2y ago

Privacy wars will be with us always. Let's set some rules

www.theregister.com

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/1482289

It's an opinion article, but I heavily agree with it. It's really sad that technical decisions are made by chimps who can't tell the difference between a computer and internet.

graybeard @lemmy.cafe

Illecors @lemmy.cafe

2y ago

Privacy wars will be with us always. Let's set some rules

www.theregister.com /2023/11/20/opinion

8 comments

The fight for privacy is not new, and it predates the internet by far.
The problem is that, in the past, the state was on your side in the fight for privacy. Today, it sides with Big Tech and whoever offers it the most data to conduct its own privacy violations, or pays our elected officials the most.
It's a bit overwhelming when giant, unchecked and unaccountable monopolies and your own country, both with almost infinite resources and legal ways to do whatever they want with impunity, gang up on you at the same time.
First it was Chat Control, and the US was flirting with it's KOSA reform, now with elDAS 2.0 this all seems like global whac-a-mole for privacy. I read that elDAS was subject to approval behind closed doors in Brussels on November 8, What happened?
- No idea about what happened behind the closed doors, if anything; but I feel like compiling your browser with a patchset that removes the restriction on CA removal is going to become a thing. Good thing I'm on Gentoo already.
  
  Could you link to this? I didn't know such a patch-set existed
The eIDAS regulation makes an enormous change by mandating man-in-the-middle attack technology that it would be illegal for browser makers to defend against
How would this law affect websites with Onion Services (eg Facebook) that don't use http at all, but Tor's internal pinned end-to-end encryption with a pinned certificate tied to the .onion name?
- This doesn't affect websites as such - it's the end clients, i.e. browsers that would be forced to accept gov issued CAs. I don't see anyone going after TOR as it's already a very niche thing, so it should be fine.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and hundreds of experts don't, pointing out that elements of proposed revisions to EU regulations called eIDAS would exempt state-approved certificates from security action by browsers.
This would give states, state-approved organisations, or anyone corruptly part of that particular chain of trust, the ability to make fake sites that monitor and decrypt Web traffic silently and at scale.
The EFF is a fully open group of people with a long record of identifying and warning about harmful attempts to damage user freedoms on the internet.
The eIDAS regulation makes an enormous change by mandating man-in-the-middle attack technology that it would be illegal for browser makers to defend against.
It weakens the security on which the web is built in a unique way for unsophisticated users, while giving a wide range of entities the tools to decrypt data of all kinds.
It is as likely to go wrong as any state-run secret security system, through incompetence, accident or malevolence, with consequences that could affect not just the half-billion EU citizens but all those who use EU-based services.
The original article contains 1,015 words, the summary contains 181 words. Saved 82%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

8 comments