Like, breaking encryption is just not possible if the encryption is set using a proper algorithm. Governments try, and they try to pass laws, but it's literally impossible. No amount of political will can change that. Ultimately I can write an encryption algorithm or use GPG or something and nobody on Earth, no matter how motivated or how rich, can read what I encrypted, provided I do not let out the key. If I just keep the password in my head, it's impossible.
So, until we invent technology to extract secrets from a human brain, you cannot universally break encryption. Its just not possible. Doesn't matter if 7 billion people worldwide vote for that. Doesn't matter if Elon Musk wants it. Doesn't matter if the FBI, CIA, and the NSA all work together.
It's also not a technical problem because technical solutions (like GPG) already exist. The problem is political (stopping these authoritarian laws) or should that fail, social (convincing people to inconvenience themselves with alternative communication apps that aren't available on app stores)
Normies won’t start using PGP. Normies will use whatever popular app their friends are on.
Those apps can have their encryption made illegal, kicked off stores, and their developers jailed. The thing protecting the developers from this isn’t the strength of their encryption, it’s the laws saying the encryption is legal.
That's the same 99% of the population whose motivations and priorities define the incentive structures applicable to politics. If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight without quite a lot of leverage attached to entirely unrelated issues.
So the choice is between creating impediments to the enforcement of this bad policy, and at minimum using technology to establish a frontier beyond which it can't reach -- one that is at least available to those motivated to seek it out -- or instead surrendering completely to politics controlling everything, with it being almost a certainty that the political process will be dominated by adverse interests.
Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.
We will need technical solutions to Chat Control of course, but that's just the last step. First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement. An uncensored chat app is useless if we can't install it on our devices without government approval.
Unfortunately a significant portion of the tech community is in favor of these walled ~~prisons~~ gardens. Anything we try to do is doomed to fail without freedom to do what we want with devices we own, so until we get past that hurdle I'm hopeless that we'll be able to do anything about Chat Control.
I'm not very hopeful about politics generally, for that very reason. The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.
> First we need to crack open iOS and Android with anti-trust enforcement.
Another political solution? Not going to happen. We need to work towards a functional mobile OS ecosystem that isn't controlled by Apple, Google, or the government. That won't be easy, and won't offer any immediate short-term options, but work is already in progress, and will in the long run be far more effective than waiting for politics to save us.
I hold out some hope that the EU "faction" responsible for the DMA makes enough progress in the coming years to make the lives of Chat Control proponents difficult by fighting for viability and complete independence of third party app stores. That's why I think it's critical for the EU to strike down Apple's (and now Google's) notarization process.
I'd also invite those who support walled gardens and attack the EU for the DMA to rethink their position because if authoritarian legislation like Chat Control succeeds in the EU, it's definitely coming to the US next.
Of course an independent OS would be the dream but I'm even less hopeful about that.
That depends largely on how the issue is presented. For example, it is now seen as "only sensible" to use pseudonyms online to protect your true identity from random people.
Why does the same not apply to your other data?
Why should the government have access to pictures of your children?
It targets the 99% of the population who do not care about your absolutist stance on encryption, do not care about the technical reason you can't have simultaneous perfect encryption and a gov backdoor, and do not care about math.
They care that the world changed pretty much overnight, and they are tired of finding out that their children have been solicited for sex by strangers on the internet and platforms have done everything possible to NOT address that problem.
People are tired of being victimized, tired of not having some control over what their children are able to interact with, tired of being blamed for giving their kids access to the internet while their kids are required to use the internet for things like school
It's utter insanity to think parents wouldn't rather just cede some freedom to have a fighting chance of bringing up children the way they want, of being able to keep them safe from literal pedophiles. That's not apathy, that's a difference of priorities.
The entire history of human civilization is the story of ceding certain freedoms for some sort of stability. Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
The internet has been the single largest boon to pedophiles and people making and distributing child porn ever, and parents are tired of waiting for Google and Facebook to hem and haw about how they can't afford to fix it and wont even try.
If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative that doesn't take enormous effort to learn and understand, that actually works, that doesn't put the onus on them to magically be able to police every single HTTP request their child's devices make without even giving them the tools to do so. Stop blaming parents for not parenting hard enough. You have no idea how absurd this entire situation is for parents who aren't tech experts.
And no, child parental controls on devices right now are utterly unsophisticated, and utterly useless at stopping this. Parents will turn on as much tracking as they can, and STILL find out their kids figured out a fairly trivial way of bypassing it.
Stop ignoring the very real problems that modern parents are faced with.
They certainly shouldn’t have always online devices capable of accessing social media platforms.
US father of three here and if they’re younger than 15 just hand them a Nintendo switch… if you hand them anything at all.
You will never win the arms race you’ll be fighting- against both your children and the platforms.
Just opt out.
No! It is not my job to appease your fantasies. It is your job to first and foremost prove that Chat Control will effectively curb child abuse, which proponents of the legislation have completely failed to do. Secondly it is your job to ensure that your solution doesn't break the EU charter of fundamental human rights.
Here is a solution for you: All children must be accompanied by their legal guardian at all times - a child must never leave their sight. Unlike Chat Control, this solution would actually work and prevent all cases of abuse except those perpetrated by the guardians themselves.
> Parents will happily run government code on all their devices if it means the government strings up pedophiles every week.
By all means, I support your decision to run government code on all of your devices. Just keep mine and everyone else's out of it.
Does your school not force them to have some sort of laptop? I was using my middle school provided laptop to do things I probably shouldn't have on my parent's network with them none the wiser, and the school not caring what I did, and utterly unable to stop me even if they wanted. In fact, the IT department basically drafted me and a few other students to be repair techs.
I was only superficially technically inclined at the time.
Parents will want control over their 16-18 year olds too, that's kind of a critical time.
"Just don't let them use the internet at all" is a great way to ensure your kid cannot develop any sort of healthy relationship with the internet once they become an age where they can just buy their own stuff, and sets them up nicely to be fresh, naive meat to whoever wants to exploit them.
My family is all experiencing this.
You have simply given parents a lose lose lose lose situation, and then complain when they turn to the only remaining group claiming to offer assistance.
But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here -- how does Apple merely not wanting a competing product ecosystem to emerge explain why it hasn't? Especially considering that it is happening, though slowly and haphazardly.
> Not really sure how you think that 2 of the most valuable companies on the planet do not have the resources.
I mean, it seems observably true that the foundation layer of both of their products comes directly from FOSS projects. Claiming that the FOSS world doesn't have the resources to develop an alternative product ecosystem, given that the proprietary solutions are already based on that ecosystem, seems a bit incorrect.