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Comment by theginger | Hacker News Reader

The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand that there are no boarders on the internet, and it'd be impossible to impose any without the kind of extreme restrictions of a totalitarian regime.

Any measures without broad international cooperation will push vast number of people towards darker corners of the internet, which will not just end up completely undermining what they are trying to achieve, it will make the problems worse.

Meta alone have the power to make this law a miserable failure. People will want to use WhatsApp, the government themselves use it extensively. If meta refuses there is very little they can do. Facebook can continue to operate without a single person on the ground in UK. It might harm their business in some ways but it's definitely doable. The government might be able to force/convince Apple and Google to take it out their app stores in the UK but such regional restrictions are easily bypassed and WhatsApp is popular enough to make people try it. So that would then normalise the practices such as side loading / jail breaking and avoiding regional restrictions. Cyber criminals would be rubbing their hands at the opportunities this creates and I am sure the peodos and terrorists this is meant to be stopping will jump at the chance to get in on the act.

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> The government might be able to force/convince Apple and Google to take it out their app stores in the UK

Apple has even threatened to withdraw their own systems from the UK rather than comply with this.

https://9to5mac.com/2023/07/20/apple-imessage-facetime-remov...

Unlike in China, where they do presently escrow keys to the government for mass surveillance.

Yes, because China has double the population as the whole of Europe. Ceasing operations in the UK wouldn't hurt their revenue as much as doing so in China.

So Apple's only principled if they'll make slightly less ludacris amounts of money?

It's really hard to be a credible "privacy/security" choice when your morals are plainly for sale...

Nobody is talking about morals here. Its bad for business for Apple to capitulate to the UK. It's bad for business for them to not capitulate to China.

And iPhones ceasing to be sold in the UK would probably be all it takes for public backlash to neuter the law. I imagine that's not on the table in China.

> Its bad for business for Apple to capitulate to the UK. It's bad for business for them to not capitulate to China.

It's very difficult to square these two sentences together.

On one hand, if they break their privacy and security for the UK government, it's bad for business because they'll continue to sell iDevices and services?

On the other hand, if they break their privacy and security for the CCP, it's good for business because they'll continue to sell iDevices and services?

You're tacitly admitting my assertion - Apple's morals are for sale.

If the US threatened Apple, we can expect they'll sell out there too, no?

> You're tacitly admitting my assertion - Apple's morals are for sale.

Yes.

China is much further from the Western world than the UK. Capitulation there isn’t a step onto the slippery slope. Doing the same thing in the UK would lead very quickly to EU and US demands to do the same.

By exiting such a small market, Apple defends the much larger markets against creeping surveillance.

Remember how fierce the backlash was to their CSAM scanning proposal? They walked that back. Some people might think it was for moral reasons, but I’m pretty sure they realized it would harm their bottom line.

The way things work in China is not the same as the UK. They either play by CCP rules or they don’t play at all. Apple’s calculus here seems to be that not playing in the UK market is worth it, whereas missing out on the Chinese market is not worth it.

Nobody needs to operate in China. That's the thing that's being overlooked.

Apple made a choice to operate there - and would have still been the world's most valued company regardless.

So, Apple's choice was to sell-out their privacy and security credentials to make more money - counting on their other large markets (ie. the US) not paying close enough attention to see the blatant hypocrisy.

"Security and privacy are great - unless we can make more money selling off your security and privacy to oppressive government regimes!"

Somehow that just doesn't have a catchy marketing ring to it...

So now there's precedent that Apple will violate everything they stand for if a large enough market demands it. What happens when the US government decides to place Apple in the crosshairs for not "helping catch terrorists" or something? Will Apple sell out too? Why not?

I agree with all of this. Though I do believe Apple would put up a fight—if it comes down to it they’d follow the law and keep selling phones.

We have examples of this from previous attempts to weaken encryption. The FBI’s San Bernardino case being the most memorable one for me.

While a good example, that was in 2015. There haven't been very many (or any?) public challenges since - which does make one wonder...

Apple could simultaneously backdoor their devices while also keep them secure from anyone but the government with a warrant. These things are not mutually exclusive.

The China precedent is troubling - to say the least.

You cannot backdoor a device in such a way that only 'certain' people can access it. Once that door is there, people will find an exploit it. The only way to be completely secure is never build the door in the first place.

