> The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online.<p>You think the UK is safe, go to China or Russia! They have _really_ 'safe' internet. Even better, just cut the internet off, it couldn't be any safer!<p>The politicians passing this stuff are literally the least qualified people to discuss anything tech related. They literally do not understand (or possibly don't care) that a backdoor for them is a backdoor for any motivated attacker.<p>> A clause of the bill allows Ofcom, the British telecom regulator, to serve a notice requiring tech companies to scan their users–all of them–for child abuse content.<p>This is Apple's CSAM [1] all over again. I'm sure it won't be used at all for out-of-scope reasons... Firstly expanded to terrorism, and then generic crime, then extreme political views, then hate speech, etc.<p>Can somebody in 'Big Tech' please remind them that this includes _their_ messages too? I want you to email them on a regular basis something like: "We have scanned all of your files and private communications as per the requirement of the OSB, and found nothing currently deemed unacceptable by the current government. This is a reminder that any content sent now or any time in the past will be retroactively scanned and reported based on continuously evolving guidelines."<p>> This would affect even messages and files that are end-to-end encrypted to protect user privacy. As enacted, the OSB allows the government to force companies to build technology that can scan regardless of encryption–in other words, build a backdoor.<p>It looks like I will be moving to E2E via private servers.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_for_Children_Frequently_Asked_Questions.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...</a>
I've said it before and I'll repeat it here - as someone who lives in the UK the thing that bothers me the most about it is a complete apathy from everyone I know, and I work in IT. People just go "meh what are you going to do", or recently very common "I don't have strength to be angry at this government all the time over everything, I just carry on forward and hope things improve". And of course the fact that this is getting 0 coverage from mainstream media doesn't help.
Whatever happened to making governments regulate their own citizens? I remember a time on the internet where if a government wanted this sort of control they had to implement it themselves. Something happened at some point where Twitter, Google and Facebook began to comply and now it's the status quo. Why can't we go back to telling governments to go fuck themselves? Police your own fucking people, if you don't want them using our services then block them from doing so. I can't even run an XMPP server with OMEMO now without having to have a fucking legal department to respond to emails from these bureaucrats. I'm absolutely tired of this shit, and the meek response. <i>I am not subject to your god damn jurisdiction.</i>
It seems a big majority in this thread agrees this is bad, and user privacy is key.<p>I wonder, what do you think about the Government's counter-argument, that effectively user privacy is secondary to child protection? I'm just playing devil's advocate, and not endorsing this position.<p>- Is the internet a major medium for child exploitation?<p>- If this bill puts N offenders in prison per year, is it worth it? What is N?<p>I agree this is bad for internet privacy, and likely just a privacy grab by the government. Equally, I think discussing it without referencing the stated goals ("it's just a power grab", "we have a right to privacy", "this won't save any children because, erm, it won't") is counterproductive to getting the point across to a wider population.
Sadly there wasn't much hope of this bill not making it into law. The opposition parties if anything felt that the law wasn't strong enough and pushed to make it even more draconian. The British public at large are in favour of any law that imposes harsher penalties and regulation on the tech giants. 'Protect the children' is far more emotive than 'But we might eventually lose encryption', and the collateral damage to our freedoms is slow and insidious enough that it's not recognised or appreciated. I think given everything we have to take the governments vague concession of 'when the technology becomes available' as a win, it was the best we were going to get, no way was this bill not going to pass.<p>We are still in the early Wild West days of the internet, but in the decades ahead bills like this will become more commonplace as governments try to wrestle back control of what citizens can access
Not quite two weeks ago I was discussing the censorship that we face in the west with a few other users here. Some of them seemed to not quite believe their ears when I brought up the phenomena.<p>I think that some good can come of bills like this, and the letters which the UK parliament recently sent out to question various internet platforms about a users ability to operate on the platforms. Clear cut government censorship like this, can bring to attention how pervasive censorship in general actually is.<p>And I strongly hold that this is just the tip of the iceberg, the visible censorship, when governments ask explicitly try to stop freedom of speech, not only in their own countries but among neighbors as well. What lies beneath the surface is untold amounts of private censorship which certainly is not often government affiliated, but still politically motivated.
