What has actually happened is that after about three years of faffing about the Council finally decided on it negotiation position begore the Coreper 2 meeting last week, thought it seems they ran put of time at actual the meeting and had to have the formal approval this week.
The Council is only one of three parties that draft new laws, so now there's are still several rounds of negotiations left.
Nothing substantial has happened to the three texts since last week, it's just that "chat control is back" drives traffic and "Council preparatory body formally approves draft position that got consensus previously but didn't formally get passed because people were fighting over Ukraine stuff for too long" doesn't.
While I agree with your point, it's still crucial to raise awareness of Europe's actions. It may be a small step, but it is not insignificant.
This is an extremely totalitarian-style move from EU - governing bodies are exempt from the law, meanwhile peasants have to be watched 24/7 for wrongthink, all under guise of protecting the children.
Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
I'm thinking like state already, i would never trust ANY state with such powers, even the one that was perfectly aligned with my political views.
It's not issue of state, but dilution of responsibility and the way the votes are counted.
It is also an issue of unelected officials deciding things - the whole system is broken.
Before you say that heads of state were elected - this is highly contentious issue, no one ran on this in internal campaigns, and votes on this issue are counted country-wide(all for or all against), without any regards to distribution of populace's opinion on this subject.
>Even without any argument about personal rights and what's totalitarian, I can't even square the circle of the unstoppable force of "the economy is dependent on encryption that can't be hacked" with the immovable object of "hostile governments and organised criminals undermine ${insert any nation here} and communicate with local agents via encryption that can't be hacked".
You're enacting legislation that will actually empower those entities this way!
Criminals - surprise surprise - can just break the law, and use devices/software that just.. does not do content scanning, and uses true E2E encryption. Even over insecure channel by using steganography and key exchange over it.
Espionage can be handled the same way, probably even easier as they can easily use one-time pads and key phrases established beforehand in their country of origin!
Meanwhile only group affected by it are just normal citizens.
First, this can be made a crime by itself, and detected automatically because the mandatory back-doors fail.
Second, what gets talked about in public (the only thing any of us knows for sure, but also definitely not the whole picture) includes foreign governments recruiting locals via normal messenger apps.
More of a problem is that the back-doors can be exploited by both criminals and hostile powers.
You're assuming they continue to use monitored channels to carry it out.
Can you square the circle, even in principle, without questions of cost?
and the answer is no but yes - by encrypting everything E2E you can massively reduce harm done, and treat espionage/crime as policy/economic problem instead.
> Especially as perfect encryption is indistinguishable from noise.
Irrelevant. If powers can't decrypt it, powers deem it a crime to have or send.
"white-noise.wav is a test file and I'm an acoustics engineer": tough, supply the seed to the PRNG which created it or fine time.
> policy/economic problem instead
Instead? Everything about this is about groups wanting to act in secret for their best interests, and other people wanting to ensure that only the interests they share get to do that. This is true when it's me logging into my bank and criminals trying to get access to the same, when it's the Russian government sponsoring arson attacks in Europe and local police trying to stop them, and when it's the CIA promoting Tor for democracy activists in dictatorships and those dictatorships trying to stop them.
We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
1) Illegal telecoms equipment can be seized
2) Someone doing this on the public Internet would only get away with it if their encrypted packets *never ever* went through a government licensed router. The moment they go through a public router: instantly detected.
Can't square the circle. Crypto is too important.
Must have. Can't have. Must have. Can't have.
If it was easy to come down one side or the other, everyone in the world would be on the same page.
The tension between them is pulling everyone in both directions.
It's a photo I took yesterday. Now what? It may or may not have a secret message that only the target knows how to decrypt. Or maybe it's just more "traditional" text encryption with code names, but real human-legible text.
It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.
If that seed doesn't generate that particular white noise sequence, or if you can't supply that photo, then you go to jail.
> It's technically unfeasible to ban encryption.
It's also economically unfeasible.
Am I using moonspeak without realising it when I say "I can't square this circle"? Is this a phrase that people are unfamiliar with and I just haven't realised?
Guilty until proven innocent, the burden is on you to prove it.
you are hung up on your pre-made assumption that the EU(state) in this case can have perfect control - which is fallacious in itself - and therefore are just arguing in bad faith. When they have such perfect control this is already a totalitarian state, that requires no such thing as due process.
all of that to push forward your point:
>We must have unbreakable encryption, and yet also we cannot have it.
A judiciary in such a sorry state, that has not adapted to a changed reality, cannot be permitted to read private communications.
Freedom of speech is about pre-moderation. It doesn't mean your actions do not have consequences. If you yell fire in a theatre while there is none, you should be held liable. See also the case of Gennaro P. (the Damschreeuwer) who at May 4 of 2010 yelled during two minutes of silence of Rememberance of the Dead.
Now the rest of Europe has much more freedom of speech than UK, but that is an example of a mean tweet about a government official that got sentenced. We don't want that in the EU.
Note that the guy was convicted even though he almost immediately deleted the tweet and apologized, the law is that bad, you aren't allowed to slip up even a little bit.
https://nypost.com/2022/03/31/twitter-user-sentenced-to-comm...
YES IT DOES THAT IS EXACTLY THE POINT
You obviously do not believe in freedom of speech as defined by US law. You are conflating extremely narrow exceptions with broad politically motivated violations of freedom of political speech
Neither do you. The Supreme Court of the United States has repeatedly held in numerous rulings that freedom of speech and/or freedom of expression is not absolute and you can be sanctioned, prosecuted and/or imprisoned for some forms of speech and/or expression -- i.e. you do have consequences.
- Schenck v. United States (1919) -- Speech that has intent and a clear and present danger of resulting in a crime is not protected under the First Amendment
- Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) -- The First Amendment does not protect fighting words, which are those that inherently cause harm or are likely to result in an immediate disturbance
- Feiner v. New York (1951) -- The police are permitted to take action against those exercising speech that is likely to disturb the peace
- United States v. O'Brien (1968) -- You can be prosecuted for destroying certain property as an act of political speech; the law forbidding this was not unconstitutional
- Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) -- It is permissible to restrict speech that advocates for imminent unlawful violence and is likely to incite people to perform such
- Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton (1973) -- Restrictions on the dissemination of obscene material are not by themselves unconstitutional (see also the ruling immediately below)
- Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc (1991) -- Public indecency laws banning dancing nude are not unconstitutional
- Virginia v. Black (2003) -- Partial reversal: While a broad ban on cross-burning is unconstitutional, banning cross-burning for the express intent to intimidate is not
- Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) -- As a public official, you can be sanctioned by your government employer for speech contrary to employment policy
- Morse v. Frederick (2007) -- Schools can ban students from sharing speech about illegal drug use at school
- Counterman v. Colorado (2023) -- True threats of violence are outside the bounds of the First Amendment, and laws covering stalking and making threats in this manner are not unconstitutional
There's a good reason why on every half-serious index about freedom of speech or freedom of press, the best countries are Scandinavian and Switzerland, followed by West-Europe. And that data is from before the current orangutan is in office.
First you say freedom of speech is about after the speech (it is about before the speech, as after that the law is applied pragmatic).
