[HN Gopher] Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's ...
___________________________________________________________________
Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat
to privacy [pdf]
Author : g0xA52A2A
Score : 536 points
Date : 2026-06-08 19:42 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (signal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (signal.org)
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Surveillance Is Not Safety
|
| Maybe not, but as long as the average person thinks it is, it may
| as well be.
| Animats wrote:
| It's a great meme, though. Use it more.
| ktallett wrote:
| The average person doesn't have any knowledge on this system.
| rockskon wrote:
| Does the average person think this? Perception of what other
| people think doesn't always line up with what they actually
| think.
| pydry wrote:
| I doubt the average person gives it much thought at all.
|
| This certainly isn't a result of democratic overreach by a
| concerned group of citizens. No demographic is demanding
| this.
|
| It's one of those "create the infrastructure for stasi 2.0"
| the epstein elite tries to periodically ram down our throats
| ironically using "think of the children" to manufacture
| consent.
|
| The last time they did this they contracted saatchi and
| saatchi to run an a disturbing campaign:
| https://londondaily.com/revealed-uk-gov-t-plans-publicity-
| bl...
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| The average person doesn't think that far ahead. They just
| hear "a cause I like can be furthered by implementing 1984"
| and so they support it.
|
| Check out any comment section on transportation policy,
| environmental policy, professional licensing for trades other
| than software. Look at how HN, people who should know how
| this sausage is made, schemes about how policy and technology
| can be used by government to enforce it's will and
| preferences upon other people in ways they cannot avoid or
| resist. It's not a case of divide and conquer, it's a case of
| completely lacking principals. Nobody believes in privacy,
| civil rights or that the application of government (violence)
| should be expensive and difficult and politically fraught
| when it's an application that they like. Nobody is thinking
| far enough ahead to wonder how those systems will be used
| when the whims and dispositions of government and society
| shift.
|
| Just this morning I was reading a comment where some jerk was
| scheming about how the government should (the implication
| being that now that AI makes it easy to automate) scrape
| property listings and fine people for not pulling permits
| when there's a diff from the prior listings and that the
| whole thing can be automated and anyone innocent can just
| have the government tour their home to prove it.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| There is something to be said about true believers, who
| will go out of their way to not 'live and let live'. I
| remember getting extra antsy when one such individual was
| flying drones over private properties looking for signs for
| what they believe is an issue.
|
| Tech.. it truly is a tool and something of a true reveal of
| character. It immediately shows what you do with power.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| I don't respect those people unless they're willing to
| suffer the same tactics used upon them to enforce other
| issues.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Does the average person think this?
|
| The average person hold all kinds of conflicting views.
|
| The average middle class parent will surveil the shit out of
| their children, for example.
|
| Hence the title of the article is not completely correct. The
| outcome of surveillance is the intent of the entity
| surveilling. In the case of the parent, this is likely the
| safety of their offspring. In the case of a state entity,
| it's likely the safety of the people in power of the state.
| This second type of safety is very dangerous and does not
| include your safety.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| I think you are onto something with intent here. By now, we
| effectively know that various power centers are getting
| away with things that normal people do not. If true, the
| concern is not that we are getting away with things, but
| that we might be thinking that maybe current arrangement is
| no longer suitable. In other words, they are literally
| preparing for a worst case scenario. And to me, this seems
| silly now. As in, I buy the fear of a peasant uprising and
| being on the wrong side of the scythe, but I sincerely
| doubt peasants will actually do anything.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| The average person does not think anything much. They receive
| the meme, they transmit the meme. No processing occurs.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| isn't more as long as the average billionair thinks it is.
|
| It's not like it's the average person pushing it.
| circadian wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/610/
| cwmoore wrote:
| If only the average person had tools and access to all such
| information.
| ktallett wrote:
| Won't somebody think of the children appears to be the world's
| most effective method of bringing in restrictive and privacy
| destroying laws, yet they just don't work.
| christoph wrote:
| Well yes, the great cabal of people bringing in these immense
| rafts of surveillance are the very people who commit, or who
| certainly hang out with the people who commit the most heinous
| acts. See the Epstein files.
|
| Notice the same people will also talk during the daytime about
| morals and equality, while then conducting genocide in the
| evening.
| Lio wrote:
| We'll see. I can't be the only voter fed up with how Labour are
| handling this.
|
| I find they way that Peter Kyle and Jess Philips have dismissed
| privacy concerns about online surveillance particularly
| condescending.
|
| Come the next general election they are going to be paid back
| for this.
|
| (Oh, and I appreciate Signal speaking up and have just donated
| to them again for doing so).
| ls612 wrote:
| The idea is that people who have politics like yours can be
| "visited" by the police and asked to "voluntarily" come down
| to the station for an interview about "hateful rhetoric" on
| social media. Doesn't matter how you vote if actual political
| opposition is outlawed, which is where the UK is heading
| rapidly aided by digital surveillance.
| budududuroiu wrote:
| The ratchet ratcheting: client side scanning, then remote
| attestation to ensure client side scanning works, digital
| identity verification, etc etc.
| ajb wrote:
| Yes, but this is preaching to the choir.
|
| The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an
| emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the
| solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral,
| emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to
| parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an
| opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile,
| and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own
| child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the
| electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.
|
| Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to
| reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure,
| complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make
| you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to
| people in the terms they care about might.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own
| mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic
| bureaucracy will label your picture as.
|
| I 100% agree on the need to counter emotional fire with
| emotional fire. And this is the right way to combat this sort
| of overreach
|
| However, I do think that "the choir" need to rethink what is
| and is not privacy - a huge amount of the benefits of having
| our every waking moment monitored by the virtual world (which
| is going to happen) can be lost if we don't allow epidemiology
| to follow our digital selves.
|
| Detecting one's word use is slipping might signal a trip to the
| doctors or a thousand other digital tells that will help us
| improve our lives. If we have to fight against ads and digital
| searches for terrorism, at least let's get the benefits too.
| ajb wrote:
| That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal,
| economic, or technical system which will allow separation of
| the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone
| else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used
| to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal
| agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency
| law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms"
| clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address -
| insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the
| absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only
| use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually
| want to use data for good should be on the side of robust
| assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted
| and that no accountability is needed.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| It's hard to enforce a law so we should not have the law
| seems a poor argument.
|
| Let's say we define personal data about, generated by or
| inferred from the actions of a natural person as owned by
| the society as a whole. And misuse is liable to 5% of
| annual turnover. It's more or less GDPR. That seems viable
| - and I am sure an army of class action lawyers will be
| happy to help out
|
| (Ok I need to work on a better proposal but I think this is
| more doable than you are allowing for)
| ajb wrote:
| I don't think we necessarily disagree. I am pessimistic
| about laws being effective in this case, but that doesn't
| mean we should not try to find ones that are. I like your
| idea. Thinking and trials in that direction would be
| good.
|
| Data using organisations often seem to prefer fig-leaf
| laws that aren't effective, and lobby against ones that
| might be effective. "My data use is a good use, therefore
| I should not be subject to restrictions and oversight".
| Instead, anyone with a use of data which is valuable to
| the public should not see themselves as on the same side
| as the advertisers and surveillance vendors. They should
| see themselves as on the opposite side.
| varispeed wrote:
| Don't forget all the pedos working for government to watch all
| the reported images.
| areoform wrote:
| Signal should come out swinging. Here's a pitch.