You are wrong. Despite some recent movements to produce iPhones in other places, approximately 100% of all iPhones are made in China.

Without China, there is no iPhone, and there is no Apple. Apple, presently, needs to operate in China. They have them by the balls.

Compliance with CCP demands is non-optional.

This may change in the future. Today it is 100% true.

So you're claiming it's not possible to produce an iPhone in any other country besides China?

That seems incredibly dubious.

Who forced Apple to manufacturer iPhones in China?

Nobody.

US and European political leadership who made manufacturing unaffordable domestically.

It will take about five years optimistically to build that capability.

It's the global debt-based fiat monetary system. It squeezes workers hard and turns every industry into a winner-takes-all industry since workers are so poor they can only afford the cheapest of the cheap. In the old days, a business could afford to continue to operate and thrive even if they weren't necessarily number one at everything... People had enough surplus income to not worry about spending a bit more for some local product even if it wasn't necessarily the best value for money. Also consumers were not so insanely well attuned to squeezing every penny as they are today (due to lower financial stress levels) and this created more room for new businesses to compete with incumbents.

It's the effect of the monetary system squeezing the masses hard which forces everyone to buy the cheapest things and it created a kind of technological shrinkflationary race to the bottom.

You’re correct of course. Even so it’s worth noting that you could also call it the global asset based monetary system. Credits and debits are just two sides of the ledger.

In my mind, and definitely informed by my attraction to medieval Catholic philosophy, the problem isn’t really debt but rather usury.

Kind of interesting that the definition of usury became about 'unreasonably high' interest rates as opposed to merely any interest. I think the harm of usury can happen at any interest rate level depending on the specific details of debt contracts.

I actually think that if it's one's own money, they should be allowed to loan it at any interest rate since they're taking the risk upon themselves. If they can find a willing borrower at such high rates, then good for them. If the borrower agrees to a bad deal, then it's the borrower's own fault.

What I most strongly oppose is the idea of public institutions loaning citizens' money through the issuance of new currency (which dilutes the value of previously issued money). It's especially harmful when the interest rate is low.

For example, if the interest rate is 0%, then it's unjust for a government institution to dilute citizen's currency and shift the risk of borrower default onto currency-holding citizens (savers) without offering any upside to those savers; in that case, the central banks turn regular citizens (savers) into suckers by loaning out their money for free for the benefit of reckless borrowers who borrow it for free.

>US and European political leadership who made manufacturing unaffordable domestically.

Manufacturing consumer goods in the west was never unaffordable, just that insane corporates profits weren't possible while keeping manufacturing in the west, as they were in China.

A lot of consumer electronics were made in the west before the mass exodus to China. Nokia phones was made in Finland and Germany, Siemens phones were made in Germany, Ericsson phones were made in Sweden, etc.

It was all possible and they also didn't cost an rm and a leg, but companies saw the allure of ultracheap labor and loose environmental regulations in China to jack up their profits.

Right. And governments failed to establish public policies to make that unattractive when they certainly could have.

Exactly. Tariffs on Chinese made goods would have prevented this but everyone saw only shareholder value increasing opportunities so it was decided to offshore all electronics manufacturing.

> That seems incredibly dubious.

Check out the global battery supply chain

Are you asking if the west could make phones? Almost certainly. Have they chosen to do so? Not at all. Apple may be big enough today to possibly operate without china in 10-20 years, but no chance in 2007 or today.

It's not possible to make 25,000 iPhones per hour anywhere else on Earth right now. There are over a hundred thousand people who work on manufacturing the iPhone and you can't just clone them (and their skills and experience and knowledge) in a week, or a month, or even a year.

That's not dubious, that's obvious.

> Who forced Apple to manufacturer iPhones in China?

> Nobody

Ironically correct: the absence of alternatives — nobody else could do it — is what forced them in the first place.

The recent pressure from the US government to "bring it home" is because the US government finally started to realise that was both true and bad (doesn't matter if Huawei was really spying, Washington believed they were); similarly for equivalent EU pressure.

I think it's more that not capitulating to China would potentially result in destroying Apples supply chain. China could potentially kill Apple, the UK can kill a portion of Apples user base.

US stock listed Businesses have no morals, it’s amazing people somehow talk about them like people, not profit maximizing paperclip engines.

