EU age verification app to ban any Android system not licensed by Google
reddit.com
reddit.com
The operating system was licensed by Google
The app was downloaded from the Play Store (thus requiring a Google account)
Device security checks have passed
The issue is being raised here: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android...
I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan.
Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification
further deepens the EU's dependency on America and the USA's
control over the internet.
Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have
to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is.
There are a number of comments in that same thread that indicate a mandate to utilize Google services may run afoul of EU member nations' integrity and privacy laws.
No. The lesson is that stuff like this is concerning what ever the "political climate".
Anyway, you mainly don't want the gov in your vicinity to snoop. Non-local OS:es is probably advantageous in that regard if you choose to run proprietary code...
We say this, but many also want to entrust all our PC games to one closed source launcher. Or have videos/TV all on one subscription service. There's definitely a spectrum of benevolent and greedy dictators people draw lines on.
And obviously it is not just one arena, because it seems to be one glaring issue with human beings: they do not want to see the road ahead. And the ones they do are, at best, ignored.
I think that is far more that people like the other closed source launchers less, and each launcher potentially adds it's own stream of notifications and adverts to their system so there is a cost to having multiple active even if the PC resource cost is practically undetectable.
Furthermore if comparing game launches and related issues to political climates, I'd consider all the current closed source ones to be the same in those respects. Also we are not subject to several local political climates at any one time in that way (though we are when looking at a wider scale, of course).
> Or have videos/TV all on one subscription service
While there are other issues (each service tracking you etc.) this is more due to the fact that each service charges what we used to pay (in fact more, as in some cases prices have gone up by more than general inflation) for a single service that provided the same amount of content that they cared about. This doesn't really equate to trust on political climates (except where commercial greed is considered a political matter).
That is because the introductory prices were not 1 to 1 to the business’ existing revenue streams from cable and satellite transmission fees. Especially considering that before, there was a very limited supply of content restricted by time slots, and now you are buying far, far more on demand content without advertising breaks. And without contracts with a cable or satellite company.
People are spoiled, and don’t appreciate how much easier and cheaper it is to watch or listen to most content than it was pre streaming services.
One only needs to look at market cap graphs of the various media companies to see that streaming isn’t the cash cow people think it is.
Bad pricing descisions are a them problem, not a me problem. But it isn't just pricing of individual services that is the issue, it is the separation of content amonst many services which is the companies gauging out what they can with no care for how inconvenient it is for the audience, at least those who don't turn back to the high seas.
> without advertising breaks
Despite the increasing prices, and the need for multiple servies at those prices, the adverts are very much coming back. All the conveniences of streaming are being taken away and companies are surprised that we aren't happy paying for that…
> People are spoiled […] see that streaming isn’t the cash cow people think it is
If they are, then they were spoiled by the companies being deliberately misleading to get them hooked in the first place. My level of sympathy is limited by their level of honesty and “prey I don't change the deal further” attitude.
When the question is “but how did you expect us to make good business under those conditions?”, a perfectly valid answer is “you very much lead us to believe that you could”.
There is no “make good” since there was no contract about long term expectations.
Even the media business’ leaders don’t know the future. Fewer eyeballs watching or listening to a specific piece of media means the cost has to be amortized over a smaller audience, meaning higher prices, or less quantity and quality of media.
Price volatility should be expected in a changing business environment, and the media business got rocked by increasing supply (Meta/ByteDance/video games/on demand historic catalogs/etc) in the last 20 years, as evidenced by the change in their market values.
It’s just business, so no one needs your sympathy, but it is also weird to see supposedly numerate people gripe about the effects of rapidly shifting supply and demand curves.
I suppose. But it is also weird to see supposedly numerate businesses repeatedly having the same trouble then blaming everyone else for it.
It is almost like they are deliberately running a long-term bait & switch everytime (see also another item coincidently on HN's front page today, Stop selling "unlimited", when you mean "until we change our minds").
Why does one need a game launcher? Cannot we just like run games as we run any app? Having to use a launcher that by default requires internet connection, even if the game itself doesn’t, sounds like a very specific choice of how to do things. We don’t run any other kind of program like that.
I have no issue with steam per se. It has actually kept on its path threw the years and it actually invests back into gaming with games and steam deck/proton. However, I find it hard to trust good intentions after many platforms with good intentions were at some point sold and enshittified. I would rather have DRM-free games that do not depend on a launcher that maybe after 10 or 20 years will not work the same.
Otherwise, steam is a great platform and a rare example of a platform that not only has not enshitified but invested back to the product they sell in ways that benefit users.
With a launcher, I can back up the 50 I care about and leave the storage of the rest to it. If they were to disappear without warning, I don't ~really~ care, but I still have easy access to them. Then the launcher can also take care of compatibility issues with old games automatically. Say a game is dependent on X, which was made in the Win XP times and no longer works, the launcher can find a modern fork/substitute and auto replace it, so that I don't have to fuck around with it myself.. There's value in it.
Then you get the platform itself with good guide integration, mod workshop integration, friends (game invites, sharing, etc), combined store...
It's kinda like what I believe GOG is trying to do, though I'm not very familiar with them since I just don't like how much their launcher pings (blows through my NextDNS usage limit in a week).
Steam makes the most money if it bridges interests of consumers and publishers together - they don't profit by screwing over the customer(either publishers or end users). Is depending on them a problem? yes, but least likely one. preferably you could move your digital licenses to any provider you want.
Meanwhile subscription services profit the most from enshittification, especially ones that offer 'free' access with ads, or different tiers.
and this current issue isn't even about dependence on google - that's bad in itself - but about gigantic governmental overreach and step towards killing anonymity online under guise of protecting the children.
It is even worse when you consider some EU countries already went after people when politicians got insulted online.
But it's nice so many people care about the last few places where hard freedoms exist. The biggest risk is missing the forest for the trees and not seeing the local extensions of short term political comprise.
There is some amusing irony in the EU relying on the US for furthering its own authoritarianism. It's unfortunate that freedom (in the classic rebellious, American sense) never became that popular in the EU, or for that matter, the UK.
IMHO, the push for age verification is just a stepping stone towards requiring a mandatory ID for all social media posts made from EU. Given the current trends against freedom of speech, it's not unreasonable to think that by the end of the decade any site, including HN, might need to link usernames with their respective eIDs in case posts come from EU IP addresses.
> officially sanctioned hardware and software
Right now, if you want to run an alternative OS, it's already an uphill battle to use tons of member state services, as well as to do banking. Even if you have microG available, the situation is terrible. I imagine it's going to become harder. I cannot understand why the European Commission wants to reduce our reliance on FAANG services, and at the same time they make Google Play a de facto standard, reinforcing the mobile duopoly. In this context, free alternative mobile platforms, such as Sailfish, cannot flourish.
what?? how is this againt freedom of speech???, south korea implement this ages ago and there is nothing like that
I wouldn't consider South Korea as having any meaningful freedom of speech; in fact they seem closer to China than the EU.
if you talk to people directly, no one said that
If you come from the perspective that there used to be freedom of speech and now there's all those pesky laws restricting what you can say, it looks like a slippery slope. If you realize that people have been required to check ID when selling material unsuitable for minors in physical stores since before the internet existed, it seems a bit more unlikely that ID requirements will expand to cover everything else.
There are many things that you are not allowed to write or say by law in EU countries simply because the legislator has decided that they are wrong opinions, and it is generally accepted that the State can and should implement such controls.
Note that lying is not a crime in general. Your examples are for very specific contexts.
Moreover, in practice, there is more freedom of speech in most EU countries than in the USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/freedom-of-expression-ind...:
USA: 0.89 France: 0.96 Germany: 0.94 Czechia: 0.96 etc.
Whatever the ECHR might say what I wrote in my previous comment is factual. In Europe "freedom of speech" comes with a long list of small print.
In fact, this is so embedded that the article of the ECHR you quote provides for restrictions and even states that they are "necessary": "subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society"." QED
Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of stupidity
Freedom of stupidity has to be the most basic right in a free society. Imagine if stupidity wasn't allowed!
Racism against other groups, deportations, camps, ...
You argue about the EU as if we were still living in 2005.
Likewise I would not say that the New Popular Front is communist, either, although as a coalition it does include parties that are.
Their main talking points are against immigrants. They have extremely suspicious connections to the Kremlin (Russian bank loans that literally saved the party from bankruptcy, and resulting lack of condemnation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine). They've been caught in corruption scandals. They are anti-EU (used to be for leaving the EU, but after the disaster of Brexit, toned it down to just renegotiating everything the EU is for).
There are traditionally right parties in France that are much more mellow than them. If LR and MODEM are right, what else would RN be other than far right? Yeah they're not as extreme as the lunatic born in Algeria who wants to expel anyone not born in France and who wants to ban non-French names, but they're still pretty extreme for the French political spectrum.
And yeah, the NFP aren't communist. Even though they have socialist and communist parties in their coalition, they're barely socialist.
"Euroscepticism" used to be quite significant in the "traditionally right" and Gaullist parties in France, like Thatcher was in the UK. And that was before the massive EU power grab of the recent years.
MODEM is centre (I mean it's Bayrou's party, so as centre as can be!). LR has effectively split with the 'right' now allied with RN and the 'left' allied with Macron. The LR now allied with the RN is not so different from Chirac's RPR when they won the general election in 1986. It it right, not far right but not centre right, either.
The original National Front (FN) was far right but it has shifted left and now RN is the de facto main party of the right. It is the largest party in Parliament and it is difficult to argue that 30-45% (depending on elections) of the French are "far right": They are not and the party isn't.
Actually, I would say that your comment illustrates was I mentioned in my previous comment. There has been, and still is, a rather insidious narrative in France and Europe that labels anyone against the current level of immigration and against the current EU trends as "far right" to shut them down. The only result is to make those parties get more and more votes as people's concerns are ignored.
Objectively, they are. And another 30% are for centre/centre-right/right.
> MODEM is centre (I mean it's Bayrou's party, so as centre as can be!
They are more and more leaning centre-right to right as can be seen by their policymaking (prioritising business over people and ecology, e.g. by refusing to even discuss reducing government aids/tax cuts towards businessess, but instead proposing to cut public holidays).
> There has been, and still is, a rather insidious narrative in France and Europe that labels anyone against the current level of immigration... as "far right" to shut them down
> The only result is to make those parties get more and more votes as people's concerns are ignored
It's funny, because the minister of the interior has been very strongly anti-immigration for quite some time now. And anti-immigration laws have been passed, with support for RN. How is that "ignoring people's concerns". And it's always funny how the people most voting for RN are either from disadvantaged post-industrial areas, where there are few migrants, or from rich posh areas, where there are few migrants (other than rich foreigners buying property). RN are just successfully blending the message and advertising migrants as the single big thing that will "solve" all issues, regardless of how factually incorrect that is. While stealing public money to enrich themselves.
Subjectively (and subjectively anything can be anything so...), but not objectively because, as said, there is nothing "far right" in their manifesto. Again, being anti mass migration and eurosceptic does not make a party far right.
> by refusing to even discuss reducing government aids...
I would argue that their refusal to really cut government spending in general makes them more left-leaning... So perhaps they are indeed centrists overall, then?
> It's funny, because the minister of the interior has been very strongly anti-immigration for quite some time now
Ah yes the nominally LR guy who's serving in Macron's government and who has objectively not done anything in practice (well he has no power to and has been in the job for less than a year...) although he is good at talking tough but that 'talk' is in fact mostly calling for existing laws to be enforced...
And so we get back on my previous claim that the narrative has been so skewed against any action on issues like immigration that he is described as "hardline"
> And it's always funny how the people most voting for RN ... where there are few migrants"
That's clearly not true since even the days of the FN. There are post-industrial areas that used to vote communist and switched to RN and there are areas with immigrants, historically the South East for instance. Now it is widespread, anyway: for instance in the 2024 general elections they came in first in the first round in 297 out of 577 (basically half) constituencies.
It's odd to see this refusal to face reality and to keep denying that immigration is an issue throughout Europe.
That's a common misconception (that right leaning governments are somehow fiscally responsible. Some are, to a fault (austerity), but many are only paying lip service).
But in any case, the Bayrou government are trying to lower spending and raise revenue. Entirely with policies which are right-leaning, such as privatising government owned companies, and reducing the amount of public holidays, or lowering spending in the public sector. While the left leaning parties are crying to reduce government subsidies to businesses, which could be an easy budgetary win.
> Ah yes the nominally LR guy who's serving in Macron's government and who has objectively not done anything in practice (well he has no power to and has been in the job for less than a year...) although he is good at talking tough but that 'talk' is in fact mostly calling for existing laws to be enforced...
Minister of the Interior 2020-2024: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rald_Darmanin?wprov=sfl...
New immigration law announced by him, stricter on illegal immigrants while also providing some ease of temporary migration for specific sectors: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loi_du_26_janvier_2024_pour_co...
This is a concrete law voted in to curb immigration and make it easier to expel illegal immigrants or abusers of the asylum system. Yet, to people like you, and far right politicians, nothing is being done! We're being overran! People in power are ignoring the provlem!
> switched to RN and there are areas with immigrants, historically the South East for instance
Like Nice, where the immigrants are rich Russians, Brits and Arabs.
> It's odd to see this refusal to face reality and to keep denying that immigration is an issue throughout Europe.
It's extremely odd seeing how people focus so narrowly on this issue, and somehow think it's existential and nobody is doing anything about it and it's going to ruin the country... And have been saying the same thing for decades. Yet many things are being done, and it's obviously not that existential of a threat if the country is still there... And it's the main topic discussed all the time in political debate! And regardless of any measures, far right politicians just don't shut up about it.
It's just an easy distraction and an easy thing to point to as the source of all evils that can easily be fixed. And that is the hallmark of a modern European far right party, pointing the finger at the EU and migrants for any and all issues. Regardless of substance (like the fact that without migration, France would have had negative population growth for decades, which would have made the already difficult to handle public budget significantly worse).
No disrespect but a lot of what you write sounds like the archetypal "parisian bobo" who has little idea of life outside quartier latin.
Nice attempt at invalidating my opinion, but you still haven't explained how a new law being passed to curb immigration is politicians ignoring "The Problem".
Considering that you claimed that in Nice "immigrants are rich Russians, Brits and Arabs", I must tell bluntly: Either this is not true or you didn't leave Le Negresco hotel.
Either way this perfectly illustrates my previous comment. Next time in Nice my humble suggestion is that you try to see the reality (Google "quartiers sensibles a Nice").
> you still haven't explained how a new law being passed to curb immigration
If you have lived in France long enough you would detect that this is the same as it always is: This is not a law to curb immigration and it won't curb immigration. This is a law for the show and to be able to claim that the government is tough on immigration. There are no "tough" measures against immigration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...
> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.
> Under Title 18 Section 871 of the United States Code it is illegal to knowingly and willfully make "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the president of the United States." This also applies to any "President-elect, Vice President or other officer next in the order of succession to the office of President, or Vice President-elect."[45] This law is distinct from other forms of true threats because the threatener does not need to have the actual capability to carry out the threat; thus, for example, a person in prison could be charged.
Is the first line in the chain post you reply to. Also, read the guidelines (rude comments or dumb comments).
None of the replies I got address the point. They are at best beside it, at worst they are misrepresentations and bare insults (guidelines, indeed!) for no apparent reason. Is it because "EU good, Trump bad"? I have no idea.
The restrictions on "free speech" that European countries implement, and which are increasing, would be unthinkable in the US because of their understanding of "free speech" and the legal protections in place.
This is why you don't get a "serious" reply. You think too highly of US free speech, and it does not have a foot in reality, and you use "US good, Trump bad" crap when Trump is not even mentioned, it is more than you have a bias of "US good, EU bad".
>"in the US sense" being the key word
There is no difference; free speech is free speech. That is your core issue in the argument.
Concrete examples please.
Please also explain how examples differ fundamentally from limits on speech that have historically been and are currently imposed in the US.
Article 5 of the Basic Law guarantees freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of reporting by broadcast and film. It immediately restricts those freedoms with "limits in the provisions of general laws, in provisions for the protection of young persons and in the right to personal honour." https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
Many kinds of speech aren't covered by the enumerated freedoms in the first place, and "protection of young persons" is the basis for age-verification requirements.
Though given that the US constitution claims to guarantee freedom of speech while many things that people would ordinarily consider speech remain illegal, maybe "freedom of expression within limits" and "freedom of speech" is a distinction without difference in practice. But I think the former approach is more honest.