|
| The Government is going to put a snitch on every phone, tape
| every bedroom, and listen in every evening on every home. Every
| doctor's visit. Every therapy session. Every pub. Every street.
| Every store.
|
| When the snitches phone home, what you type to your lover may get
| the cops sent to your home.
|
| Artificial stasi in every desktop, laptop, tablet, camera, and
| phone. Around every corner. In every living room. No one will be
| exempt from their gaze.
|
| Are you ready for your vacuum cleaner to phone home?
| saltwatercowboy wrote:
| AKA The Witness in Nick Harkaway's novel Gnomon.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Shrug. If they don't, they will lose the customers who do care
| about privacy and they won't lose the ones that don't .. right
| away. However, it will near guarantee further fragmentation and
| circling a new solution that will be recommended to normies by
| their techy friends or current batch of cool kids. We have been
| here before. The only way to win the game is not to play.
| Especially with government, the moment you start playing, you
| lose.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| Signal the messaging app/platform? A funny thing is that Signal
| barely works (with VPN ofc) here in China. Sending media/images
| is impossible. Sometimes it's blacked out weeks on end.
| Everything else seems to work fine ish (again with VPN ofc).
| autoexec wrote:
| Signal outright lies in their privacy policy. It opens with
| "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive
| information." but they collect and permanently store
| sensitive information in the cloud (user's name, photo,
| number, and contacts) and in some cases they even store the
| contents of messages. They've steadfastly refused to update
| the policy even as they introduced those features deceiving
| users about their risks. Signal can't really be trusted at
| this point.
| ryan_n wrote:
| > in some cases they even store the contents of messages
|
| I hadn't heard this before. Doesn't that kind of defeat the
| entire purpose of using the app?
| autoexec wrote:
| It's an opt-in feature.
| https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/signal-introduces-free-
| and...
|
| A service that advertises itself as privacy focused
| refusing to update their privacy policy while adding
| features like this seems like a pretty big dead canary.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Signal is on the right side here. I think it's time for us
| techies to fight back by developing the future. I'm trying to do
| my part - https://mediaden.ca
|
| Also looking to get involved with the meshtastic project.
| purpleidea wrote:
| Looks proprietary. Need fully open source to guarantee that
| right long term.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I used to agree with this, but now I don't actually think I
| do. Apple's app privacy report can be used to guarantee
| network access for any iOS app -
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102188
| Cider9986 wrote:
| That only shows the domain eg facebook.com, not
| facebook.com/tracking-script. There's no reason that they
| can't put all the bad stuff on the same essential, first-
| party domain needed for the app which makes DNS blocking
| and viewing not effective.
|
| That's why you can't block youtube ads with DNS, only with
| a browser-level adblocker because the browser adblocker is
| able to block the specific paths.
|
| You can view the full encrypted traffic with something like
| mitmproxy, but there's ways apps can detect or prevent it.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Good to know - I hadn't considered the proxy bit.
|
| For me, right now, I think it's conceivably a security
| advantage if the source isn't public. I know security by
| obscurity isn't a strategy alone, but with an incredibly
| difficult surface area to attack, I think user's using
| the app are very well protected, except for against
| nation states.
| cantalopes wrote:
| Praise
| michaelt wrote:
| I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who
| worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this
| as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as.
|
| Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users
| to corporations, by technical means, that politicians _couldn 't_
| transfer that control to themselves by political means?
|
| Did they think they could lock things down to extract their 30%
| app store fee while enforcing rules through app review (and
| demonstrating censorship of sites like Tumblr) that politicians
| wouldn't _want_ that same rule-setting, censoring power?
|
| Did they think their employers were going to _prevent_ that
| transfer, that the trillion-dollar companies would become some
| sort of Che Guevara style insurgents, running a guerrilla
| campaign to overthrow the very system that made them trillion-
| dollar companies?
| uniqueuid wrote:
| That was nicely put.
|
| I think you can learn about it most by reading clever, capable
| people from big tech corporations. Their framing often involves
| tradeoffs against a slow but inevitable societal pressure that
| is helped by compromising on freedom.
|
| So I don't believe they are ignorant of all your points; it's
| rather that they don't see a realistic way how tech,
| corporations, and perhaps even ordinary people can go forward
| (being better, or richer, or more sophisticated or whatever)
| without making that compromise. It's as if they saw the forking
| paths of the future, and none will end up without technical
| restraints, regardless of whether they do it or whether things
| just get worse and someone else then does them.
| vasco wrote:
| A lot of harm would be prevented if people didn't do bad shit
| under the assumption the next guy will do it if they don't.
| You're the next guy.
| trumpdong wrote:
| But they're right. The next guy will do it if you don't.
| And you'll be fired meaning you won't have any power any
| more, and the person who thinks DRM is good will be hired
| and become powerful in your stead. How does that help?
| vasco wrote:
| > You are the next guy
|
| If you don't understand this, then you just don't
| understand.
| gnerd00 wrote:
| Twitter people expressly started their company with the idea of
| crowd-friendly semi-anonymous msgs on demand.
|
| The game of GO delivers an idea where a very large construct
| can be built then in one move the entire thing flips to a
| different purpose... seems relevant somehow..
| xeonmc wrote:
| I often also wonders if ideological zealots ever thinks of this
| passage while pushing their agenda for control:
| ...and it was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast,
| so that the image of the beast could even speak and cause those
| who would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.
| Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor,
| both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the
| forehead, so that no one can buy or sell who does not
| have the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of
| its name.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Those who would think of such a passage (or any biblical
| passage) and those who push for a total-control agenda are
| disjoint sets.
|
| Communism and fascism were both fueled by atheism (either
| explicit or functional), not a Judeo-Christian worldview.
|
| "Ohne Gott und Sonnenschein bringen wir die Ernte ein."
| (Without God and without sun, we will get the harvest done.)
| - the slogan of East Germany in 1975 when people were hungry
| and it kept raining during harvest.
| sophrosyne42 wrote:
| The existence and polularity of Christian socialist
| movements in Europe contradicts this thesis strongly.
| autoexec wrote:
| Christian fascism exists. In the US it's how fascism came
| to the country. Christofascism doesn't seem to have any
| problem with the absence of atheism.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| that's not Christian though (in the sense that their
| beliefs are not scriptural and not subjected to
| scriptural review)... it's something else, and it's
| really ugly.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I don't think 1st century Rome had much in the way of digital
| surveillance.
|
| Or even surveillance, for that matter.
|
| Plenty of hubris, mind.
| HiPhish wrote:
| The implementation might change, but the pattern of
| absolute control is old as time.
| xeonmc wrote:
| "Implementation details are left as exercise for the
| reader.
|
| When in doubt refer to the public API as specified in
| Revelations 13:15-17"
| dreambuffer wrote:
| Rome had the "frumentarii", which was essentially a proto
| intelligence agency to do spywork for emperors.
| yason wrote:
| My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that
| are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted.
| "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now
| we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether
| DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not,
| it is just how it is."
|
| This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The
| first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the
| other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change
| it".
|
| People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when
| it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there are
| no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic rules and
| the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they looked at
| the green/red light of law instead of whether there are
| oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross and a
| red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no cars.
| HiPhish wrote:
| > My impression is that people who can work on stuff like
| that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for
| granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital
| restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have
| a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard
| business practice or not, it is just how it is."
|
| I like to call those people "ventablackpilled". Being
| blackpilled is all about gloom and doom, but being
| ventablackpilled is beyond being blackpilled. It is when you
| actively want the world to be a worse place because you
| believe that that is how the world works.
