Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Especially since this isn't some hand-wavy-future agreement, it comes into force (provisionally) in 3 days.
The secondary legislation is the bit that can be updated without requiring a new Act. If EU law is set up in the same manner, (and no doubt it will be similar as not only is this method good when meeting the ideal but useful for corrupt politicians to write law with less scrutiny) then the copy and paste is from secondary legislation. It may well need an update but that doesn't mean it can't be updated in the manner you advocate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegated_legislation_in_the_U...
Putting on my govt contractor hat, there may be a business opportunity here to set up VMs running Win95/Netscape Communicator for use by all the civil servants looking to comply with the law. Could charge a pretty penny too - it’ll all get budgeted as “Brexit compliance” costs.
The text quoted in the linked article in no way mandates the use of Netscape Navigator or Mozilla Mail - it merely references them as being widely distributed software capable of using RSA 1024 and SHA-1 (which it does appear to mandate).
That reminds me of FIPS for some reason...
Sometimes they don't exist - who maintains a sufficiently reputable list of safe email clients and web browsers?
Sometimes they exist but they carry some baggage - the FIPS standards for cryptography are probably fine, certainly better than hardcoding a couple of algorithm names, but they're also controlled by a foreign government.
Trying to keep lawyers in business it sounds like. “Intent” is one of the trickiest things in the world when you want it to be.
Commercial agreements are complicated, if you can re-use text, you do.
I suggest the lawyers may not view the 'examples of tech' as we do, after all 'Mozilla' is still a 'browser'.
Brexit was never so much about commercial terms, it was about political ones. There would be no 'Brexit' from the EEC.
So if the mandate is 'keep the trade stuff the same as possible so 28 different countries can just say yes quickly' - then this snafu would seem more than rational.
This, combined with "Signal hacked by cellebrite" last week (bullshit: https://signal.org/blog/cellebrite-and-clickbait/) means the BBC is on a roll lately.
Is the fact that parts of this agreement, that means so much for so many, is nonsensical worthy of a journalist's attention and a paper's publication?
> A more charitable interpretation is that the copy/paste isn't because the authors are hopelessly out of touch: instead, they're seeking to enable the direct re-use of all of the executive policy and judicial precedent which has developed around those legal particulars since they were first codified.
I mean honestly if this is the most egregious thing they have found in the agreement so far, it doesn't sound that bad (and I voted to remain)
On the one hand, a legislative body so recklessly plunged the nation into chaos through its own incompetence that the parliament changed hands thrice, each assembling with a new headmaster more incompetent than the last. That it, in its eminence and wise foresight, divined it prudent to carefully and diligently craft both in word and in meaning a strong and thorough treatise that on its face may seem silly yet upon only the most assiduous review is the machination of a truly divine primium mobile into which this nation will resume its normal course...
or..
the same bumbling octogenarian landed gentry that put everything from food security to the protestant catholic truce in jeopardy has somehow forgotten the year again.
Applying that razor, it seems a mite more likely to me than some octogenarians forgetfully bumbling their way into a thousand page agreement.
(I mean, I certainly am of the opinion that allowing that exchange to be uninterrupted is very important, but I also have that opinion about everything else Brexit wants to sever. I'm definitely not the person you need to convince that maintaining relationships with the EU is worth doing even if the cost is abiding by EU regulations.)
You answered your own question with "and perhaps to be desired if they are in the service of Britain". That's what sovereignty is and that's what the whole point has been - or at least a very large part - not to disrupt things for the sake of it. Does leaving the EU mean the UK must become its enemy?
Sovereignty apparently means whatever they want it to mean. If it means trashing the 80% of GDP devoted to services, strangling small businesses with expensive and time consuming red tape, trampling all over the goodwill that Europe used to have towards the UK by creating a hostile environment for EU citizens, and wasting everyone's time and money on vapid nationalistic posturing - then apparently that's "in the service of Britain."
Except it isn't. It's really only in the service of a corrupt, delusional, entitled, and frankly rather stupid rump aristocracy who saw their so-called sovereign power - and ability to evade taxes - being diminished by EU membership and decided to do something about it.
The idea that anyone could argue that low-rent cut and paste legal boilerplate is somehow evidence of national sovereignty is - really quite strange.
Indeed, which is why no one is. You’ve also got a reply that shows you’re incorrect on the tax claims, and the part about trashing the economy could be pulled from the writings of Nostradamus it needs that much clairvoyance and doom-mongering.
When I find I haven’t researched a topic properly and I’m demonising people based on malicious rumour and a mind reading ability I’m not even sure I’d want, that’s a good time to reconsider my opinion.
