Ferk

Thanks for the link, and the clarification (I didn't know about april 2026).. although it's still confusing, to be honest. In your link they seem to allude to this just being a way to maintain a voluntary detection that is "already part of the current practice"...

If that were the case, then at which point "the new law forces [chat providers] to have systems in place to catch or have data for law inforcements"? will services like signal, simplex, etc. really be forced to monitor the contents of the chats?

I don't find in the link discussion about situations in which providers will be forced to do chat detection. My understanding from reading that transcript is that there's no forced requirement on the providers to do this, or am I misunderstanding?

Just for reference, below is the relevant section translated (emphasis mine).

In what form does voluntary detection by providers take place, she asks. The exception to the e-Privacy Directive makes it possible for services to detect online sexual images and grooming on their services. The choice to do this lies with the providers of services themselves. They need to inform users in a clear, explicit and understandable way about the fact that they are doing this. This can be done, for example, through the general terms and conditions that must be accepted by the user. This is the current practice. Many platforms are already doing this and investing in improving detection techniques. For voluntary detection, think of Apple Child Safety — which is built into every iPhone by default — Instagram Teen Accounts and the protection settings for minors built into Snapchat and other large platforms. We want services to take responsibility for ourselves. That is an important starting point. According to the current proposal, this possibility would be made permanent.

My impression from reading the dutch, is that they are opposing this because of the lack of "periodic review" power that the EU would have if they make this voluntary detection a permanent thing. So they aren't worried about services like signal/simplex which wouldn't do detection anyway, but about the services that might opt to actually do detection but might do so without proper care for privacy/security.. or that will use detection for purposes that don't warrant it. At least that's what I understand from the below statement:

Nevertheless, the government sees an important risk in permanently making this voluntary detection. By permanently making the voluntary detection, the periodic review of the balance between the purpose of the detection and privacy and security considerations disappears. That is a concern for the cabinet. As a result, we as the Netherlands cannot fully support the proposal.

It seems the article is misinterpreting things. It's not that it's "voluntary for individual EU states".. but rather "voluntary" for service providers. The service providers don't have to implement this chat detection if they don't want to.

The thing is that if they don't pass something like this, then by April 2026 a bunch of current services that are already doing CP detection would be breaking the law, since the temporary derogation of the e-Privacy Directive will expire. But I don't think this affects services like signal/simplex who voluntarily choose to not try to detect it.

5

Where is this explained? the article might be wrong then, because it does state the opposite:

scanning is now “voluntary” for individual EU states to decide upon

It makes it sound like it's each state/country the one deciding, and that the reason "companies can still be pressured to scan chats to avoid heavy fines or being blocked in the EU" was because of those countries forcing them.

Who's the one deciding what is needed to reduce “the risks of the of the chat app”? if it's each country the ones deciding this, then it's each country who can opt to enforce chat scanning.. so to me that means the former, not the latter.

In fact, isn't the latter already a thing? ...I believe companies can already scan chats voluntarily, as long as they include this in their terms, and many do. A clear example is AI chats.

The thing is.. that even if there are countries publicly rejecting this, once the infrastructure is in place and a backdoor exists due to it being enforced by some other country, how can you be sure it's not being used / exploited?

Even in the (hypothetical) case that the government is not using it (regardless of what they might say to the public), I wouldn't trust that this backdoor would be so secure that nobody else than a government could make use of it.

I believe Germany is now in favor of this new proposal, according to https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

Only Italy, Netherlands, Czech Republic and Poland are against. This seems to be based on "leaked documents from the September 12 meeting of the EU Council's Law Enforcement Working Party".

1

the local sending side has some way to control the state their particle wavefunctions collapse into (otherwise they’re just sending random noise).

Do they? My impression is that, like the article says, "their states are random but always correlated". I think they are in fact measuring random values on each side, it's just that they correlate following Schroedinger's equation.

I believe the intention is not "sending" specific data faster than light.. but rather to "create Quantum Keys for secure information transmission". The information between the quantum particles is correlated in both sides, so they can try to use this random data to generate keys on each side in a way that they can be used to create a secure encryption for communication (a "Quantum Network that will be used for secure communication and data exchange between Quantum Computers"), but the encrypted data wouldn't travel faster than light.

I'm not sure if that'd be what it'd look like.. distributions are hardly ever that heterogeneous.

I'd bet all the GrapheneOS users would get together in their own corner and nerd out about their customizations.

For the record: 1 in 25 is 4% ...the image gives (intentionally?) the illusion of the proportion being higher.

1

The Pixel is easily unlockable, so one can install custom firmware without being a "pro", its hardware is (or was reverse-engineered to be) compatible enough to make the experience seamless, with a whole firmware project / community that it's exclusively dedicated on that specific range of hardware devices, making it a target for anyone looking for a phone where to install custom Android firmware on.

But I'd bet it's a mix of 2 and 3.

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Code being visible is not very useful if you can't distribute it, extend it, expand it and improve it.

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It's meant in the sense of "underwhelming" (as shown by the follow-up comment the article references). It's not incompatible to be surprised at how capable AI is (ie. being "impressed") and at the same time be also unwilling to pay the costs / repercussions and want to ban / regulate it.

In this context, being deeply unimpressed with something is equivalent to calling that something "irrelevant" / "incapable". If AI was no more impressive than it was before the LLM boom then there wouldn't have been such a reaction against it to begin with. If anything, people being now opposed to modern AI is proof of how impactful AI has become.

4

Yea, but he's (intentionally?) misrepresenting things.. people are not "unimpressed" by AI, what they are is not interested in MS "agentic OS", these are not the same things.

It's irresponsible to hand in control of your machine to an AI integrated that deeply into the OS, particularly when it's designed to be tethered to the network and it's privately owned and managed by human entrepreneurs that do have the company's interests as first and main priority.

1

Makes sense. Also the forearm has 2 bones, so I guess passing a nail in the gap between them would be easier than breaking through tight bone joints.

Many Keepass clients have support for not actually deleting entries, and instead moving them to a "Trash" subgroup inside the kdb that is ignored when searching entries. Also they usually keep track of the history of changes to each entry, to make it non-destructive.

Coupled with Syncthing typically automatically creating backups whenever it encounters conflicting changes, I feel this should be enough, at least for me personally.

1

Yep. I just confirmed it.. restarting Firefox seems to make the ID in https://demo.supercookie.me/ change. Thought as long as you keep Firefox session open the id will be the same.

I'm not sure if the links you reference are the whole story though, because they are talking about partitioning the cache per top-level domain, which I would expect wouldn't have been enough, since the demo is specific to its top-level domain and it's not necessarily about cross-domain id.

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