They have huge illiquid manufacturing in China. The government has a lot of leverage over them. Its impossible for them to gamble on this. It's not even comparable to the UK situation at all.

Nobody forced Apple to manufacture anything in China - let alone sell devices there and be held to Chinese laws regarding privacy and security.

Make no mistake - Apple traded their moral high-ground for a few bucks.

Even if they pulled all manufacturing from China, they could still potentially be kneecapped if China blacklisted them from purchasing things like gallium.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/prices_of_gallium_and...

China wouldn't care if Apple bought gallium if Apple wasn't selling/manufacturing devices there in the first place.

Apple made a choice folks... and it was to sell out to an oppressive regime. There is no other way to see this.

You really think if Apple completely boycotted China that China wouldn't retaliate?

Most companies in this world do not operate in China.

Apple made a choice. It's really simple.

I don't think they had a choice not to operate in China in any practical sense.

They could have not been a large scale electronics manufacturer, but then they don't operate in China by making an entirely different kind of choice to be an entirely different kind of company. I don't think any electronics manufacturer (or meta-manufacturer/designer/whatever/globalization is weird) within an order of magnitude of Apple's scale can practically operate without benefit of China's manufacturing base.

It feels like you have to bend the intuitive notion of "deciding" to operate in China even means for this to make sense and you just want to pin something on Apple here because they're a giant corporation, and all giant corporations are morally gray at best. The global economy has "decided" that China has the manufacturing base for this kind of business.

This doesn't seem productive in the way that appeals to personal responsibility fall flat in dealing with societal issues, like, we shouldn't have public drug treatment programs because people shouldn't do drugs. People do drugs, and there are costs to not having public treatment programs, so if you want to pretend it's just a matter of personal responsibility, you are indeed pretending, because it is also a societal problem not negated by framing it as personal responsibility.

Here, we assign "personal responsibility" to Apple for operating in China, when we have the "societal issue" of large scale electronics manufacturing centralizing there so that they have the industrial base for it. The world, on the whole, has allowed China to link into the world economy in this manner regardless of their humans rights record and other issues.

So, while there's nothing to love about Apple here, I feel like it's really missing the forest for the trees to frame this as an "Apple" issue in any sense whatsoever, but should be framed as a China-human-rights, globalization, and world economy issue, and we don't do ourselves any favors with appeals to "corporate personal responsibility"

A company has no morals… Its policies depend on the people within it, who do have all sorts of moral principles that are always more or less at odds with each other. Trying to go beyond that is a fool’s errand: a company is not a person. Everything makes sense once you’ve understood that.

When it happens, a company acting purely on someone’s moral code (usually a dictator CEO, though) sounds fine and reassuring. But on the contrary, this is unstable as you never know when that person will be sidelined, forced out, or realign their principles. At this point the company you trust can very well become an enemy. Just look at Twitter or Reddit.

On the long term, you need the company’s financial interests to be aligned with your (various) interests. This is the only thing that remains stable. Well, as long as nobody comes and make it private; then anything goes. It sucks, but that’s capitalism for you.

For the moment, Apple is mostly safe because basic privacy is their brand, and dropping it would be costly. This gives them leverage against some governments, but not so much against others. You can also count yourself lucky not to be born in China, but then there’s nothing Apple can do about that.

It's also important to draw red lines right away before unwelcome precedents are set. We'll do this for China and maybe for India if that market grows big enough, and we would absolutely do this in the US if compelled to, but we will not do this for anyone else. Except maybe for the EU.

No, the population of China is not the issue. The problem for Apple is that so many of their products are still made in China that if they anger the Chinese government they risk having their factories closed, leaving them with no products to sell. To say this would be disastrous for sales would be an understatement.

The last thing China is going to do is close manufacturing plants.

Apple makes 10x more selling in the Chinese market than they do in the United Kingdom, even with all of the roadblocks and handicaps China erects. Further Apple realizes that as the UK is a Western, democratic nation it is easy to essentially bargain about policies. Apple's current threats are essentially negotiating. There would be no negotiating with China about stuff like this.

Beijing can’t even shut down the factories north of the city that dump particulates into the lungs of the leadership and their families. No way they can shut down some of the big iPhone factories.

