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Discussion (67 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
But this is the ultimate "grant me dictatorial powers so I can do good" play.
Rather than narrow and specific - it's a broad based law that suddenly touches everyone even though offenders are a small percentage and should be able to be targeted more efficiently.
Reminder that none of this has any evidence that it helps CSA, but nobody cares about the actual children.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/07/07/european-parli...
The party that they want to ban is a consistent and loud opponent of chat control.
It would be hard to imagine a US party that didn't believe the other party is out of compliance with US values. As a justification for blocking democracy it's universal and ever present.
It’s important to note the lawmakers stay in office even if the European party is banned.
Europe is also not the US and from my knowledge it seems that this is the only party suspected of not complying with values. There are many many more parties that they are not trying to ban.
They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.
But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
Or rather struggling to hold onto the fantasy of a Russian invasion on their Eastern borders, when Russia has spent 4 years in order to manage to hold on to a quarter of Ukraine, entirely filled with Russians.
> But at the same time, their politicians can't do anything because the minute they suggest that they might have to start cutting pensions and public welfare, and all of these different things in order to start supporting national industry and defense, they lose support immediately.
They don't have to do this, they can cut public spending and invest (and aid private investment), but the EU is too weak to do this. What they're hoping is that spending on arms can revive their economies. They deeply need a looming threat to convince member states to do this. They should instead make the EU a real federation with teeth (and a real central bank), or call it a day.
The EU needs a proper way to get investment into technology, innovation and infrastructure, not to invade the east a third time (not that they're willing to spend the money on that either, no matter how hard they propagandize and censor.)
The EU seems to spend most of its time threatening to regulate things that it has no ability to produce, and is also not investing in its future ability to produce. It seems doomed to continue to be a vassal of the US, or if it wises up just a little bit, a vassal of China.
"A temporary derogation from the ePrivacy Directive that allowed (but did not require) providers to scan private messages of unsuspected users for potential child sexual abuse material."
Does that imply it's currently not allowed?
EDIT: apparently not enforced at least:
"Chat Control 1.0 expires
The legal ground for voluntary, indiscriminate scanning ends. Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Snap state they will continue scanning private messages regardless. "
1. allow MITM decryption by a privileged authority
2. require all devices doing E2EE have a non-user-modifiable piece of functionality to scan on-device
The second is the Apple style on-device CSAM scanner? I have to say that I do sometimes think about it while taking a photo of my baby playing in the bathtub - photos like my parents have of me which have been kind of nice to see later. It would be a pity if I had to have a separate analog camera just for baby photos because then I'd need to learn the whole developing film stuff.
This is exactly what has been proposed. E.g. WhatsApp has a piece of code that scans images and texts before sending. After that, they are "encrypted".
Polaroid coming back in business! I would not complain at all if we started reverting some of our lifestyle behaviors back to analog.
I think there is no way to fix this system from the inside - it is designed to be abused like that. We need an alternative system.
I thought I'd heard it all here on HN, but expecting EU to clean up after the US shooting itself in the foot with a completely unnecessary war probably comes somewhere in top 5 easily.
We aren't done yet. Game on after the midterms.
Please don't pretend to misunderstand a point just to manufacture the opportunity to reply in bad faith.
Nobody in EU is saying the EU should clean up others' mess around the world, people are just saying the EU should be busy building domestic capacity and capabilities to insulate itself from the issues caused by others around the world, such as securing domestic energy supplies so that the next time USrael blows up the middle east, the EU can just eat it no issue indead of being at the mercy of foreign oligarchs for overpriced energy.
US is so monetary rich and energy rich that they can afford to blow up the middle east every 10 years with little domestic consequences for them, and still have enough gas to drive their Ford F-450s Super Duty to Walmart, heat their pools and AC their homes, without leading to national unrest, but EU is so energy starved that securing energy independence should have been a national security issue for the past 20 years already, not since 2022.
And not just energy, EU is exposed in other areas as well (SW, AI, semiconductors, lithium batteries, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, etc), and again, it will only wake up in panic mode at the 11th hour when US or China twists their arm in some spontaneous international dispute. But politicians instead of focusing on preemptively securing these vulnerabilities BEFORE shit hits the fan, are too busy focusing on controlling people's privacy, which is what EU citizens and commenters here are criticizing.
If this is what you wanted to have said, say that from the beginning instead of leaving some vague and ambiguous "general complaint about the Strait of Hormuz" and maybe others like me will understand you better.
