Europeans Fight Back Against Back Doors - DTNS 5121

0:03This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 8th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context and we do our darndest to help each other understand. Today, we fight again about encryption and backdoors, this time in Europe. Maybe this is the final countdown for Europe. Probably not. I'm Tom Merritt. And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. Hey, Sarah. Yeah. Remember the dozens of other times we've covered governments trying to get backdoors into messaging systems? I feel like we sounded like AI podcasters just now. Yes, I do remember.

0:43I do remember many of these stories. So there was U.S. trying to get Apple to do it. Then the U.S. trying to get a law about it. That didn't work. The U.K. is trying to do it. They're fighting with Apple. They got a law in the books, but they're not having a whole lot of success. And now there's a fight over a similar proposal in the EU. Aren't you excited? Yeah, can't wait. I can tell. Everybody loves a good backdoor. The European Union is considering a proposal to fight CSAM, child sexual abuse material, proposed by the Danish president right after Denmark took over at the presidency of the EU Council.

1:23It rotates country by country. This proposal would give police the power to force messaging companies. So Signal, WhatsApp, et cetera, to scan their service for CSAM content, illegal CSAM content. Those services would need to deploy code that could, when they're asked to, scan messages for matches to illegal content. So this is one of those situations where they're saying, we're not going to report all your content to people. We're just going to scan it. And if we find something that matches illegal content, then we'll just report that it found those messages. And there'd be a set of rules meant to identify CSAM that would be used to identify it.

2:04Signal's already said if this passes, it will stop operating in Europe. It'll just pull out. More than 40 EU tech companies have signed an open letter opposing the law. However, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard says the measure is more balanced than previous proposals, and the scanning would only happen as a last resort. They wouldn't be scanning all the time. They just want the possibility. What's the first resort? That is a very good question. I guess what they're saying is if we suspect that this is happening, then we'll start the scanning. But of course, like you say, if the thing's in there, somebody's going to figure out how to use it for something else.

2:47Anyway, the news today is that a 30-year-old software engineer living in Alberg, Denmark, going by Joachim, no last name given, has set up a website called Fight Chat Control that lets users email a warning to lawmakers about the bill. That email can be sent to national government officials, members of the European Parliament, and others. As of early October, nearly two and a half million people have visited the website. We don't know how many emails they've sent because the emails are sent by your email service. So there's no tracking on that. But two and a half million people have visited the website and each person can send multiple emails.

3:26So there have been a lot of emails. In fact, some members of the European Parliament have reported their inboxes filled with hundreds of these emails. EU member nations need to create their own positions on this proposal, then bring them to the European Parliament to negotiate an EU-wide policy. There's different ways these things become law in the EU. That's the way this one works. So the proposal needs to be approved by EU ambassadors on Wednesday in order to advance to the meeting of EU ministers in Luxembourg next week. And it's starting to look like that might not happen. Poland's government said last week it was against the scanning of messages.

4:03And German officials said Wednesday they will vote against the proposal. And a lot of people feel like that's it. It's kind of the nail in the coffin, right? It's like, I don't see this passing next week. Like, especially with Germany saying, uh-uh, we're not doing that. And it looks like Joachim can get credit for part of that. It certainly has raised awareness. This bill was sort of lower down on the totem pole, even after Signal said that it was against it. It didn't get as much attention until he got this website going. And then word of mouth, it spread over the internet like things do on the internet.

4:40And suddenly you've got the entire government of Germany saying, nope, we're going to vote against. the the whole thing with c sam content it's like we can all agree we should not have this kind of you know we don't want that law enforcement should we we don't want it it's not good and at the same time every every bill that gets introduced to uh you know i don't know squelch c sam content ends up being just a huge privacy issue for everyone else yeah you know i was kind kind of joking a couple of minutes ago when they were talking about like, it's only a last resort. It's like, yeah, but how do you get to that point?

5:23Right. Really? You know, what are the keywords? What are we looking for here? Because if we're all being scanned and maybe I got flagged for something, which is completely out of context, right? I, I want to know exactly how that's working. And I don't feel like anybody in the EU knows how that's supposed to work. So of course, you're going to get a lot of people saying, hold on a second. This is not you know, this is this is a huge privacy invasion. If you're only scanning as a last resort, then you're not scanning all the time, which means this wouldn't be very effective. But if you're scanning all the time, you have the concerns that you just expressed, which is like, well, what happens when there's a false positive?

6:04Because when you're scanning that many messages, you know, Europe's got millions and millions of people. There's going to be a false positive. How do you deal with that? And you're right. I don't think any of us want CSAM to be traded freely, but are you taking the baby in the bathwater and throwing them out together? It's going to weaken privacy for individuals to do this. Now, some people argue that it's worth it, that this is the best of all possible worlds. They're not monitoring your communications. They're only reporting when a match is made and then law enforcement can follow up and seize your phone and search it.