I would say this claim has been debunked, but in fairness the debunk is talking about reality while many of the most famous Leave campaigners have explicitly claimed they want to leave because of what they incorrectly believe about what EU law does.
https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-not-concealing-offshore-a...
What is the principle that determines that this treaty is worth signing but also determines that staying in the EU is not worth it?
(Maybe the answer is just "The people demanded Brexit out of a sense of identity, but they don't want Brexit as an actual policy, and so this preserves national morale without affecting anything else"?)
That question cannot be answered to your satisfaction without answering this:
> I guess I don't see the sense in which Britain did not already have its sovereignty and now gains it by this move.
The easy way to distinguish the level of sovereignty is not to compare UK/EU treaties before and after Brexit, but to compare them with the treaties and level of sovereignty between the EU and Canada or Japan. The treaty we’re discussing now is of that ilk, and clearly, the level of sovereignty of those countries is of a different level to that of one in the EU. Can the EU make a law that Japan must implement domestically? No, they are covered by international law as a sovereign state. Same goes for Canada, and now the UK.
The argument that the UK had full sovereignty in the EU was a popular argument by those opposed to leaving but it was obviously false, which is surely one of the reasons their arguments were unpersuasive. From 22:31 of Vernon Bognador's talk[0] at Yale (which is fascinating from start to finish, by the way):
> When Harold Macmillan sought to join, he encountered fundamental difficulties, difficulties which probably have never been resolved, and the essence of the problem was one of fitting Britain into a continental system whose assumptions about constitutions, politics and economics was so different from those held in Britain.
> The most fundamental problem, perhaps, was that of fitting a constitutional system based on the sovereignty of parliament and the absence of a codified constitution into one based on a written constitution, the separation of powers, and subordination of the legal systems of the member states to superior system of European law.
Vernon Bognador is British Research Professor at the Institute for Contemporary British History at King's College London and Professor of Politics at the New College of the Humanities. He is also Emeritus Professor of Politics and Government at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and has written several books on the British constitution and Brexit. He voted to remain in the EU[1].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMV9wSSLcCY
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/10/10/second-refer...
Edit: formatting, will I ever get used to this flavour of markdown? </lament>
You mean the electorate.
They didn't. Ever.
At no point have any of their many promises - to stay in the Single Market, to eliminate red tape, to pay an extra £350m a week to the NHS, to be able to trade globally without restrictions, to continue Erasmus membership, and on and on and on - been in any danger of coming true.
So the voters voted for the most ridiculous lies, and apparently that's "democracy."
No, it isn't. It's fraud - plain and simple.
The current state of democracy in countries like UK and US brings to mind that famous Churchill quote:
"No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
The common conclusion seems to be "oh, okay, guess that's it, then" rather than "maybe it's time to try something we haven't yet".
Elections are some times a democratic institution, but not always.
Democracy is government for and by the people. Considered decision making is a very important part of it.
By fetishising voting proponents of referendums cast aside all the important bits of democracy - consultation, consideration, listening to other views, expressing dissent.... and replace it with a brutal contest of propaganda.
Voting is important, but it is not the most improtant part of a democracy and if all yu have is voting and elections you do not have democracy.
Let's start with the simple case: in a democracy, people vote to affect policy. There's a referendum, and the will of the majority of the people voting in it determines the outcome. Easy.
Now, going in a more sci-fi direction, as a thought experiment: imagine that an evil mastermind invented mind control, and used it to ensure the majority of people voted a certain way in said referendum. Technically, I guess this would still be a democracy -- but in name only. In reality, the will of a single person determines the outcome.
Pulling back into reality, obviously we don't have mind control, nor an evil mastermind concocting schemes. We do know that if trusted people in positions of power abuse that power to outright lie, and spend very large sums of money to pursue a specific goal, then the will of these people will end up having a noticeable effect on the will of the population. If someone manipulated you and convinced you of something that wasn't true for their own hidden goals, is it still really your will that you're enacting by voting for it? or have you been tricked into enacting someone else's will?
So while by a surface definition of democracy, any of the above processes are democratic because they allow people to vote, a functional democracy relies on a well-informed populace -- we knew this even in Jefferson's time ("wherever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government").
If you tell people R will give them S, and they vote to get S, but it turns out R doesn't give S at all and you knew it all along; that doesn't mean people voted to get R. They voted to get S, giving them R is not therefore "technically" democracy (or any other weasel way of saying it).
The current PM was one of the relatively few political voices supporting Brexit.
Seems that with enough money from oligarchs you can make enough lies stick to swing a simple majority.