Then you come with this KJU joke. North Korea doesn't make these indices. [1] [2] [3]. In each of these, USA is decidedly below the vast majority of the free West, including the very countries I mentioned before, each of which couldn't be further from North Korea. It is also Trump during Trump 1 who was positive about KJU (IIRC before the Rocket Man rhetoric, but still), and who is being a shill for one of North Koreans partners (China by proxy / Russia). Mind you, all of these sources are post-Trump 1 yet pre-Trump 2 (ie. from Biden 1 era).
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...
[2] https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-freedom-index-2025-econom...
[3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-i...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
On all of the freedoms, USA tends to do best on freedom of speech. But how can you say such, when the press has less freedom than in other rich West countries? Isn't that counter interactive?
These things shouldn't move forward, indeed. But being angry about it for years at a time when things aren't even remotely set in stone doesn't seem healthy for an individual or society at large.
It is in every appreciable way censorship via unaccountable mob. It's censorship in a way that Reddit's downvote isn't, because Reddit allows anonymous users to read downvoted posts - or at least did the last time I checked.
At the point where tensions rise beyond polite disagreement, HN ceases to be a functional social space and turns into a game of "who can make the other's opinions disappear first."
Doing so is technically against the rules, but either the moderators don't care, aren't doing it on a large enough scale to be an effective deterrent, or are knowingly complicit.
1. this wasn't fast, it took ~5 years and most (but not all) of the problematic parts have been removed
2. It also wasn't "fully rejected" or anything in the decision which gained some awareness of hacker news, just one specific draft was rejected, not the proposal as a whole (but IMHO it should have been).
3. it's not passed just approved by the council, which consists of the various head of states elected in their respective countries (i.e. is the easiest part to pass something controversial), but still needs to pass the European parliament (elected through the EU elections)
4. and then it must not be shot down by the ECJ or ECHR, both might shot it down, the ECJ for it being excessive/disproportional, and the ECHR because privacy is accepted as a human right by it (in general, there are exceptions so not 100% guaranteed). Or shut down by the German supreme court (same reason as ECJ and ECHR) which has somewhat of a veto right (or else Germany wouldn't have been able to legally join the EU), idk. if any other countries supreme courts have similar veto rights, but idk. why they shouldn't have)
Yes however EU has very limited capabilities to enforce that. They can bully smaller countries a bit more but Germany can do more or less whatever it wants
The constitution is always supreme, because the ability to agree to the treaties derives from the constitution.
This only applies where countries ceded sovereignty to the EU.
Technically in Germany non of the sovereignty was ceded but transferred based on two different articles in the German Constitution. But that transfer is neither absolute, nor automatic. Practically it means that in most situations it is "as if" it was cede, but just in most situations.
This leads to a situation where if the supreme court rules that some EU regulations or similar are against the German constitution you have a conflict between the constitutional articles which transfer authority and the ones the court ruled to have been infringed one.
But in the German constitution not all articles are equally, the first few have special protections and extra hurdles to amend. And the article which transfers powers to the EU _is not one of them_. This means that for any of the more protected clauses Germany has not at all ceded the authority of their supreme court to do a final judgement on.
In such cases if the German supreme court says no, it's means no for any application of law in German no matter what the EU courts say. And there are only 3 ways to fix that, 1. the EU amends their regulation, 2. Germany amends their constitution (practically impossible in such cases), 3. the rule informally applies to everyone but Germany, 4. Germany leaves the EU which would likely mean it's end.
So while everyone pretends there is no issue (3rd option) can in some situations be viable and given that 2 is non-viable it pretty much always ends with a compromise of amending things just far enough to not longer cause an issue with the German constitution.
Systematic breaches of privacy through mass surveillance fall under that especially protected articles in the German constitution. And option 3 doesn't really work here. So it's one of the rare cases where German Supreme court actually matters on EU level.
Through practically it hardly ever matters outside of very very few cases:
- because of Article 1 (the most protected one you could say), the ECHR has more or less implicitly the same amount of power as the supreme court, only if the ECHR does rulings in conflict with human rights would that not be the case (so in practice never)
- as one of the core founding members and the country with the largest population (and seats in the EU parliament are distributed based on population) Germany can normally make sure such a situation doesn't arise
- and the breach must really be of a constitutional article standing above the one which transfers power to the EU (which most are not)
- you have to propagate things up to the supreme court, while all other courts will rule based on EU law/ECJ decisions
but it doesn't mean that it never happened,
e.g. there had been one case where the German supreme court ruled that a) something is against the constitution and b) that the EU organ which caused this acted unreasonable in a way which isn't covered by the transfer of authority. That case go resolved with compromises, but was neither the first nor will it be the last where "in practice" the German Supreme court overruled EU decisions, even if it on paper doesn't (because it only overrules what happens with law in Germany and overruling an EU decision would affect other countries, too).
Local devices only scanning which only if there is an issue sends any information to anywhere outside of the device might actually be compatible with the German constitution by the argument that the privacy is only violated if the local validator phones home and that it only does so if there is a reasonable suspicion at which case it isn't baseless mass surveillance anymore... on a technicality iff the local scanner have close to now false positives. It's anyway a bad idea and a lot of the things it claims it's meant to help with have a lot of neglected other solutions which would improve things a lot.
Saying "forced" about this is like if someone offered me a job, me reading the offer and saying "can I do a 4-day week?", the company's response being "yes, here's a new contract for you to sign", and describing that second contract as "forced" on me.
This has been the typical modus operandi in the EU. There is always a correct answer and the people are free to choose as long as they choose it.
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
The process is many things but quick it is not
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-new...
This message brought to you by the Bureau of Sabotage
Or the commissioners that are appointed by the democratically elected heads of the member state governments?
Appointed, so, not elected. Thanks for answering.
You will never get an answer from them. But we should keep asking it anyway.
I always wondered if they live on the EU and are genuinely too stupid to understand how the bloc their country joined works or, most likely, live outside of it and the idea of the EU as a political entity offends their sensibilities or heighten their anxiety.
It's harder to ask, "Why are people still voting for this despite it seemingly being against their interests"
But once you do start asking that question, you'll find "they're just stupid" isn't really the only answer. At least 1 other answer would be they're responding to politics of other parties failing them too.
Is it the most rational decision for those people? No, probably not, but ignoring their motivations and chalking it up to stupidity or whatnot is really not going to solve anything - and, in fact, is only going to push those people further into what they believe. You should consider whether that's what you want.
Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
Where's your "factual basis" for such assertions?
> Regarding your specific point about using recent context to inform political opinions, if you spend any amount of time listening to the opinions of people online you'll find that not only do they fail to accurately recall past events, but they don't bother to research what actually happened, and when they do they fail at anything but the most superficial political analysis.
1) People regularly online are a rather specific group
2) People sharing their opinions online are a very specific group
3) Basing your views on society at large on opinions of those groups is a risky strategy, especially given how easy it has become to spread propaganda online
Anyway as for my optimism, it's based on actually interacting with people directly. Having discussions with them. Talking to them about what they believe, and why. They're usually a lot more complex and intelligent than those various descriptors used above.
The democratic process needs a revamp but it shouldn’t be driven by the general populations attention span.
The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
If legislative processes are so drawn out and complex that no more than a handful of ordinary citizens could keep track of them, the advantage that paid lobbyists have over the public is enormous
No matter who's in charge, no matter the election results, no matter the protests - the same style of legislation is pushed.
and once something's in it is almost impossible to remove.
It would work if we could elect politicians who were both competent and trustworthy.
