UK unveils extremism blocking tool

The most surprising part of it is that it cost "only" 600k

I'm sure some other companies could have done it for 100x the cost using "proven technology" (that doesn't work for the problem at hand but sounds nice on paper)

The politician pushing this is the Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who is notorious even among UK politicians for her shaky grasp of technical matters. Anyone unfamiliar with her previous work is advised to Google "Amber Rudd encryption".

My guess: someone enterprising has seen her on TV and spotted a business opportunity. We should be grateful that they only took us for £600k.

Alternatively, this technology will ban loads of things that aren't extremist material.

To be honest I actually think if you just look at metadata (IPs, locations, services, usernames, previous uploads, titles, etc.) you can probably get the percentages they are talking about, at least until people start marking up the extremist material in different ways. The article even says they don't want to say how the technology works which implies it'll be trivial to get around.

* False positive rate probably depends on the cut-off for when something is flagged up for a humnan to review, but yeah, for all we know could be high

* No one quotes metrics based on the training set, so I'm sure these guys haven't done that.

* Most trained ML models don't require much computing at all to make predictions.

* The idea seems to be to flag content for review by a human, so there is a human in the loop

* No one is forcing anyone to use this... so there's no straight forward censorship issue

* maybe this does embarass bigger companies into explaining why they don't develop there own system to do this (removing IS content seems uncontroversial) - I presume this is why the Home Sec is really interested

I would think it unlikely that they have a comprehensive corpus of "offensive content", meaning they can't train/test their system on all of it. So really they're claiming "99.995% accuracy against what we already have". The real world experience will surely be different. You're right that the number is essentially meaningless.

Isn't that the difference between conservative and liberal politics? With the conservative Tories in power this is right up their alley.

Disclaimer: Am Swedish so have absolutely no idea

> Why does the UK seem to take 1984 as a guide book, rather than a cautionary tale?

Answering a rhetorical question here, but the UK is an unreconstructed colonial government left over from the Empire. In some ways it hasn't really adapted to the independence of Ireland, despite that being nearly 100 years ago. Instead it runs a system designed for control of "distant savages" from London on an absurdly reduced scale, like someone trying to use Kubernetes for their "hello world".

Three of the four home nations have colonial office structures. There's a reason there's no Secretary of State for England.

Even within England, places like Stoke-on-Trent and Great Yarmouth get treated as if they were in remote inaccessible jungle because you can't get there on an Oyster card.

Brexit is where we find out which of the bits of the British constitution are load-bearing.

(The PLO are not a proscribed organisation, but Hamas and the PKK are: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... )

It sounds from the BBC piece that this was trained specifically for Daesh content (part of the reason they don't want to say what the features they look for are), and as you say that is uncontroversially extremist content

This is an entirely predictable consequence of Theresa May being PM. She is just continuing the trajectory that she set when she was Home Sec. Troubling stuff.

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."

— Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

It's worrisome especially since UK has started classifying "serious crimes" as crimes that would normally be punishable by 6 months in prison. This greatly expands the ability to "legally" spy on everyone. The fact that the police has almost the same level of access to the mass surveillance tools as the GCHQ does is also extremely worrying, and it's something that should never be allowed in any country that portrays itself as a "democracy."

The courts have recently said they can't allow the cops this much power, but May has already pre-empted this with some purposefully half-baked "improvements" to the law, so that it looks like they're changing the law according to the ruling, but in really they're not. Then they'll have to be sued again, which will take a few more years. And then they'll pass some new half-baked improvements, and so on. It's a game they seem more than happy to play and drag out real reforms as much as possible.

May for instance knew the EU Court would ban that type of surveillance (the court's top advisor tends to signal how the ruling will go many months ahead), so she rushed IPA through Parliament like a month before the EU Court's decision. It's just goes to show how mischievous these guys are.

If you don't want things like this to continue to happen, refuse to work for companies who develop such technology --- and advocate for others to do the same. "Stop making the nooses on which to hang yourselves," as the saying goes.

And journalists as well... And that's implying the video detection works perfectly 100% of the time (which of course it won't).

Not for a moment. They give no numbers on false positives, and I imagine it’s astronomical.

If anything, I can see human moderators having to do more work to restore falsely flagged content than they currently have to do in removing content - but humans are lazy, so instead we’ll just see content going in the “extremism” bin, along with a mandatory report to the government, and people being taken to court for spreading extremist content, which is actually cat videos.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare in the making.

The key point for me is that Amber Rudd wouldn't rule out forcing tech companies to use it by law.

If the UK government are going to throw their weight behind a tool, they'd better hope that it's of sufficient quality to not be torn to shreds by some of the most technically competent people in the world.

The UK government has always had a hostile approach to technology. Now they want to give a tech company the chance to be hostile back, and if this tool doesn't work I can see a very public response to the legitimacy of this tool.

Nobody's worried about commies any more, not since the 90s.

But that's exactly the point, isn't it? To me, people trying to censor media are extremists, because of how I view the world. In the same way, they may flag me as an extremist because of this.

In the end, the problem with censorship is that it gets defined by someone who decides what is extremist and what's not.