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Comment by mindfulhack | Hacker News Reader

To not even be sure whether a website you visit, or a file you download is actually what its creator says it is, is like picking up an orange but the government secretly replaces it with an apple that contains almost no vitamin C in it at all.

You have the right to seek out and eat an orange for your immune system and survival, and no government should have the right to interfere with that, at any time.

This law is a fundamental attack on basic quality of life and basic human rights for all Germans. Whoever proposed it should be ashamed of themselves. I hope the parliament outright rejects it for what it is.

The very fact it has been proposed is Orwellian and chilling. Internet giants like Google should resist this technology and tell us when a government has just tampered with our web browsing.

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> Whoever proposed it should be ashamed of themselves

Name and shame: Interior Minister Horst Seehofer of the conservative-authoritarian CSU. He and his party friends are who want this.

We have the chance to kick them out of office in 2021, it's time for the stranglehold of Conservative internet-printers (Internetausdrucker, a German word for tech illiterates) as Interior Ministers to end once and for all.

> ...internet-printers (Internetausdrucker, a German word for tech illiterates)

Let me guess, this word describes people who print out their emails?

Not only mails. I had teachers printing out web pages before reading them because it felt more natural for them.

For serious reading, that does make sense, at least with all monitors I've used so far.

How's the CSU authoritarian? That's like throwing expletives around; you might as well call them Nazis and get it over with.

It's not. Modern CDU/CSU are basically where the social democrats were about ten years ago.

Precisely!

Yet more proof that "Conservatism is progressivism driving the speed limit". And the speed limit seems to be rather generous in this case. But for some it's never high enough, they'd pull down all of Chesterton's fences at the merest whim.

You are confusing social politics, economic politics and interior politics.

No, I don't.

> Modern CDU/CSU are basically where the social democrats were about ten years ago.

relevant?

That too. But I was mostly referring to political positions.

Spineless, aimless and dysfunctional?

Look at the history of CDU/CSU interior ministers, both federal and in the states. They are authoritarians, and their party line regarding interior politics is authoritarian.

As for calling them Nazis... well, when one looks at the events regarding former Verfassungsschutz chef Maaßen, instituted by HP Friedrich and protected by successor Seehofer until it was no longer tenable, who is accused of having protected the AfD during his term: it's not that far to at least imply ideological support or tolerance toward far right political positions.

> Conservative internet-printers

By association Otto Schily wasn't a conservative and yet...

Otto Schily exited office in 2005, fifteen years ago. While he is a law-and-order hardliner himself, he's not relevant for any recent discussions. Since then the office was filled by hardline authoritarians (Schäuble, Maiziere, HP Friedrich, Maiziere, Seehofer).

But if Schily is any indication (and why not?) it doesn't help to have a different party fill that position. Just like it took Nixon to go to China (because he wasn't at risk of being mistaken for a friend of communism) other partys can't afford to look much "weaker" than the current folks - and then have _anything_ go wrong.

> But if Schily is any indication (and why not?) it doesn't help to have a different party fill that position.

I agree on that one. There aren't many progressives in interior politics aside from Left and Greens, the rest is all authoritarian/law-and-order hardliners. Frankly, it's disgusting.

That there are other authoritarians doesn't make the CDU/CSU less authoritarian.

> I hope the parliament outright rejects it for what it is.

Unfortunately, there's not much hope for this. As the article states: "The proposed law is already the result of lots of back and forth within the government and many expect it to pass when it is presented to Germany’s congressional body, the Bundestag, after next week."

I wonder how they would break TLS though. Your ISP cannot just break that up. Maybe degrade your connection to http, but without local access to your machine, it would be quite difficult to inject something in a data stream that is encrypted. Easier to do it through app stores of any kind.

Browsers and operating systems include a list of root certificates which includes those of various governments. Pretty much any government can thus issue valid HTTPS certificates for any domain to MITM traffic.

True, that would be possible. Time to ban the German one in my opinion for breaking the chain of trust.

Certificate transparency should mean that those wrongly-signed certificates make it out into the world though, right?

I am not quite sure how mandatory CT is at the moment though.

Part of dns actually prevents that. So long as you are using a browser that has implemented its use, dnd entries specifify the public signing key of the destination server, so if the browser receives a packet signed using a different certificate the Browser will prevent you from navigating there.

I know for a fact that Chrome and Firefox have implemented this as standard behavior specifically to prevent this kind of man in the middle attack, and have explicitly come out against previous government attempts to subvert this guarantee of privacy.

The biggest problem isn't that your own government might swap that orange you wanted for an apple, it's that by making it possible they also make it possible for a foreign government to do so, and they're likely to replace the orange with cyanide.