So are Whatsapp, Signal and Apple going to keep their word or has some minuscule thing changed in the legislation that they can backpedal by saying it's now fine with them?
I wrote a letter to my congressperson (US based) when this topic come up a few months ago.<p>His reply was, basically, there are exactly two distinct groups of people:<p>1. People that think their government should be able to read what they do online.<p>2. Child molesters.<p>I don't have a lot of faith in the system anymore.
I've been using VPN services for every byte of traffic in and out of my home and on my mobile phone for 15 years.<p>This sort of thing is why and I will continue to do so.<p>Based on stories I've heard from people work in industry, every major ISP in the UK keeps DNS query logs and "internet connection records" and makes these available to authorities (without a warrant)
I wrote to my MP about this and got a response.<p>They agreed with me that it is "important to protect users' freedom of expression and personal privacy".<p>They "do not believe it is right for encrypted messages to become decrypted. There must be a balance between our fundamental right to privacy and keeping people safe online, which raises difficult questions for platforms such as WhatsApp".<p>But they "do not believe that the legislation impacting private messaging will damage this encryption, as a variety of technologies are emerging that could allow for scanning on issues such as child sexual abuse material while retaining the privacy benefits afforded by end-to-end encryption".<p>They do note however that having Ofcom be the regulator and monitor isn't right, which seems to have been a bit under reported to my knowledge.<p>Funnily enough, they did not vote on this matter and I shall be finding out why.
What I really don’t understand is why parents aren’t responsible for monitoring they’re children's access to the Internet anymore?<p>Why does it need to be done at each website instead of at the point of access?
Fundamentally, encryption is just math, and math is still mostly legal in the UK. There seems to be an obvious workaround here:<p>- It's not illegal to supply someone with an E2E encryption tool like OpenPGP.<p>- It's not illegal to provide a messaging service.<p>- The OSB seems to make it illegal to provide both of these things in a single package.<p>So there is now a bit of friction involved for anyone who wants E2E communication in the UK, but there doesn't have to be <i>that much</i> friction. You just need separate legal entities to provide you with the 2 tools involved (the encryption tool and the messaging service), and you need to keep track of your own private keys.<p>Sure, the vast majority of people will not bother with this, but it's really not enough friction to stop even the casually motivated; i.e. anybody involved in anything even remotely illegal.<p>I'd applaud the implementation of a maximally convenient system like this, just to lay bare the idiocy of this law.
What relationship does a company need to have to UK to be subject to this?<p>(Have an office in the UK? Use a SaaS/PaaS subject to UK? Have users from UK? Want your iOS or Android app to be available from the official store to UK users? Want your DNS and routing to work in UK?)
> This violates fundamental principles about anonymous and simple access that has existed since the beginning of the Internet. You shouldn’t have to show your ID to get online.<p>My current hypothesis is that this will start happening within the next few years anyway, regardless of such laws - there will come a point when spammers start making massive use of LLMs to post to forums, comment sections, chat rooms, etc., and there doesn't seem to be a way to defend against that taking over your websites, unless you implement a "one ID-verified person = one account" type policy.<p>Am I wrong about that? Are there any other reasonably implementable solutions that people have been thinking about?
So many people fail to realize that it's not a partisan game. Surveillance and authortiarianism keeps going in one direction in many countries no matter what the party is.<p>Stop buying into this simplistic false dichotomies.
China: Look at our internet, users only do what we want.<p>UK: Hold my beer, I'm going to do this for the whole internet.<p>---<p>All the companies that said they would stop operating in the UK if this bill was passed, need to now do so. There are provision in place that say companies won't be forced to do so unless technologically possible. But I think we all know how that plays out.
Has anyone figured out what the wording "directly on the service" means - does that mean they've accidentally exempted federated content, ie. everyone having their own Mastodon server?