Of course that would require successfully electing people who are competent about a broad range of issues, able to see through well funded and clever lobbying, unblinded by ideology, and able to resist pressure.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
Your problem is with the leadership of countries, not with the EU as an institution. I agree that it is a problem btw, but I think you got the wrong culprit. This isn't pushed on the states by the EU, this is the states using the EU to push it and launder the bad publicity.
Imagine is those issues were campaign promises and part of internal(country's) elections - they aren't in reality but we can set that aside for now. as it was extremely well said by sibling post.
My country is 80% against 20% in favor(in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control!), other EU countries are 51% for, 49% against.
Yet such 'vote' by heads of state counts whole countries in,if you were to count individual votes majority of EU citizens would be against it.
This allows you to pass undesirable or extremely contentious legislation, that would most likely prevent you from being elected in the future in your local elections but you can easily shift the blame too!
This is as far form democracy as possible, it is pure bureaucracy that serves it's own goals.
A unitary state would solve that problem by allowing us to have simple, Union-wide elections instead.
"But why can't we just leave the EU to stop this" - too late. Most EU countries have enough intra-EU migration and trade to make leaving unthinkable. The UK was a special case - and, ironically enough, actually responsible for some of the EU's worst decisions.
Furthermore, this isn't exactly an EU exclusive problem. Every supranational organization that is responsive to member states and not individual voters is a policy laundering mechanism. Ask yourself: where's your representation in the WTO, and when did you vote for them? The sum of democracy and democracy is dictatorship. Any governing body that does not respect all of its voters equally is ripe for subsumption by people who do not respect them at all.
[0] Originally, US senators were appointed by state governors. This eventually resulted in everyone voting for whatever governor promised to appoint the senator the voter wanted. Which is sort of like throwing away your gubernatorial vote for a senatorial one. This is why we amended the constitution to allow direct election of senators, and I hold that any sovereign nation that makes the mistake of appointed politicians will inevitably have to either abandon it or fail.
They then in effect elect a Prime Minister, who appoints an executive, who create laws and then put them to parliament
In the US you can vote for the leader of the executive directly. 64% of Vermont voted for Harris, yet they still got Trump.
> in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control
My understanding is that the public as a whole do not want chat control, yet the democratically elected heads of each member government do want it. The problem here is the democratically elected heads of each member government.
Doesn't take many council members to be against it to stop it in its tracks.
[1] In fact, we have helpfully seen this play out with our friendly early exiter. The remarkably self-destructive Labour party has passed their own absolute nonsense "online safety" bill, and are likely to be utterly destroyed in the next election with repealing the bill being part of the platform of the party that is polling at ~twice the share of the next largest party. With the EU providing blame-as-a-service, though, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to repeal Chat Control once rammed through, without exiting the EU entirely.
Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.
And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter
Completely immune is overstating it, and the power to initiate legislation is not that meaningful given that the EC initiates what the council tells it to initiate and can't actually turn it into law without parliament and council
You are aware that those with power to initiate legislation are appointed by national governments right?
If you are unhappy with how your country posed itself in those propositions, you can and should vote for parties that have different stances.
As for council or commission, I presume you can elect different national governments from time to time? I mean, unless you are in Hungary.
In the UK with a Parliamentary democracy, unpopular policy ideas can be abandoned. Manifestos are not always adhered to, but they typically include ideas that their canvassers can sell on the doorstep and there is robust media criticism when they abandon their promises. We have a strong history of U turns because our politicians are wary of unpopularity. The most recent big backlash was the Winter Fuel Allowance cut which was proposed by the two parties (with the Treasury pushing for it behind the scenes) and abandoned by both due to deep unpopularity in the Country. Even the budget this week had a run-up where various fiscal changes were unofficially floated through the media, to see which ones had the smallest backlash.
This is completely different to the EU, where the Commission and Council arguably get what they want even if it takes several attempts.
Those are not Lovecraftian entities that came from undersea. Their members are appointed from the national governments. If you dislike how your country position itself on those organs, this should change your view on how the ruling parties in your country took decisions at the EU level.
Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.
If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
Because your puny state is no match for the US, China or soon enough, India. Heck, even Russia in its current incarnation outmatches 80% of the EU countries.
That's it, it's that simple, conceptually.
It's basically the Articles of Confederation vs the Constitution of the United States.
Yes, it's not a pretty process, but the alternative is worse.
We can all live in La-La-Land and pretend we're hobbits living in the Shire ("Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you") until reality comes crashing down.
Then proposals maybe turn into laws, through a complex process. We are HERE.
A good government doesn't have many with abhorrent LAWS.
They are not. People just don't bother themselves to spend half a calory in brain power to read even the Wikipedia page about it, and just repeat shit they read in forum posts.
I mean, here on HN, a website where people are supposedly slightly above average in terms of being able to read shit, the amount of times I read how EU is "bureacrats in Brussels" "pushing hard for changes" is weird.
I wonder who could have a vested interest in depicting the EU as a repressive regime...
Well, here is the guy from where that comes from, the minister of justice of Denmark. He certainly represents a good part of Denmark, even though he may be irrelevant to any other EU country.
I'm not sure how you can have already forgotten the fact that we have to upload or face or ID to access websites.
Ofcom (the communications regulator charged with imposing the censorship laws) literally maintains a public list of non-compliant websites that anyone who doesn't want to give their ID to a shady offshore firm can browse for example.
can't browse?
In 2029 it's likely we'll have a more libertarian government:
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Reform will repeal some of the awful legislation that's been passed over the last few years (e.g. Online Safety Act). They've been loud critics of government overreach.
https://www.ft.com/content/886ee83a-02ab-48b6-b557-857a38f30...
You seem to be confused. The Libertarian Party never gets any power. The closest we get is representatives like Ron Paul, Justin Amash, and Thomas Massie, who run as Republicans (which are NOT the party of small government, despite what you may have been told) while acting much more like Libertarians.
Thomas Massie in particular is famous for frequently and routinely standing up against Trump, much to Trump's chagrin.
I believe that's the point.
The Republican Party *pretends* to be "small government", but isn't.
From the article:
> In March 2024, the BBC called the party far-right but soon retracted its statement and apologised to Reform UK, writing that describing the party as far-right "fell short of our usual editorial standards".[219] Commenting on the incident, the professor of politics Tim Bale wrote that labelling Reform UK as far-right is unhelpful, and that it "causes too visceral a reaction and at the same time is too broad to be meaningful". Bale noted the importance of distinguishing between the "extreme right" and "populist radical right", and stated that parties described as far right should instead be "more precisely labelled".[220] Reform UK itself rejects the descriptor, and has threatened legal action against media using it.[221] In May 2025, Ross Clark, writing in The Spectator, argued Reform is "now a left-wing party", by attracting disillusioned Labour voters with stances on restoring welfare benefits, nationalising the steel industry with 50% of utilities and increasing government spending (including the NHS).[222]
A lot of politicians change when they get in power.
In the UK, is it all about media ownership or something?
Yes.
GBNews launched in 2021 with a strong anti-establishment mandate. The growth in its audience surprised everyone, surpassing both BBC News and Sky in viewership. For four consecutive months (July-October 2025) GBNews has been Britain's number one news channel (Source: BARB).
Crucially it also has 2.5bn views on YouTube since launch.
