• Fourthly, scanning for known, thus old material does not help identify and rescue victims, or prevent child sexual abuse. It will actually make safeguarding victims more difficult by pushing criminals to secure, decentralised communication channels which are impossible to intercept even with a warrant.

    This point is huge, and on its own explains why half baked compromises are worthless.

    The criminals will use banned chat apps, while innocent people get their messages read.

  • I want cameras and microphones in every politicians house, in every room. These record 24/7 and will be live-streamed on twitch. Any politician against this proposal is obviously a child-abusing terrorist, or do they have something even worse to hide?

    •  tal   ( @tal@lemmy.today ) 
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      8 months ago

      The law restricts providing a commercial service in the EU that provides end-to-end encryption without monitoring of the content of communications, not using end-to-end encryption. Unless you’re planning to run some kind of underground messaging service, you probably won’t be the one violating the law.

      • What is to stop a company from offering their services in the EU though? As long as they don’t legally cooperate with the EU it should be fine. Like Telegram operating from Russia (if they weren’t collaborators already).

        •  tal   ( @tal@lemmy.today ) 
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          8 months ago

          Well, depends on the jurisdiction where they are operating from.

          In the US, if you’re intentionally offering commercial services in the EU (and while the US and EU definition of that may differ, I don’t think that the difference is broad enough to matter much from the standpoint of services that are being affected), my understanding is that the US will honor EU jurisdiction, and will enforce rulings against companies. Now, you have to actually be doing business under the US standard of doing business in the EU for this to apply – like, this can’t just be some random non-commercial server that you set up and then let anyone on the Internet use, as the US doesn’t consider that doing business in the EU. A US-based lemmy/kbin server isn’t going to be considered by the US to be doing business in the EU, but if its operator, for example, says “hey Europeans, donate money here and avoid restrictions”, then that’s targeted advertising to the area and the US will consider that to be doing business in Europe. Someone like Whatsapp definitely can’t just say “oh, my servers are in the US, ergo EU law doesn’t count, and I’m going to go right on selling ads and services and such in the EU and whatever else I do”.

          For somewhere like, oh, Russia, Russia may not care about enforcing EU law. However, that isn’t a blank check.

          First, it may be a pain for the EU to act against Telegram itself, but if money is involved, so are payments. It’s not hard for the EU to act against payment processors – banks, Visa, stuff like that. If a service is getting payment either directly from people in the EU or from advertisers in the EU, the EU can tell the payment processor to cut them off. The payment processor isn’t going to fight the EU on that; this sort of thing happens regularly.

          Second, if you’re using an illegal service, the EU might wind up having EU ISPs block it. Russia has been running around requiring ISPs to ban certain sites. The EU hasn’t done that yet, but it could. I am not at all convinced that in the long term, it won’t be the norm for countries to have a list of “banned” services that they require their ISPs to block. I am pretty sure that there are a number of parties who would like piracy sites to be blacklisted, for example.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_Russia

          Third, from an individual standpoint, that means that someone in the EU is not going to be getting any EU legal protection, in the privacy sphere or elsewhere. Now, maybe the technical benefits of having end-to-end encryption outweigh that for the user, but stuff like traffic analysis on messages and the security of the client may be up for question.

          Specifically for Telegram, I haven’t used Telegram, so I don’t know how it handles key distribution, which you need to do for end-to-end encryption – OTR, for example, needs some pre-existing shared secret or secure sideband channel to bootstrap trust between two users. It looks like Telegram provides source, but for that to be useful, one needs to believe that someone trustworthy has validated the source, that the binary for the client is a legitimate build from that source, and that you have properly distributed keys with the other user using that client. Those can all be done with a lack of legality, but my guess is that a lack of legality likely makes it harder.

    •  tal   ( @tal@lemmy.today ) 
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      79 months ago

      Most people don’t use PGP/GPG, despite it being generally available.

      If the vast majority of people don’t use something, it doesn’t matter much whether it exists.

      A service that makes end-to-end encryption easy for the vast bulk of the public is another story.

      •  notepass   ( @notepass@feddit.de ) 
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        69 months ago

        Most people also do not care about privacy or understand anything about encryption.
        If this shit was to happen, it would hit the news for a cycle, some people would get slightly upset and then it would go on with the next thing.

        Most people here care a lot about these things and are technically inclined. But we are a minority.

  •  bbbhltz   ( @bbbhltz@beehaw.org ) 
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    239 months ago

    So this is how liberty dies…

    I can’t see Signal operating in Europe if this is the case. Telegram has already handed over information, so they will likely adapt and continue doing their thing. Meta/WhatsApp will want to keep that money, so they will find a way to operate as well.

    I suppose Signal could have a European server, but that might cut them off from the rest of the world.

    Might end up using Briar or XMPP.

    I haven’t given the proposition more than a once-over, but I assume this will cover emails too?

  •  Dyskolos   ( @Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ) 
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    209 months ago

    Great. That would probably mean a ban for Telegram would also be needed, as they’re known to not bow to local surveillance-laws.

