ThreeUK blocks access to encrypted provider Tutanota due to 'age restriction'
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Of course this was going to happen. If it gets enough blowback there will be a statement claiming this was a mistake. But people warned everyone, scope creep is real, if you allow governments to restrict access for one reason they'll use it to restrict access for any and every reason. This starts with pornography, then it will be anonymous services to get around the anonymity, eventually it will be "please verify your identity to access internet services".
I'm not defending it - I'm just saying that UK is already a surveilance state and the population at large really doesn't care, at least I have never met anything other than "meh" when I brought it up.
Every site on the internet will need to independently take your credit card details or some quack like face recognition app, or make it's content safe for thirteen year olds.
And it will achieve nothing, but be a disaster. But this is real. This is before Parliament, right now, and the only opposition is that it's not draconian enough.
Opinion columnists fulminate about injustice but studiously avoid suggesting what anyone should do about it; hence the very British style of saying 'Authorities must do X Y Z' which lets their readers enjoy a good harrumph at the start of the day and then quietly return to helpless impotence. In the evening there are TV shows that let everyone enjoy a good larf at their rulers and then shiver themselves to sleep under the blankets.
> how it will "finally" make social media companies responsible for the less savoury content
Once again, blaming the evil foreign tech companies.
the bbc independent as per its charter, and it is covering thus piece of legislation. but it only reports, doesn’t express an opinion.
the rest of press love it thou. so does the public, the various ngos, all political parties etc.
> Once again, blaming the evil foreign tech companies.
i don’t know if you’ve followed the news but, politically, europe as a whole is firmly against US tech companies.
He also supports fox hunting, deporting war heroes who immigrated here legally, benefits cuts for the disabled and a whole plethora of other schemes that harm the vulnerable.
Normally I’d say dicks like that would be voted out but the Tories put him in a safe seat where people will vote Conservative regardless of who is the MP.
An example of how safe a seat this is, the previous MP sent multiple pictures of his cock to female reporters before he was eventually replaced.
I hate U.K. politics. It’s rigged to support a monopoly of power.
I'm starting to see the wisdom of the founding fathers regarding the second amendment & tyrannical rulers. They were under British rule back then. Perhaps the years made us forget something they knew.
I wouldn't think they have access to your actual URLs as this is HTTPS, only the domain name. Or am I missing something.
And specifically because the logs are so crap and don't actually contain any information beyond the domain name, they can be used to infer pretty much anything the prosecutors might want to see. Otherwise, why even keep them?
partly false. it’s only DNS and can be very easily bypassed.
Similar story for other countries as well, apart from totalitarian regimes that does the same thing openly.
It's only natural that they don't see themselves as the threat. To them the threat is criminals/terrorists, etc. and sacrificing our civil liberties would typically let them catch one or two more of those.
And most upper management, CEOs and billionaires never wanted power but aquired it by accident?
The second point, that they don't see themselves as the threat, assigns them with too much of a lack of self-awareness. I believe many in the current ruling party do see themselves as a threat but they hate the woke/immigrants/workers so they're fine with it.
If your directive is to protect the public, the best way is to know what everyone is doing at anytime. Think of overprotective parents and their kids. A "the road to hell is paved in good intentions" kind of deal.
There would be no shock. They intended this.
On the flip side, in the UK a mobile phone bill can also used as proof of identity in many cases.
That's not true for many prepaid/PAYG users in the UK. Anyone can still walk into a mobile store or supermarket and buy a PAYG SIM card, which isn't the case in many other European countries.
Granted, those still don't support the more unusual features such as eSIM and companion smartwatches, but they're still a valuable choice to have.
And how, exactly, would you propose to do that in a way which is privacy-preserving?
Basically you submit your ID to a service (could even be a local app with the biometric IDs we have in the EU, which have NFC) which validates your age on request in a "blind" manner (the service doesn't know what they're validating it for, the what for doesn't know anything beside an "it's OK, they're 18+).
So let's block even more and turn country into China
This is somewhat similar to the reason I left them back in 2009. They were surreptitiously redirecting me to a different version of Hotmail by fiddling with DNS records. This in turn broke Hotmail on my early HTC phone (unless I was connecting over WiFi as that would bypass their bad DNS).