The establishment try to write off and condescend GBNews, but in doing so they condescend the large and growing section of the UK public that GBNews represents (e.g. for example - people on both the Left and Right who are frustrated with 110,000 undocumented migrants entering the UK over the last three years, many of whom have been put up in hotels at taxpayer expense).
As the elite condescend and push away large swathes of the population, they are creating increasing loyalty toward GBNews, and by extension, the Reform Party.
Can't see the Tories bouncing back in a few mere years. Labour are heading rapidly into the same unelectable territory.
Which leaves us with Reform vs a Green-LibDem coalition?
But the Greens have chosen to embrace their own form of populist lunacy. And some will never forgive the Lib Dems for their last coalition.
Well, populist lunacy is how Reform got so popular, so I can see why it would be tempting for the Green party.
Main thing that's weird right now with the UK is that because it's first-past-the-post and the current polling is Reform:~29%, Lib/Lab/Con/Green:~16%, I would not be surprised by any of these parties forming a minority government nor any one of them getting a massive parliamentary majority.
That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.
Removing the 2 child benefit cap? Increasing NHS spending? Returning to New Labour levels of net immigration, being a country with borders?
> That said I will find it very very funny if the Conservative party ends up last from that list.
At least we agree on that. The Tories deserve to be confined to the dustbin of history.
Immigration is always a funny one for the UK especially, given how people tend to look at gross numbers instead of which sectors the immigrants work in, and the discourse about why locals demonstrably do not fill those roles is mostly just insisting that locals can no matter what current unemployment levels actually are. Before I left the UK, the stereotype was all the Poles moving to the UK and building houses: UK should have invited over more builders, then there wouldn't be a shortage of houses.
Immigration is a shared bit of populist lunacy Reform have in common with the Conservatives and Labour: promises to be tough on immigration, then they get power and look at what the consequences would be of doing that, and put all the blame on asylum seekers* that are banned from working and therefore safe to kick out no matter how at risk they are in their countries of origin.
* https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/working-whilst-an...
Also the small possibility of being a Russian asset of course.
As long as you are white British. If you're anything else you're probably going to be worse off under Farage.
It's a shame that if you want to vote for someone with different policies to the two main parties, you have to accept that you are also voting for an outspoken racist.
Reform policy is being drawn up by a team that’s led by a British Pakistani : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zia_Yusuf
Ordinarily we might give him the benefit of the doubt: maybe he's matured and grown up since then. But the fact that he's called all of those classmates liars says that either they are all liars, or he is dishonest about his racism.
The things said were truly disgusting.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for the Jewish community, but I would expect that they feel less threatened by something a child said in a playground during the 1970s, but rather the rampant antisemitism that has risen in our society, spearheaded by the toxic alliance of the hard left and the Islamists. Those are the ones who are assaulting Jewish people on the streets and hanging around Synagogues to “demonstrate”, or rather to intimidate them.
I honestly think that if politicians had blocked this (reform style) in 2000, the resulting economic slowdown and increasing cost for labor intensive products would've seen them voted out in short order.
I do agree that negative consequences of the approach were played down/underestimated/neglected, but painting it as pure uncaring negative is just disingenuous.
Just look at how Brexit alone affected lorry driver wages; if you cut immigration 25 years ago, you'd have seen the same effect across multiple sectors magnifying each other (because labor supply is simply insufficient), and there is a lot of people that would have suffered from higher costs in all those sectors without getting any compensation.
As a "sanity check" for this: If the UK economy did not "need" immigrant labor, you would expect significant unemployment and very high difficulty in finding unskilled labor jobs. Neither is the case.
Non-EU net migration has fallen sharply too.
It proves what was always obvious to anyone who looked at it, that high net immigration was temporary, especially the peak post covid and the special scheme for Ukrainians.
And note also that the UK and EU share high-quality education systems, Western Judeo-Christian culture and Western-aligned geopolitics.
Recent waves of immigration from countries in the Middle East and North Africa are importing wholly different culture, geopolitics, and crucially, we are importing from countries with measurably lower standard of literacy and numeracy.
These are objective facts, and they are not criticisms or judgements on the character of those who are migrating.
I would make exactly the same choices as our Pakistani, Somali and Eritrean friends, if I were in their position.
When the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans, many Greek scholars fled to Italy bringing:
• Greek manuscripts
• Knowledge of ancient philosophy
• Classical Greek language expertise
This boosted the revival of classical learning.
The Renaissance had far more to do with the Catholic Church than it had with Islam, and I’m curious to know who it was that told you otherwise?
Track down a copy of Bettany Hughes’ “When The Moors Ruled In Europe”. I think it is on Youtube. It is long but exceptionally clearly presented.
Put simply, were it not for the Reconquista, what we understand as the renaissance would be very clearly perceived as Islamic in origin.
And maybe don’t trust ChatGPT to do anything but regurgitate the prevailing interpretation of history, which was, in fact, reshaped radically by Catholic propaganda.
Haha you're so funny.
If Reform get from, what is it right now, five -- or four, or six, depending on how the wind blows — MPs to 326 MPs, which is enough to secure the majority they think they are getting, then libertarian is not what that government will be.
It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian, because pure tabloid authoritarian thuggery is the only possible strategy that could cause a swing larger than any in history, against two parties (labour and liberal democrat) who currently hold 472 seats and represent a sort of centrist blob between them.
And this is to say nothing of the challenge they will face finding 326 non-crazy, credible candidates for 326 very different parliamentary elections. And to say nothing of the foreign influence scandal that currently engulfs senior Reform figures or the catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent. Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage? And do you think Farage's reputation is going to somehow be improved by the Nathan Gill situation?
I accept they will be the largest minority. But the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
Maybe they will get to largest minority and then campaign for PR/AV/STV, and maybe finally people will understand something like it is needed. But Farage will be a lot older in that election.
(It surprises me to see people who are so keen to believe that a council election wave is necessarily predictive of a national election wave because, what, somehow everything is different now? Why is it different?)
How can you be so sure? Why do you assume that everything that the Reform chairman, Zia Yusuf (head of policy) is lies? What, from his history, suggests that he is a liar?
> catastrophic issues already affecting Reform councils like Kent.
A small number of councillors left, but KCC is still a strong Reform majority. Councillors come and go throughout the year (just look at the constant stream of council by-elections), so to call Kent a "catastrophe" is hyperbole.
> It will be populist, white and significantly authoritarian
Populist yes. But I've never understood why popular polices get such a bad rep in a supposed democracy?
White? So what? Although it's rapidly changing thanks to Tory/Labour policies, the UK remains a majority white country. Why is politicians' skin colour an issue in your mind?
"Significantly authoritarian" how? Can you name an "authoritarian" policy in Reform's last manifesto?
> Do you think Reform could succeed without Farage?
Yes. Zia Yusuf is an extraordinary man, and my money would be on him becoming the leader when Farage inevitably steps down. And your concerns about white politicians will hopefully be soothed when a second-generation Sri Lankan is our Reform prime minister.
https://www.youtube.com/@ZiaYusufOfficial
> the parliamentary maths to get to an outright majority is really extreme; the system does not support such things easily.
For that to happen, you need a strong i.e. 30%+ share, and you need numerous opposing parties with similar policies, and all polling at similar levels. That's EXACTLY what's happening, and the electoral calculus puts Reform on a strong majority (low = 325, high = 426)
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/...
