UK Threatens End-to-End Encryption
schneier.com
schneier.com
Diffie just started by explaining that cybersecurity is all about securing some asset from threats such that the cost of attack was too great given the value of the asset. How do you protect the store that has all the cryptographic keys in the entire United Kingdom? It would be essentially infinitely valuable as a cyberattack target. Government dude was totally out of his depth and the bill was eventually dropped.
[1] Turing award winner and the Diffie in Diffie-Hellman. Fair to say he's a guy who knows a thing or two about cryptography.
Aah, the good old days when the BBC was un-biased.
These days you would get a government flunky, and on the other side of the table a pro-government flunky from a lobbying outfit whose real accreditation has been carefully omitted by the BBC and they have been instead been given some generic independent sounding job title.
I'm not joking! BBC Radio 4 famously recently did a "Brexit anniversary programme". Three people in the studio, the presenter and two guests. The two guests were .... Theresa Villiers and Daniel Hannan, two hardcore Brexteers who, of course, spent the entire interview session fighting completely unchallenged over who could give the most sycophantic sunlit-uplands view of Brexit.
???: "Peter Mandelson is a hom… owner"
Regular guest: "Why can't gay people own homes?"
Host: "Well, new Director General, let's see if that goes out."
At the time, and I'm pleasantly amazed how fast this has changed, being gay and in charge was still mildly scandalous in the eyes of tabloids, and that was about the same time the age of consent was equalised.
However such (entirely valid) reasons for respecting privacy should be for all, but as far as I remember Mandelson was the only person who got to keep that particular secret.
Conversely, right after the referendum someone said the BBC should play "God Save The Queen" at the end of the day's programming in concordance with the departure from the EU, and Newsnight responded with this, which is still up on their official channel: https://youtu.be/WwsQ_5Wm4oo
I thought Alastair Campbell was Blair's Cummings ?
Imagine if they'd shared a contemporary work calling the monarchy a fascist regime.
As it stands it was just a cute joke, and in a way only served to reinforce the soft power of parliament by entering into a playful discourse with it.
The recent attack on Gary Lineker for not being "impartial" (not being sufficiently uncritical of Government policy) was particularly galling.
I'm curious, around when do you think that changed? And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?
The smell of change appeared more clearly in the run-up to Brexit. Certainly post-Brexit I would say it is very much evident.
> And was there a specific story they reported on (or didn't report on) that really solidified the change for you?
To be clear (as per my Radio 4 example cited above), it is not necessarily a case of "reported on / did not report on", it is frequently more a case of bias / lack of impartiality, again as nicely exemplified by my "two hardcore Brexiteers fight over Brexit" example[1].
However, I could also give you many examples of "reported on/did not report on". Perhaps one of the most well known is Lady Mone of House of Lords fame. She is/was subject to various investigations regarding supply of PPE during CoVID.
For a long time, Lady Mone's investigations were widely reported in all mainstream media (tabloids, broadsheets, other mainstream TV/Radio news ... you name the place, it was reported there).
But the BBC ? Nope. No mention on TV/Radio news, and for a long time a search for "Mone" on the BBC News website yielded exactly zero results.
Even today although you can now find a small number of mentions on the BBC website, you'll have to go looking on other mainstream sources for the actual detail.[2]
[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/23289638.bbc-slated-insult... [2] https://www.thenational.scot/news/20107509.bbc-refuses-say-h...
EDIT TO ADD (because I can't reply to the @Veen directly)
> Leftists think it's an establishment mouthpiece run by the Tories.
Well....
I see how they could feel that way when the recently appointed BBC Chairman is a chap who appears to have more than a few ties to Boris Johnson[3].
[3] https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/378/digital-cultu...
Regardless of the fine detail about who knew what at what time, history has vindicated people who were skeptical about the claims being made to provoke the invasion of Iraq, and it was not right of the Blair government to attempt to suppress them.
(Mind you, the BBC has never been really able to report on the security state; see the Troubles, or the Zircon Affair)
The chair is a Tory. We can then quibble over "run by", but you can't ignore the significant connections at high level.
For all its flaws, it does a huge amount of good. All reporting will inevitably hold a bias simply because selection of story for time scheduled news will _always_ involve excluding other news items.
The amount of criticism the BBC recieves is significant, and it's gone up a lot more recently.
I think it's a reflection of the incumbent gov more than the state of the organisation. There are strong forces working against the BBCs more egalitarian aims.
One of the funnier stories supporting this is that MI5 had to ask the BBC to stop sending everyone for vetting because it was unnecessary!
