I swear those Thursday bilderberg meetings are a thing.
Another is Europol, a security coordination body that can't legislate but frequently advocates for this kind of legislation.
And then there's LEWP, The law enforcement working party, a "working group" comprised of security officials from member EU states, also involved in EU policy making in some capacity.
Perhaps targeted reform of these bodies is in order so they don't keep producing this legislation over and over. The blocking minority shouldn't just oppose the legislation itself, but make sure that their representation at those bodies is stopping those recommendations from moving forward. The legislating infrastructure needs to be challenged as much as any particular bill.
>According to the Data Retention Directive, EU member states had to store information on all citizens' telecommunications data (phone and internet connections) for a minimum of six months and at most twenty-four months, to be delivered on demand to police authorities.
>Under the directive, the police and security agencies would have been able to request access to details such as IP addresses and time of use of every email, phone call and text message sent or received. There was no provision in the directive that permission to access the data must be confirmed by a court. On 8 April 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the Directive invalid in response to a case brought by Digital Rights Ireland against the Irish authorities and others because blanket data collection violated the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, in particular the right of privacy enshrined in Article 8(1).
It's easy to dismiss as hypocritical, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong. Their "solution" to leave rather than fix was simply because they wanted it but in their control. Honestly they are nutters who make stuff up about "bendy bananas" etc, which dilutes the complaint.
There are a few nutters and poor people notice these trends first. The media tend to zoom in on those people and of course that taints all their concerns because normal people don't want to say anything that people might see as poor or nutty; they want to be seen as successful and smart. Only poor people would complain about immigration and only extremists and pedos would complain about censorship and you are not one of them right?
Yep completely agree, as mentioned.
> Their "solution" to leave rather than fix was simply because they wanted it but in their control.
Any political party of any member state that even thinks about being critical of the EU will instantly be completely destroyed by "independent" national (state sponsored) media.
But even if you think UK is some kind of weird one-off example - it's not. Look at Poland - PiS has been openly critical of EU for years now and held power for years, will most likely win it again in the next elections. Konfederacja straight up calls EU facist on a daily basis and they have like 20% support for some insane reason.
>>by "independent" national (state sponsored) media.
You have to explain what you mean by this - you can't be independent and state sponsored. Or do you mean unbiasased(like what the BBC or TVP are meant to be, which they are obviously not but they are not "independent")
https://media.ukandeu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/CSI-B...
I think something that is under estimated is how much it was a matter of identity - do people feel British or European? The areas that voted remain most strongly were the nationalist areas of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
We can see how Trump treated Switzerland.
It doesn't have to be in secret, they can and do plan and coordinate these efforts in the open. When we hear about it, it was already planned for many years.
What are the odds
The Google change means that every APK has to be signed and linked to a developer with a verified identity.
Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that? The Signal clients are open source with a permissive license so there's nothing unauthorized about building and distributing a modified version yourself.
The Signal CEO aid that they would pull out entirely from the EU if Chat Control comes to pass.
> Unless Google might not be willing to approve this alternative version of Signal, but is there any indication of that?
In this scenario, Signal will still be allowed to be distributed outside of the EU so you could get it from the Play store hosted out of the EU.
They have no obligation to sign anything, and they aren’t in the business of fighting city hall. Quite the opposite.
They only break the law when it earns them bundles of money.
In this context it isn't EU laws. The upcoming Android change in 2026 will stop anyone installing a non-verified app on their Android devices. This seems to be something Google arrived at "independently". But I would bet the US and EU and whoever else have put pressure on them.
Android as it is fails as an operating system and the same idiots ruining perfectly good software in other companies now work for Google. Not that iOS is in any way better, it has the exact same and even more deficiencies.
Just don't "upgrade" and ignore all the propaganda telling you bad things about that. Keep building apps that work on older, less-hostile devices and spread the word to oppose this very deliberate planned obsolescence.
Also easily remotely ownable, so you can be spied on without even having to install any software at all. And any that aren't now will be a couple of years after they fall out of support. Which, by the way, is very hard for the community to step in and do, since they're full of undocumented proprietary binary blobs.
> Just don't "upgrade" and ignore all the propaganda telling you bad things about that.
... and when your fully owned device finally breaks completely?
There's a whole community keeping these devices alive, I trust them far more than Big G.
via a crafted HTML page
Don't forget that the majority if not all exploits will use something like JS to obfuscate their existence and frustrate analysis.
Also remember the famous sayings "Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither" and "Live free or die". Accepting the insecurity, because freedom cannot exist without it, is also important.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
The extra words are important
Also the background context of arguing for taxing the rich instead of making them aristocrats.
It's really not that hard to do, just antithetical to the purpose of the OS.
Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.
the reasonable alternative being... ?
[0] https://jolla-devices.com/sailfish_devices/
[1] https://shop.fairphone.com/de/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operatin...
I do wish ubports + waydroid would be a reasonable alternative -- but it's wishful thinking.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tesla-work...
Unfortunately, "reasonable" generally means "can do the things typically done with smartphones these days", which include things like banking, media streaming, and civic stuff - things mediated by the very systems whose vendors aren't just embracing remote attestation, but actually driving its proliferation.
For better or worse[0], this is not a technical problem - it's a social/political one. Technology created it, by making remote attestation possible - but the actual problem is with why companies want to use it.
--
[0] - Definitely worse. Technical problems are easy.
I didn't learn to program computers so I could use it to shitpost more privately. I learned it so I can make machines deal with things for me the way I want them to.
Openmoko, Pinephone, Librem 5
If you expect hostile action by Google you should also expect the rootkit that is google play services to also do that. Which means in both cases the solution would be to use a actual open source mobile OS based on AOSP.