Do you have a license for this TCP packet?

The realistic outcome, most likely, is mDL (mobile driver's license) automatically being passed through from your OS, to your browser, to the website. This will make compliance with age verification requirements easy, in addition to making ban enforcement and blocking crawlers/robots/spam much easier.

There's already a W3C browser standard in development - The Digital Credentials API. Apple is adding support for "Verify with Wallet on the Web" in iOS/macOS 26. Chrome is currently rolling out Origin Trials.

https://digitalcredentials.dev/

https://www.w3.org/TR/digital-credentials/

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/232/

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/digital-credentials-api-or...

On the flip side, there's no anonymity. Welcome to the real Web 3.0 - an internet which has been finally put in a box, for better and worse. An internet which is finally forced to respect national laws, for better and worse. An internet where what you say online, will be treated with no difference than if you had said it in person.

Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.

The endgame is to kill independent media

I think that decentralized solutions to the Web mostly suck because they're worse to use for the majority of people. But if the Web becomes useless for things people actually care about, decentralized solutions will creep in. People won't simply give up, the things that work will become better in the ways that serve prospective users.

That's kind of the worst case scenario, though, where bad politicians don't get removed from office. We can hope that most people will decide that enough is enough, or politicians will quietly back down when they realize they're dooming their own careers.

Full government control of all digital media and digital communication.

Westerners always pointed fingers at China, North Korea and Russia, but in this case we are seemingly attempting to lap them.

Residential ISPs will only transmit packets that have a valid device attestation signature from one of the well-known device vendors. "Unsafe" software won't get access to the devices' secure enclave to sign their packets, so their packets will either have to be transmitted in plaintext, or they'll be dropped by the ISP.

The end game is politically controlled speech. First you can't share porn, then you can't share violence, then you can't share police abuse, until it starts to creep into the world of anything unflattering to those in power.

And of course, it will all be under the guise of safety and harm reduction, but the veil will keep getting thinner and the amount of things covered more comprehensive

What happened in Nepal earlier this month proves that a brighter future is possible, if people get fed up enough.

Without the ability for people to have private conversations and organize politically in private, democracy is impossible. It wasn’t as much of a problem in the times when everything happened IRL, but now online is the default.

So the endgame is that an anti-democratic government eventually wins an election and uses its new tools to crush dissent and make opposition parties impossible.

Boot stomping on a human face forever.

On sufficiently long time scales, there is only one realistic outcome: the internet will not tolerate censorship and will not abide state control. It is bigger than people and computers; it's an evolutionary force.

IMO, the endgame is tyranny that we cannot escape. Something like stasi on hi-tech steroids. Such a tyranny can only be possible if there are no places on earth we can escape to and if domestic survelliance is so comprehensive that potential threats are eliminated before those threats realise what they are up to. In such a state, when there is neither external no internal pressure, the tyrant can rule for centuries. The thing is, there is a nontrivial number of those among us who prefer this way of life, and they are very capable in achieving their goals.

Notes are usually leaked by netzpolitik.org a few days after.

The nordic mindset is closer to the Chinese mindset than you think.

E.g. you've probably heard how people in the Netherlands have no curtains on their street-facing windows.

How come pigs fly so gracefully?

The comment is such nonsense it's impossible to even begin correcting it.

...and Hungary, Belgium, Sweden before Denmark. All tried to pass it. The next in line for EU presidency is Cyprus, a supporter.

The Nordic countries have always been into social control but Denmark adds a side of paranoid ethnonationalism into the mix which leads to some very strange values.

For some reason names are sensored because of the ”privacy and security requirements.”

Follow the money. AI surveillance companies like Thorn are shaking in excitement.

https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the...

The state itself.

Any shred of rights or privacy has reduces it's ability and/or increases the cost of it doing what it deems worth doing.

Lobbyists from surveillance product companies.

And law enforcement agencies.

What is extraordinary is that the idea that there shouldn't be a word exchanged between two individuals that the state cannot listen to was a Stasi wet dream. It is just shocking that western democracies that have held totalitarian regimes at bay for so long at great expense, are now going full big brother.

> Who, exactly, is so strongly motivated to make such legislation?