> when MI5 suggested scaling back the number of jobs subject to vetting, the BBC argued against such a move.
Something the BBC lied about repeatedly and only admitted years after other news agencies broke the story.
Now it's run by the guy who was the PMs boss and who organised a loan for the last PM. And people claims it's totally independent? These sound like stories about RT.
If you're referring to the Electronic Communications Bill, it did indeed become an act. And in fact it contained an explicit section prohibiting the imposition of escrow (which has not been removed by any subsequent amendments): https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/7/part/III
14 Prohibition on key escrow requirements
(1) Subject to subsection (2), nothing in this Act shall confer any power on any Minister of the Crown, on the Scottish Ministers, on the National Assembly for Wales or on any person appointed under section 3—
(a) by conditions of an approval under Part I, or
(b) by any regulations or order under this Act,
to impose a requirement on any person to deposit a key for electronic data with another person.
What's more, you can read a transcript of a parliamentary debate about escrow where all sides were keen to ensure it was clearly not part of the final text https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2000-01-25a.174.1
The debate on key escrow raged for some time. Foremost among the original proponents of key escrow was my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr. Taylor). However, the debate has moved on—as has my hon. Friend, who has changed his mind because we have learned much more about the matter. All credit is due to him for that.
It was thus crucial that key escrow should not be included in the Bill. There would be no power for the Government, or for some agency, to demand that the key—as between public and private—for the de-encryption of material could be deposited with a third party. However, we were concerned that key escrow might be introduced through the back door.
Complimented for being a rational human being, no less.
No wonder he quit.
https://www.telepolis.de/features/UK-Electronic-Communicatio...
I mean, I literally quoted an MP saying "The debate on key escrow raged for some time" and linked to the full debate in which it was spoken; hardly a sensible "escrow was never a concern" move. The Telepolis link backs this up with detail - escrow was proposed by the Tories, pledged against yet initially retained by Labour, and eventually withdrawn.
The comment to which I was replying said that an entire bill was junked. I think it's much more interesting, and indeed important, to note that in actuality the act passed with an explicit prohibition of escrow. If the bill was dropped then it would likely have been a case of the govt going, oh, damn, we got embarrassed - kill it for now, we'll come back to it later, but bury it under something else. But no - there was public debate, and democracy functioned as we would all hope - a terrible idea was proposed, defeated, and legislated against.
Also I don't trust any government not to mishandle crypto keys, so backdoored encryption = broken encryption
While I understand what you mean, there are already keys which are "infinitely valuable": root CA keys. If you have those, you can essentially impersonate anyone. Therefore, we must have ways to protect these sort of keys.
That being said, a root CA key is probably locked up on an air gapped machine vs some machine which actively using the key to scan through traffic.
Mainly pointing out here that the idea of value vs cost has to have some point at which we protect it regardless of the value because thats how the hierarchy of trust works in our CA system.
CAs have been nuked on occasion without much fanfare to everyday users.
https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/dnssec/root-signing-ceremony/
Once. This would be immediately detected through Certificate Transparency and there would be front-page headlines around the world about the chaos that ensued as vendors issued a critical update blocking that CA certificate.
They'll eventually get it.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2140747-laws-of-mathema...
Edit to add: I mention the five eyes because cryptography (and cybersecurity) tend to fall into the purview of the signals intelligence agencies in government, so that would be NSA in the US, GCHQ in the UK etc. They collaborate under this arrangement.
[1] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/the-five-eyes-the-intelligen...
[1] Just a random click https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_House_o... on the Bishop of Chichester https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bishop_of_Chichester#List_of_b... reveals a list of bishops going back as far as 681, the year 681. Particularly funny is how the majority of the bishops seem to have "died in office". To call a land with 1,300+ years of hegemony "democratic" is beyond satire.
At least according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index it’s one of the most democratic countries at 18th in the world (to be fair that’s made by a UK company but I don’t see why they would be biased)
Entirely untrue. The monarch has a weekly meeting with the Prime Minister. There have been many cases of the Queen getting carveouts, influencing laws, and vetting bills. There is no law forbidding the monarch from not granting Royal Assent. This notion that the British monarch has no power is an absolute farce.
There’s also the whole concept of King’s Consent, wherein the King gets to vet every single bill for affect the crown's own prerogatives or interests, and negotiate secretly with the government to change the contents of that bill. The Guardian articles detail this process as well. If you seriously believe the King has no power in practice I have a bridge to sell you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Consent
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-queen-l...
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/queen-lobbied-fo...
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/28/queen-secretly-l...