| okanat wrote:
| You're giving too much thought into the issue or trying to
| construct something like a conspiracy out of it.
|
| I sometimes work with people who worked on or at least
| worked with DRM-like stuff (Trustzone etc.). The people who
| make those systems and the structures that allow it falls
| squarely on banality of evil. It is not a big evil org or
| people with their own evil agendas (unlike Palantir, i
| think they are the true "ventablackpilled" ones). They are
| thousands of developers who push JIRA tickets like
| everyone. Many of them live in the developing world and
| they just pray to keep their jobs. The reason that big tech
| attracts developers despite their obvious and much bigger
| (IMO) evils is the same reason that attracts developers who
| make systems that can be completely closed down.
|
| Many of the developers are not outright evil either. They
| sometimes voice their opinion. Their opinion doesn't matter
| in comparison to the business goals.
|
| Sometimes it is understandable to write blocking software.
| Not all equipment is sold. Many industrial equipment is
| leased. So the actual owners want guarantees that their
| devices cannot be modified by renters.
|
| The amount of info you can extract from an Apple phone or
| Graphene OS is limited due to same restrictions working in
| your favor too.
|
| Similarly phones can be locked down due to radio
| restrictions. Nobody wants infinitely exploitable SDNs in
| peoples hands. It makes such SDNs a juicy target for
| enemies like Russia to exploit and turn into scalable
| attack vector as spoofing and jamming devices.
|
| The reason those are attack vectors is also banal. We made
| our bed as engineers, voters, governments and business
| leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made shitty chips and
| shitty software with no care for security or safety. We
| sold millions of them and nobody wanted to pay to "do it
| right way". Worse is better. Silicon Valley style scaling
| up is the goal. Competition is for suckers. All those and
| every single one of us ate the fruits of shitty hardware
| and software that are protected by closed down systems. We
| engineers got the cushy jobs, our business leaders made 10x
| 100x gains from our work. We either had little voice
| (because making a big noise is guaranteeing that your cushy
| job no longer exists) or whatever we had is ignored in the
| hubris of shipping shit to billions of people.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| << We made our bed as engineers, voters, governments and
| business leaders one sloppy work at a time. We made
| shitty chips and shitty software with no care for
| security or safety. We sold millions of them and nobody
| wanted to pay to "do it right way".
|
| I dunno. By that I mean, I am sure it happens, but I am
| not sure this is the reason for it. FWIW, I am not an
| engineer, but I have a window into that world.
|
| In my little corner of the universe, we are going through
| belt tightening exercises already. So it is an
| interesting game of less meetings, shoving as much as you
| can onto others and the classic 'doing more with less'.
| In other words, even for internal customer's 'doing it
| the right way' is imply not a priority. On the other
| hand, getting more people, bigger budgets and somehow
| money saved is. 'Doing it the right way' is a distant
| ideal.
|
| All that said, I don't think you are that wrong with the
| 'banality of evil' thought.
| dgroshev wrote:
| Ironically, the very OP statement is exactly that: trying
| to make the world a worse place because they believe that
| that is how the world works.
|
| The solution to avoiding dictatorship is engaging in
| politics and preventing dictatorship directly through that.
| Trying to retreat into the (perceived) wilderness and build
| barriers to dictatorship doesn't really work. But since
| people drafting that statement don't believe that politics
| work and it is, in fact, possible to both have a vibrant
| political scene (we have what, five viable political
| parties vs the American two?) and not let kids send nudes,
| they try to drag everyone into the same mind frame.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| I think it's vantablack unless you mean like a Starbucks
| Venti cup of black
| Cassell wrote:
| The critical mass of people who don't use critical thinking
| as their main means of decision-making.
| try_the_bass wrote:
| > This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The
| first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the
| other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change
| it".
|
| What? I don't understand how this is a "two kinds of people"
| generalization, when the two categories aren't even mutually-
| exclusive?
|
| One can think a law is bad and should change, while
| simultaneously recognizing the rule of law and following it.
|
| It's pretty weird to try to pit those two perspectives
| against each other
| trumpdong wrote:
| Then you are the first kind. Since the law will not change,
| you will continue to follow it.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| > "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind
| think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it".
|
| There's zero point in changing the law if you don't
| expect it to be obeyed and enforced. Those positions are
| not opposites.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| If you don't expect it to be obeyed or enforced, then I
| would say that means it should be _fast tracked_ to be
| changed. "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime."
| Zak wrote:
| Somebody had to work on it before it was how the world is.
| When Microsoft proposed a scheme involving remote attestation
| and DRM in 2003, the New York Times published a critical
| article. Google SafetyNet a decade later barely got a whimper
| out of major _tech_ outlets, much less the mainstream press.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-
| saf...
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Somebody had to work on it before it was how the world
| is._
|
| The mindset the parent described extends to what they're
| asked to do. They don't challenge it. It doesn't have to
| already be law for them to accept it and build it. It's
| enough that the ask comes from authority (a boss, a
| government) and pays.
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| >People who look at pedestrian traffic lights and cross when
| it's green vs. people who look at cars and cross when there
| are no cars coming. The first say you must follow traffic
| rules and the second kind say they wouldn't be alive if they
| looked at the green/red light of law instead of whether there
| are oncoming cars: a green doesn't mean it's safe to cross
| and a red doesn't mean you can't cross if only there are no
| cars.
|
| Don't forget the selfish jerks who simply ask for whatever
| class of traffic that isn't them to be punitively regulated
| to their benefit.
|
| (both literally and transferrable to other issues as a
| metaphor)
| jjav wrote:
| > The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it"
| and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we
| must change it".
|
| Indeed. I can't understand the people who blindly believe any
| law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good?
| What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused?
| Then maybe it should be changed?
|
| I advocate that every law should have an annual review to
| catalog every case where it has been applied. How many were
| sensible positive outcomes? How many were unintended
| consequences? How many were clear abuses of the letter of the
| law? Every legislator should vote on the record based on that
| annual review to either renew or cancel the law.
| yason wrote:
| > I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law
| is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's
| good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then
| maybe it should be changed?
|
| I think many people have an expectation that (all) laws are
| just and needed because... somehow they're the law.
|
| In reality, laws can be unjust, unnecessary, biased, and
| completely arm-wrestled together by people strictly
| following an agency of their own. Other laws are put
| together by sheer ignorance and lack of thinking beyond
| mere good intentions. The first question shouldn't even be
| "is this law fair" but "was this law made fairly".
|
| It creeps me that people treat laws as axioms whereas
| they're just polished and reinforced opinions. Sure, many
| laws we can agree on, and many others that don't agree on
| aren't worth changing, but you should always question the
| law and question where it came from before choosing to
| accept it.
|
| I can see the same pattern with technology such as the
| various digital restrictions management (DRM) schemes.
| bragh wrote:
| Oh, the people who work on secure boot, attestation, DRM, and
| other such features know very well, but don't care. This is
| because the claimed benefits for them, such as less hackers,
| less malware, less bot traffic, outweigh any possible downsides
| for the society.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think it's even worse than that. Our industry has a strong
| track record of only looking at potential upsides (and
| pretending they're certain) and not even seeing that there
| may be serious downsides.
|
| It's a kind of blindness. The kind that is, in my opinion, is
| one of the major reasons why we ended up building a world
| that's more than a bit dystopian.
