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Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

I want to see the shock on the faces of the people who support legislation like this for the sake of the children.

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".

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Exactly this. I mean it starts with one thing, but in the end we will only be able to use the internet if we link your online identity to our passports and gov will know literally every site we've ever visited.

....you do realize that's already the reality of living in the UK, right? Your provider has to verify you are over 18 to enable "adult" content on your connection, so your mobile operator has to see some ID or you need to have a valid DD linked to a bank account, and the Snoopers Charter made it so that all operators in this country have to keep your entire browsing history for a full year, and it can be accessed by 17 different government agencies without a warrant.

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.

Might have to start using a VPN or TOR more often.

If you're using Private Relay, your ISP won't be able to see what websites you're visiting. Would you still need to verify your identity in that case?

No you wouldn't. As far as I know VPNs aren't blocked even with the "adult content" filter enabled on your account. So yes you can bypass it if you know what you're doing.

The Online Safety Bill, going through Parliament, is very clear that is not sufficient.

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.

Absolutely. And pretty much no one in mainstream media is talking about it, other than some very surface level articles about how it will "finally" make social media companies responsible for the less savoury content. Which it will, sure, but at an incredible price.

You mean the government sponsored & operated BBC wouldn't cover it? I'm shocked!

> how it will "finally" make social media companies responsible for the less savoury content

Once again, blaming the evil foreign tech companies.

> You mean the government sponsored & operated BBC wouldn't cover it? I'm shocked!

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.

The UK has always had this prison camp mentality. The mummified body of the Jeremy Bentham is literally enshrined in the London School of Economics and the government operates a panopticon whose primary purpose is making sure that everyone affirms that Britain is great despite being literally cold and hungry.

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.

*University College London, not London School of Economics.

I keep doing that. Thanks for the correction.

ps: 'always' in the sense of 'as long as I've known it', which is about 35 years of adulthood.

I have to say this reads like satire. It's completely surreal.

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.

The leaders who make these decisions don’t even have to face up to any real criticism for the inconvenience they cause - they can palm everyone off on some faceless goon running a customer service chatbot as in the example above.

When you say browsing history you mean DNS lookups?

I wouldn't think they have access to your actual URLs as this is HTTPS, only the domain name. Or am I missing something.

That is correct. Still, it's enough to establish that you(linked with your driving licence/passport) have visited pornhub 37 times a day on the 12th of December. They dont' store exactly what you were doing, but obviously it's not like the public cares about that. And pornhub is a very mild example, let's say a website you visited pulled some resource from 4chan(website known to harbour terrorists and pedophiles! /s) or somewhere that sounds like it's a terrorist organisation. Or even hacker news(are you a hacker? that's illegal you know). You have no control over your DNS lookups(by default) so you don't actually know what gets written in those logs, nor have any way to inspect them.

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?

> and the Snoopers Charter made it so that all operators in this country have to keep your entire browsing history for a full year

partly false. it’s only DNS and can be very easily bypassed.

I tried to speak to my (then) local MP about this and he was fucking useless because he refused to discuss the topic.

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.

It's so telling that politicians that feel free to intimidate others with unwanted dick picks are supporting internet filtering for the general population.

can someone explain to me in simple terms why governments have constant obsessions with IDing/tracking everyone everywhere all the time?

Power

It seems pretty natural to me. Government is dominated by people who want power and people who want power pretty much always want more power.

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.

I can easily agree that the majority want power, sometimes even to do good.

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.

> Government is dominated by people who want power and people who want power pretty much always want more power.

And most upper management, CEOs and billionaires never wanted power but aquired it by accident?

Who said anything about billionaires?

Nobody in the government ever got fired for "erring on the side of caution".

Yes, this is it. Things like this are almost never due to some inside conspiracy, but rather result from systemic incentives applied to different actors over time. Absent laws that forbid security bureaus from being too cautious, they will inevitably tend in that direction, precisely because the careers of the actors involved depend on it.

Are you sure? Everything from the Snowden disclosures tell us otherwise. Take the US for instance, in which the government ramped up its surveillance capabilities in ways they knew were illegal. They had to rely on secret interpretation of the law to "justify" their actions, an interpretation that even the author of the law was reportedly not aware of. That's no accident. Instead, it was directed by the highest ranks of government who knew very well what they were getting into.

Similar story for other countries as well, apart from totalitarian regimes that does the same thing openly.

Without assuming any kind of malice...

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.

They always could do this in the past, so it's more about "it's gone dark, we can't see that now" and trying to put genies back in their bottles.

Because they are terrified of what will happen to them if people decide they have had enough of it.

> I want to see the shock on the faces of the people who support legislation like this for the sake of the children.

There would be no shock. They intended this.

I'm talking about the everyday people. Mothers that don't think past "I don't want my kids seeing porn but I don't want to raise them myself so the government must do something about it." The politicians and the loudest proponents, they know what they're up to.

Similar things happened in Russia. Whole traffic control started as “save children” story. Then government expanded it to block any business or political view outside of their control.

I pointed out more than once here, that the pencil pusher who replaced Steve Jobs as head of Apple is doing the same shit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32839035

Can't you just verify your age and be done? I don't see the issue, plenty of things end up being blocked, so it seems like this is just something you'd do anyway, it's no big deal.

>"plenty of things end up being blocked"

So let's block even more and turn country into China

How do you verify your age without showing some kind of ID?

Uhm.....you don't? With my provider here in UK(GiffGaff) I had to send them the digits from my passport to have "adult" content unlocked on my sim, it's all blocked by default otherwise. There are several other types of ID you can use for this.

The solution is to enable full-time VPN, not to provide your ISP with information they have no business collecting.

> Can't you just verify your age and be done?

And how, exactly, would you propose to do that in a way which is privacy-preserving?

There's at least one standard in the works about such a thing (blind signing) - https://privacypass.github.io/. IIRC there's also an EU proposal for such a thing.

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+).

This doesn't give them any information they didn't already know, phone operators in the UK require at least one form of ID for you to open an account. They already have your details on record, this is just a formality - recording your consent to opt-in. The Snooper's Charter bill is far more dangerous.

On the flip side, in the UK a mobile phone bill can also used as proof of identity in many cases.

> This doesn't give them any information they didn't already know, phone operators in the UK require at least one form of ID for you to open an account.

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.

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