For the part that Denmark is playing, I think the answer is somewhat readily found in the current national politics of Denmark. We've just had a pretty prominent politician 7 years ago get convicted of being in possession of CSAM. I think that's very personally offensive to our current prime minister. That has to be viewed along with her personal view of herself as the "children's prime minister", to make it into a double whammy.

We've also been dealing an inability of the police to investigate some crime, and the investigative committee established to figure out what to do about it recommended an ability for police to more readily be able to investigate digital material. I imagine the current policymakers imagine Chat Control to play a part of enabling that at a national level.

It's surveillance companies, i.e. follow the money. Imagine if you can force every IM app to include your nonsense? BILLIONS of instant installs and subscription fees.

The EU ombudsman actually asked the EU Council to comply with a Freedom of Information request about who attended the meetings about this and all we got was a fully redacted PDF with a list of about 30-40 individuals/groups (literally blacked out in the PDF). It's absurd how non-transparently this is bought & paid for.

Swedes and Danes are at the forefront.

The truth is that Scandinavian societies are much more authoritarian and illiberal than they want people to believe.

I think you're confusing technical encryption with the privacy of encryption.

For example, let's say I implemented a CSAM-scanning AI model in my chat app, which runs locally against your message, before communicating the message over an encrypted HTTPS channel. If the message is flagged, it can be sent over an encrypted HTTPS channel to authorities, on a secondary separate connection. At no point, did it leave the device, in unencrypted form.

Is that message encrypted? Yes.

The way that you want? No.

Governments have recognized this distinction, and have figured out they can have their cake and eat it too; the security of encryption with none of the privacy.

The seeming trend that worries me the most these days is the lack of competence at multiple levels of society. Our leaders, their supposed subject matter experts, the people doing "the science" all seem to be demonstrably incompetent at their jobs. I don't know if this is an actual trend or just the perception of one but it's concerning either way.

This is about power of the state over the individual. Full stop.

all of this is basically irrelevant, given that the type of ppl who this legislation claims to target can always just resort to email + pgp or some such, over which governments don't really have any meaningful control...

> I lost count how many times the "lets get rid of encryption" plans have been tried and failed.

They only need to succeed with it once, so they'll keep trying again and again.

That's exactly why it's very important to raise awareness about it everywhere.

It is perfectly possible to encrypt a message such that two different keys can decrypt it. There is nothing in modern encryption that makes that impossible. See https://faculty.cc.gatech.edu/~aboldyre/papers/bbks.pdf and many others.

So your chat app encrypts your message with the recipient's public key and the state's public key.

Hey presto, you have a message which cannot be read by someone who casually intercepts it. If the state seizes your message - or records it for later analysis - they do not need to break encryption. There's no plain-text version laying around for anyone to sniff.

Is this a good idea? No. Even ignoring the civil liberties aspect, we know that key management is extremely difficult. A leak of the state's private key(s) could be devastating.

But let's not pretend that this is somehow technologically impossible.

I do not agree with you that they have good intention or have good goals. They know what they are doing, and they are doing it to gain control. I think by saying they have good goals, but they don't know better, we are down playing the danger. They know what they are doing, and they are doing it to have more power over people.

> they still managed to not listen to anyone who knows anything about encryption and online safety

Why do you assume something like that? Do you actually know the arguments that the parties in favor of this kind of regulation are presenting? And can you dismiss them based on objective facts?

> The goal they are trying to achieve is good

That is what should be, in my opinion, the basis of this discussion. Assume good intentions and try to work out with the parties involved to achieve the goal in a reasonable way. This is the way, I believe.

Hand-wavingly dismissing other party's arguments would be in my opinion disingenuous.

Key enablers that ensured those plans fall apart were PC platform and default code freedom on it. It doesn't work because anyone can just compile the clean versions of apps using gcc, on PC. Same cannot be guaranteed on Android and is not even happening on iOS.

We shouldn't have shrugged off the weird feeling of shackles on our wrist when iOS(iPhoneOS) was first released. We should not have relied on geohot stopping by and dropping a jailbreak he found. We should have voted to force it open by law.

Are vpns controlled by private companies safe?

Isn’t the point of Chat Control to scan on the device so that they can say encryption isn’t affected?