We have to try and move on from this; the next decade is going to make some rich people incredibly wealthy at the expensive of many, many people becoming poorer in the UK - not just by financial measures, but in terms of opportunity, health, quality of life. It's grim.
I often wonder what Douglas Adams would have thought of all this. The quintessential intersection of proud Englishman and citizen of the world.
He would have had some choice words for this whole mess I am sure.
Not only will some corps leave for Ireland taking their jobs with them, not only will small businesses and consultants find it far harder to sell services in the EU, not only will the UK be excluded from cutting edge research programs and funding, and not only will UK students be excluded from the international Erasmus scheme - but the current government literally has no idea why these losses even matter, never mind why it's important to mitigate them.
The absence of No Deal means the UK will tend towards slow decay rather than instant crash and burn, but the medium/long term prospects of almost everyone working in IT are now significantly diminished.
It makes sense in a way, because there wasn't really time to re-legislate every outdated multi-national standard and regulation that needed addressing in the agreement.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudn/2008/616/annex/chapter/1...
Gecko is a modern browser engine.
And I say this as someone who knows that Gecko is constantly being updated and that Servo is a testing ground for new technologies that after being shown to be effective were migrated into Gecko.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13602947
Aside from that, the burden of proof is on the person I responded to. The idea that anyone needs to prove them wrong is completely backwards.
Anyway, the burden of proof is on anyone who makes any claim in a debate. And you do make a claim:
> This information is incorrect.
... without any further explanation as to why that claim would be more correct than the claim by the person you disagree with.
Or put in other words: there is nothing in the comment that would be of any substantial help to a third person reading along who doesn't know anything about Gecko or Servo. Even if they were to believe that you were right they wouldn't know what the correct information is!
There is no imperative—moral, logical, or otherwise—that I or anyone else spend energy to substantiate the debunking of a claim for which there has been no attempt to substantiate the original itself—even if you want to use a bullshit accounting method which frames it as a de novo claim that the first claim is incorrect. To insist that there is, especially when the energy required to debunk is much greater than the energy spent spitting out the original one sentence nugget of misinformation, is to deliver a set of conditions where Gish gallops are even more effective than they already are. (And that's before we get around to pointing out that you're not even following the rules that you're vigorously arguing are in play; we can let this be one of your exercises for the reader: swap in the word "claim" in place of my use of the word "insist" in the preceding sentence, and then pay attention to the ramifications it has for any of the comments you've written here, esp. wrt the "way to hold a discussion on a public forum".)
In fact, on the topic of outsized expenditures of attention and energy sinks, think about the role you're playing in this even now. (Although, perhaps that was the point—and not an attempt to excite oneself with a pastime that only incidentally happens be tedious in the way it makes contact with others' lives.) This will be my last comment in this thread.
It's like the old Greek philosophical riddle: "if you have a ship and replace one plank of wood, then is it still the same ship afterwards? And what if you replace all the planks of wood one-by-one?"
Well, this is not good
So you're fine that your DNA information is transmitted in clear in an email?
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... page 921
Also, you have to poll continuously, destroying the benefit of having something pushed over smtp.
Exactly. I’ve seen people who work like that. Copy-paste a bunch of stuff that they don’t understand and betting that the people that read it don’t understand or don’t care either. And worse yet it turns out that often they are right. No one cares anyway. So the people that do this get away with it. And the people that do care are spending their time writing stuff that in the end most other people that don’t care aren’t even going to give more than a cursory glance anyways.
> negotiations on this agreement didn't start (and couldn't legally begin)
This could have easily been worked around had there been any (good) will in Brussels (or more importantly in the washing machine!)... but there wasn't. Certainly the UK government at the time were desperate to negotiate everything in one go since, as the saying goes, "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".
If the withdrawal agreement had been 2 years we can be sure it would have taken precisely 2 years to compile the agreement.
[1]https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2017...
Of course, politically speaking there are obvious reasons why journalists at organisations like the BBC would kick up more of a fuss about this as part of the Brexit deal than as an EU rule, and indeed conspiciously neglect to mention the EU is presumably already using this insecure cryptograpy internally. Writing the article in this misleading way plays nicely into existing anti-Brexit narratives about it being an incompetent attempt to return the UK to the past and about Brexiters screwing things up by not listening to experts. That doesn't make requiring every EU state to upgrade their systems at the last minute any more practical though.
(And yes, the original text is decades old and it's quite obvious that the negotiation team stldecided to keep the existing process and therefore take the same legal framework)
Sherpas in this sense is the actual career diplomats who do the hard work - but I suspect they did not have subject matter experts to pick this up.
Lawmakers are not and can never be experts in your preferred subject, so they talk to people who are - either by retaining them as bureaucrats, or by asking lobby groups as-needed. I've not seen armies of programmers clamour for the former, so honestly, what on Earth do you want?