It is true that paragraph 2 allows limiting expression, but the point here is that generally it is not permissible to limit speech based on its content, but only due to other "general laws" that aim to do non-speech related things (including upholding other constitutional rights).
In the case of protection of honor, I find interesting the interpretation of the constitutional court that this does not limit speech if there are alternative non-demeaning ways to express your opinion. This to me seems the strongest divergence to the US concept of Freedom of Speech. If you can express the same content in a less demeaning way, the courts can force you to do so. Still: It is considered crucial by the constitutional court that general laws do not limit the freedom to criticize.
Overall the court has noted that the limits of freedom of expression need to be as small as possible, and that there always needs to be a balance of other (constitutional) rights being protected when there is such a limit placed. Laws can not arbitrarily restrict speech, and the special importance of the constitutional right to freedom of speech needs to be considered.
Paragraph 32: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Entscheid...
The protections around speech are constructed differently than in the US, but overall seem to arrive at roughly similar results. It is also important to note that protection of speech has varied quite a lot over the 20th century in the US. From 1919 for 50 years, Supreme Court precedent was that advocating against the draft was illegal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. ... The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree."
In this case the clear and present danger is that of "hindering the governments war effort". This was the status of Free Speech in the US at the time the German constitution was written.
So yeah, there are important differences, a ton of nuance, many similarities between German and US cases, etc... Which is why I can't really consider anything that boils down to "Well the US has free speech, unlike EU/Germany/...", without even hinting at the freedom of speech trade-offs that are made in both systems, as an argument made in good faith.
A quick look at Steam says otherwise. All the games that credit cards companies pressured to get removed from Steam, were already long gone in Germany. Because that's the level of government censorship that is completely normal in Germany.
The only reason why one might get the idea that Germany ain't so bad is because Germany doesn't do (much) Internet censorship, so we have access to the much less censored outside world. If German law would apply worldwide half the Internet would be wiped out.
Just because a bunch of noisy people shout about freedom all day long doesn't mean they are not talking absolute garbage.
Not a great example.
No physical store would bother to check the ID of anyone clearly not {too young or borderline}.
Digital ID requirements are such that age verification of some form is required for every single connection .. and to assume that a connection from {X} might well require another ID check an hour later as it might well be a different person at the same computer or another device altogether.
That's an expansion from {only check young looking people} to {check and possibly retain records for _everyone_}.
Edit: I'm not saying EU uses it but it could...
Edit: the EU asserts the app is "privacy preserving" and "Additionally, work on the integration of zero-knowledge proofs is ongoing."
~ https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-mak...
It's not the assertions made that trouble me, it's the quality of any actual implementation and the scope for deliberate or accidental side leaking of knowledge that should be zero .. but likely (in a pragmatic view of a political world) is not.
To be fair my main motivation for comment was the up thread comment about physical ID checks of the past being an indicator that not much would change with digital checks.
In the event of a physical store ID check system failure you have one owner at one location having access to just the ID's checked (perhaps blackmailing underage drinkers into dubious acts).
In the event of a digital ID check failure there's potential to leak all the ID's and access patterns of all users across the board thanks to the ease of digital storage and communications.
And a shady government might sort out some shady deal or backdoor with providers. I don't think EU is that government though (I bet Russian is but ironically they don't care about this stuff they just install black boxes at all ISPs and monitor your traffic directly)
Except where police cadets or paid informants go into stores to buy age-restricted goods. A convenience store near me got whacked with that recently, and now has a no-exceptions ID policy.
If there is a law in one jurisdiction that says you have to be 21 to buy some product and a different jurisdiction sets it to 18, or has no age restriction at all, and someone who is underage in the first jurisdiction goes to the second jurisdiction to buy that thing, what happens? The seller sells it to them. This has always been a completely normal thing for people to do in border towns, or when people e.g. visit Amsterdam because of less restrictive drug laws.
The internet allows anyone to visit the site of a supplier located outside of their jurisdiction. That's completely normal an expected too. It also makes things like age verification laws for digital content pretty much entirely worthless, because most of the suppliers weren't in your jurisdiction to begin with and the ones outside of it are... outside of your jurisdiction.
Governments now want to pretend that it matters where the user is rather than where the site is, but that's a joke because there is no way for the site to even know that. If you try to require it then they'll either ignore you because they're actually entirely outside of your jurisdiction and you can't impose penalties on them for not complying, or treat IP addresses in your jurisdiction differently (possibly by banning them entirely) and then people there will just use a VPN.
Neither of these cause the law to be effective and ineffective laws are inefficient and embarrassing.
This is not a new thing either. Whenever something somehow touches multiple jurisdictions, it's generally safe to assume that laws from all of them apply. Countries can and do make laws that apply entirely extraterritorially. When that makes it difficult to do a thing while complying with all applicable laws, you either have to not do the thing or pick which jurisdictions' laws you want to break and deal with the consequences.
I don't think most lawmakers will consider the potential embarrassment from difficult-to-enforce laws much of a deterrent against outlawing what they want to outlaw. They're more likely to put additional requirements on third parties to assist with enforcement (e.g. VPN providers are an obvious candidate.)
How do you suppose this is supposed to work on the internet? Is every globally-accessible social media site supposed to implement Saudi Arabia's blasphemy laws and China's censorship of Tienanmen?
> Countries can and do make laws that apply entirely extraterritorially. When that makes it difficult to do a thing while complying with all applicable laws, you either have to not do the thing or pick which jurisdictions' laws you want to break and deal with the consequences.
But that's the point. There will be services that actually are outside of any given jurisdiction and have no fear of penalties from it, and then those laws are pointless because they're unenforceable.
> I don't think most lawmakers will consider the potential embarrassment from difficult-to-enforce laws much of a deterrent against outlawing what they want to outlaw.
That's only because they have no shame. It's the government which is humiliated, not the politicians. Which is why the voters should learn to punish them for their vandalism of the public trust.
> They're more likely to put additional requirements on third parties to assist with enforcement (e.g. VPN providers are an obvious candidate.)
How is that supposed to work when the whole purpose of the VPN itself is to be in a different jurisdiction?
The typical go-to in these cases is to try to use the financial system, but that doesn't work in this case because there are plenty of foreign VPN services that will offer the service "for free" by installing a residential proxy on your machine or accept payment in cryptocurrency in an amount that a normal person could easily mine themselves. And then unsophisticated users do the former and sophisticated users do the latter and the only thing you get from banning payments to foreign VPN providers is the facilitation of DDoS botnets and increased and familiarity of your population with cryptocurrency.
The internet is like media (press) or communication by letters. Both extremely established in terms of guaranteeing freedom of speech and in the latter case, also secrecy. And the ID identification (that you then make your argument about) is only loosely related to free speech strictly. It's about being constantly searched and surveilled with a presumption of crime.
It seems to be different branches of the EU? This has been a recurring problem in EU tech legislation - the EU government bodies are sufficiently autonomous that the right hand seldom knows what the left is doing...
> Hacker: One of your officials pays farmers to produce surplus food, while on the same floor, the next office is paying them to destroy the surpluses.
> Maurice: That is not true!
> Hacker: No?
> Maurice: He is not in the next office, not even on the same floor!
This is the best case scenario for coherency in law making. It's designed to be as undemocratic as possible, so there's no need to make compromises or engage in pork barrel politics to get stuff over the line. The incoherency of the EU's approach is just a consequence of the incoherent thinking coming from the top. The EU always has extremely powerful but very low competency presidents, always for some reason those who were failures at national politics.
That's not true. First of all, amendments can be introduced by both the parliaments and council so it's not rubber-stamping. But more importantly they have the right to censure the commission (Article 17(8) TEU and in Article 234 TFEU) and thus force it to resign.
In practice the EP doesn't matter. The MEPs rubberstamp everything because they aren't serious politicians with serious ideas. They can't be, because they can't change the law, which means they can't have party positions or campaign on policies. It's fake DDR style politics that pretends on the surface to be democracy, where there appear to be parties and politicians, but they can't actually do anything so the only people who bother to turn up are those who already agree with everything the government is doing and just want to get paid to cheerlead. The EU Parliament is like that: the death of ambition, full of apathetic losers who drift into politics without any real idea of why they're there, or people who are using it as a springboard to national parliaments where some power is still allowed to exist (only in specific areas the Commission hasn't yet taken control of).
So it's all a dummy process designed to look democratic enough to confuse people whilst actually turning Europe into a unified dictatorship.
And it's designed to confuse people. Don't take my word for it. Take the word of the EU's own former leaders who routinely boast about deceiving and manipulating the public:
When people ask politicians today “What will become of Europe?” or “Where is European integration heading?”, we usually give an evasive answer. “We don’t want a super state” that is generally the first thing we say. I must admit that I have in the past often resorted to this kind of thing myself. (Viviane Reding)
Europe's nations should be guided towards the super state without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation. (Jean Monnet)
We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided we continue step by step until there is no turning back. (Juncker)
Super democratic attitudes right there.
> The EU Parliament is like that: the death of ambition, full of apathetic losers who drift into politics without any real idea of why they're there
I have to disagree. There are many (or, "at least a few I know personally"? [1]) people who sit in the Parliament with a real intention of making good. Their power is simply null, though.
1. David Sassoli (deceased, ex president), Guy Verhofstadt (Renew), Patrick Breyer (Pirates), to name a few I follow.
After the German occupation in 1940, the Nazis accessed and exploited the Dutch population registry, including religious affiliation.
About 75–80% of the ~140,000 Jews in the Netherlands were killed.
This is the highest percentage in Western Europe.
Compare that to France, which had a more fragmented administrative system, and less complete central records and 25% of Jews in France were deported and killed — a much lower percentage than the Netherlands.
As usual, when reaching the Godwin point, the idea is not for you to take it at face value, but to extrapolate to your situation.
The concentration of power and centralized people tracking are eventually always abused, and once your system becomes less free (which has historically eventually happened on a long enough timescale), you will pay the price for it.
In our case, having a full history of all opinions, interactions, locations, and behavior linked to full identity of people is what we are ultimately talking about here. It's already well on its way, but it will make it worse.
The more you concentrate power and feed data about people, the greater the potential damage.
And of course, it doesn't need to be a full-on dictatorship to get problems with those.
It's a spectrum of increasing problems you will get, the more you lean into it.
Sorry, but why would the Dutch government need to know all those details in the first place? Did Dutch citizens never ask that question back then? Nazis or no Nazis, that was an issue waiting to happen. I guess it wouldn't have mattered if they did, since the Netherlands was a kingdom and people didn't have much say into how the monarchy ran things.
Maybe the Dutch citizens did ask these questions you think they did not ask, but the Government won.
And the current legal setup mean you would have to own a google account, a terrible private life setup.
So that is why the government needed to know how many Catholics or Jews there were.
Well, not really. Age verification doesn't have to, and IMO should not, lead to a linked identity. Just a blind check "are you a real human older than X years old? Yes! OK". That way you get the benefits of age restrictions and real human validation, without any of the potential privacy ramifications.
But to be clear, most real people's online presence is under their own names (or linked trivially to their own names, like a cutesy turn on their name for an instagram handle that is linked to their Facebook account which has their full name). It's already possible, and done, to track your public social media presence and interactions. Places like HN and even Reddit are much more niche than that.
It should not.
That's not required though. Your friends have already given your name to them by allowing the app access to their contacts.
Not to detract from the rest of your message, but it wasn't centralized; the data was collected and stored in each municipality separately. The only part that is centralized is the historical archive: after death, each person's info card is moved to the National Archives.
This system has never been centralized, even after digitization: birth records are still kept only in the town of birth, and when moving house your active records must be officially requested and the transfer manually authorized between municipal systems.
And this is only the beginning. It will be more and more difficult to speak against the actions of your government the more unpopular the politicians become and the more people hate the results of their policies. And instead of changing course and following the wishes of the voters, politicians instead will clamp down on free speech.
Is Le Pen governing in France and I'm not aware of? Because I've never seen Macron do that.
And people are the ones blaming open borders, then some parties choose to capitalize on that (even if they ultimately do nothing), while some other parties choose to suppress that viewpoint as being right wing propaganda and that in reality there are no issue with open borders, that all the crime is imaginary, which is why they push for online censorship and anti-encryption laws, to make sure only their viewpoint becomes the only legally allowed one.
To start with, there is no such thing as open borders (unless you mean Schengen?).
Second, saying someone is spouting nonsense isn't "suppression". Especially when the "suppressed" viewpoint is being proudly repeated almost daily on TV, radio and online on media sponsored by billionaires investing heavily into passing this message (like Bolloré).
Third, Le Pen isn't governing in France, but her party (reminder, she was banned from standing for office for corruption and stealing public money to enrich herself and her family, so it's no longer her), which has around 1/3 of the votes is crucial in maintaining the current ruling government. Without their support, the government has ~1/3 and fails a vote of no confidence immediately (the other 1/3 hates them both and would happily bring it all down in the hopes of new elections). So they are de facto exercising a lot of control.
You're moving the goalposts to hate speech. When saying uncomfortable negative facts about government's actions are considered "hate speech" then you're no longer living in a free country. You must realize that.
The whole hate speech can of worms is such a dangerous slippery slope since the government can just sweep all criticism of itself and its actions as "hate speech" whenever it feels like it, and just ban it, problem solved, no more criticism, all citizens are happy, just like in USSR.
"Hate speech" is too broad of an umbrella to ensure it will never be used in bad faith because it 100% will be and it is. Whichever political party will come to power next will 100% gonna weaponize the existing speech censorship rules implemented by previous regimes, in its own favor to further entrench their own power. History proves this yet people are oblivious an think the solution is even more speech censorship.
It's the classic subversion and propaganda stages of denial, the deeper you dive:
Stage 1: It's not happening, you're just imagining it
Stage 2: OK, it's happening but only a little bit no need to exaggerate
Stage 3: OK it's happening a lot but here's why it's a good thing that it's happeningIn the UK that happened when a woman phrased her criticism of open border policies as a call for migrant hotels to be burned down.
This was controversial as many who wanted closed border policies (like Nigel Farage and supporters) thought that rallying crys to re-enact some kind of version of kristallnacht should count as protected political speech.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/bradford/6135060....
Now it would be naive to assume the political establishment only stopped at one cover up and there's not more under the rug that haven't been yet uncovered.
Just like with the post office workers scandal, you realize the political establishment doesn't exist to protect you the taxpayer, it only exists to protect itself from the accountability of its citizens and will go to great length in censorship, suppression and legal battles to defend itself, since there's nothing for them to loose if they loose, as none of them are ever going to jail for their mistakes, but if they win, then their image stays clean and can stay in power for longer.
I see, he was really helping his case here, sounds like a cultured and educated gentleman.
Could you give any examples of this happening? I assume you aren't referring to the one who called for migrant hotels to be burned down with brown people inside in the middle of race riots?
Things like calling politicians idiots, giving the middle finger to someone, and insinuating government policy is ineffective.
https://thedispatch.com/article/europe-germany-britain-free-...
Until then, it’s made up.
Not to mention that it’s irrelevant to the the original point about hate speech and migration but whatever, you managed to change the goalposts now defend the new ones :)
I can't find any backing for their assertion that people have gone to jail for obscene gestures toward government entities in either Germany or the UK, but obviously we have already slipped a long way down that particular slope. Apathy doesn't seem like the smart option. It's hard to put it any better than you did yourself: "Here the wolf is clearly visible."
1: https://driving.ca/auto-news/entertainment/middle-finger-to-...
2: https://www.iamexpat.de/expat-info/germany-news/driver-gives...
Yes but not the politicians but the police. Yes but not hate speech but criticism of policy. Yes but not criticism of policy but the middle finger. Yes but not to jail but a fine. Yes but…
Meanwhile in the US flipping the man off costs 175000 dollars: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna159185
It’s hilarious.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros...
https://extremism.gwu.edu/fighting-hate-speech-germany
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/06/german-fined-e6000-for-vio...
https://www.dw.com/en/german-man-receives-fine-after-insulti...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-greens-habeck-presses-charges-...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/german-woman-fined-faceboo...
All of these are cases of targeting groups of people or individuals.
I guess some people just can’t grasp that distinction?
This is no longer just rhetoric. Meanwhile, the EU’s polite, tea-drinking cousin, the UK has quietly deployed a “social media surveillance unit.” Not to fight trolls or bots, of course - but to ensure His Majesty’s Subjects think correctly in public. Doubleplusgood, wouldn’t you say? [1]
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-socia...
