about the disrespect that the EU commission exerts against the people. That in itself is unacceptable.
Aren’t Europeans supposed to be the good guys?
There are no “good guys” or “bad guys” in geopolitics, just shades of grey. On quite a few topics, the EU is better, but any government is capable of doing stupid shit.
good take
No, the EU is just as much liberal capitalism as the US. They have a better social safety net and looked better in comparison.
the EU commission is absolutely dumb and definitely not on the side of the people though. by the way, it’s also not democratically elected.
The EU’s been veering right for a few years now.
I’m just so tired of it all. At this point I would not be surprised about ending up in prison a decade from now for using encrypted communication.
It’s ironic to use a meme from a movie depicting a fascistic government, to protest against a fascistic measure.
I suppose the better meme would be “it ain’t much, but it’s honest work”
Thanks for sharing the link to contact the MEPs. Thats actually very useful.
In many cases this could be argued as unconstitutional.
In germany, it’s not technically unconstitutional (i checked last week because i assumed it should be) but it definitely feels like it should be unconstitutional. After WW2, there was a consensus to not surveil your own population, and this is a very important constraint to keep in mind.
In Lithuania privacy is defined as a fundamental right and it includes correspondence, digital or otherwise.
Would that prevent passing laws enabling chat control? Doubt it, but I can see it as a good legal argument against it.
According to the EU constitution?
According to constitutions of member states.
At least here it’s worded in a way that chat control could be argued as unconstitutional (not a lawyer tho).I would not be surprised that any other sane constitution protects privacy, and by extension digital correspondence, under fundamental rights.
Yes, the right to privacy is a fundamental right in the eu charter.
I yhink the declaration of the rights of man and citizens is in there somewhere. But I haven’t really looked at it since the Schengen treaty mess.
I’ve contacted them yesterday evening. Funnily enough, all the AfD opposes chat control. They’re clever. If chat control were to pass, they could campaign on having opposed it, and then mission creep it once elected.
Also get those MPs imprisoned
If it passes in the EU, it will pass in the United States. This affects all of us.
EU politicians are probably the only ones who ought to be scanned