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/28/revealed-queen-v...
Canada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander-in-Chief_of_the_Cana...
As all executive power is legally reposed in the Crown, the role of commander-in-chief is the only constitutional means by which decisions are made over the deployment and disposition of the Canadian Armed Forces.[6] Under the Westminster system's conventions of responsible government, the cabinet—which advises the sovereign or his viceroy on the exercise of the executive powers—generally exercises the Crown prerogative powers relating to the Canadian forces.[6][7] Still, all declarations of war are issued with the approval, and in the name, of the monarch and must be signed by either the sovereign or the governor general, as was done with the proclamation that declared Canada at war with Nazi Germany, issued on September 10, 1939; it stated: "Whereas by and with the advice of Our Privy Council for Canada, We have signified Our Approval for the issue of a Proclamation in the Canada Gazette declaring that a State of War with the German Reich exists and has existed in Our Dominion of Canada as and from the tenth day of September, 1939."
Australia: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca4...
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION ACT - SECT 68.
Command of naval and military forces.
The command in chief of the naval and military forces of the Commonwealth is vested in the Governor-General as the Queen's representative.
At the same time, whatever government opens that particular Pandora’s box is in for a hell of a ride, so I understand why.
I'm obviously an abolitionist but I would be much less worried about this if the powers matched the role. I'm sure HN could empathise better than most websites that giving a supposed read-only user unused, powerful permissions is probably not the best idea.
That's not too say that the guardians findings aren't troubling or that the powers the UK monarchy do wield aren't antidemocratic. But they're only ignored because they're relatively minor.
In the case of something major like a national security incident they'd be overruled and potentially trigger the dissolution or atleast severe weakening of the monarchy. They're aware of that fact and thus careful about what they do.
Turns out that people who hate fun (Puritans) are even less popular than a King who keeps starting wars, so Parliament installed a replacement King.
Refusal of Royal Assent has happened since then, and not caused similar responses, though (in England; parts of British North America are…a different story; no regicide of course, but the monarchy itself was replaced.)
Most recently Assent was withheld from a law passed in Scotland, on the advice of the British government. This conflict makes sense, the Scottish Parliament is necessarily subsidiary, and this was basically a Culture War law, in my opinion the Scottish were on the right side of history, but it's not astonishing that (as conceived when the Scottish Parliament was set up) the British parliament could say "No".
Before that the last time assent (as opposed to consent) was refused in 1708 is genuinely interesting. It was used because of unfortunate timing. Parliament said OK, those Scots seem useful, we don't fully trust them but we need more armed men and nobody doubts they can fight, so here's a law arming the Scottish. And then, with the Bill passed but Assent not yet granted, they received news of a French Fleet landing in Scotland. Suddenly giving arms to the Scottish seemed less clever as who knows if they'd be on France's side. So Mary was told (by the Government) to withhold Assent from that bill.
Probably not if, as was the case the last time it happened (in 1708), it was because of what was perceived as a radical change of relevant circumstance in between the law being passed and the expected date of royal assent.
(Of course, refusal of royal assent to colonial laws in North America did happen after that, without that reason, and did cause, or at least contribute to, a revolution in those colonies.)
That the royal family is useful for tourism is also laughable
Why so? Because although they had sufficient numbers to ensure the bill wouldn't become law, using Consent allowed them to prevent debate.
That you don't see an issue with democratic debate being shutdown on the advice of a government minister to the monarch is another issue.
If you're genuinely interested, you can learn more about the Royal Prerogative and prerogative powers here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03...
I’ve always just thought of royalty as sort of like the prototype for American celebrities like the Kardashians. Just a bunch of people who are famous for being famous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35687508
I'm just not sure that "rich person lobbies government" is the jackpot that republicans think it is. The day that Biden, Trump. Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush I and before don't get lobbying on a regular basis from major donors then I'll consider it one.
Indeed I'd rather Charlie spend an hour a week lobbying Sunak as it takes an hour of lobbying away from anyone else.
No, even aside from soft power, the monarch has some hard power (which can serve as a powerful lever for soft power, as well). Notably, for instance, the requirement for Monarch’s consent (not just the more pro forma Royal Assent) to legislation affecrtng the hereditary revenues, personal property or personal interests of the Crown or the Duchy of Lancaster or Cornwall, including the Royal Household and the Royal Palaces (including the Palace of Westminster), the Crown Estate and the Crown Estate Commissioners, the Monarch's private estates, and the Monarch's interest as a landlord or an employer.