Politicians who simultaneously increase immigration and stir up hatred against immigrants will inevitably cause a tragedy.
So they try the same tactics as they know from home, asserting their rights, conflating separate issues, slippery sloping etc. And they freak out when it doesn’t work.
It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of police officers descending on someone's front lawn is definitely "getting in trouble with the law".
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/police-s...
Money quote:
> More often than not, the police record these episodes as “non-crime hate incidents”, with over 13,200 recorded last year. What’s so extraordinary about the police’s zealous pursuit of these non-criminals is that the rate at which they’re catching actual criminals is falling. Fewer than seven in 100 crimes now lead to a charge or summons, down from 17 in 100 in 2015. In the year to September 2023, the total number of burglaries left unsolved stood at 213,814, a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year.
So ... police gets their numbers up persecuting people for wrong thought while they avoid having to deal with actual, real criminals which might fight back violently. And Whitehall is clapping to it.
Then there is the case of David Wootton - who is currently fighting against a verdict that declared him having a tasteless halloween costume in a social media post (dressing up as the Manhattan Area bomber, with an arab headscarf, an 'I love Ariana Grande' t-shirt, and a backpack that read 'boom') to be a count of 'hate crime'. He faces up to two years in prison over that. Deeply tasteless? Sure. A 'hate crime' worth of spending two years in prison over? Seriously?
Let's move away from the UK - to Germany, an actual EU state. Which reintroduced a lèse-majesté law that makes it more prosecutable - and carries harder sentencing - if you post something against a politician that they do not like. That law is used most happily especially by the Green Party, but they all are complicit. It led to early-morning Special Forces raids against the former flat of someone who called a politician '1 dick', and standard raid against someone who called a former minister of economics 'a doofus' in what could easily be understood as satirical use of a common brand name. Sometimes, quoting them with wrong interpunctation is reason for a raid, and sometimes just quoting them is enough. And the state prosecutors? Laugh on American TV about how they know they never get most of the cases through a proper court case, but 'the raid in itself is the punishment already' [2].
And, fun fact: Courts have decided that even stating the truth about a politician can qualify as a prosecutable insult ("Schmähkritik") if it is 'sufficient to negatively impact their future political work'. So better thing twice, and have an exit plan before you point out that Patrick O. Litican is a compulsive liar, with a list of deliberate lies told by Patrick in the past, and casting shadow over a bold claim he has just used to shoehorn another policy in.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc
These aren't aberrations. They're stress-tests of the system’s tolerance for dissent. And it’s failing - gloriously, publicly, and with a press release. Europe is on a dark, dark trajectory, and it needs to be monitored very closely when they keep increasing policing powers.
Why are not the "journalists" in Europe investigating this? Je!
I mean, the Kremlin doesn't have such a wide area of influence over all the European borders; they only have influence over part of those borders, in a typical mob-like way (their way, their mob oligarchy). They could not be doing all what is happening alone without help from within Europe. It's all about public money and some politicians pockets within their respective countries - it is an inside job... , cut that money to those NGOs and related, process those corrupts, and see what will happen.
The problem is the instrument in itself, and the message it sends - not the officially intended use.
That’s not what’s happening, and not the kind of speech suppression that people are worried about.
Seems to me like you’re quibbling, because you can’t defend your claim by showing a single example.
Freedom for me is the ability to live a good life, and be happy, not harass people.
You know like the Nazis and the Jews.
>>public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence toward a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation (= the fact of being gay, etc.)
So hating on someone publicly for being an immigrant is hate speech but criticizing policy isn’t.
By this logic we are no longer allowed to reform banking no matter how flawed it is, even if the flaws of the banking system give rise to actual antisemitism due to unaddressed economic dysfunction. Dysfunction that the banking critics point out and which they claim has more to do with how those institutions are structured and what policies they have enacted than the people inhabiting or benefiting from them.
Dumber yet. There are even more extreme offshoots of communism where simply criticizing capitalism without being a communist means you are a fascist or nazi. It's pretty clear to me that those communists believe they have a monopoly on criticizing capitalism and if you gave them enough power, they'd enforce that monopoly on everyone.
Even dumber. The moment their communist utopia fails, they will start looking for "capitalist" scapegoats rather than fix their institutions according to the non-communist criticism and commit exactly the crimes they projected onto you, which you never had the intention of ever doing, because you actually are somewhat of a pacifist and genuinely believe that your policies and institutions are inclusive to all and work without the need for scapegoats or enforcement through violence.
Don't dare say anything with the remotest chance of being controversial or that could have a hint of upsetting someone, don't even think about expressing an opinion that someone might not agree with.
The problem in your ideal digital world isn't that the bad abuse the freedom they have now, it's that the bad will also abuse the lack of freedom everyone else will have then, and suddenly everyone with no ill intent is on the wrong side of the enforcement.
The comment you just replied to would probably find itself on the receiving end of it because of the wording and tone.
With that exact sentence, you could be labeled a racist because I know the code you're using. What YOU really mean is that New Zealanders are better than South Asians.
See the problem?
That makes no sense...at all.
Proudly made up by Anonymous aka 4chan ;)
https://www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764728163/the-ok-hand-gesture...
We have laws that have been carefully written and refined to counteract that.
Simplified: Hate speech = attacking or demeaning a group for who they are (e.g. race, religion, gender).
Right now in Europe there are people arguing that it's fundamental to the nature of Islam that adherents hate anyone who is not Islamic. They can cite Quran saying some pretty horrendous stuff about non-believers, that they need to be killed in a holy war and things like that. Is it within the bounds of society to decide that being Islamic is ipso facto a hate crime?
Define "freedom". Freedom to or freedom from?
See Timothy Snyder's recent book On Freedom:
> Freedom is the great American commitment, but as Snyder argues, we have lost sight of what it means—and this is leading us into crisis. Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: We think we’re free if we can do and say as we please, and protect ourselves from government overreach. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from as freedom to—the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible.
* https://timothysnyder.org/on-freedom
Snyder is an historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust, who previously wrote an award-wining book on that area during the 1930/40s:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodlands
Some other recent books of his:
Chickens are neither mammals nor worms, what are you talking about.
Come on brother let’s not give up before doing anything.
If you didn't come up with a way to have paid trolls in such a system doesn't mean that there won't be any.
People already sell access to their Google accounts so buyers can run not-that-legal ad campaigns. Creating one extra step won't do much to solve problems as long as the incentive is big enough and budget is sufficient.
You present it as a possibility when it isn’t one as long as we can avoid autocracy which the existing trolls are working towards.
A rule of thumb that works too often is "how is mainland China doing things?"[0], and assume the West will follow behind shortly.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/15/china-digita... ("Big Brother gets new powers in China with digital ID system")
(tl;dr: Mandatory digital ID, with central government attesting and holding personal data in escrow. The "privacy-preserving", "least-bad option" a sizeable portion of even HN itself advocates for).
> "This means that companies, like social media site Weibo or online shopping behemoth Alibaba, will no longer be able to see the personal information of their users with digital IDs — but Chinese authorities will be able to see the real identity behind online accounts across a range of sites."
If you are a system that depends on people being constantly under the yoke of your jurisdictional powers, you do not want a strong, free, ecosystem. You want as little diversity as possible, ideally two so there is an illusion of choice.
The EU doesn't have power beyond their jurisdiction, as much as they may pretend otherwise. Facebook and Google go along with what the EU wants because they make money there, and have physical properties located on the continent. YC does not.
It's called bad faith, and it's an all too common problem with politicians and business types alike.
The EU Parliament was given a vote on von der Leyen. It was a ballot with a single name on it: hers. By the time it go to the rubberstamping stage the decision was already made. The MEPs couldn't propose other candidates for the vote, and the Parliament can't propose changes to the law either, so it's not the legislative branch of the EU. The legislative branch of the EU would be... the EU Commission. Which is also its executive.
The way von der Leyen was selected is a secret. Nobody knows how it happened. She didn't run in a democratic process of any kind, so she isn't a politician. If you ask EU fans they'll tell you the heads of state selected her. We have no evidence of this. That's the written process, but no records were produced of any such meeting, or a vote, or however it is that this decision was theoretically made. She could have been presented as a fait accompli by a single country, other countries could have been bribed, they could have been excluded entirely. We'd never know.
>She didn't run in a democratic process of any kind, so she isn't a politician
The word you are aiming for is "аппаратчік" -- carreer party member. Which is a fair point, but I don't see it as something fundamentally wrong. I want an experience faceless bureaucrat to do the very valuable faceless bureaucratic thingy -- the technicalities, of which are many. I like, it's great.
> and the Parliament can't propose changes to the law either
They sure can and they sure do it. Commission gives a draft, the chamber votes on the first reading, then a committee in of the parliament can do whatever with the text, including changing "approve" to "reject" making it the opposite of what commission proposed. Which is then voted again by the parliament and again by the council ( which is basically an upper chamber ). I'm not sure whether the chamber can bring back voted down amendments or introduce their own during second or third hearing, as I didn't read the procedural rules, but I suspect it's all there.
If anything, the whole thing is more resembling the original US double chamber parliament than the current US, because the EU of now is as fragmented (or you can say federated) than US was when it originally formed.
She is however notable for being a terrible negotiator and constantly being at the center of corruption scandals. Wikipedia has a sample.
But that is how the EU rolls.
There's no similarity to the US. Congress is the supreme power and originates all law. They might take suggested drafts from the executive branch, but outside of carve-outs where Congress lets the executive branch pass its own regulations, the civil service can only make suggestions for legislation. The EU is backwards: only the civil service can change the law, and the so-called Parliament is reduced to suggesting changes.
The structure of the Union is grim. I wish it was different, but how to change it now? It would have to be the Commission itself that suddenly decides that most of its powers need to be delegated to the Parliament.
I'm dedicated and I have a literal PhD in computer science, yet I'm fucking exhausted fighting this battle all the time. 0.1% chance someone has the capability to, and willingly goes through all this bother.
Then tfa is just a nail in the coffin.
I think, keybase already does it, and there are users here with signed proofs of identity.
You'll be surprised, most of the time it's simple ignorance: the people making decisions don't know everything about everything. Hence democracy comes to rescue.
But the way the European Commission takes decisions is anti-democratic (secret draft documents, undisclosed lobbying, overlooking the role of the Parliament…)
They figured out that much of the population is easily manipulated and controlled by exploiting their desire for "safety and security" --- in stark contrast to that classic Franklin quote (yes, I know the context isn't the same, but the words are otherwise a perfect fit for the situation.) It's only a minority of the population; and I'd suspect a smaller minority in the EU than the US; which is willing to argue against it.
Next time you find yourself arguing for something or doing things a certain way, throw in an "it's better for security" or similar phrase with a plausible-sounding argument why, and see how easily it shuts down the opposition. In my experience, many won't even question it.
64% would be uncomfortable with companies sharing their personal data with outside groups doing research that "might help them improve society", which is great because it shows people understand that such phrases aren't just about sitting around and singing kumbaya.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-an...
IMHO "would be uncomfortable" is not a strong opinion. "Oppose and actively seek to prevent" is a strong opinion. In my experience the majority just have a sense of learned helplessness.
People are usually quite interested to learn about ways to can work against the dystopia to some degree. For a specific example I've converted numerous of people to Brave users just by demoing the ad-block and privacy features. People who have never used ad-block are often in borderline disbelief. Not once has a person ever been like 'oh why bother.' That is just literally unbelievable.
That's one out of dozens though. Most people are thrilled by the improved experience.
True, but I am not sure it is even that many people.
This whole narrative is strongly driven by Apple themselves, one of their strategies against regulations like the EU Digital Markets Act is to rally its userbase against the EU.
Even activists can get exhausted
The smartphone was a closed ecosystem from the start, tinkering around was an uphill battle fought with custom ROMs that only few users dared to try (if the bootloader wasn't locked down to begin with). Adding more restrictions didn't have much impact on most users.
same idea has been pushed since forever(you can include ACTA and other copyright protectionist movements like that as its originators too) over and over again.
People need to protest all the time and win, legislators can just keep pushing it over and over again.
What's even worse you get really smart people seeing noting wrong with this.. Meanwhile this reeks of same methods that were used in my country under communist regime.
I don't know how it works technically, but clearly there's a way to fake it.
This is another one of the reasons why I'm opposed to the current trend of "memory safety" that the megacorps are so enthusiastic about. When insecurity is freedom, and security means securing against the user's control, attacking insecurity will only close off paths to freedom.
So the argument is that those buffer overflows in iMessage used to target people (i.e. https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i... used to target a Saudi activist) are actually good because a hacker might jailbreak a phone with it?
It's good if all my software on linux crashes with segfaults because it might let someone unlock a locked down linux device one day?
I don't feel particularly free if my device is pwned with ransomware
I think you're trying too hard to post cynical remarks as if the were this major gotcha. Even though the bill is quite awful, Occam's razor is quick to point out this has all the hallmarks of an overzealous technocrat than authoritarianism. Try to think about it for a second:
- the goal of the legislation is to ensure adult content is not provided or actively pushed to children,
- adult content is pushed primarily by tech platforms,
- the strategy is to allow access to adult content only to users who prove they are adults,
- the strategy followed is to push an age verification system.
- technocrats know age verification systems can be circumvented if tampered with.
- technocrats proceed to add provisions that mitigate the risk of tampering age verification systems.
The detail you're glancing over is US's hegemony over social media and tech platforms. The world is dominated by three platforms: Microsoft's, Apple's, Google's. Even Samsung is not European. How do you expect to push a technical solution for an authorization platform without leveraging the systems that people use?
Also, the way the current US administration is pushing their blend of fascism onto the world is something I do not find funny. If anything, this would mean the American fascists are succeeding.
Imagine a world in which there are ten thousand phone platforms, some of them are developed by communities rather than business entities, and anyone can easily create a new one. Can your system function in that world? If so, then do it that way. If not, then assume it shouldn't work and stop trying to build it.
You'd be imagining a world that's very different from reality. Lawmakers have to operate in reality, though.
If only there were some changes to the laws that could make the better version of the world the reality.
> Lawmakers have to operate in reality, though.
Someone should definitely inform the lawmakers of that.
Yeah, you can stop here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
Maybe an easy to manipulate technocrat with an authoritarian figure guiding them from behind.
> the goal of the legislation is to ensure adult content is not provided or actively pushed to children
It always starts with the children or terrorists. It's an easy way to sneak the idea in your head. You wouldn't want children to be harmed or terrorists to win, would you? Once you got used to the though, everything else follows.
Name something you want or like I can lazily turn it into a "think of the children" situation.
What will happen in reality is that videos and information is labelled adult content when in reality it isn't, e.g. videos of democratic protests. How do I know that? Because that's what's already happening.
Hardware attestation is an Open standard in the Android world, and it doesn't require Google buttplug in the phone to function.
Details here: https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
(I'm not discussing with your other points because at this point they're null and void)
Hate to say it mate, UK is already one of the worst offenders.
In their own "internet bubble," with curated Google searches that only present a very "Commonwealth countries bias" in search results. After I worked in the UK for a couple of years, I noticed there is a strong bias toward the same sites (Government and UK companies, especially biased toward "facts"). Second, you leave the UK. You will never get it. Try a VPN outside of the UK and search for the same stuff, you will notice it right away.
The UK have used the "think about the children" excuse for different stuff they don't like (Remember the Porn pass Idea? Where you had to go down to your local Tesco to get a "wanker pass" from the cashier.)
Same thing, now just for EU, and they use the "protect the children" excuse, but they have now started to aim at video game companies and others to "verify" age for the sake of "protecting the children". It is horrifying that they want to ID children in the excuse of their "safety". In a couple of years, they will likely offer free in-game currency to trick users into giving away their personal information.
The problem is relay services that supply positive age verification results to any interested user for a fee. With a non-privacy-preserving solution, those aren't a problem, law enforcement can just track whose credentials those services are using and shut them down.
I'm not a fan of the whole idea in general, but if we have to choose, I choose privacy over hackability.
*Google claims phones not updated for the last 8 years are secure merely because they have privileged Google services. Tell you what: many of them are rooted, with Google play services blind to it, and still claiming phones are "verified".
If you're not passing STRONG attestation it's exceptionally difficult to protect against AI video injection attacks.
Well payed "transatlantic" lobbyists across all political parties of the EU at work.
They are self-serving and learnt to give a big F* about the citizens of the EU.
But slowly slowly it will turn into mass terror and deaths. The control freaks in power are taking our freedoms away inch by inch.
this is not the way to make a point that the other party will find persuasive.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/06/11/confidence-in-...
whatever your political alignment, saying the situation in the US is problematic might sell pretty well in the EU.
