I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.

I used to support DTP, and graphics for the systems house at which I worked. I travelled round the UK installing PageMaker and A4 paper-white CRT displays - boy were they heavy!

My endearing memory is calling the company in Edinburgh for technical support, to be greeted on the phone by a lady with a lovely, cheery Scottish accent announcing "Aldus UK".

Fun fact: I was first person in the UK to print in colour on an HP ink jet printer at the trade show where they were first demonstrated. The HP folks hadn't got the official colour driver ready for the show, so the HP guys were printing in mono, but I'd had an advanced model to try and hacked some other print driver to work with it.

And then they will take away your right to boot whatever you want. For national security reasons and the children, of course.

The older manual rear view mirrors worked much better in my opinion.

A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

Invalidate every patent that is older than the maximum lifetime allowed by law, and you'll see it magically fix itself up.

Come on! Get real!

I don’t know about the US, but in UK and the EU they are certainly trying to do just that. And if not today, the will simply cook us slowly a little longer until they succeed. The problem is, that regular people just don’t care enough.

It’s almost like they need these to exist.

I second this. And it would only be half as bad, if there was a chance to democratically undo this, when people realize the consequences. But no, this will stay forever and only become worse.

But they have ways to evade the law. And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.

That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.

It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.

In this regard, note that the EU can only propose legislation that falls under one of its "competences". For example, national militaries, income tax, education, most of foreign policy, etc, do not fall under EU control.

The ECHR itself is independent of the EU, it is national governments that have signed up to this treaty.

So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???

.... It would be interesting to hear knowledgeable legal opinion in this!

>So perhaps the EU institutions do not need to directly refer to the ECHR, only national governments should???

Correct. EU is not a party of the convention, member states are, so EU law can be ruled on by ECJ and national law and actions of national governments by ECHR.

Then at the end of the day it's the national government that would look at your chats and "I'm just following EU law" would not be an especially great excuse for the ECHR court.

I fear it is already too late, thanks to the phone duopoly and bulletproof secure boot environments. The EU can now make remote attestation mandatory by law.