| wmf wrote:
| _Did they think that the trillion-dollar companies would become
| some sort of Che Guevara style insurgents..._
|
| Arguably this plan is mostly working for Apple.
| shiandow wrote:
| The phrase 'banality of evil' comes to mind.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from
| users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians
| _couldn 't_ transfer that control to themselves by political
| means?
|
| Corporations are already hostile enough that it doesn't really
| matter:
|
| _The report says that between 30 and 40 Rockstar employees
| working in multiple offices in the UK and Canada were fired on
| October 30, all of them part of a private trade union chat
| group on Discord._ - https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-
| industry/rockstar-accused-of-...
|
| _Leaked Amazon Whole Foods Docs: Workforce Diversity Helps
| Prevent Unions_ -
| https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403 (summarizing
| https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-
| unionizat...)
|
| _Microsoft Are Fixated on "Hate Speech" With Lopsided XBOX
| Live Enforcement Strike System_ -
| https://www.techopse.com/microsoft-are-fixated-on-hate-speec...
| HiPhish wrote:
| I guess they think "someone is going to do it anyway, so it
| might as well be me so I can be the one who gets paid for it".
| But yeah, I'm sure there is also a good chunk of tech workers
| who are indeed useful idiots who think they are the last link
| in the chain.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from
| users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians
| couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political
| means?
|
| Makes me think of the most sobering line I ever saw in a museum
| (Berlin): The biggest atrocities were committed by people with
| a spreadsheet and a performance goal.
| trumpdong wrote:
| It should be present tense. Especially in Berlin.
| itishappy wrote:
| What defines a bad tech vs a good tech? Similar arguments can
| be made for most research including nuclear fusion, AI,
| vaccines, space, polymers, combustion engines, electric motors,
| semiconductors...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What defines a bad tech vs a good tech?
|
| Good tech empowers individuals and subverts authorities,
| corporations, oligarchs and governments. Bad tech subverts
| individuals and empowers authorities, corporations, oligarchs
| and governments.
| SidewaysView wrote:
| Online is terrible for kids. Online is terrible for adults! Too
| many people don't have the agency or social skills to manage
| themselves. Conspiracy theories, anarchists and libertarians,
| misinformation and disinformation, weirdos and beardos and
| creeps of all description. People end up believing all kinds of
| things that just aren't real.
|
| It'll be best for society if things are a little more
| regulated, a little safer. And I'm happy to help where I can.
| Listening to the terminally online about it would be
| counterproductive.
| GZGavinZhao wrote:
| They're ultimately employees. Their employers hire them to
| write the code that the employers want. If they don't write the
| code, employers just fire them and move on to hire some other
| people to write code. As much as how ethically questionable it
| is, it's still very rare that people would give up their jobs
| to defend their viewpoint.
| trumpdong wrote:
| The practical alternative is sabotage. Write the code poorly,
| with obvious bugs. Don't sign the full URL so the user can
| just delete the drm=true parameter.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Meanwhile Signal Corporation keeps trying to connect to
| updates2.signal.org even when the app is not being used.
| "Automatic updates", remote code execution by default with no
| option to disable
|
| Silicon Valley has its own ideas of what "privacy" and
| "surveillance" mean
|
| To those folks, it does not mean privacy from Silicon Valley
| companies
|
| The Signal app will keep on trying to connect to the mothership
|
| Because to the people who work on Silicon Valley software, that
| is not a privacy violation
|
| The battle is over _control_ over software not privacy or
| surveillance. The later is not possible without the former
|
| Silicon Valley does not want the user to have control any more
| than they want the government to have control
| trumpdong wrote:
| use simplex then. Signal is what it is and it's not trying to
| be something it's not. E.g. use of phone numbers.
| briandear wrote:
| Why do people vote for large, strong governments that are able
| to take the power you suggest Tech is enabling them to take?
| komali2 wrote:
| It's starting to feel like ethno-nationalism is the answer.
|
| See: the PRC. Support for surveillance is allegedly high.
| Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances where
| they don't need to worry about said surveillance (e.g., when
| they're vacationing in Japan and I want to pester someone and
| practice my mandarin), they generally like it. Makes them
| feel safe.
|
| The CPC has sold them on a vision of them as members of the
| state-race "Chinese" (which is not really an ethnicity any
| more than "American" is) and the surveillance as a thing that
| keeps them and their "Chinese" lifestyle safe from non-
| Chinese. Uighurs have to be extra surveilled until they're
| also Chinese, which, many are now according to the CPC.
|
| So PRC citizens feel safe and cozy among in the country for
| "their people," not realizing this whole ethnonationalist
| concept is at best 100 years old, maybe even younger. During
| the Qing dynasty, there's a whole hell of a lot of people
| that think of themselves as "Chinese" that _definitely_ weren
| 't by the dynastic government.
|
| I smell similar happening in Russia, the USA, and Israel,
| with State support. It looks like right wing groups are
| trying to pull it off in the UK and Germany as well.
| Levitz wrote:
| >Anecdotally, talking to PRC citizens in circumstances
| where they don't need to worry about said surveillance
| (e.g., when they're vacationing in Japan and I want to
| pester someone and practice my mandarin)
|
| I'm not sure you are aware that China has monitoring
| operations for its citizens _outside_ China.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I remember piping up about all those things. But the excuses
| were everywhere.
|
| - Oh but you can turn it off so it's no issue (secure boot).
| Well yeah but more and more stuff just won't run then (eg iOS
| apps on Mac). It will become the norm to stay inside the fuzzy
| walled garden just like it already is on phones. And if you
| stray you will just be blocked from any app that does something
| useful.
|
| - But companies need to be sure you are who you say you are
| (attestation). Yes but they will abuse that power if they can
| profit from it.
| jmyeet wrote:
| People forget how we got here. Whatever your philosophical
| stance, history has shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that
| giving most people complete control over their device has been
| an unmitigiated disaster.
|
| Scams, stealing credentials, stealing money, botnets, viruses,
| losses of data, ransomware, etc etc etc.
|
| What is better for most people is a locked down device like an
| iPad where each app has to be approved and they're incredibly
| sandboxed. 20 years ago we had people installing malware
| because a strange email promised them smiley face emojis.
|
| When we transitioned from the single-user ODS-based Windows
| model (ie Win98/SE were the last of that line) to a multi-user
| restricted privilege model based on NT 3.0/3.5/4.0 (first as
| WinXP) it was meant to be better but privilege escalation was
| still too easy because of what users had become accustomed to
| doing and of what was needed to install software you
| downloaded.
|
| Things like an App Store (on Mac and eventually on Windows) are
| actually a good thing. Signed apps are a good thing. Having to
| go out of your way to install unsigned apps is a good thing.
|
| I really abhor "technical libertarians" because they never
| address these issues. It's all principle-based while ignoring
| reality, human nature and whether or not unfettered access
| gives users something they even need.
|
| Also, other people pay the price. Where do you think these DDoS
| attacks come from? Compromised Windows PCs (primarily).
| autoexec wrote:
| > Whatever your philosophical stance, history has shown
| beyond a shadow of a doubt that giving most people complete
| control over their device has been an unmitigiated disaster.