In this case, however, it's your poor English to blame. In English when you talk to another person, that other person can be called the other party. It's not an attitude, it's a very neutral term.
Whoops, Google have delisted your government app from the Play Store, how quickly can you de-couple your citizens internet access from the corptocracy?
Then we have systems like:
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
Proving we do not need a system prone to PII leaks, just collaboration between content providers and guardians, helped by OS & browser vendors.
But it seems restricting minors is a side effect, at best, of the on going theatre.
I am forever thankful that Trump won the last election. If it were a Democrat party at the helm it would be practically impossible to have opposition to this, as most of the left would simply fall in line and cancel anyone daring to oppose the party. Look at how Obama strengthened the Patriot Act and carried out mass deportations with but a tiny grumble from the press.
Protecting Kids from Social Media Act (Tennessee HB 1891)
Sponsors Representative William Lamberth (R‑TN)
Requires: Social media platforms to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for under‑18 users; restricts retention of verification data; allows parental monitoring & time limits. Went into effect January 1, 2025.
Utah Social Media Regulation Act (SB 152 & HB 311)
Sponsors: Sen. Michael McKell (R) , Rep. Jordan Teuscher (R-District 44)
Requires: Mandatory age verification for all users; parental consent and oversight for under‑18s; bans algorithmic targeting to minors; curfews; data‑privacy protections. (As of mid‑2025, enforcement blocked by litigation.)
The Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act (Mississippi HB 1126)
Sponsors: Walker Montgomery (R‑MS)
Requires: Digital service platforms to verify age using "commercially reasonable" methods, obtain parental consent for users under 18, limit collection/use of minor’s data, moderate harmful content (self‑harm, grooming, etc.)
Texas SCOPE Act (HB 18, “Securing Children Online Through Parental Empowerment”)
Sponsors: Bryan Hughes (R-District 5)
Requires: Platforms to verify the parent/guardian age if the account is for a minor; parental consent before collecting data for users under 18; content filtering for self‑harm, etc. Enforcement partially blocked by lawsuit.
Kids Online Safety & Privacy Act (S. 2073 – pending)
Sponsors: Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA)
Requires: Commission study into age‑verification technologies; does not mandate verification itself
Utah Social Media Regulation Act S.B. 152
Sponsors: Sen. Todd Weiler (R)
Requires: Mandatory age verification, parental consent, time‑bed restrictions, limits on algorithmic recommendations; currently blocked in court
Mississippi Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act (HB 1126)
Sponsors: Representative Walker Montgomery (R‑MS)
Requires: Age verification for digital services, parental consent, limits on data collection and harmful content moderation
Georgia Protecting Georgia’s Children on Social Media Act (SB 351 / Act 463)
Sponsors: State Senator Brandon Beach (R)
Requires: Platforms verify age of new users; under‑16 require parental consent; schools to ban social media access
Virginia Amendment to VA Consumer Data Protection Act (SB 854)
Sponsors: Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D) , Sen. Lashrecse Aird (D)
Requires: Requires age determination, parental consent for under‑16, limits usage to 1 hour/day unless overridden by parent, fines up to $7,500 per violation
Louisiana HB 142 (and HB 570) Online Age Verification for Adult Content
Sponsors: Representative Laurie Schlegel (R)
Requires: Websites where ≥ 33% of content is adult must verify users are 18+ via IDs or transaction data; private causes of action allowed
Ohio HB 96 (2025 law)
Sponsors: Bryan Stewart (R-Ashville)
Requires: Criminal penalties for commercial sites failing to verify adult content users
Iowa SF 207 / HF 864
Sponsors: Kevin Alons (R-Disctrict 7)
Texas SB 2420 (App-Store Age Verification)
Sponsors: Angela Paxton (R)
South Carolina HB 3405
Sponsors: Representative Brandon Guffey (R‑SC) prefiled Jan 2025
Proposed: Require app stores to verify age and obtain parental consent for minors; still pending
Protecting Kids on Social Media Act (S. 1291 federal bill)
Sponsored by: Senator Brian Schatz (D‑HI), Senators Tom Cotton (R‑AR), Chris Murphy (D‑CT), Katie Britt (R‑AL)
Requires: Social media platforms to verify user ages, prohibit access to under‑13s, block algorithmic feeds to users under 18, require parental consent for minors
App Store Accountability Act (H.R. 10364 / companion Senate bill)
Sponsored by: Rep. John James (R‑MI‑10); Senate version by Sen. Mike Lee (R‑UT) with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D‑CT)
Requires: App store operators verify ages and obtain parental consent before minors download apps or make in‑app purchases; federal preemption and FTC enforcementMy thesis isn't that Democrats write those bills, my thesis is that there is never effective citizen resistance against government overreach when Democrats are in power. People can only be free when they are fighting the government and people only fight Republican governments, ergo we must vote Republican to keep the fight going. Both sides are our enemy, but one side enjoys a much larger cult following that will never attack it.
https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-...
You're 100% right that it's happening today.
which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.
> which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy;
What do you mean by this, an unnecessary ideological divide?
> too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.
What sides did they choose and whose additional support did they alienate?
and to me that can be summed up as "the EFF", and the EFF is decidedly left whinge, and does not attract the support of others who are concerned about free speech.
free speech on the pre-web internet didn't really need a group, it was a given and generally accepted by all parties
It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.
Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.
You're saying some "dynamic" of people you have noticed do not really support free speech in some cases?
Lots of people don't support free speech. My original post bemoaned exactly that.
And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.
> And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.
That's untrue.
It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".
> people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.
Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.
People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that. There was never any fascist movement for freedom, the openly stated goal was always to remove the freedom. But if you are not one of them say so and mean it as a criticism, you are somehow supposedly preventing their free speech.
It ended up being associated with the far right by far leftists. Really. Go outside internet bubbles and ask normal people on the street. People don't think free speech is "far right". Really.
> It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".
I've heard that a lot, so that's false.
> Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.
I'm not seeing where the humor is.
> People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that.
Also wrong, many free speech advocates have greatly minded conservative efforts to censor speech in the past.
> There was never any fascist movement for freedom,
No, but that appears to be a strawman of your own construction by equating free speech advocates with fascists.
Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
So then the purpose of the internet was to share cat pics? This quote is so wrong in every way.
> Do not think for a moment
I will decide what I think thank you. It's very ironic when arguments against "censorship" go this way.
The purpose of a system is not what it does.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.
Or if you limit your demographics, perhaps you might be thinking of the Tuskegee syphilis study, where treatment was intentionally withheld for a progressive, life-threatening disease without the consent of the patients, making its purpose to slowly kill the participants by its own admission?
Yes, if your hospital does seem to kill more people than most and there's no alternative explanation like accepting more severe cases, then its purpose might be inverse or orthogonal to its stated goal.
Infant mortality for hospital babies is what, well under 1/1000? Infant mortality was 25% for the vast majority of human history.
Modern medicine is legitimately indistinguishable from magic.
Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".
I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.
The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".
Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.
And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.
It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.
But rest assured, so long as you want to discuss privacy and nostalgia of the pre-invasionary internet, you'll find a knowledgeable expert on IRC.
So is Matrix which doesn't have the capability for this kind of checks (and is federated so you can add your own server without it).
Never heard anything like that from many people I know in Germany.
I feel like there is a huge chunk of context missing here.
I'm referring to sim cards bought in a supermarket. Prepaid, no contract. The activation process, regardless of the brand (I've tried many!) involves those video calls.
I think Ireland still doesn't require registration either.
Let's stop beating around the bush. We all know this doesn't make any sense.
The average person could never do that; critical evaluation was always needed (and it was needed for the material people encountered before the internet, too.) The only thing that is a change from the status quo ante in the first sentence is “LLM generated”.
The "temporary anomaly" is one of perception. It was individuals talking to individuals. In terms of volume the world has never had this much free flow of information, and its never been easier to transmit encrypted data within a group.
At the same time the problem with letting the internet be without government means it pushes digital crack to all children, and an oligarchy of (natural) monopolies tightly control certain powers through systems like "sign in with Google".
The options for companies to instead use a government backed digital identity seems like an obvious step forward if designed carefully enough.
That requires the right mindfullness of people's rights, eg the right story. I just don't think the war on the free-internet narrative from 30 years ago is up for it.
They want to stop children from accessing porn, which really isn't all that bad. Certainly it's not nearly as bad as wasting hours on perfectly legal social media and streaming sites
The west is going to be less and less free.
I'm sorry I feel the chill writing this, but I hope the hackers keep the flame alive.
Hackers: keep giving the finger to regulators when they overreach. They don't get to make the future.
Political problems cannot be solved through technology or yet another forked FOSS project. They require political power, numbers and threat of violence to those in charge.
The population (especially the youth) is anesthetized by social media, shorts, fear-inducing news, economic hopelessness, climate extremes..
In the meantime, everything is getting integrated - banks, tax systems, tech platforms. Now this age verification.. And of course, AI is being implemented everywhere so that no one can evade the big brother.
As it stands now, this Internet is no longer salvageable imo.
If anything, I’m seeing more calls for internet regulation on HN and other tech places than in the past.
Every time something is shared about topics like kids spending too much time on phones or LLMs producing incorrect output, the comments attract a lot of demands for government regulation as the solution. Regulation is viewed as the way to push back on technological and social problems.
The closer regulations come to reality, the less popular they are. Regulation seems most attractive in the abstract, before people have to consider the unintended consequences.
The most common example I can think of is age verification: Every thread about smartphone addiction come with calls for strict age-based regulation all over the place.
Yet the calls for strict age-based internet regulation generally fail to realize that you can’t only do age verifications on kids and you can’t do it anonymously. The only way to do age verification is to verify everyone, and the only way to verify that the age verification matches the user is to remove the possibility of anonymity.
The calls for regulation always imagine it happening to other people and other companies. Few people demanding internet age verification for things like social media seem to realize that it would also apply to sites like HN. Nobody likes the idea of having to prove your identity for an age check to sign up for HN, they just want to imagine Facebook users going through that trouble because they don’t use Facebook and therefore it’s not a problem.
They flip flop on this stuff at least once a month, and the most annoying part is that they always herald everything they do as some new epoch-defining initiative only to quietly forget about it and do the opposite a few months later.
If nation states are dogs, then EU is the chihuahua: loud, proud and extremely ineffective.
Because in the background it's a French vs German vs Irish vs Czech vs $insert_eu_state business interests competing with each other.
Notice how it's almost always French legislators and businesses that mention "domestic EU tech" and not Polish, Czech, Romanian, Dutch, or even German policymakers or businesses?
That's why.
National interests always end up trumping the EU in it's current form. And for a large portion of the EU, American BigTech represents the majority of FDI (tech and overall).
Japanese and Korean automotive players did the same thing with the US in the 1980s-90s in order to ensure their interests remained aligned (though the Plaza Accords did play a role)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9qhDGv300&t=150s.
(the entire video is interesting and informative, I've skipped it to the France-US specific part, up to about 11:02 where Australia is introduced as the US sycophant it is)
Whether it's logical or not, offences past, even those thought forgotten, are easily recalled when under similar pressures.
From an American NatSec perspective, French strategic autonomy is viewed as a positive, as can be seen with Elbridge Colby's work (and similar work by Mastro and Doshi), and a lot of the initiatives led by the Biden admin, as this would allow burden sharing because the US is no longer in a position to manage a two continent war. France does our dirty work in the Sahel and can help in the Indo-Pac (as was seen with the US, France, and India jointly armtwisting the UK into ceding Diego Garcia to Marutius)
In Australia's case (and to the US's benefit), alignment with France makes sense and has been something that has come up in Australian NatSec for years.
New Caledonia is barely 800 miles off the coast of Australia and NZ, and both New Caledonia and French Polynesia have faced pressure due to China, especially after the recent violence in New Caledonia was linked to Azeri [5] disinfo networks on TikTok, along with decades of covert ops by China in New Caledonia [6][7]. France has also been an active defense partner with India and Indonesia - both of whom are increasingly cornerstones of Australian defense.
By every single standard, having an active "Indo-Pac" France is a net benefit for America+ strategy and Taiwan.
That said, French NatSec "strategic autonomy" does not have anything to do with French industry's alignment with marketing a "European first" tech story.
France has similar issues to the US with power politics (as can be seen with France, US, SK, and Israel sharing a similar CPI score), and the biggest booster and beneficiary for "European Tech" is Xavier Niel [0] (France's Mark Cuban or Elon Musk), who is on a first-name basis with Macron [1][2] and whose Father-in-Law (Bernard Arnault) has personally played a significant role in French power politics for years [3][4]. Arnault is also the reason why every country negotiating with the EU ALWAYS tariffs congac and champagne - Arnault's LVMH owns Hennessy and all the other congac producers, and the majority of champagne producers.
End of the day, this is just another inter-elite conflict between vested business interests like any other, but couched with the flag of nationalism.
Nothing wrong with that, but this is why you don't see alignment amongst EU member states - as each state is supporting their own vested business interests amidst a trade war. For example, there's a reason all of us American tech investors end up working with the same handful of politically aligned law firms in Czechia or ending up in the same IT Parks in Eastern Europe.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-02-12/xavier...
[1] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2024/12/22/emmanu...
[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-22/french-mi...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/insight-macro...
[4] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2023/08/08/bernard...
[5] - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/russia-azerbaijan-exploit-...
[6] - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-ca...
[7] - https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2024/05/16/why-and-...
Sometimes. And then, the outcome of that autonomy is that France makes a decision that doesn't please the US, and the US goes ape.
It also aligns with Mastro, Doshi, and Colby's doctrine around the US retrenching in the Indo-Pac and the UK concentrating on the European continent [2] as the US increasingly cannot guarantee boots on the ground in Europe and Asia at the same time.
With the UK in the Indo-Pac, British supply chains would be stretched with marginal benefit for the US in an Asian theatre, but the same resources spent on BIOT could be better spent on British possessions in Cyprus, bases in the Middle East, and the North Atlantic.
[0] - https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/decolonise-die...
[1] - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/uk-mauritius-chagos-deal-r...
[2] - https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2025/03/24/its-time-to-re...
For example, the violence in New Caledonia was instigated on TikTok by Azeri disinfo networks [0][1] due to French support of Armenia, which itself is due to French support for Greece+Cyprus against Turkiye, who is the primary patron for Azerbaijan.
Algeria has been doing something similar [2] due to French support of Morocco, and China's UFWD aligned groups have done something similar in the French Pacific [3]
Unless you're insisting I'm a troll or a bot, which I strongly disagree with. I've worked closely with EMEA (and especially French institutions and businesses) in my current career and previously when I worked in the policy space. I just kvetch on HN because it's not significantly on any radar yet and the anonymity is appreciated.
[0] - https://www.politico.eu/article/france-accuse-azerbaijan-fom...
[1] - https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/expressions/azerbaijans...
[2] - https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-roots-o...
[3] - https://www.aspi.org.au/report/when-china-knocks-door-new-ca...
That's not to claim there's no foreign interference. I'm sure there's a large kernel of truth in that French claim. But hammering on that point is a form of dehumanization: it's to say people who disagree you, having been misled, no longer have the right to a voice, and are fair game to be silenced. That's atrocity. That's bad-faith rationalization by an actor pointing authoritarian weapons at their adversary, which they were intending to do anyway.
It's difficult to speak with nuance on this dilemma: that every political debate in existence, today, is saturated with bad-faith actors, allying with both sides. But people tend to view this through one lens, selectively amplifying the bad-faith on the other side—as if it entirely invalidates them, instantly wins the debate—while minimizing it on their own side. If you don't want your voice silenced because of what other people, who are not you, said—you should not advocate doing that to other people. If you don't to wake up one day with all your favored newspapers and media sites blocked by government order—you should not wish for that to happen to other people.
[0] https://www.politico.eu/article/french-tiktok-ban-new-caledo... ("French TikTok block in overseas territory sets ‘dangerous precedent,’ critics warn")
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/tech/news/french-court-void... ("A French court ruled today that last year's ban on TikTok in New Caledonia was illegal and disproportionately infringed rights and freedoms")
That could be true, if there weren't 3 referendums organised to give those people a voice in deciding their fate. They all failed, progressively more in favour of New Caledonia remaining part of France.
After the last one, and the announcement the end of the franchise restrictions to ensure that those referendums gave a fair chance to the pro-independence indigenous people, a targeted propaganda campaign stoked rioting. People were waving Azeri flags while rioting ffs!
