New EU Chat Control proposal moves forward(techreport.com) |
New EU Chat Control proposal moves forward(techreport.com) |
As far as I understand, people using this site to contact their elected officials were instrumental in making lawmakers back down from ChatControl v2.0. Hoping the same will be true this time around.
Viewing it as anything else is actively counterproductive.
The fact that they will keep bringing it back until we have better people in the EU Parliament just means that we have to win more victories.
What if the foss app has the “scanning” but can be disabled with a compile time flag
Is my email client going to have to implement this scanning if I use pgp?
Makes me wonder (and worry) if they can stretch the definition to apply to standard package repos as well. Are we going to be entering an era where you have to verify your identity & age to apt-get software?
These proposals are against German laws and other EU countries. It can be treated as terrorist attack attempt.
It creates psychological and physical harm, indiscriminately for ideological gain. Textbook terrorism, except done by nice people in suits and there is no blood (yet).
The disguised return of EU Chat Control - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45929511 - Nov 2025 (340 comments)
- The Dark Web: TOR, I2P (<--- not sure why I2P didn't gain more popularity) or potemntially other alternatives in the same space
- VPN outside the EU and access a secure messaging system via the VPN exit point. This would assume that the system would have E2EE / some kind of at least superficial privacy guarantees.
Am I missing any major category / tech combination?
The real danger is if hardware becomes dongled by firmware that doesn’t allow you to install anything you want anymore.
Think things like requiring play integrity attestation to access banking, or an equivalent service baked into macOS, Windows, iOS. If you aren't on one of those proprietary and spied on OSes, you can't access most of the web.
So technically the hardware will remain relatively open, but they'll make it so you can't interact with the rest of society with it.
But these proposals came not from the EU Parliament (who you directly vote for), but from the EU Commission (who you do not). They have since been revived by several presidencies of the Council, who are also highly likely to be immune to your electoral displeasure. The EU Parliament has no ability to initiate legislation.
The EU-critical minority on HN keeps pointing this out only to receive downvotes, while the same old misunderstandings continue. Any democratic link between the EU Citizens and the Commission is effectively homeopathic.
I am glad that the Parliament had rejected these proposals, but remember the saying… you have to be lucky every time.
Each member state nominates a Commissioner candidate, in consultation with the incoming Commission President. Each Commission candidate is interviewed by a Parliamentary committee, and (rarely) they might be rejected. I suppose you could pressure your MEP if they happen to be on the committee...
The MEPs as a group have to approve the whole Commission as a final stage and could reject them... but this has never happened. The closest thing to this would be the Commission of '99 that collectively resigned over corruption.