|
| I'd argue that giving governments and corporations control
| over our devices has also been an unmitigiated disaster. You
| could say the same thing about any kind of freedom though
| couldn't you? Freedom is so dangerous after all. Look at all
| the problems it's caused. Giving up all of our freedoms would
| surely make the world better right?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| People often misuse freedom. The answer to that is not to
| take freedom away, but to educate people on how to use their
| freedom, and only restrict those who have proven to be unable
| to handle it. Let's say your argument, that clueless users
| getting infected are an externality upon everyone else and
| thus they need to be locked down for everyone's good, is
| accurate (though I don't think it is). In that case, why
| should the majority of intelligent people be made to suffer
| because a minority can't handle the freedom? No, in that case
| the correct thing to do is to have a mechanism by which we
| identify people who are hurting others, and restrict them.
| Nobody would countenance the idea that because some people
| are irresponsible drivers, cars must therefore be unavailable
| and everyone pushed into using public transit. But that is
| the exact same logic people try to use to crack down on
| freedom of use for computers, even though they are nowhere
| near as dangerous as a car.
|
| > I really abhor "technical libertarians"...
|
| Well, I abhor those who try to take freedom away from people.
| So the feeling is mutual I guess.
| trumpdong wrote:
| What if the "clueless" users are 99.99% of the users?
| fartfeatures wrote:
| Why as an Apple user in the UK am I considered too dumb
| to use a 3rd party app store but if I were 30 miles away
| in France I would be considered intelligent enough to
| cope? Because this was never about my safety. It was
| about their 30% as correctly supposed above.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I am guessing they thought "My kids are depending on me to pay
| our mortgage and buy food"
| autoexec wrote:
| Yet they stopped thinking as soon as their wallet got
| involved and never considered that their kids also need
| freedom and the ability to use technology that works for them
| and not against them. Selfishness and greed are the problem.
| The kids are just a convenient but shallow way to deflect
| from that.
| trumpdong wrote:
| Idk, sounds better than being dead, just in my opinion.
| autoexec wrote:
| Nobody implemented DRM with a gun pointed at their heads,
| and anyone capable of implementing harmful technology has
| the skills to work on something else for lots of money
| implementing other things. It was always a choice.
| fluoridation wrote:
| That you could work someplace else doesn't mean someplace
| else is hiring someone with your skills, or that you
| could afford a pay cut if necessary.
| userbinator wrote:
| Or more likely these days, "I need to stay employed so I can
| legally stay in this country."
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from
| users to corporations, by technical means...
|
| Your argument is flawed here. The truth is that measures such
| as secure boot _do have_ real security benefits. They can be
| misused, like any technology can be, but that is not an
| inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is implemented.
| And as the developers of such measures are not a monolith, it
| is unfair to paint them as merely trying to exert control. I 'm
| not going to argue that some involved parties were trying to
| exert control. But lots of others were trying to implement a
| genuine security benefit for the users, and they don't deserve
| to be reprimanded as if they were some kind of apologists for
| authoritarianism.
| trumpdong wrote:
| There is no difference between the tech and how it is
| implemented.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> They can be misused, like any technology can be, but that
| is not an inherent feature of the tech, but rather how it is
| implemented. And as the developers of such measures are not a
| monolith, it is unfair to paint them as merely trying to
| exert control._
|
| You can argue that exerting control is a _good thing_ - a
| clever scam artist convinces a vulnerable user to paste an
| attack at the command line, and the benevolent OS vendor uses
| their control makes the attack impossible, no matter what the
| scam artist tells the user to do. A greedy software maker
| produces a spyware-laden, cookie-stealing update and asks the
| user to enter the admin password to install the update. The
| benevolent OS vendor uses their control to make such
| malicious updates impossible, even with the administrator
| password entered.
|
| But even if the control is being used exclusively for good,
| _it is, ultimately, control_.
| trumpdong wrote:
| There's a selection effect. Some people thought these were bad
| and didn't implement them. Other people thought they weren't
| bad and implemented them. We use implementations from the
| latter group of people. Obviously.
|
| Same thing is happening with age verification. We had the
| chance to just ask if the user is over 18 when setting the
| computer up, but we didn't do that so they're using a solution
| from a mass surveillance company instead.
| stodor89 wrote:
| > Did they think
|
| Pretty sure they didn't do a lot of thinking.
| cryptonector wrote:
| It isn't TPMs nor attestation nor DRM making this possible. It
| isn't secure boot either. It's walled gardens with secure boot
| -yes, secure boot- that the consumer can't bypass. Secure
| booting isn't the problem in an enterprise setting -- of course
| we _want secure booting_ in the enterprise. It's consumer
| devices that can't be jail-broken that are the problem.
| Although even then, the silly age verification laws and the
| people pushing them don't even care if the OSes run on walled
| garden devices.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| Corporate devices that can't be jailbroken are also a
| problem. It's a right-to-repair and e-waste issue.
| cryptonector wrote:
| But they are not walled gardens.
| MrDrMcCoy wrote:
| I would posit that any device that can't be jailbroken is
| a walled garden. Whether the wall is made of an app store
| or an operating system, it's not yours if you can't do
| what you want with it.
| cryptonector wrote:
| But corporate devices can boot any OS you might like.
|
| Sure, they have MEs that maybe you can't disable, but you
| can firewall them.
|
| Server kit is just not like consumer kit. Even laptops
| are [still, for now] a lot better than smartphones in
| this regard.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And yet you can secure boot Linux
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Although even then, the silly age verification laws and
| the people pushing them don 't even care if the OSes run on
| walled garden devices._
|
| Believe me, the people writing the age verification laws care
| a great deal _whether the age verification can be turned off
| by the device owner_.
|
| The whole exercise would be pointless if teenage device
| owners could turn the censorship off.
| photios wrote:
| These people have names and addresses. Getting them out in the
| open will help a lot.
|
| I'm not saying we should lynch them, but a good deal of public
| shaming is in order. Who knows, their kids might pick a
| different vocation.
| verisimi wrote:
| They (developers) did what they did for money. Just like
| everyone else. And they would do it all again.
|
| At a corporate level, no one cares about lots of freedoms,
| except if it is a selling point.
|
| If 'keeping freedoms' _is_ a selling point then the ideal
| position is to gain the kudos of appearing to support this
| _whilst also_ getting the benefits of the loss of freedoms. Why
| not get both?
| jjav wrote:
| > Did they think
|
| Having argued these topics for decades, I think that a lot of
| people just truly can't foresee the inevitable consequences. I
| don't know why, the consequences seem obvious but because they
| are not spelled out, many people say it won't happen.
| circadian wrote:
| Kudos to signal for coming out on side with this, and quickly. I
| only hope that this stance is quickly picked up as a counterpoint
| to the ever-so-strong narrative that more hastily concocted
| sledge-hammer legislation is the best step forward.
|
| This step forward is instead of building understanding of, and
| solutions for, the erosion of communities, trust and empathy for
| others. I feel these things might (MIGHT!) be overlooked symptoms
| of poor investment, policies and governance for healthy society.
| Crikey, perhaps I shouldn't try and call that into account, it
| sounds like I might be cynical about politics. Oh dear...
| purpleidea wrote:
| Signal refuses to answer: Why won't they release/open source all
| of their backend infra automation scripts/tools/etc...
|
| There's no reasonable reason why a 501(c)(3) won't put this out
| there to make sure there's redundancy so we could built an
| alternate network if they're compromised by some gag order.
| Chu4eeno wrote:
| Probably because its leadership seems to have been taken over
| by more politically and less technically inclined people (for
| better and/or worse) who don't understand why it matters.
|
| The trade is we get (hopefully) people very dedicated to
| keeping the org developing the stuff alive and well-funded, and
| gaining mainstream acceptance/attention.
