Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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The authorities open letters all the time. Try sending a letter to prison without it getting scanned.

The problem with this comparison is that the authorities can open a letter if they need to for various well-intended reasons, but they cannot open an encrypted message. Either the authorities can scan all messages, or they can scan no messages, there's no inbetween.

The mandate to verify age before selling alcohol has been around forever. This is not a new idea. The biggest restriction until now has been that there was no good way to do these kinds of age verification, but that problem has been solved. You can still debate whether or not age verification is a good idea for specific subjects, but selling 10 year olds alcohol or porn has been illegal for much longer than the internet has existed.

Communicating via PGP encrypted snail mail seems an attractive option.

It would make for a good alternative, but so would any app that doesn't implement scanning. If they can force Signal to implement client-side scanning or ban it entirely, they can do the same to PGP software. In theory you could do RSA by hand, but it would require a lot of hard work.

Signal would rather tell a government to fuck off than implement any sort of client side scanning.

And if everyone is treated the same as someone who has been tried and convicted of a crime worthy of incarceration we are well into the dystopia.

Last time I checked an Android phone was not selling me alcohol or porn. It requires specific deliberate actions to get access to anything like this with a phone. Any checks could be justified on the store or web-site level, not on the phone level. Treating every citizen as a child or even worse a potential criminal who needs to be constantly checked at numerous checkpoints the state so kindly put everywhere is exactly the stinking smells of the Soviet Union I'm talking about.

Play Store absolutely is selling apps with 18+ restrictions, so most of your post is based on false premise.

Google Play != Android, so your comment is based on a false premise.

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