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Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

Believing that legislative issues can be solved with technology is one of the most common fallacies among the IT crowd.

If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become as risky as getting caught for murder. At that point, it would be naive to run a Mastodon server locally, wouldn't it?

P.S. Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running. Quotes like "they already know everything" and "do you have something to hide from the government?" will become ubiquitous in public discourse.

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This is defeatist and wrong. Technology can be used to cross political barriers and solve issues, that's what the government intends to stop. They like the App Store and Google Play store, because if dissenting apps pop up they only have 2 companies to call to get it removed[0]. They like people perceiving an iMessage/RCS duopoly because that's only 2 secure channels to backdoor[1]. Threatening you with jail-time is all they can do for escaping their ire, but that's an unjust and disproportionate response from any state-level actor.

The "average consumer" has been joking about their 'FBI guy' and freaking them out with weird porn or spurious Amazon carts for a decade now. We've hit the peaks of disillusionment, we've started down the road of exploitation and most of us are starting to worry that this trend of technological limitation is specifically intended to make us politically weak.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/09/17/navalny-g...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/canada-us-india-sikh-activist-kil...

I like the quote attributed to Vitalik Buterin about how "whereas most technologies tend to automate on the periphery, blockchains automate away the center."

If you descentralize, you democratize.-

Ah yes blockchains, where there is no privacy by design.

It's not defeatist. The point is that legislative decisions still matter, a lot.

Take the Chinese Great Firewall, for example. Yes, you can use technical means to circumvent it, but the effort required (and inevitably degraded performance) means that the median citizen does not.

If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.

I’m kind of fascinated by the often simultaneously held beliefs of “America doesn’t make the world’s rules!” and “…EU does!” Countries can influence each other, sure, but if EU (US or Canada or Brazil) makes a law, it doesn’t apply to people not under those jurisdictions.

> If/when American law mirrors it or we sign a treaty, it applies to me. Until then, it doesn’t. The penalty could be “shoot on sight” and it doesn’t matter as long as I’m outside their jurisdiction.

That's great if you never need to|want to travel.

What about the time you happen to end up in transit through an airport in a country where they've put you on their watchlist, they grab you airside and hold you for hours while they look at your devices....?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/18/glenn-greenwal...

I’m not going to live my life worried about hypotheticals. What if my plane goes down, I get rescued by North Korea, and they get mad at something I said about Kim Jong Number Un? That’d suck, but the possibility isn’t going to make me self-limit in the mean time. There are enough real concerns on my plate.

Yes, there are a lot of people living their lives like that. Live fast, die young kind of mentality.

Hypotheticals in tech pretty much always come true in the end. And especially fast these days.

The world is gearing up for something, and personally I smell a global war and a reshuffling of world powers in my lifetime.

Do you comply with PRC law, or even know what it asks of you? If not, why?

I don’t know and don’t care because I don’t have to. I live in a sovereign nation and I’m not obligated to follow their rules, any more than their citizens are obligated to follow mine. That’s how countries work.

If my country signs a treaty with them, then I have to obey that specific law. Absent that, I don’t.

Hell no I don’t abide by laws of the PRC.

If they had all the things I’d ever said in my life time they’d probably execute me. I speak my mind all the time. That’s what terrifies me though, because in 20 years time they could be running the show. So why would I want to make it so easy for them to know everything I have ever said, why would I want that data stored about me.

Theoretically a valid risk, and when the first person gets arrested over a cookie banner, I'll take it more seriously.

Let's not mix contexts. This legislation was (and is) pushed by European security services. If it passes, I guarantee that it will be (ab)used widely.

It was mostly pushed by people (Ylva Johansson) linked to American organisations (Thorn) who are in the business of selling chat monitoring software.

And their customers are...?

Currently random companies [1], if the shitty legislation gets passed then every EU government.

[1] https://www.thorn.org/solutions/for-platforms/

Their website lists oracle, slack, ancestry.com and others

Security services typically don't publicize what they use, for obvious reasons.

Unless you can point out links between the Hungarian government (who announced they will re-table the directive in a few months) and such companies, I'd say Occam stays with the security services.

I'm pretty sure Orban and his scumbags just use pegasus to spy on anyone they like, I don't think this adds anything for them.

The chat scanning stuff isn't a realistic proposal either for its intended purpose or for spying, it's just grifting.

If the EU is really coming down hard on people who do mundane stuff like host a Mastodon node and chat with their friends, then I’d avoid them just like I’d avoid North Korea or any other authoritarian country.

As indicated in that article, the UK kinda sucks, so, like, don’t go there. Whatever, they don’t have any good beaches anyway.

You can lay many faults at the UK's door, but they do have some very nice beaches.

Sadly outside summer the weather is usually to bad for them to be worth enjoying, but in summer they're pretty nice.

We used to have some very nice beaches, but unfortunately the Tory government thought it would be a great idea to allow water companies to discharge sewage into the waterways at will (because shareholders), so I personally wouldn't take the chance nowadays, although it doesn't seem to bother everyone.

You make it sound like the EU is the only one interested in stuff like this... but you do know that all your communications are already monitored and recorded by the NSA and that the person who revealed it is in hiding from the US government, right?

People need to stop treating other countries as if they're just the next town over. When you visit a place or do business with them you are in part endorsing how they behave and how they govern themselves. If you have a problem locking people up for blasphemy, don't spend money in a country that does it. If you have a problem with arresting people for illegal gestures, don't fly there to take instagram photos. Stop ignoring behavior you find abhorrent for the sake of personal convenience.

>doesn’t apply to people not under those jurisdictions.