> But hammering on that point is a form of dehumanization: it's to say people who disagree you, having been misled, no longer have the right to a voice, and are fair game to be silenced
It's the misleading group that was attempted to be silenced, not the people. The people in question had been given three referendums to give their voice, via official channels. Rioting because Azeris told them so isn't a legitimate way to voice concerns.
Ilham Aliyev, the dictator of Azerbaijan, has publicly pledged to help French territories secure independence [0] and hosted separatists with full state honors on multiple occasions
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/azerbaijans-president-pledges-...
The EU is not a hegemonic state, but rather an economic supranational organization. France/Germany tend to be primary proponents of increased EU strategic autonomy, while Poland/Czech/Baltic states are less supportive.
Similar to recent discussions of self-hosting, it's a tradeoff of autonomy/control vs efficiency.
Germany isn't doing this as much anymore, because Germany Inc has become increasingly dependent on their investments within the US [0], especially after the triple whammy of the Biden-era IRA [1], the sanctions on Russia sparking a domestic energy crisis [2], and Chinese players outcompeting German industry in China [3].
This can be seen with Germany purchasing American weapons for Ukraine over French objections [4]
[0] - https://flow.db.com/more/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade-r...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-14/german-go...
[2] - https://oec.world/en/blog/bavarias-dependency-on-russian-gas...
[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/majority-german-firms-feel-...
[4] - https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-donald-trump-weapons-...
> The EU is not a hegemonic state, but rather an economic supranational organization. France/Germany tend to be primary proponents of increased EU strategic autonomy, while Poland/Czech/Baltic states are less supportive.
Well obviously, these states know how bad the Russians are since they were terrorised by them for decades. They'll be the first on the chopping block. And they know that Europe does not have much deterrent of its own right now so they're screwed without the US. Though this will come.
The EU has nuclear weapons, which is the ultimate deterrent
The push for authoritarianism seems to come purely from above. My intuition, from personal anecdotes, is that after 30 years of widening gap between the haves and the have nots, the haves are increasingly terrified buy their own populations.
I agree there's ulterior motives too though.
Apologies if it isn't, but since this is a new account only writing anti-EU comments so far, seems like troll army astro turfing. (I think it's worth calling that out, since we don't need HN poisoned by that stuff.)
Porn is not such a big deal but social media flooded by Russian/Chinese/American propaganda is destabilizing our societies. The least we can do is try to keep our youth from losing their minds over it.
People do not realise how dangerous the situation is. We are already in the kinetic phase of a world war with conflicts erupting everywhere, any major financial problem will trigger a chain reaction.
Just recently:
- A lot of people don't want to hear this but Trump just wiped the floor with Ursula with the new trade deal. It will collapse the EU economies even more.
- At few days earlier China humiliated the EU just by packing the official delegation in a bus with nobody to welcome them.
- And of course the EU inherited the Ukraine situation and is loosing a major war.
Once a major power find itself in this situation it get challenged from the inside. Individual countries will be tempted to elect Euro skeptic leaders and breakaway from the sinking ship by making deals with Russia, the US or China to save themselves.
The initial idea and force of the EU was "stronger together". But if a succession of strategic moves by its leadership make you weaker then the deal is off.
Europe is going to have to swallow (probably choke) on the pill that the avg US worker works four hundred more hours a year than their German counterparts. Two hundred more than the average Frenchman.
If the EU is going to boost defense spending to cover a gap in the US funding of staving off the EU's bad neighbor, there is going to be pain. Either more working hours, less social programs, higher taxes, or some combination.
They'll probably reach for more draconian regulations to squeeze as much money from industry as possible, and likely kill it in the process. Then they will complain that they are beholden to foreign companies.
I mean.. great for the politicians, not for an average european.
The European commission, the top of the EU's unelected and mostly unchecked bureaucracy, is currently suing its data protection office after it declared that its use of Microsoft 365 infringes data protection laws.
I mean, the EU wants to force browsers to recognize its own web certificates, while allowing Google to selectively deactivate your phone's capacity to conduct ID checks. It's the same with the "EU Cloud initiative", that at the end was full of non-EU companies.
The aim of the EU bureaucracy is not sovereignty, but extension of its power, nowadays called as "regulation". And when in place, it can't be removed, even if it's clearly self-harming.
Better check on that.
There was an article in the New York Times last week about how many E.U. countries have actually gone back to border checks. Most recently, Germany and Poland.
The border is still very much open.
France apparently also had this around their Olympics or soccer world cup or something. It's not unique and so far it has always been a fad, usually to please nationalist voters for a while
And it doesn't negate the broader point
So until recently the "free" Internet did not matter politically in the EU. Tech was used to trigger color revolutions abroad where the demographics were younger.
But now the unelected EU commission inherited that Internet things and are on the wrong side of it. Worst almost everybody in the EU speaks English and listen to Joe Rogan & co. And while the US Gov might be able to control the Joe Rogan type the EU does not.
So their only move is to crack down on the Internet and limit it with a Chinese firewall type system. But they obviously do not have the ability to do so without the capabilities of an US tech giant (remember their own systems are on Office 365, every phone is Android or Apple). And this would also be in the interest of the US because it would give them a solid control over the EU.
Remember the first goal of a system is to survive and I do not see another realistic path.
Is this meant as a joke? It's not even remotely plausible.
I only mentioned Joe Rogan because it is the most popular, but all the big american podcasts are very popular in Europe.
Also the lines between entertainment and politics have been blurred and Europeans follow much more what Trump says than let's say Ursula.
Also, why do you think the Macrons are suing Candace Owen? She is an niche podcaster with a show on Rumble (a platform which in a way blocked in France). Would Helmut Kohl have been threatened in his own country by what Alex Jones was saying in the 90s?
On the other hand, the EU bodies as well as national reps are besieged by lobbyists and diplomats, and without much backlash from constituents, it's very hard not to find someone that will do what you want. Just look at this former EC commissioner [1] working for Uber.
Flip-floping happens occasionally when the public catches up.
[1]: https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/opening-summary/en/181717
https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/media/...
Essentially, the core user journey is a privacy preserving "over 18" check. I suppose this prevents under 18's from accessing porn, in the same way that most blocking technologies impose an expense on everyone but fail to block tech-savvy children.
Doesn't seem like it could ever stop someone with a bittorrent client, unless you have to attest you are over 18 to even use bittorrent.
If I were a kid, I could see myself downloading Opera GX and enabling the free VPN. It's probably not "tech-savvy" because the browser gets a lot of ad views on YouTube; it would be pretty obvious.
Basically anything other than going to a legally compliant website and trying to attach your mom's passport to the age verification app and doing the challenge.
I would want to sit in on this audit.
I think I have become far too cynical.
But this still wouldn't stop determined kids from VPNing to another country to make their account, and wouldn't stop peer pressure on kids from bleeding to parents to help them.
We see something similar in the US with age verification for viewing porn in some states. Mainstream porn sites that I’m sure you have heard of that aren’t based in the US just ignore the laws and VPN sales skyrocket in those states.
Because the practical reality here is, like, porn is the big scary word, but the actual danger to kids is *other people.* Other addictions still exist. Removing one vice without solving the underlying systemic problem merely shifts the goalposts, and everyone is up in arms about what a slippery slope that is for good reason.
EDIT: Clarity here because I phrased that badly in a hurry: I'm in disfavor of internet access being a requirement for schoolwork, but I failed to set that context initially. If parents trust their kids enough with access, once they've reached a certain point of maturity, that's fine. I'm against technological age gates and I'm against removal of bad content from the net at large. Parents should decide when their kids are ready, and guide them appropriately.
I will leave my original remarks unedited so the remaining discussion is sensible. (Sorry!)
As for other people being the danger, there’s some truth to that for women. I have a daughter, so this will be a concern. But you know, she won’t die. Everyone goes through trauma. The key here is to make sure she feels comfortable enough to talk to me and to my wife before doing anything (too) stupid.
I snuck out of my parents’ house to go see a girl when I was 16. Took my dad’s station wagon. On the way, some car tried to pass me and ended up hitting a big truck on the side. Truck was fine, I was fine, that fella was not. He ended up on the side of the road. Me and trucker just kept going. I still think about that guy a lot, because obviously the correct thing to do would have been to call 911, but I was a dumb 16yo who was out past midnight to go see a girl.
Point is, if things went a little differently, I could have been the one who crashed, or even dead. But that doesn’t mean that the girl I was going to go see was somehow a threat to me. It means I was doing something dangerous.
Again, this is easy to say as a man. The threat model for women is different. But prohibiting minors from the internet without supervision is totally absurd, and I feel bad for any parent who helicopters their kids like that.
Ultimately your kid will grow up and have their own life. Do you want to be remembered as the parent who had them under lock and key in the name of safety, or as a parent who monitored from a distance and occasionally let them do stupid things so that they could learn from it? For me, the latter is far more preferable.
I was not clear enough, so I will try again. If parents do not want their kids to access "bad content", whatever that means to them, then they need to supervise the access. If parents are okay with their kids accessing bad content, then that choice is theirs to make. The internet itself should not be the gatekeeper here, neither should the government, but the parents do need to actually parent. I do not believe technology should be doing the parenting. And BECAUSE I believe this is a choice the PARENT should make, I also do not believe unfettered access to the internet should be a requirement for students. As long as that is a requirement, the parents aren't in control, and we get draconian laws trying to "fix the internet."
You have wildly misinterpreted my intent, and admittedly it is because my opening sentence was poorly phrased.
As far as the beheading video, why be offended? Yes, I think teenagers will be naturally curious, and that gore videos will be on their watch list along with porn. It was true for most of my friends, and admitting this truth rather than running from it is how you deal with it. It’s not "defending" when it happens as a matter of course.
Again, you’re basically arguing for draconian powers not for the government but for the parents. To me, this is two sides of the same coin; whether the jailer is the government or the parent, when I was a teen both would have been the enemy. I personally don’t want my child to think of me as the enemy. Other parents can make different choices.
And yes, I think it was fine for me to watch that video when I was 13.
The reason I think it was fine to watch the video at 13 is because it was major news at the time. The Iraq war was just starting up, and I believe Nick Berg was one of the first troops taken prisoner and executed. I wanted to see for myself what other countries were doing to our soldiers.
As I got older, I realized it wasn’t so clear cut as good vs evil, and that we were often the evil ones. (Regardless of the reason, blowing up someone’s home with some of their family inside is evil, and there were civilian casualties in the Iraq war.) But at the time, it was a major formative life experience for me. It galvanized me into wanting to join the marines, which of course would have been a huge mistake. So you could argue that me watching the video was harmful in that sense, since it influenced me pretty heavily.
I take a different perspective. Freedom is about freedom to view something and decide for yourself how you feel about it. It’s easy to forget how mature you felt at 13. If at the time you tried to stop me from watching that video, I would have been furious, and said that you’re preventing me from seeing what’s really going on in the world.
Now, I personally think that that freedom also extrapolates to the rest of the evils viewable on the internet. I watched a lot of cartel videos, some war footage, and so on. You can argue that 13 is way too young, and maybe I’ll even agree once my daughter reaches that age. But if a kid is genuinely curious to see what reality is actually like, I personally find it a little repulsive that we as a society think it’s so awful, and that we say children should be babied for their own protection. If you tried that with me at 13, I’d have given you the finger and figured out a way around whatever security measures you put into place. In my opinion, the correct thing to do is for a kid to have a close connection with their parents, to tell them that they’re curious, and for the parents to explain the reasons why the kid might not want to see it. (This also forces you to explain why it’s so horrible. Surgical procedure videos are equally graphic, but we don’t call them horrible.) And if at the end of that process, your kid wants to watch those videos, be it porn or gore, you should seriously consider their request. Your options are to be supportive or for them to do it in secret. Thinking you’ll stop them is wishful at best.
Yes, it’s uncomfortable. I don’t personally know what I’ll do when Kess comes to me or her mom asking about that. But "forbid it in all circumstances" is in my opinion an extreme overreaction given what’s at stake. At worst, it will cause them some emotional trauma. It arguably did for me. It’s good to protect children from trauma. But if they genuinely want to go through it, who are we to stop them and say we know better? Let them figure it out.
We’re their parents. It’s easy to believe we do know better. And in most cases we probably do. But at the end of the day, by forbidding this content, you’re waging war on your child’s curiosity. I personally find that as horrifying as it probably felt hearing me say that there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fine to disagree.
If this comes up the future, I’ll point back to this comment as my canonical response on the topic. If after reading it people still want to be offended, then okay. But I’m not trying to tell you how to raise your kid. I’m saying, you’re fighting a losing battle if you think you can stop them.
You're trying to logically and emotionally appeal to people whose amygdala have been hijacked by a moral panic.
I agree with you, but good luck.
W T F ? ? ?
> Because the practical reality here is, like, porn is the big scary word, but the actual danger to kids is other people.
Bad news, Champ. Other people also exist off of the Internet. They always have. The world is not entirely safe. And that does not mean children shouldn't get to be part of the world.
The main problem here is panicky idiocy.
That idea has never really been realistic short of keeping them isolated from society until 16-18 (which most would consider abuse), but it’s not even slightly possible today with how readily available information has become. It’s an inevitability that they will learn about the topics you’ve been avoiding and take on external influences you may not approve of.
Now to be clear, I’m not advocating for letting kids run wild on the internet with no guardrails, especially earlier on. Guardrails are important, but it’s even more important in my opinion to try to stay ahead of what they may encounter by talking with them about those things so when they eventually run across it, they’re not flying blind and might even seek your guidance about the incident since they know you’re not going to get angry about it. That’s much more likely to bring positive outcomes than if they ran into these things without parental support.
The point I was actually trying to make is just this: if the parent's goal is to block content, then the simplest thing to do is to be there when the child is surfing the net. That shouldn't take crazy technological measures. At some point, most parents realize their kids are mature enough to handle things and back off, but the parent should be making that call for their own kid. I don't think the government should be doing it on their behalf. If the government believes the internet is dangerous for young minds, then it should focus on the thing it can control: educational curriculum, primarily. Trying to "fix the internet" is a fool's errand.
For instance, it's not illegal for me to be served alcohol. If I'm not carded when being sold a drink, nothing illegal has taken place.
If the lawmakers are being cowards and not saying they want to round up and ID all the children from birth until they are eligible to participate in the adult world, that's their battle to fight and not our burden.
So no, this is totally ineffective. And it's not like there's actually a problem. There's no crisis of messed up kids or young adults. We all had access to porn in some form and we all turned out fine. I used to watch the late night pay tv which was just 'scrambled' by removing the sync signal. It was easy to put that back with some electronics chops. I saw my share of gangbangs and cumshots and I did not get messed up or get weird ideas. In fact I often get compliments I'm a sensitive and caring lover. I never do or push for the dirty porn tropes (unless she asks for them :)
So did most of my school friends. Also video tapes got passed on at school and later CDroms (when the writable DVD came I was already an adult). We all had plenty.
This is all to mitigate a "crisis" which doesn't actually exist.
But I agree, forcing verification will not be effective enough, kids will find their way. The real solution is more education on this topic from younger age.
It's a choice and it comes with consequences. Parents can step up if they so choose - the problem is they don't choose.
If even the exact parents a child don't care, why should I? They've decided it's okay, and it's their kid. I'm inclined to just agree with them and move on.
This has been true for millions of kids (now adults) in the US since at least 1999.
From watching porn?
Does seeing these things mean I am broken in some way? It for sure didnt make me agressive or violent, actually Id say that it had quite the opposite effect.
I dont buy the "we must protect children by denying them access to whatever I feel like to prevent trauma", in fact the opposite, I feel the denying of access creates trauma when the false world-view eventually gets shattered by truth. It wasnt problem when I was 8, because I didnt have a false view about the world. It didnt traumatize me, I was just learning ugly stuff about real world.
Now it seem the only publicly acceptable option is to shelter everyone (without their consent, and ideally awarness) until they 18, and then throw them into the world and watch them struggle as they try to reconsile their dream-like version of reality with real world.
Liveleak was an everyday video host and they had terrorist beheadings on the front page. Once the masses moved online and the power players consolidated everything into modern social media (reddit, facebook, youtube), it kinda sucked all the air out of the room and killed all the small sites, of which there was no shortage of "test the limits of free speech" content.
That being said, the modern incarnation of social media has probably caused far more youth mental destruction than rotten.com or faces of death.
This is exactly the problem. You have no idea what you want and will thus cave to whatever direction the winds blow.