The statement only observed a bad thing. It did not advocate or even hint at some other bad thing as a proposed solution.
Putting words into someone else's mouth is worse even than whatever they might have said if they had actually said it.
It's an actual wrondoing that you did vs a fabricated wrongdoing you accused someone else of doing.
From the sibling comment by PhilipRoman:
> But I would ask you this - when you are jailed for speaking, would it be of some comfort to know that the decision to jail you was decided by 100 politicians instead of 1?
I realize this comment was written 5 minutes after yours, so you had no way of knowing, it is amusing how quickly the parent turned out to be right.
They weren't saying that democracy is bad, or that anything else is better, they were saying that it (largely) doesn't exist.
I think the point was not to say that authoritarianism or anything else would be better, but simply to say that in order to get a useful result from judging something, you have to judge what it actually is, not something you imagine.
Oligarchy is probably just an inevitable emergent property of any collection of cells each exhibiting the human condition. No one is saying that it's good or roght, just that it is the actual state of things, where democracy as we were told to imagine it in school, is largely a fantasy. A nice one, and surely the direction we should always aim, but not what is or realistically ever will be.
The point as I see it, is only to point out that when trying to decide what to do, and how to interpret the results of what has been done, there is a difference between the direction you push, the ideals you want, and how far you have or even ever possibly can get, how much of those ideals you have been striving for you actually have, regardless what labels are on things or what they tell everyone in school and on tv.
If you want to judge something, and have a useful result, you have to know correctly what you are actually judging. IE: it's misleading your own self as well as others to imagine that various outcomes and current conditions are the result of democracy, no matter what country you are in. In all cases, regardless what label is on the tin, it is really the result of oligrachy. (or at least to some large degree, and at least so I percieve that comment to be saying, and at least so I am saying myself)
Aiming for democracy is still probably better than not. Not because it demonsteably produces better outcomes, but because at least on paper there is some chance for it's nominal purpose. A paper declaration of agency is better than none at all.
edit: re-reading your comment, I think (mistakenly perhaps) you were suggesting that I support Russia. I would like to clarify that I most certainly do not.
So your comment is unfounded and useless, in other words.
One can point out that liberal democracies are heavily liberal and only somewhat democratic without committing to endorsing any other kind of government or regime, ya know.
(A common statist fallacy: assuming that some criticism of an existing type of government must imply that they are rooting for another kind of government. Not saying that this applies to you, though!)
they can be completely bypassed when necessary
they are a scrutiny committee and despite the gold and pomp they do quite a reasonable job
There is statistically a good chance you are from the US, which has no concept of Lords, but which has its own very serious shortcomings.
[1] Just the top: Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), almost 51.5 years mandate, most kings couldn't even dream of such a lengthy reign, https://www.senate.gov/senators/longest_serving_senators.htm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Winston,_Baron_Winston
[1] A really fun one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_of_Dunsany#Barons_of_Dun...
Christopher Plunkett, 1st Baron of Dunsany (1410–1463)
Richard Plunkett, 2nd Baron of Dunsany (died c. 1480)
John Plunkett, 3rd Baron of Dunsany (died 1500)
Edward Plunkett, 4th Baron of Dunsany (died 1521)
Robert Plunkett, 5th Baron of Dunsany (died 1559)
Christopher Plunkett, 6th Baron of Dunsany (died 1564)
Patrick Plunkett, 7th Baron of Dunsany (died 1601)
Christopher Plunkett, 8th Baron of Dunsany (died 1603)
Patrick Plunkett, 9th Baron of Dunsany (1595–1668)
Christopher Plunkett, 10th Baron of Dunsany (died 1690)
Randall Plunkett, 11th Baron of Dunsany (died 1735)
Edward Plunkett, 12th Baron of Dunsany (1713–1781)
Randall Plunkett, 13th Baron of Dunsany (1739–1821)
Edward Wadding Plunkett, 14th Baron of Dunsany (1773–1848)
Randall Edward Plunkett, 15th Baron of Dunsany (1804–1852)
Edward Plunkett, 16th Baron of Dunsany (1808–1889)
John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853–1899)
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878–1957)
Randal Arthur Henry Plunkett, 19th Baron of Dunsany (1906–1999)
Edward John Carlos Plunkett, 20th Baron of Dunsany (1939–2011)
Randal Plunkett, 21st Baron of Dunsany (born 1983)[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randal_Plunkett,_21st_Baron_of...
Real power flows through those who've maintained their assets, e.g. Duke of Devonshire; those who own the media, e.g. Viscount Rothermere; and just buying your way in, like Baron Lebedev, son of former KGB oligarch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Lebedev
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Drax#:~:text=still%20o....
