Mullvad VPN Present and Then? (chat Control Is Back on the Menu)

For most of my life, news orgs have been treating national IC/LEO as if they have a history of truth-telling. Whenever a press conference comes up, journalists/editors reliably forget that they've never been told a meaningful truth in one of these.

If the people's who's job it is to highlight the lies of the powerful - usually don't, what hope is there for the proletariat?

Yes. You cannot have a system that positively associates illicit content with an owner while preserving privacy.

These things solve entirely different problems that are different from the ones you suggest. The main problem is there are no products that solve the problem Chat Control aims to solve without infringing massively on everyone's privacy, (including children). Any suggestions that do exist come with serious risks. The reason for that is because it's easier to encrypt data than develop some kind of system with a magical key only authorized people are able to use under certain circumstances.

What Mullvad highlights is that the whole chat control proposal is mired in corruption, a particular individual with an agenda to sell something he has adjacent interests to as the solution. No doubt they will want funding for "research", because they don't have a global universal solution. Instead they try to make it appear as if they do, and then get others to do the heavy lifting eg, making something a law and then expecting everyone else (companies, and any software developer) to comply, who may not even be required to do so, as they may not be in the EU.

Make no mistake about it, this proposal has nothing to do with children, and the demonizing of encryption, so that when law enforcement arrest someone, they can say "has encryption = offence = something they can charge that person with" rather than actually having to have evidence of a crime against a child.

> EDIT: Here is one idea I had: Sign images/video with hardware-secured chips (camera sensor or GPU?) that is traceable to the device. When images are further processed/edited, then they will be subject to differential-privacy scanning. This can also combat deepfakes, if image authenticity can be proven by the device that took the image.

And there obviously will be totally like no way to like not do that and then have an anonymous photo.

>

Things can be always worse, and you shouldn't assume that the powers that be will use these things to prosecute the things you find morally offensive. Which is another problem as well.

> Mullvad is also in for a rude awakening. If criminals use Tor or VPNs, those will also face a ban. We need to give governments solutions that lets them do what they claim they want to do (protect the public from victimization) while preserving privacy to avoid a very real dystopia.

The space will innovate regardless of what governments want, so that's the rude awakening. Criminals always will be criminals and they'll just get better at doing what they want to do regardless.

> Freedoms and liberties must not come at the cost of injustice. And as i argued elsewhere on HN, in the end, ignoring ongoing injustice will result in even less freedoms and liberties. If there was a pluralistic referendum in the EU over chat control, I would be surprised if the result isn't a law that is even far worse than chat control.

Okay then guess we can all "think of the children" whenever anyone is worrying about the injustice caused by abuse of these new powers.

> I understand that you seem to think that adding systems like this will placate governments around the world but that is not the case. We have already conceded far more than we ever should have to government surveillance for a false sense of security.

Placation of government and law enforcement is never complete. For them every goal post moved is perceived as making their job easier. They only have one job, and that's to convict people of things. That is the only metric they care about. That includes making up new offences to charge people with, including "the defendant used non compliant products to hide their offending which may or may not exist" - not a crime in the EU right now, but you can bet that will be the next step.

> Let me post a longer reply later. But for your last point, we do have automated machine generated alarms in form of smoke detectors. We're legally required to have them in our homes.

A smoke alarm has very little room for abuse as it only does one thing which largely aligns with the occupant's interests. A more comparable argument would be that you must have cameras in every room in your house to record burglars, home invaders and potential child abductors.

Funny how nobody has ever made that argument.

Every VPN provider's IPs are blocked now. IP data providers finally got serious about identifying them, 5 or 10 years back.

If you want to look for alternatives: https://kumu.io/embed/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-c...

It's true that servers are flagged, but every VPN has that issue. Usually switching to a new server resolves it and I've noticed some servers aren't use much and are very fast and not flagged by many websites.

What I like about Mullvad is not only the commitment to privacy, but also the VPN speeds. I get 300-500MB/s pretty regularly. Some servers get congested during peak times, but switching to another I'll usually find a fast one in a desirable country very quickly.