Are you joking? Even a random middle class flat in Beijing would have at least one OK air filter appliance. Party elites likely have pretty good industrial grade ones everywhere. First thing is shield themselves from the fruits of their policies...

I’m pretty concerned about what Apple is doing in China, but there’s no evidence at all that Apple is escrowing end-to-end encryption keys to the government. There’s also no evidence that the Chinese government is using Apple’s non-E2E keys (held in Apple hardware in a cage at a Chinese hosting provider) for mass surveillance. I’m not saying that it’s impossible: I’m saying if you could come up with that evidence, either through reverse-engineering or a verifiable leak from Apple, it would be the biggest story in tech. You would be famous and (if you knew the right hedge fund) probably very rich.

That Apple operates iCloud in every single country except China, where GCBD (AIPO Cloud (Guizhou) Technology Co. Ltd) operates iCloud, think I makes pretty clear what's going on.

That’s separate from iMessage, which is end to end.

Apple used to be able to access iMessages through iCloud backups. They changed their system worldwide, now they can’t. So presumably GCBD also lost access to iMessages in iCloud backups.

Apple can still read ~100% of all iMessages in real-time because iCloud Backup (non e2ee by default) serves as a key escrow backdoor in the e2ee of iMessage. It is thus legitimate to state that iMessage is not e2ee as in practice each iMessage is also encrypted to a key held by Apple (in addition to the endpoints).

Even if you turn it (e2ee iCloud Backup) on, it's ineffective, as both parties to a conversation must have turned it on for the conversation to be private.

Your beliefs are inaccurate.

> iCloud Backup (non e2ee by default)

I don't see any option to enable e2ee iCloud Backup on iOS 16.6, does this mean your information is outdated and it's all e2ee now?

It’s called “advanced data protection”. You’ll find it hidden deep within the iCloud settings.

It’s off by default.

Wow, thanks for mentioning this. I was also under the impression it was e2ee by default but it was actually disabled for me.

Interesting. FYI, I'm not an apple user, but no upset that some are.

I wonder. Is this an attempt to market? Make it optional, but tout "we do this!', as if it is?

It's not a bad marketing position.

More prosaically it's probably because turning it on means it's easier to lose access to your data if you lose devices/keys. Apple can't help you if they don't have the keys. It's not a bad marketing position.

Actually there is a third option, don't back-up your iMessage to iCloud in the first place. In this configuration you need to transfer your content from device to device using a local backup if you intend to keep your messages.

You the have the same level of privacy (if not higher) than with ADP. But with the same drawback, if your recipient does backup to iCloud without ADP then messages can be intercept by apple at rest on your recipient iCloud backup.

Incidentally ADP mainly target users that didn't trusted iCloud backup for the lack of e2e encryption at rest.

Yes and to be precise this is the relevant source : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

The optional iCloud feature called "Advanced Data Protection" is currently an opt-in. It comes with a significant drawback for typical pop and mom users --> If you lost you password and recovery key it's game over you loose everything. So I guess it's sensible to keep this as an opt-in until users are better educated about this drawback.

What will be quite significant is wether or not this feature will be available for chinese users.

It make sense from a technical POV to block ADP feature in poorly democratic countries that might request it like China and maybe tomorrow the UK.

PS : Once a significant % of users activated ADP it could be a good UX improvement to display a warning to mixed ADP status conversation that the conversation is not fully e2e encrypted. However this might be premature right now otherwise early adopters of ADP would be flooded by such warning.

There’s some confusion here, iMessage is end to end encrypted by default. That in no way protects the information on each users device.

If iCloud is enabled, then by default it gets unencrypted copies of these messages from the device unless “advanced data protection” is also enabled which ensures iMessage is encrypted but means losing your password also loses access to these backups. However, disabling iCloud sidesteps this issue and honestly if you want that kind of privacy then disabling iCloud is probably a good idea.

So if one users uses ADP and the other user disables iCloud then the conversion is protected.

If you scrolled down in the link provided above, it mentions with BOTH Standard and Advanced data protection messages are end to end encrypted, it’s just with advanced data protection the encryption key also ends up being encrypted too, but I’m positive even this has changed recently. You can try looking at logs when you turn on messages in iCloud and see that your messages are encrypted.