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Signal did such things always. They delayed years to clarify
| licensing to allow iOS forks. And hid server source code for
| a year to hide MobileCoin integration.
| ageedizzle wrote:
| Is Signal compromised?
| autoexec wrote:
| Signal just can't be trusted at this point. They're probably
| compromised. My theory is that that's why the very first line
| of their privacy is a lie saying that it's designed to never
| collect or store sensitive data when they keep a list of your
| contacts forever in the cloud (and in some cases now even
| message contents).
| big85 wrote:
| So, in this order:
|
| 1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to
| verify your age before viewing adult content
|
| 2. It applies to social media too
|
| 3. It applies to your operating system too
|
| 4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be
| powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send
| your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit
| nudity. It must be capable of running in real-time, presumably,
| to work on Facetime calls and such.
|
| Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and older
| devices. Excellent news for Google, Apple, and Microsoft, bad for
| Linux and alternative operating systems. Remember when schools
| handed out Raspberry Pis?
|
| Edit: And they are asking for this to be implemented for free in
| three months, because nobody knows how software engineering
| works. Great job
| Bender wrote:
| With just enough fascistic pressure maybe Usenet can be great
| again. Just have to figure out how to filter known good content
| from the spam which I think can be solved with OpenPGP
| identities. Otherwise Tor and download managers for the patient
| people. Static generated galleries of pictures and videos
| spread across thousands of small sites. Some downsides of
| pushing people into dark corners is that all regulation goes
| out the window along with some tax revenue. Loss of tax revenue
| may be one way to get their attention.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >Next step, certainly to outlaw most operating systems and
| older devices.
|
| They won't have to.
|
| Instead, they'll just make some new _essentially mandatory tech
| which older devices cannot run_ - update or stop existing,
| societally.
|
| ----
|
| Phones and email already seem this way (i.e. "required") - from
| my perspective as an internet user whom _doesn 't_ use
| phone/email, personally. Nobody believes me when answering "no
| phone, no email" - free-est man alive - their loss is
| disbelief.
| pesus wrote:
| I am very curious how you make it in current society without
| a phone or email. It does sound incredibly freeing, but I'm
| definitely having trouble comprehending how it works.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| "everybody wins"
| madaxe_again wrote:
| This isn't just your photos. This is all content displayed on
| the device, all content captured by the camera - everything.
| Full take. GCHQ must be wetting themselves.
| londons_explore wrote:
| We all know this is the first political position. They'll
| walk back half of it, and what remains will appear to be a
| compromise, but was what was intended all along.
| subscribed wrote:
| We all also know they know they will be absolutely ravaged
| in the next GE, at the scale of the Tories.
|
| The question - why hand that to Farage and his far right?
| Is Keir Starmer a far right operative in Labour? His track
| revord would suggest so, but do we have any receipts?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Incompetence. I don't remember when there was last a
| competent PM or government - not in my lifetime,
| certainly, and I am no spring chicken.
| cryptonector wrote:
| We should all write on our devices private nastygrams to
| whomever is assigned to watching our devices. The least we
| can do is mock them.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Does the law really require third party? Because having on-
| device functions configurable by parents doesn't seem terrible
| at all.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| That's not what the UK is demanding. They want client side
| scanning malware that breaks DRM, circumvents encryption and
| VPNs, and bypasses other security features in order to scan
| everything visible on your screen.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Given the PM's association with a certain good friend of
| Epstein's, it's hard not to wonder if child _protection_ is
| really the point.
| trumpdong wrote:
| I'm happy the UK government finally decided to outlaw DRM.
| dgroshev wrote:
| It absolutely doesn't. However, the argument doesn't work
| when it's about connecting the "is the user a kid" bit to the
| existing and constantly running object recognition (phone
| cameras already run skin detection all the time to set white
| balance), so people invent "third parties" and "report people
| to authorities".
| alkonaut wrote:
| But "Is the user a kid" is already a switch that I (a
| parent) switch on in the device and that the kid in
| question can't switch off. That bit seems like a solved
| problem?
|
| Why would anything else even be needed in that space? The
| interest of parents and tech companies likely align here.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| So this is ill defined.
|
| However the original proposal was pretty much aimed at phone
| manufactures. It is perfectly possible for current gen phones
| (and previous gen) to detect nudes in camera. Infact most
| phones do that already in order to adjust the exposure, its
| just you dont see that.
|
| The problem for the UK is that they are not legislating
| technically. The original proposal was tightly scoped. The
| problem was, because of the way government runs in the UK it
| was shelved. Now that its not, the original scoping has been
| mashed, as its been blended with an child social media ban
| (quite what makes them think social media is ok for elder
| millennials++ is also interesting)
|
| If they actually decided to make laws like they did for
| building materials or cars (ie all phones must conform to EU/BS
| standard x/y/z) then life would be much easier for everyone.
| But alas we have forgotten how to govern. something must be
| done _now_
| OnlyNoobsRunJS wrote:
| Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps installed
| on their fingerprinted tracking device and 2fa with their phone
| number, and have no idea what 'sensors off' does.
|
| Palpable irony present when a chat provider whom requires
| personally identifiable information to use their service
| complains about privacy...
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Same people screaming 1984 have five authenticator apps
| installed
|
| "Yet you participate in society. Curious!"
|
| https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
| Terr_ wrote:
| Follow-up/P.S.: There's a Doctorow piece [0] which I think is
| relevant here. It's about how individual refusal (e.g. to
| quit your job at an employer when they require an
| authenticator-app) is an inferior substitute for "real"
| politics on both a practical and emotional level.
|
| > It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or
| shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You
| don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. [...]
| Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if
| you've been convinced that the only way to change the world
| is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays
| terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and
| neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong.
| [... and] every political disappointment in your life is down
| to your friends' personal defects.
|
| [0] https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/21/purity-culture/
| pesus wrote:
| Personally, I only have authenticator apps because my job
| requires them. I don't see any contradiction in being opposed
| to things you're forced into.
| HiPhish wrote:
| What's wrong with two-factor authentication? TOTP work without
| any network connection and only requires synchronized clocks to
| work. You could even do TOTP with pend and paper if you wanted
| (and were fast enough), no computer needed at all.
| big85 wrote:
| Two-factor is one thing. They're mandating client-side scanning
| in every operating system. This was previously rejected for
| obvious privacy reasons.
|
| There are already phones with an anti-nudity feature as a
| parental control option, but the key there is that it's
| optional. The major pivot with age verification is that all
| devices treat all users as a child until they identify
| themselves with a third party. This allows a rhetorical paradox
| that the controls are only for children, when they apply to
| adults too by default.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| Have they never heard of "the boy who cried wolf"?
|
| First of all, age verification is not mass surveillance, it is
| possible to verify your age without disclosing who you are to the
| site you're visiting, and without disclosing what site you
| visited to the government. There are even age verification
| services (and I do despise them fully, this should be a
| government provided service!) that use only facial features to
| determine your age (you can call it surveillance, but not
| "mass").
|
| See, the thing is, no matter how good your intent is, no matter
| how noble your cause, if you use lies and half-truths to further
| your argument or resist change, it only serves to undermine it
| all. For example "They do not deserve surveillance," is so
| disingenuous, if a site is required to verify age, the only
| children whose age might be verified are those who might have
| been exposed to that harmful content otherwise anyways, they're
| not being selected for surveillance, no one is trying to spy on
| children (or could possibly benefit from doing so using this
| method, since it is so unreliable), but they're framing it as it
| is so.
|
| This isn't like "DRM" or "the nsa is spying on everyone", and
| there is a big difference between Signal (how are they involved
| in all this? is this just opportunistic politicking?) being
| required to verify peer-to-peer messaging from a porn site or or
| a live-cam site for sex workers requiring both parties to be age
| verified (where children do get trafficked!!).