    I’m all for doing everything to find effing pedos, but I’ll doubt it will help catch one. Who would be so dumb to do illegal things on the surface-web?

      •  Yamayo   ( @Yamayo@lemm.ee ) 
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        9 months ago

        Of course it is encrypted by default, just not on device, but in the server side. Just like Gmail, office 365, and so many online services that are perfectly secure and that no one mentions as being a problem.

        If you need End to End encryption, you have the option to use it, but being server encrypted it’s more convenient for syncing on devices and for uploading files, which I use a lot.

        • Sorry you’re right, I meant end-to-end encryption of course. (Gmail, Office 365, and most HTTPS websites are only encrypted in-transit though, not on the server side.)

          Which is, of course, the kind of encryption that matters for this proposal. (And which I believe you don’t have the option of using in group chats on Telegram, but don’t quote me on that.) Non-end-to-end encrypted messages can already be obtained by law enforcement by coercing the service provider.

      •  Dyskolos   ( @Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ) 
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        19 months ago

        Signal or tgram. Whatever floats your boat and isn’t whatapp and co. It’s not always about encryption alone. It’s also about trust. I trust tgram and Pavel Durov. If one doesn’t, go signal & co. Perfectly valid alternative.

    • not really, cos telegram is not end to end encrypted unless you do not use group chats, and deep dive into the menu to enable secret chat for every individual contact.

      I have no idea why telegram got this secure reputation. it is literally the absolute worst of the bunch, security wise

      •  Dyskolos   ( @Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ) 
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        19 months ago

        Encryption wasn’t relevant in the context of the surveillance-law, as having ways to decrypt it will be required then and hence make it useless.

        Telegram does not bow. They won’t bend their knee to a government wanting them to plant a bot. They then will just be banned.

        Besides, there is end2end-encryption if you want, where is the problen? Noone forces you to use the cloud. And it’s also not “hidden deep”.

          •  Dyskolos   ( @Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ) 
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            19 months ago

            If that’s “buried deep” to you, then maybe that technology isn’t your thing. Beside that was totally irrelevant to the topic at all. If you don’t like tgram, use something else. It’s not a pro/contra encryption discussion, it’s anti-observation.

            If a messenger is still alive after this law gets real, then you have your answer regarding security and privacy.

              •  Dyskolos   ( @Dyskolos@lemmy.zip ) 
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                18 months ago

                I think, you didn’t get the real impact of the meaning of this post if you fight about encryption-capabilities of some clients.

                Wow. 4 taps. This is really above the horizon of most boomers 😁 (of which you surely aren’t of)

                Seriously, who cares. If you don’t like it, use another client. Telegram rocks and has a lot of features i would never want to miss. It’s not all about privacy and privacy. Smart people know when to use which tool at what occasion at their disposal. It’s about having even the option to do so at all, which the law mentioned in the OP is going to fuck away from us. But sure, go ahead and fight your peasant client-wars. Omg tgram is not the most secure client, i gotta fight it until the last secure messengers are gone at all. Happy whatsapping then.

  •  0x815   ( @0x815@feddit.de ) 
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    129 months ago

    Germany suggests splitting up child sexual abuse material regulation

    Germany has suggested splitting the file into two parts, namely “generally acceptable provisions”, which should remain in the compromise text, and “controversial provisions”, which should be removed. The removed parts should be included in a new draft regulation.

    Controversial provisions could be “discussed without time pressure”, to come up with solutions that protect children and also respect data privacy.

  •  jsdz   ( @jsdz@lemmy.ml ) 
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    89 months ago

    the proposed text would mandate the implementation of surveillance bugs

    And they call it 2.0? I’ve never seen such a blatant example of version number inflation. It should be called 0.2a, as it’s nowhere near ready for release and full of bugs.

    •  Xoronil   ( @Xoronil@feddit.de ) 
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      78 months ago

      Might depend on your country, but for Germany there are no direct candidates that we votes for. Everybody hat one vote one could give to a party, which had presented a list of people for the election. At the end the party then send the first x people of that list, according to how many of the German representatives were to be send by that party.

      So, effectively all MEP which are German are “my” MEP. Or just the party I voted for if I want to be exclusive.

  •  denny   ( @denissimo@feddit.de ) 
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    59 months ago

    As long as it applies to the normalplebian things like WhatsApp, I’m not really concerned nor surprised.

    It is up to us to protect themselves and it has been since the wake of malicious ads that track your every click. It’s gotten so bad that you’d have to be insane to not use uBlock Origin.

    Now it’s time to find another means of communication. So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends… such as SimpleX Chat and Session Messenger.

    Don’t sleep on your OPSEC, unless you have a reason to. :)

    •  tal   ( @tal@lemmy.today ) 
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      8 months ago

      As long as it applies to the normalplebian things…I’m not really concerned nor surprised.

      So many privacy oriented open source apps have come out and all that you need to do is install one and tell your friends…

      If you don’t want to interact with “normalplebians”, I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.