So lots of confusion in this thread, my advice for Apple would be make it very very clear to users that your data is safe. I mean they are threatening to back out of UK, so it’s against their core principles and also probably very technically expensive to undo they end to end encrypted system.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I've read that ADP is not fully available in China.

Don’t know why you’ve been downvoted. You’re correct. I forgot ADP was optin. This is likely why China allows it.

Also possible ADP is off as an option in China.

Of course this wouldn’t work for the UK system unless the UK demanded the iCloud keys same way as China has.

They don’t want their data leaving their country? Doesn't GermanyAlso have some privacy laws that require data on Germans to stay within Germany? Isn’t this just an extension of that in a way?

Is China the only country where this applies you mean? Because Apple runs the iCloud servers in every single country, except China.

Regarding the financial impact, what's the trade if they find out China is different? Shorting Apple? I don't think that would be a consequence. Nobody cares that China intercepts everything, we just don't want to live there or in a regime like it.

There was a rumor about separate HSMs for device personalization in China, and this would be verifiable by determining whether the Chinese HSMs could verify cryptograms produced by derived keys from a US device, against Apple's personalizaiton endpoints in china. I don't know the protocol off hand, but there is a short list of ways to do it. If Apple uses different root secrets in China from the rest of the world, what further evidence would you need?

Apple has claimed that they don’t allow China to intercept communications using these keys. They’ve said on the record to the WSJ that they don’t do any combination of these things, and they left very little wiggle room in their denials (Google Apple China encryption keys WSJ). If you could show that they were compromising security for the Chinese government but not making any allowances for the FBI, and that their executives were lying about it, it would be a massive political scandal. There would almost certainly be congressional hearings, simply because any one of {Apple, China, tech executives caught lying, tech executives secretly collaborating with foreign governments} is by itself an opportunity for Congresspeople to get their face on TV and this would cover all the bases. Following this there would be huge US government pressure for Apple to (at minimum) cease collaborating with China to surveil its people, or else to offer the same capability to the US government. Potentially Apple’s entire business in China could be jeopardized if it was predicated on secret collaboration, not to mention their whole supply chain would be even more at risk. In the long run Apple might maneuver out of the situation somehow, but in the short run it would certainly affect them very badly.

> Following this there would be huge US government pressure for Apple to (at minimum) cease collaborating with China to surveil its people, or else to offer the same capability to the US government.

Congress knows this would only kneecap one of their largest companies (with no fallback option at present). There is no iPhone without China.

Apple can and does already provide surveillance of this type domestically to FBI/DHS/et al. Approximately all iMessages are readable by Apple and extension by the USG in real-time, with or without a warrant.

>Apple has claimed that they don’t allow China to intercept communications using these keys. They’ve said on the record to the WSJ that they don’t do any combination of these things, and they left very little wiggle room in their denials

There's wiggle room in what you wrote: "Apple doesn't allow China to intercept communications, China just does it on their own" for example is a way to parse that sentence.

That would be a bigger scandal. If Apple's communication protection protocols could be subverted in flight (i.e., not via endpoint compromises) without Apple's consent or active participation, that would imply that the protocols themselves were just for show.

Chinese national security law includes a gag order for such assistance requests.

Apple can say they don’t allow it, because their local partner company is the one actually doing it. And the local partner would say they don’t allow it, because Chinese law (and the Party) requires them to keep all national security assistance secret.

US executives can be compelled to testify truthfully under oath. There is no "Chinese law compels me to keep this secret" defense to perjury charges in the US. If credible evidence emerges, Apple executives will eventually be forced to admit whatever they know. The only viable strategy here is to have a broken system and plausible "not know" it's being exploited, but that's a very fragile approach (technically risky, vulnerable to whistleblowers) and it only works once.

> held in Apple hardware in a cage at a Chinese hosting provider

There's also no evidence to support the claim of this architecture, either.

> You would be famous and (if you knew the right hedge fund) probably very rich.

Famous, sure.

Rich? Perhaps… but I suspect that annoying a superpower will mean that, like Snowden, one would be somewhat restricted in ability to make use of any such wealth or fame.

Would like a citation for this. Also, Apple recently deployed e2e encryption for all of iCloud, and this is live even in China.

True, but the Chinese are in control of the iCloud system used for Chinese residents, which was carved off to comply with Chinese law.

You can frame it the different way: Apple has given up improving the freedom of the Chinese people because that is infeasible. But it hasn’t given up hope on the West.