It may be little better even now, but back in those dark days the prospect of getting support to recognise what this even meant was nigh on impossible - at the point of cancelling my contact to leave them as a supplier, they interjected that they could offer the same services at £4 a month (insanely cheap) which totally missed the point: what good is a service no matter how cheap, if it's fundamentally unusable!
It's a shame, because in many other respects Three are one of the more differentiated suppliers here and they seem to offer more useful services with fewer gimmicks than the others in the UK.
It was blocking regular US news sites as "adult content". Supposedly you could enter your driving license number (which also encodes your date of birth) in order to get the restriction lifted.
It never worked.
I gave up using Three.
It's not a case of "who is the best" but rather "who is currently the least worst"
Three is named (joint) worst network in the UK by the official telecoms regulator (part of the UK government).
Called them multiple times, no-one would tell me why. Went to a Three shop and they told me I'd been disconncted for "security" because I'd been away from the address on my account too long!
Plus their broken app and abysmal coverage in London...
I went to the nearest branch and loudly proclaimed I was there to "to verify my age because I want to watch porn in my phone".
Absolutely dumb policy - probably enforced by the govt.
I don’t know whether the government leant informally on the mobile providers to do this or whether it’s legally required for them to do so if they don’t know that a user is 18+.
I only ever have signal problems in places the other networks also have problems.
I’ve regularly seen over 800 Mbps in London, consistently faster than any of the other networks.
(On the other hand, I wouldn’t pick Three if you value good and consistent coverage. But if you are using it from a fixed location with a good 5G signal, it’s great)
> if you are in an area with good coverage
In my experience, this is a huge caveat.
I have complaints about Three but coverage is not really one of them.
Not always the best option in the UK.
5G mobile broadband is often both faster and cheaper than old-fashioned DSL, which is still all that's available in some areas/buildings. Even when you can get fibre to your home, it's often significantly more expensive and requires 12+ months contract commitment etc. Unlimited 5G data, on the other hand, can be got for around £20/month with no contract.
5G also tends to be more reliable. There’s a lot of redundancy built in to mobile networks that you don’t get with fibre.
Is that so? I didn't know. But I require internet connectivity anyway; being in a fixed location, I use a fixed connection. So I have FTTC. My VOIP-phone plugs into my router, so all I pay for is a local number, and maybe a local POTS connection at the other end. 5G may be cheap, but it's not as cheap as not buying 5G.
Oh, that kind of phone. Apple doesn't make "phones"; they make mobile devices.
We were speaking of fixed-location phone services. You don't need a mobile device to do fixed-location telephony; my VOIP-phone is made by Gigaset. It doesn't do iMessage/Face-whatsit, but neither do I.
I'm usually at home; I wouldn't need a mobile device, except that some commercial and government services refuse to believe I exist unless I can spit out a mobile number. I don't carry my device with me; it lives on my desk at home.
In terms of standard voice telephony, my Gigaset phone works better (and is much cheaper to use) than my mobile device. And the battery never goes flat.
As long as you don't want to use Tutanota.
Or more realistically get blasted by people on contests or doing DX, hear about numerous health problems and waltz into casual racism, homophobia and sexism. The last bastion is CW (morse) where it's too much effort to be an asshole.
Well established UK Wholesale operator Simwood had not one but TWO very good goes at establishing an independent low-level UK network (or at least as low-level as is possible, they wanted to become as close as was humanly possible to a full MNO).
They ended up hitting obstacle after obstacle in the usual protection racket vicious circle between so-called regulator OFCOM and the incumbent operators. IIRC they encountered difficulties at every step, be it obtaining an independent allocation of mobile numbers or anything else.
In the end, they threw in the towel on the mobile project because they refused to be "just another" MVNO reselling someone else's rebranded service.
Publicly it could be tricky. It's been a while and I'd have to refresh my mind as to what bits were confidential and what was public. Simwood are generally fairly open about talking about most things, but mobile was a somewhat special project for obvious reasons.
There is, however this blog post from back at the time (2015/2016) when they were going for it though https://blog.simwood.com/2015/04/why-simwood-mobile/ ... which contains a couple of hints at what they were attempting and the associated difficulties.