Because they are extremely short shortsighted and a wreck in a long term.
Would you say that was "extremely short shortsighted and a wreck in a long term."?
I don't know an exact definition of a populism but for me it's when political messages are designed to trigger strong emotions, ignore complexity, promise simple solutions to hard problems. All politicians to some extent lie, over-promise and under-deliver but populists tent to take this on a next level.
Right populists tend to promise tax cuts (which unsurprisingly benefit their sponsors the most) and to balance budget they either increase debt or undermine public services (which is bad in a long term). Left populists promise to tax the rich ignoring that it's can be bad for economic growth and taxing alone would not give enough revenue to significantly benefit poor/middle classes.
In the context of its time it was a fairly pragmatic, top-down central-government post-war-socialism project. It appears more radical in retrospect, but viewed in the light of decisions in the war effort and the post-war effort, and in a country that still had mandatory rationing for example, the NHS was a solid decision that was actually pretty evidence-based.
There are few people alive now who can tell you what the foundation of the NHS was like in terms of their professional career, but my dad did tell me about that.
In no way would that have been considered "populist"; the UK was severely negative about populists at that time, for one thing. It actually made solid logical/technocratic sense. It definitely came as a huge relief, but in many ways it formalised the resource-sharing schemes in place in various regions, especially London.
I am not sure you understand what populism is, along with not understanding that securing a number of seats is not something that logically follows from projections of numbers of seats, particularly in the context of an entirely new party with divisive leadership. We don't have PR, so aggregate data like that is not easily interpreted, and council election data is not that strongly indicative.
Also pretty interesting to hear someone who is so pro-Reform so confidently talking up the NHS, considering the long-standing positions of many UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform people that it should be privatised. Free at the point of use healthcare is under threat from Reform in a way that no other political party in the UK would risk, as a consequence of that. Presumably you think we should still have an NHS but the state shouldn't own it. Given the international figures who gather around Reform and the hard right in this country, there is no way the NHS would survive Reform intact.
EU politics don't play much of a role in the media. The older and more cynical I become, the more. I am convinced: that's by design. That way, national politicians can move politically wanted, but publicly unpopular things to Brussels and blame the EU. We are just exposed to that much EU lawmaking news because we are directly affected as a subculture.
During the Brexit referendum days, I learned that British friends of mine did not even know they had EU parliamentary elections - I had to prove to them via Wikipedia AND had to read them the name of their representative (who just so happened to live just down the roar), nor did they care. Made many things more clear to me.
The EU seems to be taking the opposite approach - countries push any unpopular law into the growing EU layer to prevent local backlash affecting them. As comments around this call it - "political laundering". A great term that I shall be borrowing.
[1] Relatedly, the philosopher Jimmy Carr has a great line about the failing of communism is about scale. It works locally at the family level but it can't scale to the level of a country.
its more likely than it has been in a very long time with multiple smaller parties gaining seats. Nationalists in Scotland and Wales have been around a whole, and NI always had its own parties, but on top of that we now have Reform and the Greens making gains.
Are you predicting a minority government in the next election? Time will tell!
It did not pass.
I think the problem here is that you don't understand how the system works.
The EU parliament still would have to approve this for it to become legislation.
This is akin to a national government proposing a law, and the congress having to vote for it.
There is a lot wrong with the EU (the system). Opaque power structures, backroom deals, corruption. But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
Similar to the Political Bureau in former communist countries, but still an autocracy.
> But I wouldn't call it an autocracy.
It has most certainly started to walk and quack a lot like an autocratic duck, it wasn't the case 10 to 15 years ago, or not as visible, to say the least, but the pandemic and this recent war in Ukraine have changed that.
And guess what, national governments are the ones blocking the European Parliament from proposing laws, the EP has proposed multiple times that it be allowed to laws.
So EU member states themselves are the ones that don't want the EP to become a full blown parliament.
Please don't use AMP.
Its on the same domain as the version you link to - is that still a problem?
I just did what I always do, edit out the AMP part and check that it still works. Sometimes the URL will go elsewhere or need more fiddling, this time it just worked.
Two years ago and she has received damages however similar attitudes still abound with marked police disapproval of attempts to display the English National flag - in England.
Either way politicians prefer to push unpopular stuff like this via the EU because the responsibility gets muddied - "we didn't want it, the EU regulation requires us to spy on you!".
You defeat them one day, but they're still there, and they keep trying, day after day after day.
State always drives towards despotism and total control, society always drives to anarchy, and when there's balance, then you have Switzerland, otherwise slide towards Somali or Russia.
https://news.mit.edu/2019/narrow-corridor-acemoglu-liberty-0...
The real problem is that the State tends to grow like a cancer. When it gets to a point that it lords over tens or hundreds of millions of souls, it's already impossible to control and contain.
Any time you have a government, you will have a government that wishes to spy on you to make sure you will never attempt a competing government/army.
The economic argument is that with states, you can benefit (to varying degrees, depending on the state's lowercase-c constitution) from the economies of scale. Fixed costs which might make things like electrical grids, public transit, and plumbing prohibitively expensive on an individual basis can now be built efficiently, and with the fixed overhead cost split so many ways, the cost to the individual becomes much easier to swallow.
Almost as soon as systems benefiting from economies of scale arise, you'll want ways to govern them fairly -- the ideal here being a (relatively) neutral party outside of the services' regular users who can manage these services and the policies which surround them. Obviously, this is something we're still figuring out: we're always trying to balance cost, representation, efficiency, and effectiveness, but we've got a good idea of what doesn't work.
I won't belabour the point since I think it's clear where I'm going with this, but to paint the two parties as natural enemies is a bit simplistic IMO. One arose in response to the natural needs of the other.
I think the comment you were replying to has a better sense of things. Government becomes an entity onto itself, and prioritizes its own existence, far past the original mandate at its genesis. A constitution becomes acculturated as a default, not because each successive generation ratifies and legitimizes it anew, but simply because with its perpetuation comes power that is hard to displace.
This isn't merely cultural. The powerful interests as the head of the state have an interest in maintaining such a thing. Yes there are benefits, but your modern list ignores the true driver, which is far less luxurious. State formation is simply another form of human domination. Dressing it up as economic efficiency might make for good academic papers after the fact, but the reality is they arose out of the need to dominate others or be dominated. Feats of engineering in the ancient world were constructed to revere the state or benefit in wartime. The United States used the same rocket technology it contemplated annihilating the Soviet Union with to put men on the moon. In all cases some benefits do trickle down to the common man, but always the state itself ends up as the highest priority.
I think the issue today is, on balance if you look at the real equation between whose domination do I fear, increasingly it is your own state, there are less trickle down benefits occuring, and far more avenues for such "benefits" - like the phone in your pocket - to be deceptive, ie appear as a benefit while actually being another instrument of control.
Plumbing doesn't spy on you. And it solved a real problem and improved lives. Increasingly today in modern societies people see states with more contrived demand, "bullshit jobs", less external threats, and yet more and more state domination. Democratic checks may prove even more fatal - turn over the ancient apparatuses of domination over to a mob.
So anyway, I just ask you not ignore the obvious. People didn't want states to get cheap electrical grids. They submitted to it because they didn't want to be hacked and pillaged in their own beds. The true "natural needs" of our species are far more dire than any of those relative luxuries you have listed.
Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.
Instead of having a tree with a king at the top and your local police station at the bottom, be a part of the governance for the river that you live near, for the city that surrounds you, for the grocery store in your neighborhood, for your local fire department, and let all of them have codified relationships with each other that are determined by codified processes.
I believe the limitation on this was technological; that we had to get people into a room, get Robert's Rules out, and shout our way into decisions. Those limitations are gone; we all have phones. We should be able to participate in the governance of everything, or if we really don't want to think about that crap, hand our proxy to someone who does, get alerts on what they're doing with it, and revoke or transfer it instantly.
Let's see some real social networking.
So many people believe that, for example, the stuff written on the paper currency of the United States is legally binding. (It's irrelevant whether it is or not - people believe it, because they hear, believe, repeat, and teach the meme.)
Representative government is the same way. There are much better systems, and anyone can easily think up a few of them. The problem is going from A to B, also known as "the tyranny of the installed base".
No proposed new form of government or representation is worth the paper it's printed on unless it comes with a viable migration path from the status quo.
Do you grow your own food? Do you refine your own oil? Do you write your own contracts?
I would assume you pick somebody to do those things for you because one human can't do literally everything.
Partly it's they don't have the same pro-privacy culture that say Germany and many of the eastern european countries have.
People also think the current Danish PM was also offended by a former prominent Danish politician and cabinet minister who was arrested for CSAM possession.
I think this theme of the EU, this lack of taboo against continually bringing unwanted laws until they pass by fatigue, it may well be the death of the institution as a whole. every time they try, every time people hear about it, more and more think worse of the EU, and unlike most western governments, the existence and function of the EU is actually severely vulnerable to what people think of it. no other major government takes as much reputational damage from laws that don't even pass, and the existence of no other major government is as vulnerable to reputational damage as the EU is right now. all it takes is another 1 or 2 major exits and the whole thing will slowly collapse, which is insanely sad
Somewhat relevantly, the UK already has their own version of this legislation in the Online Safety Act which lead to a bunch of small-medium UK community sites closing and the likes of Imgur, pixiv and 4chan blocking the UK.
how is this relevant in the UK
In light of this, why would 4chan comply? Contrary to the claim above, 4chan has not actually blocked UK users, and has no reason to do so. They did however get a lawyer to write up a letter telling the redcoats to go fuck themselves.
the OSA is ridiculous and I hope it goes the same way as the last time they tried it, but this idea that US companies should be immune to domestic regulation in countries their services are available to is silly. even if that domestic regulation is silly. because otherwise the utterly encaptured regulatory environment of the US (plus Visa and MC) solely dictates the internet
I don't understand why 4chan is obligated to be the one to ensure that UK citizens don't access the site when this should be entirely within the UK government's power, no? At the very least, the infrastructure which allows their citizens to access 4chan is on UK soil so it stands to reason that they actually have authority over that.
I feel like making the case that any site which serves an international audience on the Internet has to observe the laws of every single country represented in that audience is bad precedent and has the potential to be incredibly stifling to anyone but the type of multinational corporation which has the sort of legal apparatus that's required to operate in that sort of environment.
Before you answer, substitute the UK with Iran and whatever distasteful content 4chan is hosting this week with "the dictatorship of Iran is harmful to its people, and they should rise up to remove it from power".
You also say that the collapse of the EU would be insanely sad. I also understand that perspective.
What I don't understand is how somebody could have both of these points of view at once, in the same comment no less.
chat control has not passed, and undoubtedly will not pass in any deeply unpalatable state. this is the point of the unanimity requirement of the EU. most likely in the end we will get some kind of law giving additional search powers to police, perhaps allowing them to remotely "switch on" chat scanning for a suspect via specific court order, comparably to how they compromised on facial recognition
secondly, to agree with the sibling comment, I look at the results, not the process. the EU has incredible results by anyone's measure, and perhaps their processes need a tweak or two, but this "it must be ultra-democracy or I don't want it" attitude just feels overly simplistic, and likely driven by ideological commitments to other things the EU opposes
A lot of people support what they want the EU to be rather than what it actually is. Applies in general - people can love their country without supporting its current government or constitution.
EU delegates and council members have to report their meetings with lobbyists.
Palantir and Thorn lobbyists (just the most famous ones, but you can add another few dozens security and data companies) are recorded meeting many times with countless of them, including Ursula von der Leyen.
It's really as simple as that, sales pitches convincing them of all the benefits of having more intelligence "to catch criminals (wink)".
So, US interests? Which means the NSA?
Palantir sells software for analyzing data, like Excel but on a large scale. If "Chat Control" passes, they will need software to analyze the data they collect, which is exactly what Palantir sells. It is just business.
I don't know about Thorn but it looks like the same: they sell software that may be of use for implementing "Chat Control".
But it don't look like it.
Even if the NSA was not involved the same data and security companies would have the same incentives imho.
It's currently held by Denmark so it's the Danish delegation that's mostly doing the brokering etc for this semester
Everyone operates on self-interest but not everyone is smug about it.
Especially since putin shows us exactly what happens if you try.
It's a bad example because the power balance doesn't make sense. I think you will have a hard time coming up with any example where USA would be on the receiving end of something like this.
I think ultimately this will end up being resolved with USA getting rights to something like 80% of the resource value and Denmark getting 20% in exchange for getting to keep the title.
the original commenter quite obviously doesn't find it surprising or funny, they're just anger baiting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_to_Prevent_and_Comb...
That is how the EU works. The time to disagree has come and gone basically.
And if everybody will do the scanning, maybe they will be sending all of this data to the giant EU server then that will look for 'problematic citizens' like in minority report.
Who knows, but it seems like running your own private chat for your own and your family and friends will be the only way to have some privacy in a few years.
From a practical side, if the client and server are open source then the project is survivable even if the supporting organization is wiped out. For now users don't demand it nor do they understand it. At minimum, the clients must be open source and buildable, all encryption must happen on the user's device and there should be some control over the end server connections. It is also critical that there are near foolproof workarounds for tunneling the traffic in severely locked down countries like China. This is one of the big problems with requiring a phone number, for example. If users in China can't use a communications tool then it's bullshit.
Some projects like Delta Chat are criticized for one reason while the critics take at face value unverifiable claims from other projects. Delta Chat checks a lot of boxes along with user control and deployment of servers.
SimpleX is a good concept but I'm not sure how it can scale -- which is a detail that shouldn't be ignored. How Signal expects to continue with no visible revenue source is another good question.
XMPP should not be written off either. If I had to bet on a protocol having users a decade from now, that's the one. AI coding agents are going to rapidly iterate on improving the front end stuff. With all of the privacy busting age verification coming from the US, I'd be willing to bet the replacement for Discord will be something XMPP based.
On one side the EU funded open source projects to try to break away from the US tech giants, while passing laws to kneecap their own tiny open source alternatives (Cyber Resilience Act etc.) If the US & the EU wants to exist in the next century they need to be going the opposite direction. It was bad enough that western tech companies built China's great firewall and assisted authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
Most end users don't understand that keeping communications secure is not a given, it is really expensive and difficult. Adding wacky, difficult, very expensive or impossible to follow requirements is the fingerprint of EU bureaucracy and not just unwelcome but very dangerous.
