Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?

Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.

https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...

But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.

You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...

Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.

Ah, yes, the gateway drug trope. Always a good one for asserting control indirectly. Inevitably results in increased profits for the purveyors of the gateway drug and no reduction in demand or consumption. Prosecutors and jailors get richer too. Follow the money.

> meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay.

I've been reading "illegal" manga for 20 years. I've never once thought that these acts would be okay to do in real life.

Same when I read the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher.

> It likely encourages pedophilia

It's like saying that pictures of gay people encourages homosexuality

I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?

> It likely encourages pedophilia

Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?

Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.

I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.

> will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay

I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.

What? What’s the relation between your question and being safe while consuming ok-content?

I said “deemed”. The judge can decide anything even if the user really is above 18.

Not even to ask how you enforce age verification of characters in a drawing?

There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.

Publically accessible doesn't necessarily mean legal.

IRC is such a simple protocol seeing its implementation in <1k loc in many languages and I assume bot building process must be simple too compared to signal.

I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.

Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.

XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential

I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.

> That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted"

Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.

You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.

I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.

I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.

50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.

Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.

> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.

I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.

The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.

I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.

You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.

I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.

I like this answer posted in the other leg of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352710

I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.

They can't put you in jail, but they will often happily sell your data to the government so that they can put you in jail [1], and by holding the data they are now open to subpoenas anyway.

Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.

IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...

Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.

That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)

Election cycles are unfortunately too long for that to work. Would need to reduce office terms to 2-3 months for "vote them out" to be viable.

The people who push such laws are not voted in to begin with. Thorn et.al do not have elections.

How would anyone be voted out in the EU?

Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.

People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.

You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.

If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.

The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.

I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.

Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder

SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.

Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.

I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.

Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.

Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.

Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.

And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.

For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.

Which lobbying group?

But ProtectEU stuff is about organised crime, terrorism, cybersecurity, and countering Russian sabotage operations, not sure why you brought up CSAM.

It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them.

It's like a lot of things.

> It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides.

This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.

> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious

You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.

Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.

I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.

I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.

At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).

Yeah, the Irish really should step up their GDPR enforcements.

This is a way more sick proposal of authoritarianism than any law that would allow cops to read chat messages with a warrant.

Fair point. The USA PATRIOT Act shouldn’t have existed in the first place. But one of its most controversial parts (Section 215) did expire in 2020 (it was barely going to make it, though).

But you’re right overall: most of the Act’s powers were repeatedly renewed or re-created under other laws.

Sunset clauses aren’t a silver bullet, but they do occasionally stop or slow things that would otherwise become permanent.

The mask mandates weren't to protect you, they were to protect others from you. If everyone did this, the spread would have been massively reduced, and super-spreader events wouldn't have happened anywhere near as much.

Unfortunately, a great many people simply refused to distance and wear a mask, and then when they became infected, spread it far and wide, sometimes not even aware that they were doing so. Approximately 40% of those infected were asymptomatic, meaning they would feel fine but still make others around them sick (or end up killing them).

Perhaps the messaging was different where you lived, but I don't believe any credible professional was suggesting those outside healthcare wear masks for their own protection. Mask mandates are to reduce the risk of others catching covid from you, a considerably easier task for which even cloth masks are usefully effective. There's a reason surgeons masks are still used.

The proper masks are not expensive and an imperfect fit still helps a lot.

I saw a couple unreasonable restrictions like that in some places. It's not what caused the vast majority of complaints.

The financial incentives for VPNs as they get bigger cause them to both put as many subscribers on the same IP as possible and to share IPs over the entire subscriber base. It's possible for a VPN to sacrifice profit to avoid being detected as easily.

how does it compare to mullvad?

Or proton

A VPN provider could easily support Port Control Protocol / NAT-PMP without giving each VPN client its own public IPv4.

Not a whole public IPv4, just one port on it (or a couple). And the public IP should change every reconnect.

Airvpn does it

Centrists, I'd say. Same as the people pushing it in the UK.

The left, the anti-immigration parties and really, any party which isn't wholly 'let's do the same as we've always had' probably imagine that this would be used to their disadvantage somehow.

They’re center-right.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/digital-house-arrest-how-th...

They're usually liberals, so right wing but they don't specifically hate homosexuals.

Are you suggesting the existence democracies that only ever implement policies that were a significantly theme during elections?

Are you really convinced that the EU, which is not even a nation and is usually laughed away for being incapable of making any firm decision whatsoever, is on a faster track towards totalitarianism than the US has been since its last election?

Mind you I don’t believe this, but the logic is if encryption is banned, then anyone using it will be easier to find like spies.

Before online encryption, spies still used code books but having one in your house was essentially proof you were a spy.

Measures such going dark and similar ones are wholly supported - and pushed - by police forces around europe, not by politicians. I do agree that the politician should grow a spine and trust computer scientists for one, since they're the ones making laws after all

Just because some education implementations have problems doesn't mean education itself must be excluded from the solution.

Public education and universities played a large role in freeing me from generations of magical thinking and religious indoctrination.

I think it’s because once you educate yourself, you see how the masses behave and it’s like the ultimate revelation.

They are consumers. Feeders. They want to be told what to think.

Most people don’t even have an internal monologue and many people say they don’t even think much, not even a thought.

You thought for yourself. You used your brain. But you are outnumbered. Vastly.

> Thank you for the reply, I really appreciate it.

Likewise.

> You created a company which .. ultimately undermines the government power and makes it weaker.

Undermining the power of governments and other powerful entities has benefits and drawbacks. Our thesis is that making mass surveillance and online censorship ineffective is a net good for humanity in the long term.

You are arguing that censorship is a net good in the much more specific context of disinformation campaigns on social media during war time. Yes, government censorship might be effective and proportional in that context. It could also backfire.

You are also arguing that the dynamics and algorithms of social media is the vector through which disinformation spreads. Wouldn't it then be more effective and proportional to target social media for regulation?

>> It sounds like you're arguing for censored populations to .. not circumvent censorship through technological means.. > Yes, in democratic countries..

What should people in undemocratic countries do?

> 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. > .. I do think that political activism is still possible even when there is additional risk.

I agree. At the same time, freedom of expression and of the press is under attack on a global scale. Consider this article from Reporters Without Borders: https://rsf.org/en/world-press-freedom-index-2025-over-half-...

> 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 agree that is a serious problem and I don't know how to solve it. I'm sorry.

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

Why not?

> I mean, activism is clearly a part of your business strategy.

From a cause-and-effect point of view it would be more correct to say that starting a business is a part of our activism strategy. My opinions on the proportionality of mass surveillance and government censorship were formed a decade before I started Mullvad. Running a business is hard work, and if I didn't believe in its mission I would move on to something easier.

> 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 see. I interpreted it as "for show" in the sense of not being genuine.