There is also a 2015 presentation lurking on YouTube that includes coverage of, in the presenter's own words, the "bureaucratic, political and just plain incompetent roadblocks that we've experienced, and continue to experience" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN-DXL8fRsU
You have to go into a 3 store to get adult content unlocked by presenting ID.
It is extremely annoying.
Vodafone also require you to opt-in to 18+ content.
I use SIMs for both (30-day contract with 3).
I also don't believe in registering my mobile number to my identity. Anything to claw back a bit of privacy.
[0] http://ask3.three.co.uk/srvs/cgi-bin/webisapi.dll/,/?new,kb=...
And could you not circumvent this by either using another DNS provider?
They do not. As jonas-w points out, they would need a root certificate, which they don't have.
Much of the value of TLS is protection against untrustworthy ISPs.
You can allocate users to pools and provide contectivity based on the pool, ie allowing you to limit speeds of high usage users or have different filtering lists like this under 18s list.
With these devices you are able to block traffic to specific domains even if SSL is used with relative ease.
As it is done at network level, you can't bypass via different DNS provider, only vpns can bypass
Which is taking forever to be standardized.
Generally it’s a good idea to disable ISP content blocking if you can, because they can cause all kinds of problems (slowdowns, false positives).
But it doesn't go through your ISPs DNS infrastructure, it goes direct to the nameserver for the parent domain. And even that doesn't happen if your local resolver has the result cached. The easiest way to block DNS lookups is at the DNS server; using DPI to block DNS lookups is straying into sledgehammer/nut territory.
Checked Protonmail which I made around the same time and also didn’t log into for about 2 years, and still had my account and emails. Same with that one meme email provider that starts with a C lol (I have a firemail.cc address), and I’m more surprised at them still being around and maintaining my account.
I signed up to a 2 year 5G deal with EE shortly before moving out of London, now the signal and speed are junk and I'm stuck in a 2 year deal.
Given the absurd amount our "contracted" price increases by each year (my monthly payment went up ~15% on a SIM-only plan thanks to RPI or whatever excuse they use) I'd be tempted to go with someone like GiffGaff or similar next (they're an MVNO on O2 network) and just get monthly goody bags, then you can ditch them the minute you've had enough and want to get better service/signal/data etc.
Vodafone are on my blacklist, I had a few bad experiences with them years ago, over a decade ago now I think about it, and vowed to never use them again.
Does anyone else keep a personal blacklist of companies you won't buy from / do business with? I feel like I should write it down some day.
Recently I used their 100G option as my main internet connection for a couple of months because OpenReach ballsed up a house move. Was completely usable all day.
Have used it for about 10 months and been very happy with it!
(Like the parent, no links with them, and very light user.)
If you are on a contract I would wait until next April when the yearly inflaton price hikes are announced.
FWIW I am paying Vodafone £7 pcm after cashback for 200 GB 5G data, unlimited minutes and texts.
https://pedroc.co.uk/content/vodafone-o2-beacon-1-and-2
In London, the network sharing agreement was unwound due to capacity issues.
Grab a PAYG SIM card and test out each provider's network before you go through the pain of porting. We switched and found the signal to be literally unusable near our house, so we're back on Three. And O2 incorrectly charged us a £200 early termination fee when we switched away. Took a few months of hassling to get that resolved.
It's widely known that UK ISPs and mobile networks put filtering in place by default. They did this to avoid the government passing a law to make it mandatory.
This often blocks VPNs and sites that may or may not be used to access adult content.
There is always a way to remove the block, typically with credit card/ID verification of some sort.
Three might be blocking some things that other networks aren't, but I imagine you'll find the other networks block some things that Three doesn't.
I'm with a carrier that runs on the Vodafone network. I can't log into my Vodafone settings to disable their parental locks.
Luckily I use a VPN and their lock is more reasonable than Three apparently. But still a nuisance
If it was an attempt to ban encryption they'd block much more.
I would worry about troublesome newspapers and protestor sites being "accidentally" included next.
We’re also greatly uneducated in critical thinking, so we’re easily swayed.
Also very prudish.
We love the party which advertises it’s tough on crime (emphasis on advertises) - the conservatives. They’ve been in power the majority of the time since WW2.