I've don't use Tor. I've never had a reason to.

All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.

Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.

Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)

If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.

> there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period

This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.

What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.

That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.

People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.

A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:

>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

Specifically:

>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...

Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...

> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy

Which apply equally to the government?

I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.

In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.

I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!

i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.

> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.

Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.

Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.

Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.

Its like govt banning bleach and when chemical companies protest, the govt tells them to fix problem of people mixing bleach and vinegar. Its a problem, it has to be solved. If you dont like this, find another solution govt says.

This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.

Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.

(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.

> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.

Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.

The Epstein debacle seems to indicate that child sexual exploitation is a preferred method of entrapping, blackmailing, and controlling world political and science leaders and the wealthy. And implicates the same intelligence agencies calling for mass surveillance.

Intent is unimportant; the law itself is authoritarian. And if you think that there aren't nefarious actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of these kinds of laws, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you

I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?

> Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.

Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.

It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.

A few examples of how mitigate the problem

* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.

* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.

* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.

* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).

CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.

The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.

Well, Congress renewed the Patriot act so I don't have a lot of faith. Personally I'm starting to think that all of Congress, including aides, should get cycled out all at once periodically so that their internal culture of hating the masses gets broken.

Excellent idea (re:mandatory expiration dates/sunset clauses)

Once social trust (or assibiyah, to use Ibn Khandun's term) in a region collapses, it often returns slowly or not at all. Sadly common pattern in history. I think one could plausibly argue that in this way, Calabria never recovered from the collapse of antiquity, the Gothic wars, and generations spent as a Christian-Muslim war zone.

Masks and protocols around them were largely just theatre though. Only very expensive n95 or better type masks, which were properly fitted and handled would actually provide any sort of protection from covid. Even the eventual proponents of masks initially were against the idea as in many ways many of the responses to covid were directed politically, not practically.

When governments push out clearly nonsensical regulations, like you must go to the office even if you can work from home, but you cannot go hiking, yes people do tend to get mad.

They'll probably take it to court in the regions within the EU where this would be illegal, for example Germany. This is kind of what I meant by this law would be ignored/repealed as it goes against member nations own laws. I would expect there would be a lot of civic push back too. This law hasn't passed before, I'm not confident it will pass this time either. The real issue here is that the EU is not good at handling band faith actors - the same law in different wrapping should not be allowed to persist.

Security services qualitatively have as many fuckups to their name as they do successes. I was listening to a podcast last week about British undercover police fathering children with the women they were undercover with. If the position of the anti-Chat-Control people is that we should reject not just the backdoors but also — on the basis that they just can’t be trusted — the whole idea of a national, secret security service, then they should be open and say so.

Which VPN provider doesn’t have their addresses flagged? I know a few offer “residential” IP addresses (for quite the premium), but as I understand it, these are a bit of a grey area and are also usually shared, so usually just a matter of time until they’re banned or flagged as proxy/shared/anonymiser.

Can recommend https://njal.la if you still need port forwarding.

They had to disable port forwarding due to abuse and spam iirc.

Are you expecting a public IPv4 from a VPN?

Which other VPN providers support the range of payment methods that Mullvad does?

Mullvad is one of the few that work in China today, any others? Or is it possible to run your own Mullvad server?

Rolling your own L2TP/IPSec gets flagged by the China firewall these days

They're downvotes, not bullets. GP isn't brave for enduring them.

The left? The authoritarian politicians pushing this legislation in the EU are more leftist than right.

There's democratic deficit in the whole system as this issue wasn't part of most internal election campaigns, effectively circumventing democratic process, due to lack of input from citizens themselves.

EU severely lacks checks and balances if it tries to be something more than trade union.

Wow. I cannot fathom anyone thinking this, but also I am doubtful the EU pays for propaganda on HN so it is what it is I guess. After von der Leyen's corruption and the fast pace into totalitarianism against the will of the population nonetheless. Just wow.

I'm as pro european as they come, but I think the author didn't deserve a downvote.

If there is a moment when the EU could not afford to take hits to their popularity, it is now. And here we are, gifting free shots to anti-EU populists.

> Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.

Let's assume for a moment that would be true. And let's also ignore the lack of a nuclear weapons in most EU countries.

How does breaking encryption for normal people help? Spies and Operatives will just use PGP and ignore these laws, because that's what spies do.

> Europe is preparing for the Russia invasion from one side, and betrayal by the US from the other.

Are you attempting to justify ChatControl with that situation? You might need to help us out with how you arrived at that exactly

Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.

> My cofounder and I, as well as several of our colleagues, tried classic political activism in the early 2000s. It became increasingly clear to us that there are many powerful politicians, bureaucrats and special interest groups that don't act in good faith. They lie, abuse their positions, misuse state funds and generally don't care what the population or civil society thinks. They have an agenda, and don't know the meaning of intellectual honesty.

I understand that.

You created a company which allows people to regain freedoms limited by their governments. My only problem is that it ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.

By creating a technical solutions to subvert government function, you are basically moved into a business of bypassing government regulations for people with money. Obviously when the market becomes large enough, governments can no longer ignore it.

The problem is that it creates reinforcement loops in such ways that political change becomes more difficult.

For example, we may imagine that Russia and China target people through social media. I believe that the effectiveness of this influence cannot be overstated, so naturally some governments may start thinking about limiting it by enforcing bans on some social media platforms or create laws to force them to be more transparent. You may not agree with this personally, and believe in the freedom of choice, but you are still in a business of exposing people to enemy propaganda against their democratically elected governments.

> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to respect local law, not circumvent censorship through technological means, and only work to remove censorship through political means.

Yes, in democratic countries I believe population should feel the pressure and resolve it through the process of electing the politicians representing their values, not buying workarounds from the vendor.

I believe that the exact same ads you have on the streets in the cities should be published by politicians or NGOs and not a business.

> Generally, the more a state engages in online censorship the less it cares about what its population thinks. There are plenty of jurisdictions where political activism will get you jailed, or worse.

I agree with that. To be honest, I do care about the EU mostly and I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.

> Are you seriously suggesting that circumventing state censorship is immoral and wrong?

There is a very fine line, and I don't know the answer. I do belive that people should have a right for a private communication. I also do not trust law enforcement agencies and people there.

On the other hand, I do know that vulnerable people (teens, minorities, sick, elderly) in my country get recruited by Russia en masses through messengers. I do know that Russia engages in psychological warfare through Telegram, Facebook and TikTok without governments able to do anything. I do see the politicians in the western countries aligns with the psychological warfare of enemies because it helps them to get in power.

I do want for politicians to fight for my rights, but I don't want that from businesses to be honest.

> I'm not sure what you mean by performance. Please clarify.

I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy. The more discussion you create around issues related to privacy and censorship the more users you'll have - that's why I call it performative. Mullvad's business depends on the performance of fighting for the rights at the same time as benefitting from the fight itself.

I do feel that there is a big disconnect between finding a technical solution and finding a political solution, and I feel like the tech sector becoming more and more influential and I also believe this will not end well.

> Education. Education. Education.

The problem is that many of the most highly educated people are the ones fully supporting censorship in the fight against disinformation. Higher education has become a bastion of illiberal ideology.