You can count me out of that - I'm from governments that have the size they need to properly function and I'm happy to pay taxes to fund that.
I'd be happier if people richer than me paid their fair share but, unfortunately, due to budget cuts, a lot of tax legislation was written by their lobbyists instead of actual experts and, therefore, they don't.
npm run brexit; npm install comprehensive_multilaterial_free_trade_agreement
He says, "one day we will build a digital world fit for the 21st Century ..." and I roll my eyes. At least he could follow this up with some tweets that educate his audience about how these sorts of agreement /should/ be drafted. But I suspect that he is just a drive-by critic and doesn't have any insights into how they should be drafted.
And now I feel so snarky.. the man's twitter profile says "Old World Breaker/New World Creator" .. I could only dream of growing up to be this pretentious!
This is a 1,500 page document about a unique issue. It's likely that for some topics they just went "can we agree to stick to the terms of x previous agreement?" and then just copy-pasted the whole thing.
That's the real world. In practice it's not a problem.
Given the size of the legal document (~2000 pages) I’m hardly surprised that this sort of boilerplate gets copy/pasted.
The real question is whether this sort of oversight is indicative of the quality of the rest of the text - though I suspect time and effort will have gone into the substantial “non-boilerplate” parts (with any luck).
Either way, the European Parliament won’t be debating this until February so it’s only provisional until then meaning there’s plenty of time to comb through it and make adjustments.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudn/2008/616/annex/chapter/1...
Wonder how many years would it be to search for all parts needing updating, then collect necessary personnel to rewrite those and then pass them through all parties involved. Likely very much longer than entire process has now taken time.
Hopefully this is only applies to criminals or hippies.
"establish reciprocal cooperation between the competent law enforcement authorities of the United Kingdom [...] and the Member States [...] on the automated transfer of DNA profiles, dactyloscopic data and certain domestic vehicle registration data"
This already happens under existing arrangements between EU Member States, and all this does is continue those mutual arrangements with the UK.
Though of course, the actual reason is sensible and relates to the legals around those things, I imagine.
It seems to me that the purpose of ANNEX LAW-1 is to incorporate existing EU law into this agreement. It seems like they wanted to avoid creating a new text, just because the old one was, well, old.
We probably have something similar in our programming professions: If I am to split a monolith into microservices, I'd avoid rewriting the business logic at the same time. Reuse the existing business logic, and then revisit it once the architecture itself is stable.
If you are say, writing IP and finance code, is it your responsibility to seek legal counsel or is it the legal profession's responsibility to somehow find you, discover what you are doing, and then impose themselves upon you?
(I put this in quotes because they don't put pen to paper, it's done by someone else obviously, but these are their words)
It may be copyedited by Comms for tone and grammar, as well as fact checked by someone who is an expert in the subject - but also by Legal if it touches on relevant issues. In that case, they will seek you out, if only for CYA reasons, before it goes out the door.
I don’t know which is sadder that our current leaders are so incompetent or that people must have known that and voted them in with a big majority anyway. Speaks to how poor the opposition were too.
A pox on both your houses! :P
1. https://www.indy100.com/people/coronavirus-advice-experts-mi...
The ones _getting it consistently wrong_ being key... yet rarely quoted.
We should be keeping track of predictions from those who want to be called experts, and retrospectively grading them/enumerating their successes and failures.
Regardless, I didn't mean that experts shouldn't get involved in politics. It's just that experts care and don't care about politics to the same extent everyone else does. There's no reason why an expert within a given field should be expected to care more than anyone else.
Seriously how often are people going to create fresh documents for nearly the same things? Copy and paste it is. And if they like it, then they will correct it as needed.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudn/2008/616/annex/chapter/1...
Still not really a good showing to just copy and paste previous laws without considering whether or not its out of date.
otoh wouldn't it take something like 30 years to review every single line again ? everything would have to be vetted, which means full parliamentary sessions, no ? While outdated, but accepted law, does not need to go through the whole process again.
Anyway, why such documents don’t refer to auxiliary standards with big ass year of creation somewhere on top? That might ring a bell if you’re about to use something from 3 decades ago and you have a hint it’s security related.
Computers, by contrast, do exactly what they are told and no more.
This is why it takes an engineer to craft a computer program, but a politician can craft a law.
So I guess this sort of thing does happen a lot.
It is is distributed as Thunderbird these days. And while I have a lot of gripes with the way it's managed (ugh, don't ask!) - it's still one of the best alternatives. Still sort of extensible if you sneak in the back way (i.e. not WebExtensions).