What’s truly insane about this law is how pathetically performative it is.<p>Let’s pretend it was a good idea to break encryption for users.<p>The current prosecution rate for rape accusations stands at 2% in the U.K. with only half of those leading to conviction. These problems come from poor training, lack of police and lack of funding for the court system.<p>This Act changes nothing about those fundamental issues so, assuming you catch someone with child pornography on their iPhone, you still won’t be able to convict them!<p>Edit: typo
Dang. Well here’s my public apology to Stallman for thinking he was a kook for still using ancient cellphones. I’ve been obviously proven wrong<p>However I probably won’t make it out of this fever so perhaps I’m going to die at just the right time<p>Obviously the “think of the children” justification is more about partisan censorship but I kinda still believe it’s up in the air that all this censorship is going to work out.
Meanwhile, a British MP chairing a media committee thinks it's appropriate to write to content platforms to suggest that they demonetise people they don't like: <a href="https://twitter.com/rumblevideo/status/1704584929026216118" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/rumblevideo/status/1704584929026216118</a>
Not a biggy. Let's have them implant backdoors everywhere, and then use it to acquire and publish all <i>their</i> data and <i>their</i> conversations.<p>I'm sure that besides loosing their power quickly, they also going to face prison time for abusing it.<p>It would be such a wonderfully poetical end of them!<p>/sacrasm off
I do so wish we could stop using the term "backdoor". When it comes to computer systems, there is really no "front" or "back" and so any access granted is just another door. This then removes the idea that it can be made "safer" just by calling it something different. There are so many cases of "hidden" or "secret" APIs being made public because people found them, there is absolutely no way that an additional can be made any safer.
This will be great for governments who want to silence critics of corruption. Just place the targeted media the law is intended for on the targets phone and bam! You have a case against them to discredit anything that persons says from then on.<p>If I were an ISP in Briton. I would shutdown until this law is overturned.
Does the government only care about catching dumb paedophiles?
Im pretty sure if your running a child abuse ring, your going to know how to circumvent these "protections"
serious question: there's been talk of rape gangs in britain that heir from india/pakistan<p>i've never been so i don't understand the situation outside of that<p>but from what i gather it seems the police in the uk don't do much about them, meanwhile there's videos of them harassing people over much more minor offenses, and lately there was a video where an autistic child said something mild to a english lesbian cop and this resulted in the gestapo showing up at her house.<p>so is this really over child abuse?
once again local first systems win.<p>instead of relying on 3rd parties for your privacy.<p>rely to everything being local first. download copies of things. because nothing lasts forever on the internet.<p>have multiple offline copies.<p>encrypt your drives.
I wonder what the future of governance holds in the next 50 to 100 years.<p>On one hand technology will amplify surveillance powers in the hands of few, and explode misinformation/propaganda.<p>On the other hand internet and AI compute costs will go down making the average person able to digest more information.<p>China is a great example with great firewall, restricted speech and citizens rights restricted.<p>Technology is just a tool, a very powerful tool that holds a serious risk of suppressing “others”.
Ironic that the UK wants to spy on its citizens to “protect the children” but it also just sealed Prince Andrew’s records until 2065 to hide his Epstein activity:<p><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/09/prince-andrew-government-files-secret-until-2065" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2023/09/prince-andrew-gover...</a><p>Also, Jimmy Saville sure spent a lot of time with the royal family and government leadership.
I am so disappointed by this.<p>I moved to the UK from Eastern Europe and it's hands down better in almost every way if you consider personal freedom, in my opinion.<p>In terms of policing, it's better than most EU states. See this for reference: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUxiTdRTPMg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUxiTdRTPMg</a> The argument in the video is that French police is brutal because of the remnants of Nazi collaborationists in the police, and this applies to everywhere in Europe occupied by Nazis. And then you have Eastern Europe with its brutal communism.<p>I hear a lot of British people complain about how bad society has gotten etc. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's something to still be proud of. But this kind of shit will break it.<p>To the people saying it's the fault of people being apathetic, what would you have done?<p>:(
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Sounds alright to me. Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks. This seems like a reasonable compromise that won't affect most users, while also not mandating any specific technical solution, leaving the implementation up to subject matter experts.<p>These type of restrictions are always going to be somewhat difficult to fully realise due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Internet, but at least the UK is trying to do what's right for its own citizens. Which is quite an unusual yet welcome action for the current Government.