6:45But for folks like Signal, they're like, no, end-to-end encryption means end-to-end encryption. It doesn't mean we scan and weaken your key and report things out of it. once you start leaking some information, as every good hacker knows, you can deduce a whole lot more information. Indeed. Well said, Tom. Well, DTNS is made possible by you, our listeners. Thank you to all of you, including Ken Hayes, Philip Shane, Paul Boyer. We have a returning patron, Mirrors of Time. Welcome back. And we got a raise from Tony. Yay! Yay! That's all good news. There's more we need to know today. Let's get to the briefs.

7:30We've got two Google-related notes to start us off today. Google AI +, which gives you access to 2.5 Pro and deep research with a 128k token context window, among other perks, is expanding to 36 more markets, bringing it to a total of 77. Google is also previewing Gemini 2.5 computer use, an agent that can navigate browser interfaces designed for humans that don't have an API. It supports 13 actions, kind of basic stuff, opening the browser, typing, dragging and dropping, searching, clicking, things that you do in a browser. Google says it can fill out forms and also be used for UI testing. The company posted a video showing the agent rearranging items in a sticky note app to be in the right categories.

8:21It's another entrant along chat GPT's agents, Anthropics computer use tool. These guys just cannot stop naming things. The same thing developers can get Gemini 2.5 computer use in Vertex AI and Google AI studio. There's also a demo demo on browser base that can do things like play the game 2048 and browse hacker news for trending debates. Yeah, I did the, uh, browse of, of hacker news. it took a long time. That video that Google posted was sped up three times and they had said that, they weren't trying to hide that, but it really was slow, but it did do it. And then it summarized reactions to the Synology story we're going to mention later on quite nicely.

9:05So it's, I don't know, could be useful, right? It's another way to do it. And this is clearly showing that agents are the trend with these kinds of tools. They're trying to make it so that you can just say, go do this for me, fill out this form, buy this thing, and then it'll just go do it. Yeah. I'm definitely not there yet. It's not so much that I don't trust the agents. It's more that I'm like, is it really saving me that much time? But that's also just me being an old curmudgeon who needs to embrace these tools more and more, which many of us are. Perhaps you are a curmudgeon in other ways.

9:47I'm not going to say you are or you aren't. But I don't think this is an example of that because these tools aren't ready yet. They do often take longer. I guess they're good for, I trust the tool. That's my biggest thing is I need to supervise it because I don't trust that it's going to do things right as often as I need it to with sensitive stuff. But if you do, then it can just go off and do it while you do something else. So I guess it saves you time now. Yeah. I mean, if I have to, I don't know, fill out something with the IRS at irs.gov, like, am I doing that with an agent? No, not today.

10:20Not happening. Not yet. But as trust builds and these tools get better, then maybe that would be a different conversation sometime in the future. Mastodon announced it's developing packs. These are similar to Blue Skies. Starter packs. Speaking of people naming things, similar things. They contain a curated list of accounts related to a particular category of posting type, you know, like tech journalists, et cetera. Mastodon's version will notify you if you've been included in a pack that someone created and also give you the option to remove yourself and say, you know what? I want to opt out, which you can do in Blue Sky, but you have to block or report the user, which is not necessarily what you want to do.

11:02You might not have anything against the person who made the pack. You're just like, I don't really want to be in that and get all the attention. Anyway, this feature will launch in Mastodon 4.6. The current version is 4.4, so it's not coming right away. And Mastodon hopes to make it available to all ActivityPub apps at some point. This kind of reminds me of, you know, when you get looped into some weird group Instagram DM. You're like, I'm not even offended. I just don't want to be part of this. Yeah, it's not quite as bad as a reply all, but it's closer to that in the scale somewhere, which some people love, right?

11:40They're like, oh, I want as many followers as possible. Put me in all the starter packs. Sure, yeah. But you may not be that person. You may be a tech journalist even that's on Mastodon simply to monitor, and you're like, I don't need people following me, at replying me, that sort of thing. So it's nice to have the option. I think that's good. I think I'm totally with you on that. I mean, if a starter pack is tech journalists and I'm in there, 99 % of the time, unless I like really dislike the person who made the pack, I'm going to be like, great, thanks. Yeah. You know, I guess it's more recognition.

12:12I just realized, you know, somebody could put you in a starter pack called people to hate. And you might be like, yeah, I don't really want to be in that starter pack. Like women under five foot five inches. I'd be like, I don't know. I just don't really want to be part of this conversation. Right. Even though you're not wrong. uh sennheiser launched the hdb 630 wireless noise canceling headphones that support lossless listening when they're wired so they're wireless but they can also be wired so you can use them both ways they plug in through usbc or 35 millimeter ports and there is usbc dongle that lets you use aptx adaptive for high quality wireless audio if your device doesn't support already.

12:55It's your choice. The HEB630s use the Momentum 4 chassis, but have a new acoustic system, including 42mm dynamic drivers and a high-resolution digital audio engine. Battery life is up to 60 hours with active noise canceling, and a 10-minute charge adds 7 hours of listening, so pretty spiffy. They also come with an airline adapter if you do a lot of travel. You can order now for$499.95, shipping on October 21st. Yeah, the more I read about these, the better they got. I was like, oh, you can do USB-C and the mini jack? Oh, they have an airline adapter? Oh, they have pretty good battery life? Oh, they charge fast?