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't like the idea, i really hate it but
| the prevailing positions in areas of the internet like here is so
| irrational and unreasonable.
|
| You can't flash your private parts at children, you can't take
| children to a strip club, they're required by law to check IDs
| (even night clubs are!!). if that same interaction happens on the
| internet, suddenly no age verification is needed?
|
| Is it because this problem has been left unaddressed for so long
| that so many are just too used to "the old way of doing things"
| despite the ever increasing human suffering caused by lack of
| regulations and laws like this?
|
| I hope legislators grow a pair and stand up to these tech-
| crusaders who will burn down the world so long as they feel their
| corner is safe and secure.
|
| Shame on everyone who refuses to have a nuanced discussion on
| this and instead takes an all-or-nothing position against any
| sort of legislature that would reduce (not eliminate) the harm
| being done. To mean, such people are no different than catholics,
| teachers, administrators, and anyone else in a position to do
| something about harm against children but turned the other way
| because their little world would be too shaken otherwise. Hiding
| behind "mah privacy!!" doesn't absolve you of the responsibility
| to at least attempt to be nuanced about it, at least propose an
| actual solution instead of just "I don't what the solution is,
| but not this" or "parents are at fault, I don't care" or
| something lazy like that. I wish I didn't know that when it comes
| to their own interests, wannabe technocrats like these are
| ingenious in developing tech like homomorphic encryption,
| differential privacy and zero-knowledge-proofs; this isn't about
| anyone's privacy or mass surveillance, it's about preservation of
| the status quo, apathy and faulty slippery-slope fallacy
| thinking.
| big85 wrote:
| > it is possible to verify your age without disclosing who you
| are to the site you're visiting, and without disclosing what
| site you visited to the government.
|
| I can't believe people are really okay with a system where you
| have to show your real face to access websites. Cameras on
| phones went from a novelty to a government mandate so you can
| be observed.
|
| There are various other potential methods to verify one's age,
| all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-
| knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing,
| physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The only
| permitted ones require your to link your real-life identity.
| This is a huge boon to the intelligence services and law
| enforcement.
|
| Even among the few permitted verification methods, there are
| obstacles. Each site usually provides only one verification
| method at one verification provider. You may have to trust a
| company you never heard of before. Sometimes the photo fails
| (maybe their system thinks you don't look old enough) and they
| ask for ID too, or the photo fails and you are locked out of
| verification. Some services only allow credit card verification
| (e.g. Steam), so if you have poor credit you aren't able to
| even view the store page despite being of age.
|
| What I say is, we don't need any of this. For thirty or so
| years we had client-side optional Parental Controls, and it
| worked fine. Many adult sites voluntarily use a <meta
| name="rating"> tag to ensure sites are correctly identified.
| The ability of adults to access adult content was not impeded.
| Parental Controls work better than verification because 1) many
| sites will not deploy age verification, and 2) it's trivial to
| overcome photo-based ID by holding your device up to a picture
| of an adult on a television set.
| dgroshev wrote:
| > There are various other potential methods to verify one's
| age, all of which are forbidden by OFCOM. Account age, zero-
| knowledge proofs, key signing, some kind of OAuth thing,
| physical tokens that require proof of age to buy, etc. The
| only permitted ones require your to link your real-life
| identity.
|
| This is just not true. See 4.17 here, for example [1]
|
| [1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/c
| ons...
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| > The only permitted ones require your to link your real-life
| identity. This is a huge boon to the intelligence services
| and law enforcement.
|
| Then let's talk about THAT!! why is that not the discussion
| instead of "nah, we'll find a solution some other day, for
| now, let's not solve anything"??
|
| > Even among the few permitted verification methods,
|
| These laws are still being debated, what's permitted has not
| been decided, why is Signal not advocating for a privacy
| friendly alternative. Why are our options lose all privacy to
| the most horrible people ever who will do us harm versus let
| the children suffer!
|
| > You may have to trust a company you never heard of before.
|
| Why do I have to? Why can't the government itself issue
| something as simple as a timestamp CA certificate signature
| for a secret that expires every few weeks, requiring
| facial/ID verification directly with the government to
| generate a new secret? the site only needs to verify that the
| signature is correct. a signed token you show random sites.
| and this is the most naive idea i brought up for discussion
| without things like zkp even considered. Lawmakers aren't
| being told by the likes of Signal "there is a better way to
| do this, let's discuss" they're being told "ignore what all
| the scientists, research, law enforcement, social workers are
| telling you so we can watch porn in secret".
|
| > For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental
| Controls, and it worked fine.
|
| It absolutley did not work fine! the toll of human suffering
| is inexcusably abominable! I shudder in confusion between
| whose head i should rip off or why this damn planet hasn't
| been burned down to ashes already at the very thought of all
| that has been perpetrated using this technology. The internet
| multiplied and empowered many things, chief amongst them is
| human cruelty and apathy.
|
| > For thirty or so years we had client-side optional Parental
| Controls, and it worked fine....
|
| Save your breath, even amongst those who genuinely wish to do
| well, they have employees and user generated content they
| can't keep up with. There is no excuse for this. Forget about
| the tiny span in human history that is the past 30 years. How
| many people died of industrial accident at the begining of
| the industrial revolution, how many people died because of
| car accidents before all the car safety and traffic laws were
| in place. Take that and multiply that by like a billion and
| that might come close to painting a fair picture of the
| internet. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it
| doesn't happen. The internet isn't special, it's just a tool,
| a technology that connects people. Except billions are
| connected, and now they can abuse and harm each other across
| national borders , timezones and continents and maximize
| their profit from it.
|
| HN and tech-world in general is like any other industry that
| caused massive suffering until it was regulated. I keep
| making the same simple comparison of a stripper IRL vs live
| cam porn over the internet, and no one in this thread even
| wants to attack that simple example that I picked because it
| isn't overly sensationalized and universally accepted that
| laws should force strip clubs to check IDs in any country on
| the planet. I didn't bring up pedos, human trafficking,
| revenge porn and so much more in between. and that's just the
| sexual dramatic stuff, not the seemingly harmless stuff that
| is easier to brush away and dismiss.
|
| People can see your face and make decisions when they
| interact with you IRL, they can't over the internet. The
| problem is huge and the fact that the internet has been young
| and unregulated does not excuse looking the other way.
|
| I can't believe I'm defending politicians' (however ill
| intended) agendas against HN/tech-world. but here we are. If
| things progress this route, I would even cheer as everyone
| (self included) loses any semblance of privacy or democracy
| because the alternative was these masses keeping looking the
| other way at human suffering instead of finding sensible
| middle grounds, especially when the tech is there. This is
| insane to me! things crypto-bros (both kind!) have been
| trying to make main stream like zkp and homomorphic
| encryption and so much more can actually solve a critical
| fault of the internet, and the choice is to just let people
| suffer instead of risking a potential slipper slope.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| There's no such thing as private or anonymous age verification.
| It doesn't exist.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| zero knowledge proofs exist, don't they? also it matters
| "private from whom, and what". You can make what sites you
| visit private from the government, and your identity a secret
| from the site, but the inverse isn't true, the government
| would know the identity, and the site would obviously know
| someone visited it.