For the EU Elon haters -- with the growth of Starlink, Elon Musk or whoever controls SpaceX is going to have a deep view of global internet communications in the years ahead. That will include an ability to block, filter, and allow things either they or those who control Starlink choose. Any regulation which weakens or cripples the security of internet communications is ceding power to that entity, whoever it may be.
The Signal CEO has repeated that they will rather leave the EU than start doing the scanning.
Words are just words as far as I know but the prospect of leaving the EU for Signal would really send a strong message to all those who still believe that the EU is better in terms of privacy than the US.
As far as I am concerned this is the nail in the coffin for the EU privacy advocates/ evangelists.
The only way you fight this is by moving forward and faster than them. Because their eternal weakness is that they are slow and somehow stupid. But tech oriented people got pretty lazy in the last 2 decades:
- We let ISPs be the only gatekeeper of the Internet
- We let big tech dominate the mobile OS space
- We embrassed the Cloud and SaaS (not your computer)
These 3 things made us sitting duck to any authoritarian government and now we pretend to be surprised we are getting shot.
Here is what we can do before it is too late:
- Buy a $10-20 LoRa device and setup Meshtastic, Meshcore or Reticulum https://reticulum.network/
- Buy one for a friend
- Run openwrt and consider things like like B.A.T.M.A.N https://www.open-mesh.org/
- Connect and explore yggdrasil https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- Try I2P https://geti2p.net
- Get into a protocol like NNCP https://www.complete.org/nncp/
- Self-host at least a few services you can and care about
- Setup a DNS like https://opennic.org/
- A fair amount of understanding and use of the good parts of crypto/blockchain
- Get out of GMail, Outlook, iCloud, etc.
(there are probably many more)
It is gonna take the governments time to figure out what those things are and how to block and attack them.
Plus you will get more satisfaction and knowledge than with writing HELM charts, web apps or using AI.
Or Matrix? No experience with it though
It rewards or penalizes online services depending on whether they agree to carry out “voluntary” scanning, effectively making intrusive monitoring a business expectation rather than a legal requirement.
The legal mandate was shot down by the EU courts, but every country then figured out their own loophole and as a result data retention is effectively mandatory but not by clear and public law.
> While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to modern biologists the premise is false: changing location is a natural thermoregulation strategy for frogs and other ectotherms, and is necessary for survival in the wild. A frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Furthermore, a frog placed into already boiling water will die immediately, not jump out.
But of course some HN commenter had to do: 'well actually...'. :D If I would write something like: 'Better late than never' would you be correcting me too? 'Well actually studies shows that it is better never...'
I recommend some chilling with a nice cup of tea.
The (actual) solution should be to fix legislation to adequate protect privacy, because they'll attack this next.
But meantime, a technical solution is better than nothing.
If a P2P solution that solved the aforementioned Signal issues were to have excellent UX, then that could probably work.
Lastly, what counts as "excellent UX" for technical and non-technical people seems to differ. For example, I consider Discord and Slack to be quite intuitive and easy to use, but multiple technical people have expressed to me that they find it to be very confusing and that they prefer other solutions, such as GroupMe in one example. To me, GroupMe shoving the SMS paradigm into something that's fundamentally not SMS is more confusing and poor UX, but to these non-technical people that seems easy. I suspect that Signal's shortcomings that I perceive are an example of this: making UX trade-offs that work great for non-technical people but are less good for technical people. I'm not sure what these specific UX trade-offs are, but I suspect that it's something akin to having a conceptually sound underlying model (like Discord or Slack servers/workspaces and channels), versus having really obvious "CLICK HERE TO NOT FUSS" buttons like GroupMe, while having graceful failures for non-technical users that can't even figure that out (like just pretending to be SMS in GroupMe's case if you can't figure out how to install an app, or don't want to put that effort in, something that many people know how to use).
But some friction is to be expected.
SimpleX, and especially Tox, are much more mature. They're not newcomers.
They are only lacking in users, as they don't have the marketing resources companies like Slack or Discord do.
But people like to sensationalize stuff
This is less worse than the original proposal
Oh and honestly game chat rooms should not be private.
(of course personal 1:1 messages should)
Services are obligated to do risk analysis and take appropriate safety precautions against high risk actions. High risk actions include "anonymous accounts", "uploading media", and of course "encrypted messages".
The moment they catch the next random pedo, every messenger app on their phone will be tasked with explaining why they didn't do enough to stop the pedo. They'd better get their business together next time, because otherwise they might be held liable!
There's no law that says you have to hand over arbitrary data to the police without a warrant but when Telegrams shady owner landed in france, he was locked up until his company pledged to "work together with police better".
Don't be fooled by pretty words, none of this optional stuff is optional for any messenger the government doesn't already have the ability to read along with.
Technical gotchas are not the same as legal gotchas
OP is not reading too much into this. You are being naive if you think that this is not the intended goal of this law.
Everyone who has looked at this proposal know that the 'changes" made to the latest draft are not real changes and that voluntary scanning with repercussions is the same exact thing as mandatory.
If a robber walks into your house and ask you to give all your cash and threatens to break your legs if you don't do it, did you give your money voluntarily or was it forced by the threat of violence?
Either something is mandatory and if not done, should be punished accordingly or something is voluntary in which case, then if someone does not do it there are no repercussions.
You can't say that something is voluntary and but that there would be repercussions if that thing is not done. It does not make sense.
Yet that is exactly what this law says. High risk companies should prevent the spread of CSAM but they are not forced to do it, except that if they don't do it then bad things will happen to them but don't worry it's not mandatory.
Those are just weasel words by politicians. Nothing more.
And what my undersensationalized friend do you understand by the word chat?
Edit: Based on the downvotes, you obviously didn't. This is a PROPOSAL, not a LAW. It needs to be voted by the EU Parliament (you know, one of the 3 components of democracy as in "separation of powers").
Voting once every 5 years for groups which are organised cross-country, but not letting citizens vote cross-country, and this being the only democratic organ and the one with the least power, with no consequences for any of them breaking election promises, is imho not “letting the people decide”, but “oligarchy with the illusion of choice”
You'd basically have to rely on magic to know how those politicians you vote in will decide to vote on because they join some sect that lobbies them to vote against your interests.
And we all know no voter aside from the 1% will ever think this far. It's exactly like you called it, the illusion of choice
> Czech MEP Markéta Gregorová called the Council’s position “a disappointment…Chat Control…opens the way to blanket scanning of our messages.”
From this translation:
https://reclaimthenet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/CnZOD1F...
Then you're being dishonest. Your intention is to cause a stir instead of to inform (a word related to the word information). Because you are leaving out what she wrote about EP; the EP is, according to her, clearly against this. Why leave that out? What is your agenda? You just disqualified your entire article.
Authorities and banks avalanche everyone within their reach over all available communication channels with "warnings" about scams and frauds.
What direction are they aiming with this total control?
Moving money needs source of funds, documentation etc... doing any business requires you to doxx yourself to the world and to vendors in the name of transparency.
Luckily though none of this is a problem for large multinationals :) which the EU cares about most in the end
The yachts and private jets on European harbors and airports don't look like their owners have any problem with money transfers. Wirecard billions? poof, vanished!
If feels as if elites were in process of cutting off everyone else.
Because now you have kiddos in customer service demanding things like deed of purchase of real estate or inheritance documents.