This is objectively not true. Not to say that a porn ban combined with age restrictions would help, but it's just objectively not true.
* Rise of incels as a thing, and even violence committed by them
* Various loneliness epidemics
* Rise of movements such as the 4B in South Korea, where women flat out refuse traditional relationships with men
* the rises in STDs and teen pregnancies can probably be explained by other factors
* The rises in various diagnosis (ADHD, etc) and rates of sexual assault can probably be explained by just having more rigorous reporting and testing, as well as higher awareness, but the rise of specific types of sexual abuse (like a popular one, choking without consent, which can easily lead to brain damage) can be directly linked to its prevalence in porn
* significant differences in opinion on equality and general political leanings between boys and girls
That's not to say that porn is a problem, and removing it for <18 will magically make everything fine. But things are decidedly messed up for a lot of teens and young adults, and parts of that messed upness can be potentially inspired by porn, and "the manosphere". The second one is more important IMO.
I wish the left would just own up and take the L on this, and go back to race/gender/sexuality blind "everyone is awesome and everyone is equal" policy. Maybe we could start winning elections again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/wiki/missions...
As girls grow up and become women, they become disinterested in men, due to the perceived danger. When boys grow up they become avoidant men who are scared of approaching and asking out women, due to the perceived risk of ridicule, shaming and legal action. This prevents the formation of stable marriages, which then culminates in low birth rates.
I don't think it's specially a male issue to worry about this because some of my female friends mention being worried about this too. But because of the role models still prevalent even in progressive communities they don't have to do the approaching so much so it's less of a problem for them.
I also think this is a very specific autism/adhd thing. I see this mostly in neurodivergent friends. And avoidant attachment is more of an upbringing thing (physically or emotionally absent partners). It doesn't really have anything to do with porn.
I don't care about stable marriages or birth rates though. I'm happy to be polyamorous. A lot happier than before I knew it existed. Having a traditional family would be a prison for me and I've always felt that way. The religious community in particular advocates this as the only moral way but it isn't. In fact my poly friends are much nicer and considerate people than my religious friends.
The human population is way too big anyway. If we had half or a third of the population we'd have far less problems. Environmental pollution, housing, fighting over scarce resources leading to wars. I'm proud not contributing to this by not having kids.
Don’t know how to describe how insane this is
You can not check the age without breaking the privacy, technically it is Not possible; this is like a religious faith exercise, not science.
What one read in the specification is, firstly you install an official software in your device, the device becomes identified "as you" the first time you verify your ID and receive your unique internet ID hash, linked to your personal data at the identifier platform.
In addition, your unique internet ID hash will become you, and each time a Non-porn-related platform ask for it, you will leave track of who are you -as internet ID- to the platform (finger printing), and also what you visit to the identifier platform.
Yeah, I said Non-porn-related platform, literally, because what we are reading here is about an Internet digital ID hash for each EU citizen,
Lets be clear, if it were to protect the children from porn, it would say "verify with the personal internet ID only for porn sites", in company with all the adjectives derived from porn, exclusively, with specificity, nothing more.
But what we are seeing here about this matter is deliberately open to interpretation, they say "platform that can be considered to be accessible to minors"... boom, What does this mean, News for adults? Criticise a corrupt government for adults? In my village this is called a back door trojan, because when they want they redact the directives, laws, with precision.
Anyway, I invite the reader to take a look to the Digital ID directive on its own,
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1183/ (2024)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/ (2022)
After this, they only have to define progressively, frog cooking time, and increase the affected Internet platforms with obligatory identification, and then we will think that the Great Chinese Firewall was a children game compared with this.
The "it's to protect the children" political tactic to break privacy is quite old. In addition we should remember the other EU law about breaking the encryptions.
My humble opinion.
PS: Ironically no more of two months ago I was saying that as I was European I have freedom and I didn't need a tooling for circumvent something like the Russian and Chinese censure. Oh my... If I were know this, I was absolutely blind about what someones try to cook.
We don't need the governments to mass surveil us to protect us. We need them to sort the economy and stop invading countries and being deferential to corporate interests instead of the people they represent.
It's such an obvious push that If you don't want to see it, it makes me think you're shielding yourself to avoid contending with the reality: These politicians and govs all around, including the countries you claim "work" are absolutely power hungry and beholden to interests other than yours and will push for as much total surveillance as they can, including as much curtailment of freedoms as they can.
Obviously that won't mean elites will actually face justice or crimes will actually be solved because more surveillance is not accompanied with more government transparency, quite the opposite and bigger and more powerful burocracies, with more authoritarianism, allow for easy hidden exceptions that you can't question.
It's nothing new. Corruption is common. It's just mediocre to see "hackers" pushing for it just because the government and corporations tell them to, because foreign country bad, bad social media influences kids, drugs, word-ism, etc.
You say “so many people are advocating for this in HN” but this thread was empty except for one other comment (which was also critical of this) at the time you posted your comment.
HN and even the GitHub comments mostly start with the assumption that of course we should do this. Of course we should restrict social media to under 16/18s and either are in favor of ID to access the Internet or pretend it won't happen by consequence of this.
Now try to address what I said instead of poorly calling me out.
Please tell me exactly what you think and I can nitpick it vaguely instead of putting forth mine. Heh.
In any case, just look at the comments under my comment. You'll see them.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705630 (this is good, we need this). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44705597 (are you a conservative?! Anonymity should be reduced.)
Don't be disingenuous with your proof demands and tell us what you think and then we can discuss the merits of your argument.
The case that "so many" people are advocating this on HN. Sounds like a significant percentage!
> What's YOUR case. Assert a position
Their case is that you should give evidence.
> and provide proof in triplicate please. Please tell me exactly what you think and I can nitpick it vaguely instead of putting forth mine. Heh.
"you should give evidence" doesn't need its own proof. And nitpicking such a simple idea would be a waste of everyone's time.
"So many" means "so many". You're creating a straw man in bad faith.
What's your take on digital Age verification. Either provide useful commentary or stop trolling. Address the existence of the other comments I linked.
Or at the very least, many here support the goal of keeping children and/or teenagers off of social media entirely, while disliking the means of ID verification. But it's not like there's any other obvious means.
If you stretch the definition of "recent" to ~ 60d then you can also search for the pornhub/France thing. Quick google nets this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44210557. There are likely others, too... but I'm lazy :).
Age verification is already a thing IRL, there is no reason to not extend it online considering so much of our lives is digital. Overall I think anonymity should be reduced on the internet in general - a big reason of the world issues, especially in USA is that ideas can grow in forums where people under etherial identities can tell lie after lie without any repercussion.
See, I wouldn't have as much of an issue if you were honest about this real intention, because of how on the nose it is to reasonable people.
The idea that I will have to upload 3D models of my face and ID, or get permission from Google, just to go online because you don't like the idea of someone else's kids using the internet is absurd.
Please stop using appeals to children in your quest to "stop ideas from growing".
In the same way that you have a stable IRL identity that is your actual body so when you go into public places, you can be identified later if need be.
Similar systems are rolled out where I am, and they all involve proving you're the real living person that matches your ID, and not just someone who took another person's ID or knows their credentials, via live video of multiple angles of your face.
Ah yes. Anonymity is the only thing that enables dishonesty and of course it's the government's moral duty to regulate it.
Once anonymity is banned, the world will be honest and good and True and we'll all look back on the Bad times thinking how silly we all were.
The best part of minority report was the way everything constantly tracked identity through retinal scans; i can't wait for the future!
It's a shame you don't read the North Korean press. Otherwise you'd know that the elimination of anonymity on the Internet led to exactly this
It's a privacy preserving over 18 check.
Is it a "slope"? Sure, you can imagine an extension to the system that is "worse".
Is it "slippery"? This thing isn't draconian enough to be effective. It will be a minor speedbump that prevents exactly zero determined under-18's from accessing anything that they'd want to. So then the question is, does the government react by trying something more draconian, or does it give up?
The internet used to be a bastion of freedom. That era ended around 2005.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
After a lot of angry emails towards the helpdesk, they at least changed it, so a failed check only shows a warning that you can accept.
Seriously. You don’t need Google. You just need a plan and a will to execute.
Everyone’s ready. The only reason US is wealthy is those subscription fees and vendor lock in we have.
There isn't really venture capital like that in Europe. Your business has to bootstrap. There are big businesses that could fund big ideas but they are big because they do one thing well - a company like Airbus isn't going to branch out and build an AWS.
Struggling to think of corporate produced software that doesn’t suck. iOS Safari is ok, I guess.
In America the least bad stuff eventually rises to the top. In Europe it feels like it's all just one shared pit.
The reason is because Americans buy the other tech firms, so its not because they don't make non-bad tech its because USA just monopolizes it via very aggressive acquisitions.
> and the one that was a bit better than terrible was bought by a US company
But here you say EU can make great software? Just that USA then buys it. So we should just ban USA from buying our great software companies, is that what you are saying?
I can do most anything online, haven’t had to physically visit an gov office for years, outside voting and getting a new passport photo. And everything just works.
Edit: and before anyone points out that we’re not in EU, yes - but we’re in the EEA.
American companies like Google [0][1], Amazon [2][7], and Microsoft [3][4][5][6] have spent billions in FDI and hiring, thus building strong relationships with EU states like Ireland, Romania, Poland, Finland, Sweden, and others, but French and German competitors haven't (or don't exist depending on the service or SLA).
This means a significant portion of EU member states have an incentive to maintain the relationship, because the alternative means significant capital outflows. A Polish legislator doesn't have to answer to French voters, so they will incentivize the relationship with BigTech. Thus, these nations will lobby tooth and nail against destroying the relationship.
It's the same reason Hungary courts Chinese FDI [8] and enhancing the Sino-Chinese relationship as leverage against the EU pushing too hard [9].
[0] - https://www.gov.pl/web/primeminister/google-invests-billions...
[1] - https://www.gov.ie/ga/an-roinn-fiontar-turas%C3%B3ireachta-a...
[2] - https://www.aboutamazon.eu/news/job-creation-and-investment/...
[3] - https://centraleuropeantimes.com/microsoft-google-invest-big...
[4] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/nordics-efficient-energy-...
[5] - https://www.idaireland.com/latest-news/press-release/an-taoi...
[6] - https://www.government.se/articles/2024/06/prime-minister-to...
[7] - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/cloud-technology-emp...
[8] - https://hungarytoday.hu/hungary-seeks-to-stay-leading-europe...
[9] - https://theloop.ecpr.eu/hungary-and-the-future-of-europe/
You also can't just say, "Here's a few hundred billion in public support to create alternatives to U.S. tech giants", because the U.S. would argue that it's unfair state aid and retaliate.
There isn't enough private capital in the EU with the risk tolerance required to take on such a challenge independently.
We also lack a reserve currency like the USD, so we can't print $2 trillion a year, much of which ultimately flows into the U.S. stock market and further boosts U.S. tech companies, making competition even harder.
EU markets are already fully penetrated by U.S. behemoths that can either withstand or acquire any privately funded competitor, thanks to their massive cash flows and valuations.
For all these reasons, the outlook isn't very promising.
Indeed, it's a very sad story. I'm afraid the EU is in a coma, so waking up is not a given.
Another is economical - with tech (absolute) free-market would for sure benefit the biggest player. I don't believe in absolute free-market economy anyway (and we don't have it), and I think EU (and other countries) should protect their (tech) businesses. For example EU can start with above mentioned service tax, Trump started with tariffs anyway.
Side note - Russia had very strong domestic tech for a long time, and one of the reasons I believe was the fact it's a big market mixed with different language. I don't think dictatorship played as big of a role.
The EU has some of the brightest minds in the world. You can do this.
That can be improved by making traditional investments (real estate, land) less attractive while making investments into businesses more attractive. You just need to change tax incentives by removing capital gain tax and introducing real estate/land value tax (or raising it). Removing red tape would help as well and then making the common market really common.
As it is there is very little incentive to invest in companies here.
That's unrealistic. Majority of people in the EU own property and/or land, and no one wants to pay even more taxes on it. In my EU country, the majority of politicians own more than two apartments. I don't see them working against their own interests.
That's why nothing every changes. Ever increasing taxes on productivity to benefit the real estate/land owners is how EU operates. No wonder we have fewer and fewer children and there isn't many people willing to found new businesses.
It's a death spiral which will end with the youth rebelling or going extinct. The latter being more probable looking at current fertility rates.
Google rolls into town and wants to spend half a billion euro on a datacenter? Sure thing. They'll say that it'll boost the local economy while being built - by creating a couple of thousand jobs for the contractors that are going to build and maintain it, and then some onsite jobs for the next decade or two, creating a couple of hundred jobs for techs / engineers.
And as long as they keep playing ball with google, projects like that will pop up once in a while. If you're difficult, there's also a risk of the rich tech companies taking their business some other place.
With that said, I've recently noticed more voices for building our own stuff - as there's a real risk that US tech companies will simply comply if pushed enough, say, by a POTUS that's out for blood and wants to hurt certain foreign users. Ban/lock out certain users from gaining access to software, turn off their infrastructure, etc. who knows.
But, alas, there just isn't the same willingness to pour in capital on the important things. For private investors it doesn't make much sense, unless they have a bulletproof contract with domestic users willing buy their service - and using state funds isn't too popular, either.
Truth be told, any of the big tech businesses can undercut any competition, and probably build better and faster. If anything, it could be the case for tariffs - outsourcing critical infrastructure will leave you very exposed. If European countries all over the board started to abandon US tech companies, they'd cry to Trump, who in turn would probably start a trade-war.
You are right to be worried. US companies under this administration can’t be trusted to follow the law. Why should they, when our commander in chief isn’t and has a panel of judges who let him do whatever. Just the other day he suggested Obama be investigated for treason. So yeah, we’re toxic, and you all should seriously quarantine yourselves.
Why would you say all personal finance advisors from Europ advise their clients to invest at least 50% in the US? The aggressive ones suggest 70-90%. 53% of The Norwegian sovereign fund is invested in the US, 24% in Europe and 23% the rest of the world. Their biggest investments are in Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Broadcom, etc, as one would expect.
Why don't European investors move their investments from US index and into European companies and businesses? Norway alone has ~1 trillion Euros invested in the US. Surely they can move it to invest in European tech, no? that can make a couple of European AWSs.
The best way to get more euros over time appears to be to exchange them for US dollars, invest in US stock markets over time, and eventually exchange them back for euros. So rational investors will do that. It will work as long as the American regime doesn't collapse its currency due to overprinting, in which case all those euro investors will lose all their money.
An individual investor doesn't care about improving the economy of their country at all. They only care which investment will make the money today. And the investment market is just a collection of investors. Never make the mistake of thinking investment markets are rational economic planners - that's the fallacy of composition.
European governments may want to prevent this situation, but they're all pretty locked into the free-market regime, so there's not a huge amount they can do. They can't just give out free money, either, since there's a lot more state-backed financial crime and corruption over there, due to having enemy countries in close proximity.
My guess on what happened this time is, people were tasked to implement a way to verify age anonymously and this was the only feasible way to do it because of their constraints that don't allow them to do bigger stuff that China or USA will able to do through having the budget and enforcement power.
I know politics isn’t logical but if you keep drilling down the root cause, eventually you’ll hit bedrock.
EU needs to federalize but europeans are still too nationalistic for that to happen. Even Germany is too tiny to matter in the global stage but even small countries with population of a city in America will be like “we are special, we can take on USA and China because of our intrinsic characteristics. Even if we can’t we are definitely better than our neighbors”.
We have EU regulations, those are much tighter than in US, on practically every front. Labor, finance, environment, data, AI, you name it, we have it regulated. And then you have the country level regulations on top. That's right, EU sets the floor, not the ceiling.
Suppose you have a start up in Poland, you have managed to get funding and you are offering services in your country. You want to do that in Germany? Get ready for complying with new set of regulations. And you better hope that individual German states don't have something extra on top of those.
All of those regulations have purpose, it is possible that they were designed by well meaning people and bring some benefit. But their compound effect is catastrophic. It is not that you can't push trough, you can, just look at Kiwi or Mikrotik. But it's an uphill battle and your competition from overseas has it so much easier, that they can end up outgrowing you, and eventually buying you out.
Both the US, the EU, and the rest of the OECD began the process of aligning digital services taxation and regulation [0][1] under the Biden admin, as it was also a fig leaf tossed at the EU by the US to prevent a potential trade war with the EU [2] due to the IRA and CHIPS act.