|
| The problem with this whole thing is the expectation of
| privacy online for interactions where their IRL equivalents
| don't have such an expectation. Even if there was no harm
| being done to anyone, it isn't a rational argument if you
| subscribe to the ideal of equal treatment under the law.
| Magnusmaster wrote:
| Zero knowledge proofs exist in theory, but none of these
| age verification laws that are introduced use them,
| probably on purpose. I'm certain that every government will
| want to know what sites everyone visits.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| What the UK is trying to do here is evil and authoritarian. Its
| the sort of thing people brushed off as conspiracy theories not
| long ago. It is completely and utterly unacceptable.
| brikym wrote:
| 100%. The public tend to get very angry when police kill
| innocent people. So the govt want to squash any uprising which
| is exactly what they've been doing by taking down any video
| that allows people against the status quo to coalesce and
| coordinate. They want people to very energetic about voting for
| one of a few awful options which amount to /dev/null.
| Morromist wrote:
| I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of...
| knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder
| rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so
| incredibly afraid.
|
| They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice
| and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live
| there except the dystopian tech and business models they're
| developing ends up crossing the seas.
| windowliker wrote:
| How long until we find out the politicians have written in an
| exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my
| pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't
| unfounded.
| iugtmkbdfil834 wrote:
| Meh, at this point it is pretty much standard clause. They are
| all copying each other's homework.
| t0lo wrote:
| At least we all know who western politicians are controlled by
| now and why they are really doing this.
| Havoc wrote:
| The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making
| varispeed wrote:
| and civil service is blindly following orders.
| ksec wrote:
| You should watch Yes Minister. They certainly don't.
| varispeed wrote:
| They do. The tenders don't write themselves. The scale of
| corruption is unprecedented, yet nothing - as it seems - is
| being reported or even questioned by civil service.
| ksec wrote:
| I can tell you they don't.
|
| They do question it when they don't agree with it. Which
| is to say they do agree with a lot of things being done.
| And that is as far as I can say.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their
| government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy.
| Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the
| only way the UK government will learn a lesson.
| Morromist wrote:
| I'm sure when this law goes through they won't stop and will
| shortly be lining up some even crazier surviellance tech.
|
| I'm thinking something that automatically scans your computer
| for porn or other things, like ripped film mp4s and sends it
| to the goverment to be analysed.
|
| Or perhaps little gps trackers that children are mandated to
| wear at all times.
| EmbarrassedHelp wrote:
| Nothing will ever be enough for the anti-privacy fanatics
| pushing for this. They will always demand more.
| jamesu wrote:
| Its been getting pretty bad for a long while now. On the topic
| of UK privacy, there's an interesting requirement that if you
| are a "data controller" processing "personal" data for "non-
| exempt" purposes, you need to register with the ICO to go on
| the register. Even can apply to individuals.
|
| Sounds great until you realize anyone that does that
| effectively gets their residential address publicly doxxed and
| archived by archive.org (unless they can use a separate company
| address or spend money on a po box). And to make it worse,
| unless you have an obvious named company it's basically useless
| for looking up data controllers.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Surveillance is not education, and it is education that will reap
| long term improvement.
|
| Education is hard but effective whilst surveillance is easy and
| ineffective. Guess which option politicians take?
| greenleafone7 wrote:
| They know. That's not why they are doing it.
| leavenotracks wrote:
| I didn't mind Starmer but this is finally giving me the leg up
| onto the anti-Starmer bandwagon.
|
| What a dreadful legacy to leave - a sad attempt to get the
| biggest possible bang for the smallest possible buck. Also, 3
| months? Perhaps that is as long as he expects to be pm.
| varispeed wrote:
| Probably Palantir folks are giving him an offer he can't
| refuse. One last push before retirement into the sunset.
| varispeed wrote:
| I am ready to receive Apple's or Microsoft's AI buttplug with
| government spying software installed.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| The good news, it's inserted and installed. The bad, it doesn't
| bring pleasure.
| coretx wrote:
| You don't give a stranger the keys to your house but we run their
| code every day. This is wrong regardless of there being
| surveillance present. We all know where it went wrong and can't
| say we did not know.
| briandear wrote:
| This is a country that has arrested people for social media
| posts. It's also a crime in the UK to offend someone.
|
| Orwell identified the genetic defect in the British genome 80
| years ago.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>This is a country that has arrested people for social media
| posts
|
| And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with
| those arrests in majority of the cases.
|
| >>It's also a crime in the UK to offend someone.
|
| Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely
| not true.
| dgroshev wrote:
| This is really disingenuous coming from Signal who pioneered
| secure compute architecture for a number of useful features
| [1][2]. On-device checks are no more "surveillance" than Signal's
| private contact discovery is, and the same slippery slope
| argument applies there.
|
| It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of
| "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because
| that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android)
| searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall
| any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to
| "reporting people to government authorities".
|
| The "cover-ups" link right in the beginning is a real mask-off
| moment though. This is not a measured statement informed by the
| reality of modern Britain. It's an American view informed by the
| twitter cesspool and divisive rhetoric of the far right. It's a
| real shame to see Signal falling so low.
|
| [1]: https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
|
| [2]: https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
| Nevermark wrote:
| Surveillance replaces ostensible individual fringe threats with a
| clear dangerous pervasive and (for practical purposes)
| irreversible threat that monotonically aggregates increasing
| centralized leverage over every aspect our lives, direct and
| indirect.
|
| Knowledge is power. Forced revelation of our inner lives puts
| each of us in a position of vulnerability.
|
| Even when "not abused", the very real latent threat actively
| takes away freedoms of thought and action.
|
| It is extreme abuse.
|
| It undermines any sense that the state works for the people, when
| it operationally embodies a maximalized one-way threat over all
| citizens.
|
| AI collation exponentially compounds the threat, the passive and
| active damage.
|
| One of the wisest ethical/safety concepts ever: "The right of the
| people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
| effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be
| violated."
|
| Democracy that sets up the levers of total autocracy is the
| greatest possible perversion and threat to democracy. Democracy
| only works as long as it recognizes government is the greatest
| threat to freedom. And that strict limitations on its power over
| citizens is the only defense.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Governments have been pushing surveillance since the earliest
| days of the consumer Internet.
|
| The earliest example I can remember is the Clipper Chip. That was
| dead three years after it was proposed.
|
| This current idiocy - proposed by a PM who promoted a _very_ good
| friend of the most notorious paedophile in recent history to
| ambassador, against the recommendations of the civil service - is
| similarly doomed. Three months to implement huge changes to every
| OS on the planet? Like that 's even remotely likely.
| smashah wrote:
| Not even Saudi Arabia does the kinda draconian bullshit the UK is
| doing nowadays. This is what happens when your government is
| occupied by foreign agent traitors.
| vivzkestrel wrote:
| - does anyone have actual studies or reports or arxiv papers or
| something that actually concludes that surveillance is not
| safety?
|
| - how do you know that it doesnt cut down crimes or deter
| criminals or make identifying criminals easier?
|
| - no seriously think of me as the stupidest person on the planet
| and explain to me why everyone is super duper paranoid about
| surveillance
|
| - what other methods do you recommend for tracking , catching
| criminals, terrorists and anti social elements?
| themoose8 wrote:
| Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-
| device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance.
|
| The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite
| shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these
| images/streams.
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