[const_cast]

Its both, ultimately politics is not all-knowing and you can't stamp out all technical solutions.

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.

[dns_snek]

It's not a technical problem. Chat Control wasn't about breaking encryption, it would bypass encryption with client-side scanning. It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.

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)

[Gormo]

> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.

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.

[dns_snek]

> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue, you're not going to win the political fight

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.

[Gormo]

> Indeed, that's why I'm not very hopeful about the future of our privacy.

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.

[dns_snek]

> Another political solution? Not going to happen.

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.

[_aavaa_]

> The obvious solution is to work to make politics less of a determinant of outcomes.

This statement is meaningless. You can’t finance, develop, build, sell, and operate an OS and phone in a vacuum outside the reach of “politics”.

[dylan604]

Nobody has the resources like an Apple or a Google to develop an open mobile OS that will be able to run on any hardware

[Gormo]

If anything, I'd say it's the other way around. Apple and Google themselves don't seem to have the resources to do that -- iOS and Android are layers built on top of BSD and Linux, respectively -- whereas it's FOSS projects that are the most dominant and pervasive ones in even far more complex use cases than mobile OSes.

[pcrh]

> If 99% of the population don't care about your issue...

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?

[Gormo]

Which is all well and good, and to the extent that people are won over to those arguments and create more political capital for putting an end to these privacy-violating policies, all for the better.

But that's not a substitute for nor mutually exclusive with technical measures to protect privacy, which will work regardless of the political milieu.

[mrguyorama]

> It targets the apathetic 99% of the population who won't have the energy or knowledge to do anything about it.

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.

[dns_snek]

> If you want to stop things like Chat Control, give parents an alternative

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.

[rsync]

Children shouldn’t have devices.

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.

[mrguyorama]

The Switch has a built in web browser that is "hidden" barely. Ample Youtube videos will show your child how to use it to access instagram, discord, even roblox supposedly.

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.

[dns_snek]

What does that have to do with Chat Control? You need better parental controls offered by iOS, Android, Windows, etc. Chat Control is chiefly about scanning and censoring every private message sent between adults under the guise of stopping the spread of CSAM (trivially defeated by sending encrypted ZIP files or using an alternative non-conforming messaging service).

[_aavaa_]

I would like to introduce you to rubber hose cryptography.

[kps]

That doesn't work well for mass surveillance of regular people.

[_aavaa_]

We’re talking about how the ability for the public to use strong encryption is contingent on laws allowing that.

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.