I’m not for a second saying the system is wonderful and beyond reproach. But suggesting it’s equivalent to an autocracy or something is just flat out wrong. If you want to complain about the U.K. political system complain about first past the post or the creeping anti-democratic forces pushing things like voter ID laws. The House of Lords and the King aren’t anything comparatively.
That alone is a big "if". Getting an ID rarely requires no effort. But the bigger question above all that is why do it anyway? Why do anything to make it harder to vote? There is little to no evidence of voter fraud taking place in the UK (or US for that matter), certainly never on a scale that would come close to affecting the outcome of an election. Every time the number of people who would be unable to vote (even just because they've lost their ID) eclipses the number of fraudulent votes that would supposedly be caught.
Sure, UK is a great place to live for many of their citizens, and a great country overall, culture and so forth. It's not for nothing we are speaking their language and not Esperanto or something. But it's not a democracy, and that is fine.
If you ask me (I know you didn't, but just in case), not even the Nordic countries or Switzerland pass the main test of democracy: not being able to vote for everything, but being able to vote "No" to anything and everything. That should probably be the hallmark of a democracy. Even the toga-wearing Greeks did not have democracy to such an extent.
In an ideal world, every ballot would have as a first option the option "No". I said in some other HN comment [1], a second point would be to tie the duration of the mandate to the voter turnout, if 30% vote, then the mandate is not 100%, but 30% also of the 4/5 years mandate.
One technical issue to solve beforehand is reducing the cost of elections by 6-7 orders of magnitude. 2020 US election costed $14 billion (presidential and congressional) [1], 2020 India election costed $7 billlion [2]. It's completely unsustainable. Sending 500 million HTTPS messages using Amazon SES costs around $50,000. Perhaps elections should cost a bit more, but not with much, in order to be able to run them every other day/month.
The fact that our societies are unable to hold elections often and at the cost of spam emails is also a sign we are not trending towards increasing democracy.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/cost-of-2020-electi...
[2] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/elections/lok-sabh...
Being able to vote "No" or "No One" may see no improvement, but it would at least give a true option to the 30%-60% of people (various countries) who never vote, a protest vote which is actually significant, especially if voting "No" further decreases the mandate time.
I guess in general we should ask ourselves if the principles on which we build the society are for increasing democracy or for decreasing it. And then we can label it as "democratic" or not, but the rate of change towards a heightened democracy is more important than a single scalar "democracy index". Hence my initial repartee about a 1,300 old society which steadfastly had and has bishops, lords, kings as instruments of power or power-adjacent implementers of power.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
This idea that the royal family has no meaningful political power is not congruent with how the British political system works.
This is all outlined in the previous citation I gave.
Please define "meaningful power".
Because getting millions of pounds from the state every year [1], having massive media attention, having the ear of international leaders in politics, and having ones face on currency, sounds pretty impactful to me, especially given the fact that all this is conferred by being born to certain parents, and not by, say, something like an election.
Just imagine for a moment if the PM was head of state... Who would be leader of commonwealth? Liz Truss? Boris Johnson? Can you see how this would cause conflict? Having a heredity apolitical monarch works really well in the context of a commonwealth of nation. Electing someone would introduce politics and that isn't feasible when you need someone who can represent such a diverse range of views.
I also think the UK monarch serves as a unifying voice for the UK. No matter our political differences we can still all turn to the monarch as voice of unity for the nation during difficult times. I think this lack of an apolitical leader is quite noticeable in the US and other nations.
I don't like all of the tradition and baggage that comes with the Royal Family and I think they would benefit from trying to modernise their public perception, but I do think there is value in having an heredity head of state with very limited powers. I think the question really is how much we should be spending on that. At the moment it does seem a bit excessive...
Does it need one? For doing what exactly? And why is a hereditary position better for this than one elected by democratic means?
> Having a heredity apolitical monarch works really well in the context of a commonwealth of nation.
Why?
> , but I do think there is value in having an heredity head of state with very limited powers.
Such as? Because tons of countries in the world don't spend huge sums of money on such an institution, and don't seem to miss out on anything.