Or Apple doesn't care about either, just pays lip service to both.

They are a corporation. They care about making money. Privacy concerns are completely and utterly subservient to this goal.

That’s because Apple still makes their hardware in China & America. But not in the UK.

Ever been to China? The internet certainly has borders and boundaries. Sometimes you can sneak across or get a visa, but individual nations make their own rules. Most people either follow them or remain unaware of them, and large multinational companies will typically follow local laws because they are juicy targets.

In the UK, companies which protest this law are threatening to leave the market. That would mean blocking UK users on their properties, not helping them find ways to break the law.

Or, when you say "no boarders," do you mean that the internet is not zoned for residential use? Sorry if I misunderstood.

"and it'd be impossible to impose any without the kind of extreme restrictions of a totalitarian regime."

Surely china would fall under that statement from OP's perspective.

If the UK implemented something like The Great Firewall of China, it would be a gigantic statement about the country's future ideological direction (arguably started and in line with Brexit), and may actually be enough to cause protests large enough to make a difference.

Don’t give our idiot Government any ideas.

>arguably started and in line with Brexit

I disagree with this part. The EU is on that same path. The EU Great Firewall idea has been kicked around for years and it has even shown up in some policy suggestion documents.

I think the EU started down the path all on it's own. Fining someone who has google fonts is a bit over the top.

I disagree for the simple reason that I've lived in the UK for 40 years, and I recall each home secretary being more authoritarian and pro-surveillance than the last. The RIP bill is a decade old and was strengthened, under home sec May, before the referendum.

I would describe the EU as wavering. Perhaps they'll do it, but it's far from certain.

100% correct - the EU is a relative bastion of sanity in comparison.

It would be nice if the UK government used the ridiculous powers they gave themselves to hold Boris Johnson to account though.

The EU did implement snooping on every European's internet history in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

But you could make the argument that it was largely due to Britain.

Brexit is a refusal of authoritarianism and introducing another layer of "barely elected" government, which is why the UK is being punished for following through with Brexit.

Of course most governments in the UK, like everywhere else (whether right or left wing) are, more or less secretly, authoritarian so they will be favourable to a great firewall when the right time comes.

The EU has been talking about it for some time and I'm sure they'll stick it together with some 600 pages policy nobody will bother reading at some point. https://diginomica.com/eu-policy-doc-recommends-building-eur...

They can't remove all our freedoms at once or people may lift their heads from their smartphones and protest.

We're being slowly boiled alive.

The UK is not being "punished". All the consequences of Brexit are imposed by the UK on the UK. (Also, it seems to be leading them somewhere more authoritarian, not less.)

Brexit for most people was about almost nothing at all. It was an empty shell of an idea that people poured their vision of a better country into. That's why the UK is being 'punished' - because nobody had a single actual decent idea of what they wanted.

"Brexit" the movement has lots of meanings to lots of people but is generally a set of issues/complaints. The people that movement enabled (brexiteers) have almost universally made those issues worse.

> introducing another layer of "barely elected" government

If the UK really cared about unelected government, why don't they get rid of their House of Lords? This would have been much less painful than Brexit. It looks a lot like this unelected government complaint is just an excuse and not something that they actually care about.

I’m not on-side with Brexit, but it’s not like the UK public have been given the chance to vote on dissolving the lords at this point.

That's the kind of opportunity which must be seized, not received. The French figured this out but the British probably never will.

Bloody revolution is not really appropriate here, the majority of the House of Lords is already not hereditary - of 780 seats, 90 are occupied by hereditary peers and AFAICT they will no longer pass their seats on.

The issue is whether the leaders of the commons should be able to appoint people to the upper chamber for life, whether the church should have a seat at the table etc. Or whether the upper chamber should be directly elected. It’s a matter of governance and constitution more than embedded privilege.

So as much as “Guillotine the nobs” would be a popular cry, most of them aren’t nobs in the first place.

This kind of cope is why you'll continue to be stuck with them.

I don’t live there, and explaining the situation, which you clearly don’t understand, is not ‘cope’.

I am confident that you have accurately conveyed the British mentality towards their circumstance, and therefore the reason their circumstance will continue.

I am confident you don’t understand what their circumstance is, such that your comments comparing it to the French situation a couple of centuries ago are born from nothing more than ignorance.

