> I don't want to wear a tinfoil hat but considering that chat control is unlikely to work at EU level, local "solutions" like above in Germany and Poland may give legal way to include scanning instant messengers in the future.

That's because lawmakers think it has no impact on them. In Czech Republic a transparency law has been passed many years ago. This law effectively said that cities needs to disclose suppliers and agreements for services they are purchasing, like trash collection. Sounds pretty innocent.

It has turned out that politicians did not think that through because people found a lot of cities are buying services from companies which are owned by politicians who are also part of city council. Whoops, massive conflict of interests. So then politicians were clamping the law down until this got hidden under wraps again. All these Chat Controls, porn filters are going to have exactly same effect.

Do they? You mention something that affects politicians negatively much more than affect civilians. Chat control will be negative for _all_ of us, mainly of innocents, while bad actors will switch to other means of communication that evades the law.

Technically you can just setup a political party and then offer membership in the party for a yearly fee like 100EUR - every member will automatically become a politician and thus won't be allowed to be tracked because that's literal exception in the Chat Control. If government will want to track them, it will need to expand tracking to themselves too, which they definitely don't want to do.

So now government is not allowed to track you and you can also make quite a lot of money out of this stupid law.

If this is true, I'll owe you a beer. Or 50.

But honestly, if it were that simple wouldn't they think of it? Say, "only applies to politicians with a seat in parliament"?

They did not think it through like usually. Politician will get to the big established party through connections or through wealth. So in their minds, normal pleb can't become a politician without connections or wealth.

And picking up only elected officials would piss of their own party again. Problem is that only fraction of party is elected, so they would be committing a friendly fire again.

They already do this with social media regulations. This is the venue, not these adult content filters.

The UK already arrests 33 people PER DAY for social media posts and that was in 2023.

If we're going to throw people in jail for posting political memes anyway, at least parents will have some control over what their children consume.

https://www.reddit.com/r/charts/comments/1mut3gv/12k_arrests...

Every time when I see how these censorship laws are pushed, I cannot understand how it is possible that anyone of those who vote for them can believe that such laws can achieve their stated goal of "protecting the innocent children".

Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid that they no longer remember what they were doing as children, so I can only assume that the real purpose of the laws is not the claimed purpose, but something much more sinister.

I am male, so I do not know about what young girls think, so perhaps they are innocent and they might be protected by censorship, but I am certain that the "innocence" of young boys cannot be protected by such laws, even if they were technically successful.

I have grown in a country occupied by communists, like Poland. There existed absolutely no pornography whatsoever. There were no erotic movies, no erotic books, no erotic magazines.

So one might have believed that the "innocence" of young children was "protected", but such a belief was terribly wrong.

Due to the lack of any other kind of entertainment, a favorite pass-time was telling jokes, many of which had a strong pornographic content. I have no idea which were the sources of the jokes, but there existed a huge number of them. Starting from the age of 10 years, it was very frequent among boys to tell such jokes or listen to them.

The content of the jokes included pretty much everything that can be seen in a pornographic movie today and any young "innocent" boy was very familiar with such content, even if most did not understand the meaning of many parts of the content, for lack of explanatory images.

Of course, no boy would admit in the presence of adults of being aware of such things, but I would have expected that someone being now adult would remember his lack of "innocence" when young and would understand how futile is to expect that "innocence" can be "protected" by technical censorship, when the only means that could ensure "innocence" would be to be locked permanently in a prison cell, to avoid contact with any other humans.

> Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid

The majority of USAians voted for Trump. It would be the height of hubris to think of our average voter as noticeably smarter than one from the USA.

> Actually I cannot believe that the voters, or at least most of them, are so stupid

Yes, they are. If you are an educated, intelligent person, most likely you live in a bubble of similar individuals. Step outside of the bubble and you'll quickly realize that most people are actually profoundly retarded.

I saw someone on this site yesterday directly and enthusiastically express support for mass dragnet government surveillance systems.

We need to bring back institutionalization so people like that have somewhere their antisocial tendencies can be contained.

I think man and woman perfer different pornography, if you ever read the fiction of the month book its basically some kind of erotica but in a read format the tension is different. The primary consumer is usually woman. There is nothing wrong with that either.

I think the issue with laws like these is that there is simply no way to actually enforce that everyone uses the "legal" OS for all activities. I think we probably infantalize children way to much these day and pretend 17 year olds need 0 interaction with sex because sex bad. But its not an honest look at life and is vulcanization of puritanism. I think being unable to talk about sex in mature way has left children totally unprepared to handle things like pornagraphy which exist.

And I do understand its parental togglable setting but I think its childish to think children are not going to find ways around such things. People are sexually interested when they hit puberty which is 10-12 in girls and 12-14 in boys (roughly). Acting like they are not is stupid and plans for failure much like your describing but in a 100% uncontrolled unknown way

tinfoil hat doesn't help against hearing microwave transmitted voices

Isn't this about web hosting? That ship sailed long ago.