13:37I know they're expensive, but they're also Sennheisers, which makes good stuff. But this is a good design. I like them. I'm with you on that. When I saw the price tag, I was like, I don't need this. And then I was like, you know, these look pretty, pretty nice. And for anybody who is, you know, not everybody is a self-proclaimed audiophile, you know, lossless audio for many people is just like, you know, like, what does it even mean? And it depends on what you're listening to. Are you listening to a lot of music? Are you listening to a lot of podcasts? And the quality of all of that stuff, you know, before it gets to your ears also really matters.

14:13But these, these look very nice and very versatile. Yeah, the versatility really is one of the big attractions. Books, B-O-O-X, posted more details on Weibo about the now-called Books P6 Pro. That's the e-reader that was unnamed at the time when it was teased at IFA in September. It's a smartphone-sized device with an e-ink screen. You can get it in black and white or color, e-ink. Also has a stylus and a micro SD card slot that can double as a SIM card tray. so you can get a data connection. We don't know if you can do SMS or calls on it, but it is an Android device and it can access the Google Play Store and run your apps like WhatsApp and Zoom.

14:58If you want to do a Zoom call on eInk, you could do that with the Bux P6 Pro. It is expected to launch in China on October 9th. How would you do a Zoom on this device? Very poorly, would be my guess. Yeah. but you know i guess you could do audio you people use zoom for non-video so yeah for audio it would be fine because it's got a microphone all right finally some quick headlines that are just good to know if you want to understand the news in the future the mystery is solved everyone nintendo's mysterious short film about a magic baby now shows an army of pikmin no word on what kind of pikmin project to expect but they'll probably be cute they will be cute uh big thanks to captain kipper for posting this on the dtns subreddit a steam outage yesterday uh was part of a massive ddos attack possibly through the asuru botnet uh it also targeted xbox playstation riot games and epic the joint electron device engineering council announced the ufs 5.0 flash storage standard has been finalized with speeds up to 10.8 gigabits per second.

16:12That's up from 5.8 gigabits per second and UFS 4.1. Ooh, that's big. Synology says, we know you're all mad. So we have worked with drive makers to certify third-party drives for use in our 2025 model Synology NAS systems. That's network attached storage. So if you get the DSM 7.3 software update, you can now use whatever drive you want in your Synology NAS like you used to back in the day. Russian-speaking attackers have claimed responsibility for the ransomware attack on Asahi breweries, which temporarily halted production and caused some convenience stores in Japan to run short on Asahi beer.

16:55Now you know who to blame. A real travesty. You may have thought this was already the case, but here's a statement to Cord Cutter News from TiVo. As of September 30th, 2025, TiVo is stopping selling Edge DVR products, including hardware and accessories, both online and through agents. TiVo and its partners no longer manufacture TiVo DVR hardware, and our remaining inventory is now depleted. TiVo still makes other stuff, makes like streaming boxes, but it's the end of an era. No more TiVo DVRs. Not mostly dead. Dead, dead. It's dead, dead. Good point. It is dead. All right, folks. If you would like to watch us do stuff live, we got a bunch of live streams.

17:38Sarah and I do DTNS live every Thursday. I've got a hangout I do on Fridays. We do office hours. We stream Live With It premieres on Wednesdays. You can catch all of that by becoming a subscriber at youtube.com slash daily tech news show. We like to end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Andrew reports on AirPods Pro Translation. Yeah, this is a great story. Andrew writes, hi, Tom, Jen, and the gang. And it's because he's in Canada. I think he singled out Jen. I won't take it personally. Yeah, he just wanted to be like, hey, there's another Canadian out there. I'm in the gang.

18:17I'm in the gang. Andrew wrote, I was sitting in a Tim Hortons with tea and biscuit i'm british born when a bunch of french canadian construction workers sat near me oh darn i should have updated my airpods pro to os 26 for the translation function so i could understand better what they were saying but then realized that there was a lot of french canadian swear words uh being said i started laughing as i wondered what siri would make of those words yeah good question now i want to know now i want those construction workers to come back to tim Hortons after Andrew has updated his AirPods at some point and see what it does.

18:58Well, I know everyone involved in the story is listening right now. So why don't you all just figure out what's the best time, you know, during a construction work break, go back to the Tim Hortons and then let's see what Siri gets right and wrong. Yeah. And please record it all in video for us. Yes. Yes. Video appreciated. Thank you very much. especially the biscuits. Merci beaucoup. Thank you. What are you thinking about? You might be hungry like I am, or you have insight into a tech story. Share any of that with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Andrew for contributing that story to today's show.

19:39Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You can keep us in business, you know, just become a patron. It's easy to do. Go sign up at patreon.com slash DTNS. Talk to you soon.

19:56the dtns family of podcasts helping each other understand diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program