I'm not saying the Royal Family are not impactful (I'm certainly not defending them at all!) but I'm specifically refuting the notion that the presence of a King means that the country is not democratic. Kim Kardashian has millions, draws massive media attention and in all honesty could probably have the ear of international leaders. None of that means she can override what US voters do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
turns out separating politicians from the concept of The State works quite well
There's nothing like that in the US, by design, due to our constitutional separation of church and state. The words "In God We Trust" were added to our currency in 1864, and "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
Although I think we'd benefit from having an ELI5 branch to provide a final sniff test by voters for all controversial legislation. There's only a 10% correlation between what the public wants and what congress passes, because we never managed to separate freedom of speech from freedom of money to buy speech. So the wealthy have a disproportionate say in our political discourse, that's why they push stuff like corporate personhood to maintain power. Which goes all the way back to the formation of the country as a democratic "republic" to hand off unethical decisions around slavery, sexism and colonization to a semi-elected ruling class that maintains the status quo, much like we hand off minor sins like killing animals for meat consumption to butchers. In other words, the US effectively has a lobbyist branch which worships money, instead of a religious branch.
Of course the same argument could be used in reverse to say that all religious involvement in government is about the final control of money and power.
Its not though. The House of Commons is elected. The House of Lords and the Crown are not elected, and all three are integral components of the Parliament. [0]
[0] https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/role/relations-with-othe...
Just a rudderless, inward looking joke floating adrift off the west coast of France.
There's no smoky backroom where Biden and Macron and Sunak and Scholz sit in high-back leather chairs with glasses of whisky scheming about how to counter each threat to their power (with their super-secret puppeteers present only as a grim silhouette in the shadows, or maybe as an unexpected call at a climactic moment).
The only coordination that exists at the level of these superpowers is systemic, caused and communicated purely by a commonality of incentives and threats, not by words.
Every government wants power. One obvious means to achieve that is to retain an ability to surveil their populace. They grew accustomed to growth of this ability as communication shifted from whispered conversations to physical letters to telegrams to analog telephones to unencrypted Internet communication; now the ability of ordinary citizens to trivially encrypt their communication is a major setback to that expectation.
The timing of it is merely coincidental, or at most coordinated by the cross-border technological developments.
Why whenever anybody says anything that can be construed as conspiratorial do we automatically assume it is? World leaders can meet without the conspiracy, they do it all the time.
For instance, the leaders of prominent American tech companies conspired with each other to suppress wages. Should this be laughed at?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt#Role_in_illegal_n...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Cultural drives are somewhat globalized, big news stories which might lead to some desire for government action are unlikely to remain purely local, and they're even more unlikely to be isolated events
The whole world uses the same apps to visit the same websites and see mostly the same news stories, tv shows, movies, books, songs etc
This kind of big legislation doesn't sprout from nothing it takes time to gather momentum and in the world right now it's not crazy to think that multiple people are thinking about the same thing at various stages at the same time
And when one of these laws gets proposed or passed somewhere it helps provide momentum elsewhere so you get a slow boil and then everywhere "at once"
It should also be pointed out to them that saying “you there, yes you, stop doing that” to remote, likely anonymous, criminal types, has never been effective.
I’d say we should elect more people with tech knowledge but who’s going to quit their lucrative software engineering job to run for office, get paid considerably less and achieve little?
No, there is not.
I subscribe to Grey's Law:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"
If they can't be bothered to actually learn about the tech, perhaps it's because their funders don't want to.
This will basically make e-commerce a risky business. If I buy something from overseas, will I then get in trouble for setting up an end-to-end encrypted link with their shop or is it more likely that international sites will just stop serving UK customers so that they don't have to comply with an unworkable law?
That's certainly one interpretation, but I'd counter that an HTTPS connection to an online shop is also end-to-end as the contents are encrypted such that any intermediate ISP cannot sniff the contents, but only myself and the online shop are able to.
I strongly disagree, this makes zero sense, and I'd never heard of it in decades up until on HN just the other day. End-to-end means exactly what it says on the tin: END to END, with no middleman. The specific identity of what each "end" is, whether human, organization, or even a machine and not a human at all, is irrelevant. The point is that Alice and Bob can communicate information and nobody except "them" (noting that "Bob" here could be Future Alice too as in an E2EE storage service like a password manager) has access to plain text, only the ciphertext. This in contrast to things like email, where your goal is to communicate to Bob, but the relays it travels through also have access to the plain text even if the transmission between each hop is encrypted.
So if I'm talking to my bank through a link where only my bank and I have access to the info, that's absolutely E2EE. Same as if I'm logging into or commenting HN. HN is my "final destination" for the communication of information, and only myself and HN can see the plain text text during said communication (though of course in the case of comments HN then takes it and publishes it at my directive).
