France considers approval of European chat control plan - Stack Diary
stackdiary.com
France is considering approving a new proposal to monitor all chat messages from European citizens. If this proposal is adopted, the chat app Signal has announced it will exit the EU. With France's backing, a European majority in favor of the plan seems likely. Netzpolitik (German) has reported this development based on internal documents. A few years prior, the European Commission

The latest proposal mandates user consent for monitoring messages on all communication apps, including those with end-to-end encryption.

  • henfredemars@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    How stupid. You don’t think criminal organizations won’t be smart enough to just do the illegal math that you’re trying to ban? Looks to me that it’s just monitoring and controlling regular people.

    This isn’t much different from banning encryption. You’d have to get seriously draconian to ban the use of numbers in unapproved ways.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      Criminal organizations, LOL. They want to scan images and videos, right? A single pic may provide too little space this way, but in a video one can use a few lower bits in every color of every pixel of every frame, and of course the data would be encrypted.

      I wouldn’t need to write a program for that.

      I would convert the image to hide my message in to an XPM image, which is a human-readable format. I would split my message into the portions which I deem sufficient to take from every point. Converting hex rgb colors to binary and back is not hard. I would have to count how many colors I have and which is it for which sequence and which point yadda yadda. Or alternatively I suppose one can use a bit mask in ImageMagick, where I’ll have only to combine the source image and the one with my message and the mask (unchanging). I’d then convert that to fucking PNG.

      For a video I’d, well, use ffmpeg to split it into frames, then do with each frame as described, then combine them back into a video.

      That would require ImageMagick (and ffmpeg if for videos), PGP or OpenSSL, and writing a clumsy slow script to use those.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.zipEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          I understand this is a movie reference, but I don’t know at whose perception of tech it hints - the politicians involved or the populace.

          If the politicians - they are sadly much smarter, a certain Russian politician publicly talking like that was known in FIDO in the 90’s, needless to say - sufficiently literate, and a certain Russian fiction writer supportive of various crazy evil things was even a FIDO sysop.

          If the populace - normies are fascinating in the sense that not only they are amazingly dense when that’s socially acceptable, but they also may become amazingly bright when that’s socially acceptable. Normies would use computers the old-fashioned way before GUIs, and normies would have decent understanding of ICE’s and radios when that was normal. I’m hopeful.

          Also I think in Windows you can make a batch script, drag-and-drop something on it and the filename will be passed to it. Put it alongside a directory with anime pics, and drag the text file with your message, get a random pic with your message. On the receiving side drag-and-drop the saved picture on another batch script and get a text file. Thus we get a steganography system as easy to use as many pirate games.