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Comment by supriyo-biswas | Hacker News Reader

In recent times the EU member states seem to take many steps backwards in terms of civil rights and general freedoms, including the proposed Chatcontrol legislation, the one above, and many others.

Furthermore, because the “west” is typically seen as better than the “east”, such a law, if passed would be adopted rather quickly by countries outside the EU member states. This has happened with the NetzDG social media laws in Germany and similar onerous laws being adopted in other countries; EFF has lots of articles regarding it.

Specific to the subject matter of this article, even China is doing a better job by mostly censoring at the ISP level and investing in entropy analysis of network streams.

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The precedent here is that any of the 200 nations of the world now can arbitrarily tell browsers what to do. It's forcing the browser to be non-neutral to content & sites, forcing it to become a regulatory agent.

Right now it also sounds like thr government is basically sending letters. How does a browser maker know what letters to trust & which are outright bogus or someone in thr government overstepping their bounds? What is the expected maintenance burden we are putting on folks making browsers?

Are there any limits to this rule? What happens if elinks browser or w3m doesn't update itself? How will the government figure out who to send updates to?

It is likely that using an "illegal" browser would be a thing? What, you use this thing called "curl"? Must be an illegal tool.

I've talked a bit too much about Stallman's "The Right to Read", but this paragraph seems prescient, except that the "root password" he talks about would be some form of hardware-assisted cryptographic attestation today.

> It was also possible to bypass the copyright monitors by installing a modified system kernel. Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.

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