In contrast other sites may be both E2EE and not. If I'm accessing Migadu or MXroute or Google in order to find out something specifically from them, the HTTPS connection is sufficient for E2EE, since they're the other party. If I use webmail to send an email to someone else, the fact that I connect to their service via HTTPS doesn't make for an E2EE communication, because they're not the intended recipient, but a middleman, yet can read the plain text anyway.
Through TLS? That is certainly not E2EE. That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank. End to end means exactly that. You are able to communicate securely with only the trust of the entity you are communicating with.
You definition pretty much covers any effective use of cryptography for privacy. That would make the distinction meaningless.
It certainly is. Encryption is a separate problem from authentication.
>That is because a trusted third party (certificate authority) is involved to insure that you are actually communicating with the bank
The CA that helps with mutual authentication does not have access to the plain text, and it's perfectly possible to have other checks on top.
>You definition pretty much covers any effective use of cryptography for privacy. That would make the distinction meaningless.
Wrong. In fact, it's your definition that excludes nearly every single existing use of cryptography, also making the distinction meaningless. For most people even Signal involves a central party and trust for establishing authentication. iMessage? WhatsApp? None of this is E2EE according to you, which is ridiculous. MitM attacks and endpoint security are the core modern challenge for E2EE systems, but E2EE is still notably distinct from all the many kinds of communication that existed and still exist that aren't E2EE, and where neither of those are even required because the plaintext itself is available.
Edit to add: I don't tend to use wikipedia as much anymore, but regardless of objective objections to its definitions, I do think it's certainly worth considering for a view on what subjective consensus is. Ie, whether or not the articles are all correct, if you're trying to answer a more meta question of "what do people think it is" then that's always helpful. Which of course is a big question when it comes to language definitions. So fwiw, its entry on E2EE [0] agrees:
>End-to-end encryption ensures that data is transferred securely between endpoints. But, rather than try to break the encryption, an eavesdropper may impersonate a message recipient (during key exchange or by substituting their public key for the recipient's), so that messages are encrypted with a key known to the attacker.
Which is how I've always understood it. Authentication is a major second level challenge to encryption, but without any encryption at all it just doesn't generally come up when it comes to privacy. There is no particular authentication for HTTP or telnet. E2EE is one of those "necessary, but not sufficient" items.
----
Most people do not have effective E2EE while using Signal or other systems like it. That is because they have not verified their "Safety Numbers" which is what is used in the Signal case. It is a long known (since PGP) usability problem that makes such systems impractical for most. Relevant:
* https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...
Not making this issue clear (identity verification is a prerequisite for E2EE) is a common scammy thing done by various messaging systems.
I'm uncertain whether to be relieved (because multiple previous attempts have come to naught) or worried (because they might actually do it this time).
There was exactly one Prime Minister between Blair and Cameron, and he (Brown) wasn't elected.
(Ireland actually holds the vote for Taoiseach, and every party solemnly puts forward their own candidate, and makes speeches on their behalf, despite the fact that everyone knows what the result would be. It's a piece of political theatre.)
I still think a PM that doesn't lead their party into an election lacks legitimacy, and isn't a 'proper' PM. The most recent two - Sunak and Truss - weren't elected in that sense, because they didn't have any popular mandate.
We don't elect the party of government either, though; few people can name their MP. They vote based on party leaders, as long as voting is permitted.
The idea that the PM is "elected by the House" is nonsense. No such election occurs.
Being "selected as PM" by the monarch doesn't count at all. It's completely irrelevant (I'm a republican). The monarch appoints anyone that can "command the support of the House", which invariably means the leader of the majority party.
But in the absence of a General Election, the appointee cannot claim a popular mandate, and shouldn't do anything that would "surprise" people. Truss, outrageously, claimed to have a popular mandate, relying on the mandate that Johnson won. But he won his mandate more-or-less exclusively on the Brexit thing.
“Wouldn’t the sentence ‘I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign’ have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?”
I thought — maybe you think ChatGPT wrote the comment. But then I thought - maybe you think I used ChatGPT to recall the Martin Gardner quote. Then I was interested to see if ChatGPT would get it right… it failed badly!
I asked it for the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips… here’s the response I got:
“Yes, I am familiar with the Martin Gardner quote about fish and chips. The quote is:
"I am convinced that the best food in the world is prepared by English cooks, and served in English restaurants. The best example of this is fish and chips, which is nutritious, cheap, and tasty. The fish is delicate, the batter crisp, the chips are golden, and the mushy peas are the perfect accompaniment."
Martin Gardner was an American writer who is best known for his work in mathematics and science, as well as his long-running "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American. However, he also wrote about a wide range of topics, including literature, philosophy, and popular culture, and was known for his wit and humor.”