The US government has tried and failed to push this kind of idiocy through every other year for the last 2 decades. Every major tech company tells them they will flat out refuse to compromise everyone's safety to accommodate idiocy and the attempt is ultimately dropped.

Which DNS record type are you talking about? CAA?

Besides, for any malicious interference with updates you will be breaking code-signing on those updates.

> Whoever proposed it should be ashamed of themselves.

Our current government doesn't even know what that means.

This is why a VPN is indeed helpful, because now ISP are the primary attack vector.

So the next step will be for the governments to use VPN as the primary vector of attack

Yes, I would recommend a VPN service beyond the jurisdiction of your own government. It is not complete protection, but it is another step. Of course paying them is a transaction that would require the provider to regard local laws, but there are still ways around that. The law will be challenged of course and I hope it will get repelled. Until then this can all help. But yes, be careful with your choice of VPN or host your own.

Absolutely true and brilliant comparison. +1

What. Its awful. Privacy doesnt need comparisons or analogies. We have the language to describe privacy in native terms. We dont need help of figurative speech mixing and muddying the waters.

I love making analogies. I even compared apples to oranges and it worked!

Humour aside, analogies are really important and I have never understood the disparagement of comparing one group or situation to another. Analogising is a tool to help understand one other and promote diversity.

The analogies help break it down for less technically oriented people so that they can get behind the cause as well.

I believe that compassionate educational material - which would allow for diverse pedagogical 'ladders' or 'on-ramps' for people on different skill levels - on the core systemic issues/challenges we are currently facing, is a much better strategy than flimsy and inaccurate analogies.

I think there is a common false belief that only technical people can understand some concepts. I believe it’s more the case that as a society we often don’t have good pedagogical tools available to us in the public domain to help people become the critical thinkers our democratic society needs them to be.

I say this with the hope for a shift towards social production/Commons-based peer production, and a re-imagining of the (currently) rentier and extractive business models on digital assets, which make no sense anymore in a digital society where information is light.

Design global, make local.

Favorite authors on this: Aaron Swartz('s manifesto), Kevin Carson and Yochai Benkler.

analogies are great, but there's just literally nothing that corresponds to vitamin c on the internet. the analogy just goes into completely unchartered waters and crashes against the rocks when it pretends that it is a life or death matter. the internet can't stop you getting scurvy - in fact, since it's effective at reducing exercise, it seems to run in the opposite direction from the truth and it's just alarmist nonsense.

I don't understand your analogy of uncharted waters and crashing against rocks.

Analogies can’t convince anyone who is not already sympathetic – anyone wanting to oppose your point would only poke holes in and argue about the analogy itself; making analogies does not help when arguing. Analogies only help when explaining something to someone who genuinely wants to understand it.

All argumentation is generally for the sake of the neutral interested third party, not the firm opponent.

In what theoretical dimension do you find these “neutral interested third party” people? In my experience, every discussion is a result of (at least) two people with both an opposing view and and, more crucially, an interest to argue the point. The very prerequisite of a debate is an interest in arguing a specific point of view, which most often precludes any participant being a neutral third party.

Of course, you could always argue “for the gallery”, i.e. not try to persuade your opponent, but to merely use the debate as a platform to reach an audience. But this is not persuasion; this is rhetoric. Analogies can be used as rhetorical tools. But analogies won’t persuade your opponent.

Therefore, if you’re arguing with someone else one-on-one, and there is no one else to win over by rhetorical tricks, you should avoid using analogies, since analogies aren’t persuasive.

I always get a kick out of analogies on HN. When there’s a technical concept being discussed, someone will make a non-technical analogy. When there’s a non-technical concept being discussed, someone will make a technical analogy.

And it’s all inevitably followed by an argument about the analogy itself.

I think this blog does what you expect

> Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say

https://write.privacytools.io/freddy/why-privacy-matters-eve...

Thank you for this conception. Metaphor and analogy are vital in every human endeavor.

As for my reasoning why:

Analogies and other figurative speech is important, not just as conversational tools, but also in thinking. Language is a metaphorical tool we place on reality to manage and interpret it. This is true for human languages and programming languages. Take Python. This is a high level language which an interpreter uses to help a computer parse it into the needed lower language for its understanding. The language alone though does little on its own without the multiple layers computers use to apply given instructions. Human language is multiple levels higher than computer languages when it comes to interpreting reality. Pretty much all human language is a metaphor because it doesn't directly mean what we are referring to. It instead refers to our mental conception of what we are attempting to relate to in reality.

Now I want an orange.

Germany has a proven history of doing very bad things, just check the last century and a half and it is hard to find something worse. By comparison, messing up with your computer is a gesture of goodwill, they could give you some Cyclon.

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