I really try to like Firefox, but the last 5 minutes really captures the kind of papercut that happens often:

- I open a new tab and firefox informs me it has updated itself and needs to restart and won't allow any further operations until it does so.

- Fine, I close and restart.

- I reopen Firefox to find a brand new sponsored weather widget on my otherwise blank new tab page - from a source I would never otherwise visit.

Thanks for breaking my flow and the privacy breach, I guess.

The thing about chat control / upload filters / client side scanning, whatever it's being called now; They are responses to an old generation of technology - one of an internet governed by centralized corporations.

Anonymous, peer to peer, file sharing exists. No centralized place to subvert - except the software running locally. Imperfect now, but intrinsically extant.

What proponents of these laws really want is to roll back the clock; something that is, fundamentally, not possible.

2020 at the onset of the pandemic a pipe burst in my apartment building, flooding several floors; kicked off a series of events that at one point had us packing most of our life in a car in preparation for 14+ hours of driving.

Four years on, I am only now fully grasping the scope of stuff that I had to unload from my mind to deal with that - research papers left in drafts, unfinished projects, forgotten skills...

More and more finding myself thinking "Oh yeah I forgot i was working on that"

I didn't spend the last 6 years building open source, peer to peer metadata resistant communication applications and libraries for fun.

I did it because any secure communications that rely on a centralized service provider is forever reliant on the whims of whatever jurisdiction regulates it's existence - that is not ground on which you want to anchor your rights to communicate and associate free of surveillance.

The only person who can "protect encryption" is you.

No government, nor regulatory body, nor judiciary is going to demand that you have easy access to mathematical constructs.

They may even force some entities to only provided weak approximations.

But the math exists regardless.

At some point, at some time, the fight against encryption becomes a fight against speech, and knowledge, itself.

And like those fundamental rights, the only way to protect them, is to exercise them, continuously.