Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

> So, if I'm reading this correctly, Chat Control [2.0, implied] is bound to become law?

Nope. This is bad, but not THAT bad.

This is an extension of the existing Chat Control 1.0, which was set to expire (or maybe already has, I didn't keep track). AIUI it gives chat companies permission to scan user chats for illicit content, but does not mandate it.

This is bad, but it's not the much worse still Chat Control 2.0 that was defeated several times already.

1 - this is about Chat Control 1.0

2 - The vote was on the "Urgency requirement"

> parliamentarians starting their summer break whenever they want will never not be funny

Eh. This is the least problematic thing here. Some MEPs might just be on official PTO.

The EU is a dictatorship for some time already. The fact they push and push and push unpopular laws until they push them through is all you need to know about them.

They sneaked this atrocity in while all the EU-controlled media hype the football championship and blame Trump and FIFA boss Infantino for overriding a decision on whether a single player will play a single game or not.

> how democratic of the EU

Well, these are the MEPs elected by member states. We don’t like the outcome but this means chat control is well supported within the government of each country.

They only have to win once. You have to win every time.

So basically the people we elected will vote yes. How's that undemocratic? Because the majority doesn't vote the way I like it? I'm not even ironic, I truly don't understand those comments. You get what you voted for, garbage in garbage out.

This is so cryptic that I wouldn't even know if for or against would mean for or against 'chat control'

This is an incredibly good idea. 90 days is too short to feel the effects of some things though. Better make it a year.

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

And the worse part is: they do that because the alternative means you're building a railway on a surface tunnel because some people don't like it (or worse, not building anything)

In your doomed reality maybe, but in this reality it was already stopped a couple of times and chances are good, that it will be stopped again - unless people believe all is doomed.

Centralized messaging services won't last long, their capture is sadly inevitable. In the long run, only self-hosted/decentralized protocols can resist what's coming.

In the meantime though, Signal specifically should not do something stupid like blocking the EU, which is basically surrender. They are a non-profit headquartered in the US, so there are zero business risks to non-compliance - nothing in the EU to fine or seize. And the EU has no jurisdiction over servers in the US, all they can do is build their own Great Firewall. (However, they might pressure AWS to deplatform Signal - hopefully the team is prepared for the possibility that self-hosting will be necessary soon.)

> I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.

Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.

In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."

average people never have skin in the game too. They barely understand a lot of the things that make things possible

This is about Chat Control 1.0 (voluntary scanning).

Part of the confusion is that there are two things involved here; 'Chat Control 1', an existing (but expiring) derogation to the ePrivacy Directive which allows, but does not require, providers to scan messages. 'Chat Control 2', which you'll likely have heard more about, would _require_ providers to do this. The wiki article is quite poorly written and implies that 1 is an earlier version of 2, which isn't really the case.

Anyway, this is about Chat Control 1.

It's probably line item 156/289 on some intern's list of things to check once a week and make sure it "looks good". Politicians engage in just as much publicity management as big corporations do.

Just assume the worst: all your private messages would be read and shared between all governments and corporations in the world.

The way the uk is legislating online stuff lately I’m expecting UK version to be worse than EU

UK already technically banned encryption, causing Apple to remove the encrypted cloud service for UK customers. Check UK's "Investigatory Powers Act (IPA)"

> Hopefully this could be the first good thing about Brexit

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

The trouble with pictures is that when you share them online the platform will likely compress them before serving them to others, spoiling your steganography. I think text-in-text is the way to go. Decrypt that recipe for brownies into the actual message. For example: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20075

What I don't understand is, what kind of legitimate criminal would not use such techniques? Are bank robbers planning things out on iMessage? If so, presumably they won't be criminals for very long. Therefore these types of initiatives only impact the innocent and inept but still active criminals.

That's an excellent take.

Unfortunately, verified devices will close that loophole.

> ... these elected people act as tsars, ...

They are not elected. Even the EU is illegal, since joining the EU was rejected by people of many European countries, but that was ignored.

They just do what they want and do thorough media coverage. In rare cases that doesn't work, people just dissapear.

Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.

When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.

The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.

I am not a lawyer, but, as a Russian citizen, let me warn you. The very fact that your comment criticizing the EU regime, that you yourself admit could send you to jail, is online and not deleted by Thursday, makes it a "lasting crime". For lasting crimes, it does not matter that the regulation criminalizing the action or state of affairs was not in force when they started. What matters is that the condition defined as illegal (comment existing) is true when the regulation outlawing it is in force - i.e., that you did not cease and desist. Yes, this is a creative way authorities circumvent the ban on ex post facto laws - they say "it is not ex post facto".

Commented on Tuesday, deleted the comment on Wednesday, the regulation is enacted on Thursday => OK.

Commented on Tuesday, did not delete before Thursday => jail (and it does not matter that you can't delete it anymore because it has a reply).

Sarcasm of course, as Russian laws do not apply here.

It’s a good time to download the source code for software that allows locally encrypted messaging, particularly without central infrastructure.

Delta Chat works with any email server and has a rich feature set, Bitchat is also good to have on hand. And of course the old standby GPG, flawed as it may be.

Also NNCP (https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/) in case sneakernet solutions are ever needed.

And who's to say Drama is dead huh

I love how your average EU left-leaning cybertistic who has less serotonin than Werther and yet thinks all their country needs is more 3rd world "refugees" acts upon a tiny modicum of difficulty or government control (which should not be read as me advocating for it, naturally)

> Any advice from free people of China on circumventing government restrictions and control?

You should look into what goes on WeChat

But anyway the Chinese has way more agency and way less qualms about using air-conditioner so let me make a guess on who's surviving the heat waves

Gotta love the downvotes. At least we have free healthcare folks (for now lol).