Ehhh.

As much as the traditition of yearly votes on some version of Chat Control sucks, it’s just two mentions (The Register missed the reference to COM (2022) 209 under “Fighting serious crimes/child sexual abuse”, because of course it’d be there) in a document with way juicier tidbits. Like

• actual enforcement of the DSA (finally some consequences for social media giants gleefully profiting from manipulation, or an affront to freedom of speech, depending on your opinion)
• overhauling Europol’s mandate to make it “a truly operational police agency”, whereas the current mandate doesn’t cover such things as “sabotage, hybrid threats or information manipulation” (cool or creepy)
• “strengthening border security”, “countering weaponised migration”, “security considerations in EU visa policy”, and “revision of the Visa Suspension Mechanism” are all probably necessary steps, but taken together paint a picture of something that shouldn’t be allowed to go too far

The DSA enforcement is something strongly opposed by social media giants, so I’d expect more denigration of the document as a whole in the future.

Same. Hetzner has a solid business in hosting, they don’t make their money from mining my data. They’d hand it over for a lawful request, but the data is not -that- secret and thus possible false accusations aren’t really an issue.

I’ve barely hosted anything and those must have leaked like a sieve. Trusting Hetzner way more.

Oh, they trust the government too, or would say so if asked. Kinda “work with the system and the system works with you” trust, firm belief in not making waves or drawing undue attention to yourself. And, well, it works for upper middle class native white people in EU, if you can look away or give your silent consent to whatever is happening.

Big companies and the government are familiar 🙄, known 😐 and thus safe 😑.

My messenger needs to be one my 70+ parents, who trust big companies and mistrust anything too small, or different, or “extreme”, are willing to use. Getting them to install Signal so we could still have our family group chat after I deleted WhatsApp was a major win. Scanning each others’ QR codes, having to go through some process when they change phones…? Yeah, they would’ve been scared of being “put on a list” and wouldn’t have gone through the technical stuff even for me.

There’s also the Lineage-based DivestOS that attempts to keep up with more security updates, and relocking the bootloader in phones that support it.

https://divestos.org/

They’ll keep bringing this up again and again and again until it passes, huh.

Next Council deliberations and vote in October-December.