Somehow you seem to imply none of those things are happening right now in Europe, is this really your perspective? You think no one is thinking about domestic energy supplies? Do you not understand how EU works? Lots of things are happening in parallel, not the least a lot of work around energy dependency and other core infrastructure issues.
That's literally what the top poster said.
Your points make sense, "EU should reopen Hormuz" is laughable
Setting up the next Stasi is more important to the eurocrats than energy and food security. Wait, they did the Mercosur agreement which will cripple more of the domestic agriculture in exchange for dumping German diesel cars onto unsuspecting South Americans.
But they can't do shit about Hormuz. Only talk, talk and more useless talk, go away USA you're not using our bases to refuel and then some more useless talk.
Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48819008
-- Canadian
The concept of a modern nation is also relatively new. It emerged as an identity for groups of people who were no longer defined mainly by the monarchs ruling over them. That identity replaced the king as the symbol of belonging.
But now nationalism is often doing the opposite. Instead of freeing people from old power structures, it is holding Europe back.
So yes, maybe it is not literally “your house”, but the point still stands. Burning down the city around your house is not exactly a smart move either.
If you measure "function" by the relative economic and military power of the country, then the EU has overwhelmingly degraded the function of its initial members compared to when they joined.
One griefer which promised prosperit fueled Brexit, which caused Britain visible stagnation and now he is a candidate for MP promising to fixing it all yet again.
I need to repeat, that Simple solutions for complex problems usually do not work.
its a crime against what was not so long ago some of the greatest nations on earth. now were as citizen are living under a distopia of urss with the worst of capitalism combined with the worst of communism. mass surveillance, removal of all personal freedom (freedom of speech, right to own property and cars, right to inherit, right to have a nation for our people, harshnpunishment for any contestation’up to jail timz for memes while at the same time very lenient justice toward murderers, rapists and other criminals.)
we gave away our right to exist and be nations and we did that without even a fight
I don't like this comparison at all. Europe, the land that housed, fed and scarified my ancestors, is my house, not this supra-governmental corrupt bureaucratic institution called the EU that does not represent me nor speak in my name.
Empires, monarchies, governments and all such man-made institutions like the EU get torn down all time, when they become too bloated, incompetent, corrupt and cronyistic and lose legitimacy in the eyes of the people. See all human history.
Forests go through prescribed burns in order to be saved, for their own good, and so must political institutions. And when the rot is too big, it can't simply be "patched" anymore, it needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch with fresh new people, which in turn will get corrupted over time and get torn down, and so on, rinse and repeat because that's human nature.
Ironically, the EU has achieved its goal of uniting all Europeans, as in they're all now united via hating what the EU has become and what it's doing.
Turns out unifying a lot of different countries that have different languages and interest is a hard problem and in order to satisfy everyone a little bureaucracy is the price to pay. You may find it too bloated, too slow or even too corrupt but burning it to the ground is a lunacy for people who entertain clean slate delusions: Whenever it happens, it is a catastrophy for everyone but a few opportunists.
Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement. Now it can stay an economic union and big powers can pick and choose how to manipulate each one of us for their own purposes or it can strive to be a political union and have a standing on the international stage. We're not there yet but we will, eventually, we just need to hang tight. Things take time.
Not really. South American countries don't go to war with each other and they don't have a union. Nor do central American countries.
Taking away people's privacy and freedom of speech is a little more problematic than just "a little bureaucracy".
>Europe is imperfect but it has rejected the idea of war outside of itself. I don't think any European citizen would go to war with their neighbour. Just that is an amazing achievement.
That WAS an achievement in the past, but if you dissolve the EU institution tomorrow, no former EU member state will suddenly got to war with their neighbour just because the EU doesn't exist anymore. So the myth that the EU is preventing war in EU is bogus. That was history, this is today.
do you feel the same way when Africans speak of Africa?
But this is the hatred you are talking about?
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-embrace-eu-gloom-w...
Long-term, switch to another messenger app that's opensource and truly E2E encrypted.
That also shows why this is such a foolish proposal.
The truly scary people are not on the "consumer" chat apps anyway and most certainly will be the first ones to switch to another communication channel if this passes. If this will have any effect it'll be that some, "dumb" criminals will be caught.
Then there's the whole kerfuffle about how to actually implement this
So the thing that comforts me is that it's a dumpster fire all the way down and I'm sure there will be plenty of legal complaints about it