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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

....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.

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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 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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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

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