> Makes me really worried about the future.

It's important to remember that government is not your friend, isn't meant to be, and never has been. It's a machine of control that needs to be held in constant restrain by the population. Obtaining more control is the expected behavior of those who come into power, shown through all of history.

My guess has been an unholy alliance between 'IP holders' like Hollywood (and increasingly games), and the surveillance industrial complex.

Add in the fact that both China and the US already have practically near omniscient digital oversight of everything their citizens do through server and OS level backdoors, the uninformed politicians in the EU/UK are easier to tempt by lobby groups crying in the name of the children.

The reptile-brained politicians really hate that we can think our thoughts in secret and communicate with each other in secret.

1984 playing out in front of us. Again.

Politicians like Peter Hummelgaard are ghouls. They want their eyes in your home, watching you at all moments. And then they want to control what you do and see and think.

Defending our liberties and privacy is a never-ending battle.

Every chat application must comply by law and companies which make them without government permission will be made criminals. It's similar as the UK Online Safety Act: 4chan staff will be arrested if they ever touch the UK soil.

Pretty neat how, out of the blue, two seemingly unrelated efforts manage to tighten together to create the perfect unavoidable storm.

I swear those Thursday bilderberg meetings are a thing.

Slow heating boils the frog.

Move now to alternatives. If you must use Android, GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services.

Molly (signal fork) on GrapheneOS will still be there

> there are a few people asking who is pushing for this legislation so hard. That's mostly police forces

Do you have a source? Not doubting you. More curious for their arguments.

I don’t follow what prevents criminals of such scale from using another encrypted channel or application after this ban?

How hard is to pay a dev and make a custom chat just for them?

You can get it up and running in one week on a cheap server.

if anything should come out of this is that car manufacturers need to come up with a way so it's not this dead simple to steal cars. And it is not that hard. They already have all the tech ready with good security systems. but you know what? those are expensive. and that is something they dont want. so they go with the cheap alternative, which has been cracked 1000+ times already.

So instead of breaking the privacy of everyone, this should only impact the manufacturers.

Just my 0.02

I don't understand how you can ship a car without proper papers out of the country so easily. Maybe focus on that first?

This is true of course but the counter argument is that running your own infrastructure is probably not a problem for international criminal gangs but your group chat with the boys is not gunna go through some AI garbage filter and in the end we are still going to get our cars stolen but now the police is knocking because I called Merz a fascist bastard and once the actual fascist win an election they are going to knock on everybody’s door who called Weidel a pick me girl in Turkish.

In summary, without stupid jokes about German politics, the actual stated goal is unachievable but the real world consequences in a Europe that is sprinting to the far right are incredibly dangerous.

What about this law will prevent criminals from using encrypted chat applications?

I understand your point, but I fail to see how this law will change that.

I don't think this will stop these people. I'm fairly sure I could write some web app, or in an extreme case, provide my team of car thieves with dedicated hardware that just illegally encrypts messages.

I think these laws are simply to catch everyday people chatting about illegal stuff on a phone without any preparation.

track cars then and shipping containers and whatnot, not people's conversations.

we all pay the price, yes, but we also all enjoy the prosperity it brings us.

at best these are arguments for finally making cars harder to steal. (and for people to own fewer of them and just rent them when they need it. and the renter company can then store them in a big fucking lot with security if they want to.)

...

as other commenters pointed it out, the technology is out there.

sure, it might not convince enough voters, we'll see. but it's sure as shit that these networks are not going back to pen and paper.

They ship entire CARS.

Not some kind of fancy sci-fi grain-of-sand sized microchips that are completely impossible to track. Not even drugs! Cars! Those huge metal objects that weigh over a metric ton each! Those cars!

If the police can't stop criminals from shipping CARS out of an ISLAND COUNTRY, the issue isn't that they don't have a way to breach privacy of every citizen. The issue is that they should be all fired and never allowed to do any government work ever again.

This isn't a dilemma unique to encrypted comms or privacy. You have to weigh the net benefits to society as a whole. How much has the lack of secure communication and encryption at rest cost society? How much have the criminals you mentioned benefited from the lack of encryption? How much more difficult would it be for criminals to locate targets and victims with encryption protecting the latter?