The US has now removed itself from this OECD initiative, and most other major markets have begun to as well either due to US pressure or their own self interest. It also played a role in reducing Biden/Harris' chances in 2024, as much of the Obama era tech coalition shifted support and donations to the Trump-Vance campaign due to their support for repealing and fighting against digital services taxes globally.
The US also removed it's gloves when negotiating with the EU this admin compared to previous admins, so dangling the threat of retaliatory measures is not well received and can elicite a quasi-hard power response.
[0] - https://www.eiu.com/n/the-oecd-global-tax-deal-still-hangs-i...
[1] - https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/reallocation-of-ta...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/06/business/dealbook/biden-c...
Why? These are very closely intersecting things. It is very convenient for government to regulate and force monopolies to do what the government needs. And vice versa, strong regulation allows monopolies to avoid the emergence of new competitors. Win-win.
Anyway, if a government tried to make a European smartphone design, it would be treated as any other government supply contract, resulting in a terrible design-by-committee. So in the end, all politicians are willing to do is wait around and say "someone should do something".
It's actually a little better than that. One thing they can do, and have done, is make funds available for individuals and small groups who want to have a go themselves. Notably NLnet funds a lot of projects. They're all small projects though so they're not really capable of displacing megacorps in the free market. Stuff like MNT hardware remains niche hacker stuff.
The post WWII doctrine of US that's applied in Europe is strengthening the bigger businesses. Those businesses use US tech since investing in an actual European tech sector is expensive. Especially after all the first players took critical positions.
The time to invest in that sector was in the 80s and 90s. Europe had a different relationship with the US and it was trying to encite small ex-Soviet states to join, so they can exploit the cheap labor. So nobody actually invested in local tech sector.
It is now an uphill battle that'll cost more than the original investment. Only countries with strong independence urge like France is willing to fight it. Most of the EU countries are not.
I use GrapheneOS as a daily driver and I absolutely love it. It should be the default. There's already one app I use that must do something similar and absolutely just won't run on it, so I have an entirely separate phone running stock Android just for that one app. Still worth the hassle.
Glad I don't live in a place where all this madness is taking root, but still, the trend itself sucks.
> Very well sir, which digital payment service would you like to use?
> It doesn't matter they all force me to use my phone.
And if there really are services that only are accessible through iphone/android applications, you probably should not support them.
I would agree, but sadly that's not supported by this government verification software. If you want to use the internet, it sounds like this will become mandatory for many websites hosted in the EU that have content that needs to be locked away from kids under 13 or so. If you think we should oppose that, I'm right by your side
EU wants to push more control on the internet, today it's "think of the children" but when the infrastructure is rolled out, it'll be "real name verifiction" on social media, chat control, etc.
Whoever is pushing this in EU has to be removed before things will get better.
Furthermore, there's nothing stopping the governments implementing these standards from permitting GrapheneOS' signature. It's one of the ROMs that actually has a reliable signature so unlike random images from XDA there's a case for it to be permitted. Google's integrity check isn't just a binary check, it's a combination of a hash and a pre-defined list of suggested acceptable hashes.
So you complain to the service, they either ignore you or tell you to use the app, and then what? They are not breaking any law as far as I can tell.
And even if it was, class actions in Europe are close to inexistent, and it's not worth it for any one consumer to take the multinational running the service to court.
> there's nothing stopping the governments implementing these standards from permitting GrapheneOS' signature
incompetence and/or not caring
If you mean something like DigiD, that's only for government websites themselves. A lot of water will need to flow past parliament before they open that one up to pornhub
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
A question I have is who voted for this? I sure didn't.
I don't.
The whole point of this is that they can't, which is unlike the systems they had used before. The only information that the service provider receives is that an age check has passed.
I'm sorry but that cure is definitely worse than the disease. This is not an attack you see outside of spy movies
None of this prohibits users from modifying their bootloader, kernel, or OS image; but any such modification would invalidate the secureboot signature and thus break attestation until the user registered their own signatures with the EU.
The EU currently only transacts with Google in this regard because, as far as I know, they are the only Android OS publisher (and perhaps the only Linux publisher?) that bothered to implement hardware-to-app attestation chaining live in production end-user devices in the decades since Secure Boot came onto the scene. All it takes to change that is an entity who has sufficient validity to convince them that outsourcing permitted-signature verification to Google is unethical, which it is.
It’s a safe bet that Steam Linux was already working on this in order to attest that the runtime environment is unmodified for VAC and other multiplayer-cheating prevention systems in games — and so once they publish all that, I expect we’ll find that they’ve petitioned their attested OS signature chain to the EU as satisfying age requirements for mature gaming.
The vendor lock-in here is that Apple and Google and, eventually, Valve, are both willing to put the weight of their business behind their claims to the EU that they do their best to protect the security of their environment from cheaters, with respect to the components required by the EU age verification app. The loophole one could drive a truck through that the EU has left open to break that lock-in in the future? Anyone can petition the EU to accept attestations from their own boot-kernel-OS chain signatures so long as they’re willing to accept the legal risks visited upon them if found to have knowingly permitted exploitation for age check bypasses, or neglected to respond in a timely and prudent manner when notified of such exploitability by researchers — and if the EU rejects their petition improperly, they’ll have to answer for that to their citizens.
This is why it's important that initiatives like Web Environment Integrity fail. Once the tools are in place, they will always be leveraged by the State.
> and so once they publish all that, I expect we’ll find that they’ve petitioned their attested OS signature chain to the EU as satisfying age requirements for mature gaming.
I hope that Valve pays no mind to this nonsense and continues to allow art to be accessible to anyone.
Governments have real and serious need for verifications that are backed by their force. They’re a government; they are wielding force upon citizens by doing this, knowingly and intentionally. That is a normal and widespread purpose of the State existing at all: to compel people to align with the goals of the State, whether members of the State like it or not, until such time as the State’s goals are changed by whatever means it permits or by its collapse.
If this pans out for them, as cryptographically it will but remains to be how vendors and implementations handle it at scale, then they can introduce voting from your phone — the previously-unattainable holy grail of modern democracy — precisely because it lets the government forcibly stop the cheating that device-to-app/web attestation solves. And they can do so without leaking your identity to election officials if they care to! Just visit a government booth once in a while to have your identity signature renewed (and any prior signatures issued to your identity revoked). That’s how digital wallet passports and ID cards work already today anyways, with their photo/video/NFC processes.
Western sfbay-style tech was founded on the libertarian principle that one should be able to tell the government to fuck off and deny taxation, representation, blah blah etc. in favor of one’s armed enclave that does what it feels like. It’s fine to desire that, but it’s proven too radical to be compatible with the needs of nation-states or the needs they enforce satisfactions for on behalf of their citizens. Attacking attestation won’t solve the problem of the “State”, and has led us to a point where Google can claim truthfully to a “State” that the Android forks ecosystem isn’t competent enough to be trusted, because they can’t be bother to do attestations.
we've banned all graphic depictions from the internet, required a verified name attached to every blog post, and made sure to confirm everyone's digital passport before letting them resolve a DNS query, but at least now I can vote from me phone instead of having to go outside. The future is bright!
GrapheneOS has optional attestation, either local (another device) or remote (their server) attestation.
... unless they don't want to turn their device into a boat anchor that nothing else will talk to. It's not going to stop with age verification.
Counterproposal: fuck attestation, and fuck age verification. Individual users, not corporations, associations, or organizations, get to use any goddamned software they want any time they want for any purpose they want, and if you set up some system that can't deal with that, tough beans for you.
Smartcards also seem to have the ability to issue certificate requests. I think the keys inside the cards are signed by a manufacturer trust chain (I got a gemalto card to play with for signatures and places like IdenTrust were able to verify authentic cards, but I wasn't trying to fool anything so it may be possible... but they would only issue certain levels of keys for specific cards)
I'm not saying you are wrong (I don't know enough about the details) but it all was much more sophisticated than I had thought and the chips seem to be running some sort of attestation of the chip in the card. Basically, you can't MITM things if doing so requires getting a private key that only exists in the factory. That sort of thing.
The question is how do you convince other people to trust your phone to store their secrets--not how do you yourself come to trust your own device to store your own secrets. And if you can't convince others your device is secure (i.e. "why the hell would I trust you and your phone to store my password?"), then just use something they can trust instead. I'm not saying EU is going to allow whatever, I'm just saying it's not a huge technical or usability problem to rely on something the EU should be able to trust (like a yubikey) if the EU can't trust your phone.
They’re not concerned about a person handing their phone to someone else for a moment. They’re concerned about kids stealing age verification devices from people. Someone isn’t going to notice a missing yubikey until they check age next. Someone is going to miss their phone much more rapidly, be able to track it using stolen device features, and be able to report it stolen which incidentally remote kills HSM access. They can also enforce biometric checks and require a recertification after those change, which would make it nearly impossible — relative to shoulder surfing a PIN — for kids to make use of the parental device unit.
Even a fingerprint key isn’t going to meet these terms, and it’s going to have a weaker sensor that the kid will have hours or days or weeks to try and defeat using a fingerprinted glass and some glue. Locking it to biometrics stored in the phone prior to (re)certification makes it pointless for kids to try. A few still will, but word will spread.
I still personally think this is all kind of a hot mess of deferring parental authority to technology, but I’m not an EU citizen, nor a parent, so my opinion on the policy is irrelevant. I’m just here to raise awareness of why attestation is winning: technological superiority and unmatchable market fit, and an opposition that isn’t presenting coherent and most especially government-persuasive arguments to stop its use. Yubikeys are not a viable market fit in a world where tiny amoral thieves live among us — and whatever else children are to their parents, most of them have the moral integrity of a wet paper towel. Most wouldn’t think twice about lifting a yubikey, but they’ll hesitate strongly before stealing a parent’s phone, and it won’t even pay off doing so thanks to biometrics.
Intercepting the USB reader traffic to feed the computer a different card is about the most roundabout way of achieving that
But even if you were to want user's phones to be roots of trust...
> as far as I know, they are the only Android OS publisher (and perhaps the only Linux publisher?) that bothered to implement hardware-to-app attestation chaining
GrapheneOS does that. They guarantee this more than Google because Google allows devices with known vulnerabilities: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114864326550572663 (rest of the thread is worth reading, too)
Using Google Play's instead of Android's attestation framework means that nobody else ever could enter this market indeed, no matter how secure the OS
Kinda, yes.
(slightly simplifying the mechanism here)
This seems to be based on the EU Wallet project, which is still work in progress. The EU wallet is based on OpenID (oidc4vci, oidc4vp). The wallet allows for selective disclosure of attributes. These attributes are signed by a issuing party (i.e. the government of a EU country). That way a RP (relying party) can verify that the data in the claim (e.g. this user is 18+) is valid.
However, this alone is not enough, because it could be a copy of that data. You can just query a wallet for that attribute, store it and replay it to some other website. This is obviously not wanted.
So the wallet also has a mechanism to bind the credential to a specific device. When issuing a credential the wallet provides a public key plus a proof of possession of the associated private key (e.g. a signature over an issuer-provided nonce) to the issuer. The issuer then includes that public key in the signed part of the credential. When the RP verifies the credential it also asks the wallet to sign part of the response using the private key associated with that public key. This is supposed to prove that the credential was sent by the device it was issued to.
Now this is where the draconian device requirements come in: the wallet is supposed to securely store the private key associated with the credential. For example in a Secure Enclave on the device. The big flaw here is that none of this binding stuff works if you can somehow get access to the private key, e.g. on a rooted phone if the wallet doesn't use a secure enclave or with a modified wallet app that doesn't use a secure enclave to store the private key. You could ask a friend who is 18+ to request the credential, copy it to your phone and use that to log in.
And then the IDP gives you "yes the user with nonce 123456 is 18" signed with its private key, which you forward to the RP.
The only data "leaked" would be which IDP you used to the RP, and that there was an 18+ verification request to the IDP. The IDP wouldn't need to know which RP they're signing the proof for.
This does allow proxying the requests, but honestly, how locked down does this need to be? It's far easier to just snatch your parent's drivers license or passport at that point.
Is the EU essentially foisting a someone-else-owns-your-keys regime onto their citizens?
The idea is that once you get used to that, you will get censored from all the internet.
> Is the EU essentially foisting a someone-else-owns-your-keys regime onto their citizens?
Not quite, it's the EU essentially foisting a don't-use-free-software regime onto their citizens
Without the wallet, you'll be forced to jump through the same hoops as you're doing right now. Depending on what EU country you live in, that can be anything between "no real difference" to "making an appointment to exchange stamps on documents".
Or which hoops you mean we have to currently jump through to access 12/14/16/18+ sites
Of course, once upon a time JavaScript was optional, and now it feels like half the web won't work without it. Cookies were optional but now many sites don't even bother with a "Reject All" choice. Google Play was optional on Android, now banking apps don't work without it.
Tried to do KYC with an institution in North America lately? They used to allow diverse options - eg. physically present yourself, get a notary to attest, upload signed documents & ID - but now app-based applets which offer little to no visibility into just what data they're hoovering up from your phone and no way to manually review what you're sending before submission (...to outsourced or even offshore processors) have displaced most of those alternatives due to their convenience (especially to those who don't care about privacy) and cost competitiveness (to the service providers). Filling out customs declarations when traveling is going the same way (with longer, more customer-hostile terms of service and privacy policies than came attached to the old paper forms).
The option that's most convenient to the masses tends to become defacto, and push out the last bastions of safe alternatives relied on by nerds like me - who pay attention to this stuff and try to advocate for user agency, data sovereignty for users, and the means to maintain a healthy privacy and security posture.
I would love to see some kind of attestable flavour of Android that I as a user control the keys to (in my own case I'd even be willing to provide assurances backed up by insurance, a bond, my reputation, repudiation to some degree of vendor liability if things go wrong, etc) with tooling to help me achieve a high level of security in a low-friction manner.
Oh no! Imagine you find a willing adult who does the verification on your phone. The whole system is moot!
Don't need "copy" here for that. They can just do the verification on your device without any technical tricks
Yeah. that's where this system fails. It only stores a single attribute that you wouldn't mind putting on someone else's phone. In the full EU wallet the 'over 18' attribute is part of a larger set of credentials that is basically your entire digital ID. If you were to put that on someone else's phone they would be able to identify as you to numerous government and adjacent services. You'd be a fool to share that.
This whole scheme feels a bit rushed and not thought through.
Uh, replay attacks are a solved problem in pretty much any industry standard challenge-response authentication, including OpenID. Am I missing something?
It does seem like people tried very hard to make it privacy preserving.
Instead, they're trying to shoehorn your device into providing the same safety level and, in doing so, making it by design impossible for you to control your own device. Obviously if the sites trust a device that you control, you can make it tell them anything. The ideological part is that it's not your device anymore then and imo we should oppose that. The technical solution is to use the hardware security chip you already have with a reading mechanism that (nearly?) every smartphone already has and even works on any OS that can run a USB NFC reader. It could be an entirely open standard
Basically on such a system you can potentially manipulate the process. Here that would probably be to install the credentials of someone else on the device.
So they want a locked down OS environment where user does not have root privileges and software has to be verified (in this case by Google) to be installed.
Who the hell wants this Internet...?
Scared rich people and bureaucrats
The under educated, unthinking unwashed masses. Just look at the tea leak. The amount of people that do not care about freedom or privacy on the internet vastly outnumber those that do. And because they do democracy unmasks itself in the digital realm as the tyranny of the unthinking majority.
Weep for the future.
ps: Had to add this post after the others identified the low class and the upper class as responsible for this ;). But depending on where you are, the low class might not be "the masses".
It really seems like tying this to Google violates some key principles of the EU market.
Who are the politicians making these decisions? How did they get elected? Did anyone vote for Totalitarianism 2.0?
I don't recall any party campaigning on reducing internet freedoms.
And I'm getting tired of people pulling out pitchforks without reading anything. This is how democracies end up electing people like Trump. There are no regulations to require age verification here. The EU is simply giving guidelines for implementing harmonized age verification across the EU if any member states or companies that do business in the EU want to use it instead of making people scan ID cards like they currently do and making the receiver of said scans have to understand updates to the designs of the various ID cards used throughout the EU.
If you're concerned about totalitarianism, you should be more concerned that Texas required people to upload their IDs to access porn sites because that was the only method available.
Unless their governments start issuing Android devices to all of their citizens, I don't understand how they can require use of this app for anything official.
Not sure who you mean by "they" but you already cannot use a lot of governmental services unless you have an Android or iOS device (at least in Austria). At least in practice that is almost impossible.