Perhaps it met the criteria for a Major Ongoing Topic (MOT) or a MegaMOT, or the "flamewar detector" kicked in, or just that it wasn't convenient to discuss, but we'll never know since the precise moderation action applied to individual stories is opaque.
the requirement to backdoor e2e was dropped, and who knows what will eventually remain of the reporting requirements, etc.
of course if a company is processing unencrypted images they might be required to use some service to flag them
...
will we end up in yet another false positive flood? who knows
- Sanctions against Russia backfired (from the EU at least)
- Trump-Vance slapping the EU around in a humiliating fashion (re: that guy that cried at the Munich security council, EU being forced to adopt unfair trade deals with the US)
- look at the body language from Macron, VDL and Xi’s meeting a couple years ago, VDL is being sidelined on purpose, meanwhile Macron given royal treatment
Liberalism is dead, and these career bureaucrats are clinging to any remaining feeling of control:
- they can’t do the antitrust thing because Trump is wagging his finger at them
- they can’t project power externally
- they can’t engage with China (idk why, maybe due to their feeling of superiority)
… so they resort to projecting power internally
Nobody wants this, including they themselves, which is why they specifically exempt themselves from it.
Whoever wins the bid for the (visually hashed) child porn database Whatsapp uses is bound to receive billions of API calls the month the contract goes live. They won't make whatsapp pay for that directly, of course, but I'm sure they'll be "covering operating costs" with government grants to "protect" the public. They get to be rich claiming everyone is a paedophile yet to be caught while pronouncing themselves the foremost fighters against child abuse.
As for why politicians turn out this way, they're just pretty ordinary people (often quite impressive people actually, relative to the norm). Most people don't get an opportunity to show off how useless their political principles are because they have no power or influence. That's why there is always a background refrain of "please stop concentrating power to the politicians it ends badly".
The question is more why do the shit politicians rise to the top. Outside forces (rich people and companies) have too much power and can exert too much influence.
In this case I’m particularly curious about the Danes. They insisted on this more than any other previous attempt. They are forever soiled as fighting against the will of the people.
It's been sold as "for the children". A very substantial proportion of the population are natural authoritarians, and this is red meat for them. Never mind that "the children" that they profess to be protecting are going to grow up living in an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state, this is what authoritarians want for our future, and they see it as not only morally good, but any opposition to it as indefensible.
Dumb and greedy voters, traditional and social media, and electoral interference are known reasons. But it's also a matter of compromise: you vote for a party because you agree with a bunch of their points, but almost certainly not all. Topics like privacy are ignored by the general public, so politicians are hardly held accountable for them.
So that you can blame them for your problems.
Yes, I know Brexit was a failure and the UK is no better in terms of privacy but there has to be some sort sort of political repercussion for the people who made this possible.
Since there seems to be nothing else to do, then voting to leave is better than the status quo.
You say that you are apolitical, but you sound like an extremist. What should I believe, what you say you are or what you actually do?
If the EU politicians start working against my interests as a citizen, then why shouldn't I penalize them? If the EU as a whole starts working against my interests as a citizen, when why should I keep supporting this system?
The fact that you label me as an extremist for voicing my opinion (which I can only assume is different from yours) is telling. Your view of democracy seems quite skewed and if you were in charge of my country, you can bet I would vote you out too.
This is a forum where everyone is free to participate. If you don't like opinions different from yours, then feel free to skip them instead of insulting other people. This is not high school.
I believe that EU countries having trading agreements, sharing technology and sharing intel would be good but what we have now as the EU is not that.
It has become a single point of failure that is too easily gamed by lobbyists.
Before the EU, you needed to have lobbyist in 27 countries to get all of them to agree to something, now you just send them to Brussels and only need to convince 15 countries to agree to something for it to be approved.
We basically made the system easier to game. And now we are paying the price.
Also it is not just in Europe — digital ID is coming in USA starting January. State by state. Thanks to the Republican-dominated supreme court, and of course it is also done in the name of protecting the children:
https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/07/dangerous-us-su...
This “papers, please” is now happening quickly all around the world. Here we maintain the updates:
https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...
This is why people will increasingly need open source alternatives, not owned by large corporations, but it needs to be far better than Mastodon and Matrix. People expect the convenience of Instagram and Telegram, and open source will have to match it. That’s why I have spent about $1 million to quietly build https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
It is time to start rolling it out. This is supposed to be the People’s Platform. Anyone who is interested to get involved, find my profile on HN and get in touch by email. Put “hacker news” in the subject, so I can find it among all the bulk email. I would love to hear from people who want to join forces and contribute to something that’s already had about $1M and 10 years of work behind it, something By the People, for the People.
We are welcoming anyone who has skills, some free time, and is looking to actually do something meaningful to help liberate people from what’s coming. Whether you are a developer, want to contact journalists, or just want to promote this in a community. (And to the HN people who like to downvote this kind of stuff… just this once consider that we need to actually _cooperate_ on producing free, open-source alternatives to Big Tech, not do the weird infighting thing.)
Do you think Meta, Google and them are not scanning every bit of data hosted on their servers to ensure they're not hosting things they don't want to?
Do you think they don't cooperate with governments to share those findings?
I don't disagree that this push is silly, ineffective, and bad for democracy. We should fight it and fight for the right to privacy.
However, people are acting like we have privacy right now. What evidence is there for that?
It is not direct state imposed laws requiring you to be scanned wherever you are and every service you are using (including ones you built yourself)
But going off what I said, I acknowledged this sort of legislation is bad and that a right to privacy is needed. How do you arrive at "beatdown citizens in a government they have no passion about"?
All I did was point out the reality right now, even without this legislation.
"By filling the checkbox below, you consent to Persona, OpenAI’s vendor, collecting, using, and utilizing its service providers to process your biometric information to verify your identity, identify fraud, and conduct quality assurance for Persona’s platform in accordance with its Privacy Policy and OpenAI’s privacy policy. Your biometric information will be stored for no more than 1 year."
Web/app interface and API access are two different access layers for the model. Everyone can use the web or app interface for accessing all models, but API access is restricted unless you provide biometric information.
* Each user gets a key to sign a message, there's also one for decryption like E2EE
* The platform owners get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* The feds get a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* A watchdog organization also gets a part of a backdoor key for decryption (per message) as well (call it another end in E2EE if you want)
* If the feds want to decrypt something for actual anti-terrorism/anti-CSAM purposes, they convince both the platform owners and the watchdog org that they need keys for specific messages
* The watchdog automatically publishes data like: "Law enforcement agency X accessed message Y decryption key for internal case number Z" (maybe with a bit of delay)
* That way the users who have their messages decrypted can find that out what was accessed eventually
* If the feds are snooping for no good reason or political bullshit reasons, they can get sued
* If the feds are snooping too much (mass surveillance), it'd become obvious too cause you'd see that they're accessing millions of messages and maybe a few percent lead to actual arrests and convictions
* This kinda rests on the assumption that courts would be fair and wouldn't protect corrupt feds
Further, don't let people here bait you into revealing these types of things for them. Some ideas are just meant to be data dumped/remain forever in silence.
Of course I have 0 belief that it wouldn’t get hijacked/corrupted by horrible people anyways so whatever.
I see no clear indicator that the situation has improved since.
Source: US citizen which gives me special knowledge
E.g. what do Spain and Poland have in common?