Nice try chatto, nice try.
I pasted the quote into ChatGPT and it understood Martin perfectly —
The reply was
“Yes, adding quotation marks to the sentence would definitely make it clearer and easier to read. Here's how the sentence would look with quotation marks:
"I want to put a hyphen between the words 'Fish' and 'And', and 'And' and 'Chips' in my 'Fish-and-Chips' sign."
By using quotation marks, it becomes clear which words the hyphens should go between, and it also clarifies the intended meaning of the phrase "Fish-and-Chips." Without quotation marks, the sentence can be confusing and difficult to understand.”
No administration would do such a thing, even the incompetents in office at the moment. (quite possible is a terrible PR own goal followed by a u-turn, however)
Signed by most of the tech community and the employers, with a threat to collectively retaliate and blackhole the entire country. Or something along those lines.
Examples:
“How dare you make me become a licensed engineer just to be paid to do math?”
“How dare you arrest me for this child porn? It’s just a sequence of 1s and 0s, therefore, you are criminalizing a number!”
I don't know of human psychology really works like the toy model in my head (probably not, typical mind fallacy), but that's a separate thing to my own affect.
When it comes to porn, the general consensus is that it must be based on consent. But even that is ambiguous: whose consent are we talking about? The actors, or the characters they portray?
It's very straightforward to require consent of each person filming. No matter what the story is, actors have human rights that must be actively preserved.
But what about the content itself? Porn that portrays fictional sexual assault is generally accepted as morally good. How? Audience.
A person may have a fantasy where they are the victim of assault. Are they doing anything wrong? No. It isn't wrong to be a victim, or to imagine it. From that perspective, the foundation of consent is met. An adult watching fictional assault porn can bring their own consent into the experience, reframing the content into a useful and healthy context.
But what if that person is not an adult? The general consensus is that a child cannot give consent. I think a better framing would be to say that an adult cannot ask for, accept, or use a child's consent. This rule is the foundation for making it criminal to sell porn to minors.
Many would argue that any fictional portrayal of a child being sexually assaulted cannot have a moral perspective or utility. A child might be able to fantasize as the victim of their own assault, but no adult can sell a fictional portrayal of that fantasy to them.
---
So all that's left are the weeds: should a person watch fictional assault porn while imagining themselves as the perpetrator? Should fictional child sexual assault media be used as a pacifier for pedophiles?
These are hard ugly questions, and the emotional response from most people is an unequivocal, "no". Can we trust our emotions to lead to justice, or do they simply distract us with victory?
"""In response to more restrictive gun control laws, he set out to prove that all such laws were ultimately futile by showing that one could manufacture a functional firearm from hardware store goods, without using any purpose-made firearms parts."""
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIhGCRIQnCA
& in recreational use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YE9J7qcj0c
Mathematics is the study of fundamental patterns that are present between them. Mathematics is the abstraction itself.
Banning encryption is like government banning video compression because it could be used for criminal activity.
It's not the data itself being banned, it's the abstract math it is made from.
You can get around these restrictions by sending independently encrypted messages over chat apps and through VPNs or Tor using foreign phone numbers, but at the end of the day, a messaging service is only as useful as its network effect. If WhatsApp refuses to forward your encrypted messages because your mom or friend or boss doesn't always keep their circumvention VPN on, you don't have much of a choice.
Calling these bans "ending math" is like calling speeding tickets attempts to ban physics. People will still use these apps and people will still speed, but the majority of the population won't because when you're caught you're paying a hefty fine (or worse).
Another thing that is quite easy: A service provider can simply stop offering his service in the UK if such laws are passed. I wonder what the electoral outlook is, of a government that essentially prevents it's citizens from accessing WhatsApp...probably on par with someone proposing to ban sugar or declaring cats to be illegal.
Very few people actually write cryptographic code, and even fewer write code that is safe to use. I doubt many people will bother with some kind of messenger hook/overlay keyboard to supplant the native messenger encryption. After all, in some countries SMS/MMS is still in use and nobody seems to care about encryption there.
There are of course workarounds (e.g. steganography), but if you add enough friction then the average person won't bother, and those who do try to maintain their privacy will be at even greater risk of detection and punishment.
It also mentioned that people within the user generated content company would be held criminally liable for breaches of this law, spefically content moderation. completely defeats the point of being a company.
the whole thing is a fucking joke and should be scrapped, just thought I'd clarify some points
If authorities want to read the messages of someone, they need to lawfully get access to their device and read the messages.