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Is there any way to fight chat control in the EU?
If you go to chatcontrol.eu you will find more info about chat control and how to fight against it.
Guess China was just ahead of the curve.
I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.
The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.
The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.
If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the got-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.
It's really simple.
The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.
There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.
I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".
I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
In the EU similar stuff is promoted by companies wanting to profit from supplying the various required software.
It's really inconsequential why they want this. Their success means endgame.
The actions have consequences, and whether I'm breaking a window with a hammer to check how fragile it is or to go outside, it will have both those consequences.
We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
You can have "disinformation and extremism" campaigns with only presenting truth or things posted by real people. Just like with political representation. Representatives are a subset of citizenry. The visible posts are a subset of all things posted. Except you can pick any subset you want, if you, say, classify posts by emotion and people by political alignment and what not.
One can have so much more believable bots today, that they won't be distinguishable from people, but those are beneficial as pressure, making the situation clear for normies, - with transparent identities of people, signing and globally addressing posts, you wouldn't fear bots and you wouldn't need a digital ID to access a website. And additionally you would have a way to double check the "color" of recommendations you get.
Thus the solutions they are picking are stabilizing the "disinformation and extremism" environment. With today's bots it will soon be utterly visibly useless to communicate over social media without what I've described. Which means, superficially paradoxically but really not, an end to such campaigns' efficiency.
So the claim of this helping fight such campaigns I have disproved.
I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
There's no "situation". "Situations" develop much faster. Such a "situation" didn't transpire in the early 00s Internet, despite plenty of people in it and no identities and regulation.
What "situation" would really look like, I have described - herds of LLM bots infesting social media, which would be beneficial for propaganda of a small amount of interested powerful parties, but will just make social media sour when everyone uses such. Which is fine, there is a technical solution, they just don't like it. They want the "situation" they describe, but in their favor. It's very convenient, a weapon evil useless jerks didn't have for a long time.
OK, I'm in Russia and don't affect anything. You protest, I'll cheer.
We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .
We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .
I've been running i2p for years. It works well and if there was demand it would be fairly trivial to make Lemmy compatible.
So what did you change about your behavior after writing this message?
Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?
In any case, you can't have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.
But honestly all of today's computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.
I wonder if it's possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it's a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don't know Japanese to play with it.
Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.
Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won't help. It's not even a matter of technology, it's a matter of links' capability when you can't use the Internet because, ahem, you'll be detected and police will come knocking.
Perhaps a meshtastic delivered list of tor bridges or a wireless p2p internet . Digital dead drops
Well, in my head "like Briar" is the best thing possible for architecture. Except Briar only synchronizes joined groups.
Perhaps even with some kind of, yes, a digital dead drop, that would synchronize (purging stuff old or not in demand) everything announced by devices passing nearby. Over some low-range radio, like BT.
Asynchronous communication. Because having a real-time connection with any mesh is hard.
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it's been nearly a month and i haven't heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to "lol, nah". the french would've set a car on fire for less is all i'm saying
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest
Where were all the protests to this: https://techinformed.com/france-enforces-age-verification-law-adult-sites/ ?
This is what you get at the moment when you access pornhub from a French IP:
We used to know, even in the face of state atrocities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingdom_miners%2527_strike
Sadly, Thatcher broke the miners and we’ve never been right since.
There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.
Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
It’s cute you think VPNs will survive this.
This is all theatre. They know they have no legitimate reason to ban VPNs. Their justification for all of this is protect the children if they start banning VPNs they're going to start getting asked some incredibly awkward questions about how that's going to work.
Yup they just want more control, they know they can't have total control. So why ban VPNs, only a fraction of people uses them.
Most of the people who use VPNs use them for work as well. It would be an impossible task to craft a law in such a way that didn't ban VPNs for business use, but did for private use, other than to just come out and say that.
and that this thing will collapse
With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.
yeah and their government is planning on restricting VPN use because of that, they're not going to stop being dickheads, brits need to get their voices heard sooner rather than later
They've said nothing of the sort.
One backbench MP said something about it.
Ah ok. That makes sense where it came from then.
They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend
and stay out of the EU, england
EU isn't much better.
okay, remove your home from the EU specifically then (reference to Peter Griffins microstate)
We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late. Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.
we weren’t told what it was before it was too late.
Not that it's different on the continent but you can't expect to be told these things. You gave to gather those informations yourself.
Not easy when 7 of the top 8 newspapers are just propaganda for the Tories. You can only convert so many people when entire fear and belief systems have been cultivated over decades.
Europe will always welcome you, since for us it's obvious you belong here.
But it's not going to happen since Brits think they're part of the "international" world. And I guess with many thinking this they're not entirely wrong.
I think you may be generalising based on what our politicians say and comments on social media that are written by Russian bot farms or not mass reported by them.
All poles confirm the UK public know they were lied to and would never make the same mistake again.
I don't disagree but you're not going to find a majority that wants to reapply
Okay I wish it would happen, but this doesn't talk what specific terms etc. I still doubt it will happen
It seems that this time the EU plans to follow the UK in these atrocious policies against the Human Right to privacy, unfortunately. What a hell of a can of worms your country has opened.
