Do not accept the premise of assholes.
I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. Maybe under some organisation similar to NL Labs.
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Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route.
How are things in the EU on whether it's legal to buy a SIM card without showing ID?
The task, therefore, is to convince enough politicians to establish an independent unit that can address this issue without direct political influence.
Fund the unit with enough money so that it can take care of the cybersecurity and sovereignty of all citizens.
A side effect of this would hopefully be that these politicians would then be digitally literate enough to recognize nonsense such as chat control as such and reject it outright. I hope that most politicians would not really want such omnipotent surveillance tools if they could truly grasp their scope.
And even in that case, doing this for a long period of time violates most roaming policies
It varies per country. In some you can just buy one (or more) SIM cards at a supermarket without any ID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...
In some places your plan will be cancelled for roaming beyond a certain number of days or quantity of usage. Telecom laws and polices vary widely.
In some EU member states this might be fine, but definitely not all.
> Your local drunkard will be happy to get $10 to buy a SIM card for you.
Buying a SIM card was always the easy bit. Getting it activated may not be, it depends on which country you're in.
https://www.telekom.de/prepaid-aktivierung/en/start
"For the Selfie-Ident you identify yourself with your identity card, passport or residence permit. (Selfie-Ident is currently possible worldwide with the German ID card, residence permit and passport. Alternatively, you can use Video-Ident and identify yourself in a video call with an employee.)
Important: Temporary identification documents are not supported due to internal check. You need a tablet or smartphone with a camera and an internet connection."
As a result, sites where I could rent a number for verification, now don't offer local numbers anymore.
Secure for who, and from whom?
Remote Attestation and Developer Verification both make Android OS and platform more secure against malicious actors that would want to defeat the guarantees the platform gives, guarantees that enable secure digital services.
Yes, this includes protecting the banking services and DRM media services and advertising platforms from malicious actors like you and me, who pose a real threat to the revenues of the aforementioned players, by:
- Expecting banking to do security right on their own side, instead of outsourcing it to mobile platform and society at large (like with "identity theft" trick);
- Enjoying entertainment and education in ways the vendor or IP owner does not like or can't be arsed to support, and thus not spending extra on the inferior ways that are supported;
- Not looking at the ads.
Same is with Chat Control. Chat Control improves security of the society against threats such as sexual predators who want to hurt children, or citizens who disapprove of how the current ruling class is governing the people. To effectively provide that security, Chat Control in turn relies on a secure OS and platform providing secure digital services - in particular, secure against those malicious actors that would want to circumvent Chat Control protections.
Is the larger picture clear now? Security technologies are not inherently good, they're morally ambivalent. They're "dual-use". It's important to consider their deployment on a case-by-case basis, always asking who is being secured, and what are the actual threats they're being secured from.
Also, I'm not saying Chat Control is dual-use, I'm saying crypto is. Chat Control actually needs working crypto to be properly implemented.
> > The ID presented at time of purchase does not have to be the ID of the actual user of the card
>In some EU member states this might be fine, but definitely not all
It seems hard if not impossible to prevent or stop?