A populace in which it is politically safe to even float this suggestion is weak.

they won’t stop until they are deposed.

Everything good at Denmark? Why the fuck are your politicians pushing this into the EU council?

srsly considering to vote for a party against the eu next election.

whats the point if it is just oppression. Conservatives ruining the world.

Will this actually happen with 9 member states opposing? I thought they need every memeber state to support it?

Still can’t fucking believe Denmark, my country, supports this. Yeah, it got revised thanks to Denmark, but it shouldn’t be revised, it should be killed.

Un-fucking-believable 😡

Who do we need to kill?

Question for a the Fight Chat Control website: My country’s primary language is not English, do I need to translate the e-mail?

Cough, Briar, Cough, Cough SSB cough.

I’m tired, boss.

What is this Law Enforcement Working Party?
What is its relationship to the Council?

I was against it until I realized they would also ban minors from Roblox.

That’s kind of weird, but it would be awesome to invade the now empty lego game, filled with only adults…

outlaws anonymous communication by requiring every citizen to verify their age before accessing a service

This is likely to be the case in practice, but technologically, it does not have to be the case.

If the age verifiers (which IMO should be the governments themselves^[1], but could also be a private third-party, as long as it’s not the same as the social media company) only ever receive a blinded token representing the user, verify the user’s age, and then the user brings that token back to the social media site, unblind it, and present them the signed token, there is no way for the age verifier to track which sites a person visits, and no way for the sites to have any detail about who their users are (other than what they already have).

Why is this specifically relevant to Linux users?

Well,

• controlling end-to-end encrypted messages is only possible if either the keys/certificates are not secret (which is possible with TLS), or the software on the end-users device is not controlled any more by the user (but perhaps by law enforcement, or companies). This overturns the basis of any FLOSS software system where trust is based on transparency and user control.
• age verification will typically done by a form of attestation, a highly problematic concept. Again, this would require to run software on the users device which can’t be controlled by him or her, which is deceptively called “trusted computing”. (Technically, age verification could be done by other means, but this is not what these proposals aim for).
• in the world of public-key cryptography, which is what TLS , GnuPG, and most other modern systems are based in, encryption and digital signatures are nothing but two sides of the same coin: Who breaks encryption keys necessarily also breaks signature keys. This means it is not possible any more to sign software such as the Linux kernel, or Email clients, or browser packages. Or even banking apps or bootloaders for smart phones. Which means to give control away to the entities, groups or induviduals controlling these keys. Ironically, this will make computing lot less safe, and also undermine trust in communication networks, because communication where we can’t be sure that the communicated symbols are genuine is for humans as worthless as the numbers on fake money. (As a corollary, it is also bad for business: All business is based on some amount of trust. Would you do important business with somebody if the only communication channel you have happens to be a messanger which is a compulsory liar?)

To sum up, this is a massive transfer of control.

That’s not a surprise, but that’s sad!!

Let’s continue to fight against!!!