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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Incredible that they think this will even slow anything at all. Some of these laws you can see a trade-off between safety and freedom, which you can decide where to position yourself. But in this one I really have a hard time seeing what even gets harder to do for criminals.

If I'm sharing nasty stuff through one of these platforms and I can send text, I can send a link. In any platform "that doesn't allow links" you see people sharing them anyway through normal text, even if they have to create some new conventions. And you can also just use different platforms anyway, so where is the deterrent?

This is just annoying based on people legislating for technologies they don't understand.

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>This is just annoying

That's the most positive take you can have on this.

I think you overestimate the technical knowledge and skills of many people. For every crafty career criminal there's a dumb idiot doing dumb stuff on account of being a dumb idiot. And even crafty career criminals can and do make mistakes.

Of course it won't catch 100% of it, but very few laws or measure do that (and those that do almost always come with very high amounts of false positives). Also links are not hard to scan for either, and you can't "just" upload CSAM to anywhere either and not expect troubles sooner or later (unless you know what you're doing, in which case we're back to the previous paragraph).

I think it's very hard to deny that of course it will catch a non-zero number of people, although it's hard to determine exactly how many beforehand. That doesn't mean it's a good law, it just means that all these type of "it won't even catch anyone!" argument are just bad arguments.

I think you're making my argument out to be something else. I'm not saying we can only have laws that are bulletproof. But the fact they think links and text are different things, makes me _know_ they don't understand what they are doing. So I know their interpretation of the risk/reward is also not good and it's annoying to have freedoms taken away by dummies. If I get the impression they are smart and looked into it I'd swallow it way easier.

> the fact they think links and text are different things

I don't think anyone really thinks that.

Maybe I have some misunderstanding from the draft legislation. Can you explain how one can prevent users from sharing links while keeping them able to share text?

You can't. But like I said: of course it's not 100% foolproof. Going from that to "they think links and text are different things" is quite a leap.

First message: p 0 r n, s i 7 e Second message: dot Third message: come on over. Forth message: Sorry my mistake, organising the house.

After a while the second, third and fourth won't be required.

Jeeze...we learned obfuscation fucking years ago (torrenting was punishable then, probably is still, and a few people may be made examples of, by ip tracking etc as subscribing becomes more disliked).

> I think it's very hard to deny that of course it will catch a non-zero number of people,

Sure, but it is still completely valid to argue that it won't quantitatively be effective enough to justify its cost, either in money or in creating-the-infrastructure-for-a-fucking-police-state. "Non-zero" isn't necessarily an acceptable level of effectiveness.

Yes, but that is a very different argument than "it doesn't work at all". Then we can start discussing what the balance ought to be and all of that, rather than just a "Njet! It won't work!"

It will work maybe somehow the first time. Predators will adapt and start using obfuscation same like thiefts adapt - burgler expect that most doors will be locked and might have camera and will bring balaclava and crowbar to their 'workplace'

If it's not close to 100% is it even worth it? I think Blackstone's formulation has something to say about all those innocents caught up in it.

> Incredible that they think this will even slow anything at all.

They don't, or they don't care. Measures like these have two purposes:

1. To make it seem like someone is doing something. Constituents don't accept the idea that their representatives are powerless to fix certain hot-button issues. Even if a new law or regulation will have minimal or no effect on a problem, as long as legislators (or whomever) can pay some "experts" to say good things about it, many constituents -- most of whom don't understand the issues involved -- will be (somewhat) satisfied.

2. Continuing to establish and normalize surveillance technology and make it a part of normal life. The more that government types can mandate that people can't do in private, the easier it is for them to do... well... whatever they want to do.

But you don't even need to use a link! You could just convert and send the image as base64 or you could compress and encrypt it with 7z. I am sure there are many other methods. How accessible that would be on a phone though is another story, but I dont think it would be that hard.

Having the bad content hosted "elsewhere" is still a good gain for any service provider. It reduces the number of safe harbors for harmful actors.

Outside public content can be scanned as part of "defense in depth" too.

The goal is money and control. They enact a partial "solution" so later on they'll say they need more access to private data because of the loopholes. Meanwhile the industry of surveillance and compliance grows providing more paper pushing jobs to the establishment. Power-tripping politicians also get the ability to spy on opponents and basically anyone they please.

More paper pushing jobs and less nurses and doctors and plumbers and builders...

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