Of course not but if an American company in the US caters to EU users with, for example, a localized site it does absolutely apply to them. Same the other way around. Just because you or your server are too small to matter doesn't mean it is irrelevant.

America doesn't make the world rules is often said when they create one set of rules for them and another for everyone else (US can have warships near china but if it was reversed we would have a new Cuban crisis) and when they create rules in places they have the most power to create international laws that fit their world view but not their enemies. In a perfect world the US would have zero power and zero say a meter outside its borders.

Nobody is going to extradite you for not having a cookie banner. EU can't _actually_ make laws like that.

The reason gambling/child porn/fincrime/etc are enforced across national boundaries is that everyone (at least, in the western world) respects those laws and absolutely will extradite. Cookie laws, anti-encryption laws, anti-(adult)-porn laws are not like this.

Did we actually complain about a Chinese freedom of navigation activity? I think the US vigorously supports the right of all countries to send a carrier fleet to hang out in international waters wherever…

Try ignoring the GDPR, they will get upset at you really quickly.

What are they going to do, invade the US to arrest one guy?

And if they do?

I like the GDPR. I comply with the local CCPA version. I’m not legally obligated to follow the GDPR though. I’m unaware of any agreement the US has with EU that puts me under its jurisdiction.

EU–US Data Privacy Framework? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93US_Data_Privacy_Fra...

What regulations does that apply to me?

Who is "they" and where is it being ignored? GDPR is quite clear on where it applies.

Back when I ran a nitter instance, I’d get emails about the GDPR.

I’d simply delete them, no problem.

The United States has arrested Marcus Hutchins for violating its laws while he was not inside the United States. This was not the first time, they also arrested Sklyarov for writing software they didn't like -- but the software was written in Russia. This is plain insanity and only the United States could get away with it. (The Sklyarov arrest together with the CFAA was one of the reasons I have chosen not to immigrate to the USA btw.)

For example, imagine you being arrested at Frankfurt airport because you posted something a year ago that falls under Strafgesetzbuch section 86a. You would need to review your entire post history going back years and compare it to the laws of every country you touch during your travels.

> For example, imagine you being arrested at Frankfurt airport because you posted something a year ago

Doesn't this happen all the time? Wasn't David Irving repeatedly arrested and charged in many countries in continental Europe for things he said and wrote while abroad? (Not defending Irving's views, he's a noxious lying toad, but the principle here appears to be the same.)

Except the part where the CANZUK/US/EU blocs generally have reciprocal agreements and Interpol is perfectly empowered to enact international law inside of the US, as of 2009.

Choosing to take this stance in one of the Western Nations is foolish to an almost ignorant degree. If one of them feels you broke a big enough law, it's trivial (at best) to execute upon it.

This isn’t international law. If it had passed, it would have been an EU law without a US counterpart.

Yes, but you can break EU law outside of the EU, especially digital crimes.

Foreign national hackers are arrested all over the western world for offenses in other countries, for instance.

This is complete nonsense (and borderline gibberish - Interpol can't 'enact' any laws in the US).

Extradition generally requires that the thing you're being extradited for would also a crime in the jurisdiction you're in.

For speech offences, this makes many foreign judgments unenforceable in the US due to the First Amendment, not to mention additional formal protections like the SPEECH Act.

> Mind you, the average consumer/user doesn't care as long as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are up and running.

The enormous success of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok is because the average consumer/user can express themselves there and broadcast to the world. Normal people are actually participating in public discourse again, after most of a century of public discourse being one way with the government screaming into the citizens ear what to think and what to do, via radio and TV.

Legislation is much easier to enforce on centralized services than decentralized ones.

As long as encrypted peer-to-peer communication exists on an open internet, there will be no way for a 3rd party to intercept this traffic, or for any government to control it. They can ban the use of specific software, but new software will always be written.

They can ban the use of any software that is "designed to circumvent" such laws, which would be any encrypted peer-to-peer communication software.

And enforcement doesn't need to be 100% effective to make a difference. Fairly simple measures are sufficient to deter and/or block well over 90% of the populace and force them into controlled channels, as China demonstrates.

> Believing that legislative issues can be solved with technology is one of the most common fallacies among the IT crowd.

Believing that all legislative issues can be solved that way is a fallacies. But some issues can totally be solved (or routed around) this way.

This isn't using technology (technology happens to be involved). This is a political challenge to Big Cloud (and it's systems being steered around by the many powers that be of the word).

Federation is politics. Federation is about governance. It's about a place between centralized/authoritarian and distributed/anarchy.

> If those in power decide to push forward by increasing the penalties, eventually running a Mastodon server will become as risky as getting caught for murder.*

It's unlikely to be enforced globally. Every millimeter wrong that statement is, ever chance higher that connecting-with-one-another does try to get shut down on a broadscale, is another reason why we should be doing it, now, asap, and normalizing it.

At rhat point it's time to stock up on improvised explosives because you'd be fighting an authoritarian tyrant in a civil war.

Having such a narrow view of technology appears to be an even more common fallacy. Legislation is technology. New systems can be invented which continue to work around it, and further, law can be extended to protect certain actions. I don't have a specific answer to this specific problem, but "there's no technological solution" is categorically wrong in almost all cases because it assumes technology is limited to some arbitrary subset of technology that can't solve the problem.

Plus it's naive to think it's just legislature you need to worry about. In recent years VISA and MasterCard have been demonstrating their intent and ability to work as worldwide unelected morality police. And then there's the infrastructure platforms and associated deplatforming (and unfortunately you usually need to work with one of the "big guys" otherwise a cheap DDoS can destroy you)

And the worst part is most of the internet have been cheering it on

all political issues can be solved with technology.

it is called "war".

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