> you already cannot use a lot of governmental services unless you have an Android or iOS device (at least in Austria).
That's terrible. They have official services that require an app and can't be used via a standard browser or even paper forms? What do elderly people without smartphones do?
> What do elderly people without smartphones do?
They buy a smartphone and have their relatives set everything up for them. Not doing that isn't really an option because you can't even get your pension or planned (i.e. nonemergency) medical services anymore without going through the government mobile app.
If they don't have any relatives, they walk to the government building that used to solve these things for them using good old paper forms, and have officers there help them out. It's a completely braindead system that was envisioned by someone who has very little idea of how the common person lives.
Not that there are any channels to provide feedback, ironically enough. (Voting is a sham and has always been so here.)
Redacted, I wish...
To vote in the upcoming election, I was asked to upload an uncensored copy of an identity document to the website of the municipality of The Hague
To keep the domain I registered in 2014, the French TLD required me to send them the same thing by unencrypted email a few months ago. I tried sending a link to a PNG so it wouldn't linger in their inbox forever but they absolutely required it to be an attachment
To buy a prepaid card in Germany, I was required to show an uncensored identity document. I had put a tiny piece of tape tape over only the burgerservicenummer that the germans can't make use of anyway because it's the Dutch numbering system that's beholden only to specific authorities
There's scarcely anyone who appears to know what EU legislation says on identity numbers. The Dutch government themselves apparently don't
It turns out I was right. This is the intent. First require digital ID to access content/post anything on social media, then make it impossible to use said ID outside of the walled garden of Android and Apple, then tie this digital identity to your real world ID and make sure it can be revoked at anytime by the powers that be.
Bonus point, make sure everything you say or do is stored for unlimited access by law enforcement to protect the democracy(TM) or protect the children(TM).
If that is not a slippery slope, then I don't know what it is.
I also pointed out that creating a database of everyone in the EU containing a lot of PII in terms of religious preferences, sexual preferences and so on is a the stupidest idea that anyone could have considering that this tool could be used by the next parties in power to hunt down political/religious opponents.
Nobody can say that they did not know.
https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/comments/1mau7yl/eu_age_ve...
Who cares if it's Google or an American company. The point is you decided to let the E.U dictate what software you can run on your phone.
Who voted for this? Who asked for this?
This "think of the children" rhetoric targets encryption, anonimity, decentralized platforms, and private communication channels like messaging apps, VPNs, Tor, etc. It is nasty. Keep in mind that it does not actually prevent child exploitation and grooming. Most of the pedophiles are on Discord and Roblox anyways.
In any case, there are ways to prove someone is over 18 without revealing identity, but that is not that goal, is it? There are cryptographic schemes just for that, such as zk-SNARK, etc. ZKPs in general.
While true, I'd avoid making that argument since it implies these restrictions might be worth implementing if they actually did prevent child harm. There is no scenario in which it is acceptable for the government to mandate encryption backdoors, for example.
As much as the EU pretends there's some kind of united Europe, it covers different countries, with laws ranging from "sex work is just taxed work" to "all prostitution and porn is illegal". Even basic rights like gay marriage aren't consistent between member states.
Europeans were free to provide feedback to their representatives of course: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-building-blocks/sites/display/E...
However, everyone I've talked to about it said they don't care about it so they don't want to bother, which is probably what the people behind these laws are banking on.
I'm growing pretty tired of this rhetoric / rhetorical sleight of hand, but maybe this is a reasonable opportunity to discuss it:
- not all citizens of a jurisdiction are eligible for voting: in this case, cursory search suggests only 400M (88.8%) of 450M were eligible - seems a bit too high to me, but let's roll with it regardless
- not all who are eligible actually vote: voting in the EU parliamentary elections, which is what EU citizens can actually vote on, like most elsewhere, is not mandatory; it's a right, not a duty: turnout was 50.74%, and that is of the eligible population, so really just 45.1% (203M)
- most voting systems are mathematically unfair [0]: extensively researched, doesn't quite apply necessarily in this case though as per the next bit
- several key positions in the various bodies are elected indirectly: same here in the EU, at which point all bets are off
- laws, regulations, and policies are not voted for or against by citizens: same here in the EU too, nobody could have even possibly voted for this in the literal sense
It's a run of the mill representative system and I think it'd serve discussions a great deal if this was acknowledged properly. Surely it's agreeable at least that this wouldn't be such news if people were all just completely on board as the sentence "EU citizens voted for this." implies when read naively and literally.
I really don't see a point to this phrase other than inciting others. And before anyone brings it up, yes, this is common in US threads as well, yes, is often expressed by EU folks against US folks, but no, that does not make this better. Why dig ourselves into rhetorical holes unnecessarily? Being narratively justified to frame things this way doesn't mean one should (or must).
And "offering feedback" is not a vote nor a voting I'd say.
One thing I find reassuring is the nature of pushback on display on the repo (only read the first few comments there, mind you). Really not what I expected phrasing and rhetoric wise (unlike here), honestly kind of restored a very very tiny and fragile bit of faith in humanity in me, it's very reserved and reasonable stuff.
these people are monsters. don't help them, and don't be complicit. working on digital ID tech, and even disclosing vulns in it is like helping Hollerith make faster and more efficient punch cards.
If the proof can not be traced back to your identity, then what stops a person from creating large amounts of proofs and distributing them?
If the proof can be traced back to your identity, then... that would suck.
Well, it's more like a framework, so not a ton of details. I've just glossed over it, but from what I can gather they have thought about it:
No personal data, especially no information from personal identification documents such as national ID card, is stored within an [Age Verification App Instance]. Only the Proof of Age attestation, specifically indicating "older than 18", is utilized for age verification purposes
Stored Verification(8b): [Relying Parties] may optionally store information derived from the Proof of Age attestation in the User's account, allowing the User to bypass repeated verification for future visits or purchases, streamlining the User experience. In this case, authentication methods such as WebAuthN should be utilised to ensure secure access while enabling the User to choose a pseudonym, preserving privacy. Risks in case of the device sharing should be considered.
[1]: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/archit...
[2]: https://ageverification.dev/Technical%20Specification/annexe...
For all the shit Google deservedly gets they seem to be genuinely trying to implement good and privacy preserving solutions to a lot of these problems.
The issue of course is that there's essentially no way to do all this stuff with software and hardware the user actually controls themselves, so you end up with hard requirements that you use big tech as gatekeepers.
This is the slippery slope that IMO eventually ends the open web.
If you take that outcome as inevitable, which at this point I basically do given all the forces lined up to restrict access to information, I suppose Google is about the best steward you could hope for.
[0] https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
I don't and I wish Google et al would take a god damned stand against it. All it takes is 2 or 3 big companies to just not play along with the destruction of the open internet (the very same responsible for their genesis and incredible success), and the bureaucrats will eventually relent. Unfortunately they've chosen the path of least resistance, which also is the path of regulatory capture to their sole benefit. Sad to see that win over the ideals of the early net.
I went on youtube in bed last night to watch a 10 minute video (that I knew I had to search for to find - it was a specific one), but the app opens to shorts and they're so damn stimulating that it was 30 minutes before I finally got to the vid I wanted. I started with pure agency and was immediately thrown off course. Say what you will about my discipline or habits, but imagine the affect this has on less... aware individuals such as children.
Walking around the world you see everyone buried in their phones.
There are aspects of this initiative that I totally welcome, if it has the result of some level of de-interneting. The argument is always "they do it to protect children first, then it comes for everyone". I hope they increase resistance for the end user. I agree its sad, but what we have currently is truly awful, and less of it is a good thing.
I understand that it may not have that effect and end up in the "worst of both worlds" situation. But I don't wan't google fighting any battles for me anymore. They might try on occasion to be respectful but their bottom line is to own my attention.
If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.
At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.
I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.
Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.
The reason you can't distribute a huge amount of proofs is that the app won't let you. To make sure the app won't let you, the app tries to verify that you're not running a modified app or a modified system environment. That's the remote attestation that "bans any android system not licensed by Google".
These tokens are signed and only usable for a limited amount of time so you can't just generate a million of them and sell them for others to use.
If the app can't rely on the system working as it should, it'll need to contain less privacy-friendly measures for limiting large scale token abuse.
For the proof to be traced back to your identity, you'd need to be tracked consistently across websites, possibly with the aid of the government itself. If ZKPs make it into the app, tracking you is basically impossible.
Of course, if you're authenticating with your full name and birth date, when opening a bank account for instance, you're not going to get the anonimity benefits. Still, you do get to see what party you've authenticated with and get a button in the app to request deletion or report suspicious behaviour if you think it was a scam.
This has no effect, is it even used in production anywhere? It seems to be part of eIDAS which is a good thing, most countries already have their own identity systems as is stated in the README. The three or for id apps I have seen all have some kind of device check that is sent to the ID provider, it is not usually accisible for ServiceProviders though. On those apps you either get no indication or just a "seems suspicious" score.
The one in Sweden has a "return risk option". https://developers.bankid.com/api-references/auth--sign/auth
This does not make it possible to filter out people. And honestly considering the amount of shady phones people have I am not sure this will every work. Apple is sadly another issue, too many normals there.
It is nice that this is pointed out so we do not get a distopian future.
Bad deal all along.
My dad gets by in his "my dad" way of life without a mobile phone at all, I wonder how much longer this will be possible. I was about to rant about being forced to have a mobile if you want to participate in society, but then he uses a desktop for some of the services for which the rest of us use a mobile, so my rant falls down in that, for a while now, to participate in society you've needed either a computer or a mobile.
Hopefully computer-only can eke out some kind of base-adequate participation for a while longer.
From a legal point of view, the app should be a reliable convenience feature and not replace traditional (physical) identity verification. How much your dad will be affected will depend on how shitty and lazy the services he uses are. If he doesn't use a phone or a computer, he probably won't notice the difference.
Indeed, the bug links to another bug where the author says that it isn't restricted to Play Services remote attestation and recently followed up with a documentation update making that clear. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
Adding to what I said earlier, this isn't even an app that any EU member state will use. It's just a PoC, as it says in the README. https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android...
Unfortunately for the authors, the pitch forks are already out, and the mob is on the march. It's too bad that HN is contributing to it.
It's solving a problem that doesn't need to be solved using a solution that's fraught with risks.
The authors chose to spend their time helping governments censor information, removing choice from individuals, and the solution they choose to work on is a bad one. Any criticism they receive is well-deserved.
Unfortunate that it doesn't matter, because they're not going to accept anything that's not attested by some authority.
Attestation in itself is a bad thing, guaranteed to be horrifically abused in ways far, far worse than any problem it could possibly solve. You do not need to know what software I am running, period.
Your employer needs to know if your devices connected to its network have been rooted without your knowledge.
In any case, this is a completely different discussion from what OP alleged, which I hope we can all agree is completely false.
And a check for rooting against my knowledge probably becomes a check for rooting at all very quickly.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."
Okay I see the issue. No I do not agree with that. I'm saying if they want that guarantee then they can isolate the network. But if they don't isolate the network then it's all on them, they do not get to check all devices.
That's why my point is not just a quibble.
Also responding to the strongest interpretation sometimes means making that interpretation explicit, to make sure everyone is on the same page. In this case making the actual ownership clear. I'm not trying to dunk on you or whatever.
This is a ridiculous point to think that I disagreed about. Of course they don't get to check that your TV and your washing machine have been rooted. I explicitly specified your devices connected to your employer's network. You're trying to interpret this in a way that doesn't make sense simply to find a point of disagreement where there is none.
"the network" is the same network we've been talking about the entire conversation. Employer's network.
Obviously they can't control what I plug into a network they don't know about, I don't know why you think I was trying to argue that or how it's the strongest interpretation of my comment.
That's the same network I'm talking about. I don't know why you think I'm referring to any other network. You are not allowed to connect untrusted devices to many employers' networks, and this works via remote attestation. They don't care if your TV is rooted as long as you don't connect it to their network, but if you do, they will want to make sure it isn't rooted.
You started talking about my TV and my washing machine, so I thought you were accusing me of bringing in other networks to "find a point of disagreement".
Now I'm just confused why you brought up the idea of attaching them to my employer's network.
> You are not allowed to connect untrusted devices to many employers' networks, and this works via remote attestation. They don't care if your TV is rooted as long as you don't connect it to their network, but if you do, they will want to make sure it isn't rooted.
And that highlighted part is what I take issue with. They should not ask for that. Either allow my devices or ban them. They should never get to look at the attestation report for my devices (literal "my").
There's your misunderstanding. The way to allow them or ban them is via remote attestation. How else would they be able to do that? Once you understand that, you'll also understand why I brought up your washing machine.
The first check should be if it's their device. If the device has the correct key to show it's theirs, they could allow it right there. Or they can go further for extra security, to ask for remote attestation of their device.
If the device claims to be owned by anyone else, they should not ask for remote attestation. Why would they need it? They already have all the information they need to decide whether to allow or block. "My washing machine (unrooted)" and "claims to be my washing machine (rooted)" should be treated exactly the same by them. Allow both or ban both, depending on the purpose of the network.
Seriously you can't make this stuff up.
It may be that the people in charge in the EU don't really care about the market dominance as long as they can collect enough extra money from them...
> The current release provides only basic functionality, with several key features to be introduced in future versions, including:
> - App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
> - Additional issuance methods beyond the currently implemented eID based method.
> These planned features align with the requirements and methods described in the Age Verification Profile.
to the "In the case of Android, genuine means"...
I don't see the word "genuine" in the disclaimer. Is that a necessary part of using the "Google Play Integrity API" ?
(I'm genuinely asking, I feel like I'm missing some implicit context here.)
Also the EU: Well if you don't have a Google or Apple account you are not getting age verified.
How?, who?, Where? I'm afraid it is too late to find a group of people interested in creating a real network outside of the system. The best that i found was the LoRa communities but are useless for anyone submerged in the Tiktokian distopy.
Oh, so now we know who is pushing for age verification. FAANG
How sad is that, Europeans, you have fallen this low
The linked Reddit discussion is about the issue of attestation in the EU age verification application requiring a licensed version of Android to function properly.
The EU is not banning non licensed Android systems. This would make it hard for EU citizens to use those though, if they need that app.
It's just odd to see them bringing up America when their own government created this. Not the US. How about fight the actual problem instead of making sure the problem works on more devices.
Create a better, standardized, open-source parental control tool that is installed by default on all types of device that can connect to the web.
The internet aspect of the parental control should be a "Per Whitelist" system rather than Blacklisting. The parents should be the ones to decide which domains are Whitelisted for their kids, and government bodies could contribute with curated lists to help establish a base.
Yes, there would be some gray area sites like search engine image search, or social media sites like Twitter that can allow you to stumble into pornography, and that is why these devices that have the software turned ON, should send a token through the browser saying "Parental Control". It would be easier for websites to implement a blanket block of certain aspects of their site than expect them to implement whole ID checks systems and security to make sure that no leaks occur (look at the TEA app) like the UK is expecting everyone to do.
Also, I'm for teenagers (not little children) having access to pornography. I was once a teenager, every adult was, and we know that it's a natural thing to masturbate which includes the consumption of pornography for most in some way. Repressing their desires, their sexuality, and making this private aspect of their life difficult isn't the way. Yes, yes, there is nuance to it, (very hardcore/addiction/etc) but it should be up to the parents to decide with given tools if they trust their kid to consume such a thing.
As for the tool itself. Of course we have parental tools, but they can be pretty garbage, their all different, they're out of the way, and I understand that many people simply don't know how to operate them. That's why I believe that creating a standardized open-source project that multiple governments can directly contribute to and advertise for parents is the way, because at the end of the day, it should be up to the parents to decide these things, and for the government to facility that choice.
Obviously, besides the internet aspect, the tool should have all the bells and whistles that you'd expect from one, but that's not the topic.
EDIT: And yes, some children would find a way, just like they're doing now for the currently implemented ID checks. It's not lost of me that VPNs with free plans suddenly exploded in 4 digits % worth of downloads. A lot of those are tiny people who are smart enough. Or using an app like a game to trick Facial Recognition software.
Will people sign up to banks and betting apps with their eu wallet digital identity?
If it's not unbelievably obvious, there's an entire class of people flying private jets to "world summits" where the transcripts aren't disclosed. What do you think is going on? Use your brain.
That's easy for a company like Google to comply with. In fact the company I work for uses Google European data centers to comply with GDPR.
The wikipedia page does a pretty good job at explaining it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
Or rather is planning to. Right now it doesn't even have that integrity check, despite fully implementing the verification flow.