Hmm...

French Revolution - 1789.

English Revolution - 1649.

So the English cut off their Monarch's head before the French did. But we then invited the Monarch's back after not liking the republic of the "Lord Protector".

Admittedly the English state, not the later British state, but anyway...

I don't think they care about unelected government - a relative novelty in historical terms - so much as being ruled by foreigners.

I spent a long time rebutting each counterfactual in turn, but then I recognised that I was falling for a gish gallop. Furthermore, as dang is (rightly) adamant about avoiding personal remarks, I had to cut out the funny bits.

So instead, here's the simple truth.

The UK, in a surge of authoritarianism, cut its own balls off by leaving the EU (and the Civil rights it confers). It did this to appease fringe nutjobs and to make a pile of money for hedgies. Then it howled in pain and blamed the EU, even though the EU was against the chopping of the plums from the get-go.

The conditions for this bollockectomy were created by a barely-elected government, after the fall of which we have had, mainly, unelected government.

This entire manoeuvre was done under a screed of fractal dishonesty, in which scuttling little fibs decorate a structure of brassy falsehoods all stacked higgledy-piggledy on a giant whopper. Unwilling to accept the blame, the responsible parties continue to lie to this day.

In a parallel move completely unrelated to the above, the unelected UK government is ramping up surveillance. The EU has not done this, but the liars blame it anyway.

Today I learned the phrase “gish gallop”, which is both really useful and really fun to say.

Protests? I would leave the country. I'm already disillusioned as it is.

To go where?

Serious question as a UK citizen who doesn’t live there anymore. Post-Brexit, leaving is surprisingly difficult despite the refrain of the morons who say “if you don’t like it go somewhere else”, blind or ignorant to the fact they removed that option.

You can always go to Ireland, curtsy of the so-called CTA.

Good point, I’d forgotten about that. Probably one of the easier and better options.

Well over a million ordinary people protested against the Second Gulf War and it may zero difference.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/feb/15/politics.politica...

We're not allowed to protest.

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-government-plan...

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."

UK rebelling against the UK itself would be a nice (and IMHO, deserved) end to the empire.

We're British. Our protests either don't matter or are banned.

Perhaps you meant another democratic country where the idiot clowns hadn't taken over the circus ...

The UK doesn't need to implement a Great Firewall; if they succeed in convincing service providers to voluntarily exit the UK market, then each service provider will block traffic to/from the UK on its own. A few shitty laws may be enough to incentivize the emergence of a Great Patchwork Firewall.

The internet most in China have access to is best viewed as a national intranet.

I already block EU countries from my site. Wrote a gem called "GDPR safe" and it returns an http error code 457, if the IP address indicates an EU country.

Thank you. If only Meta would take this approach everywhere and not just Threads, society would be better off.

The borders and boundaries are bypassed with a roaming SIM card.

Cell towers operate from within the country though and are subject to their laws. That we can bypass things as foreigners is only at the government prerogative.

Correct, however the fact that this situation exists at all I feel is oft overlooked. The implications of it can be debated but the fact remains.

> That would mean blocking UK users on their properties, not helping them find ways to break the law.

That's a sad reflection of the tech industry. Too much "we can't make money from them" and too little spitefulness of the sovereignty of foreign governments.

Even with a totalitarian regime, they cannot stop the rest of the world from using encryption. People can pull their business entities out of the UK and they have no jurisdiction outside their borders.

If I create an E2E messaging app, I don't need to listen to the UK at all. The UK can't tell me what to do any more than China can. China can block my app if they want, but it's on them, not me, to block it. Same goes for the UK. They can set up a firewall too if they want. But I don't need to change my app if I don't set foot in the UK.

Yeah the UK doesn't have the clout of the US that does go after app creators in other countries all the time extraditing them to the US etc, or attempting to anyway.

They certainly can, if they wanted to - or they could block your app and exile you with minimum effort.

Telegram is half banned in Russia.

Of course this doesn't apply to the bad guys: they're already breaking the law, using E2E is a no-brainer for them.

The UK government can't ban math out of existence (even if it looks like they're trying very hard, judging from the quality of their education system) so there will always be encryption.

It's the same with guns: congratulations you've outlawed guns and now only criminals can use them.

Your last analogy is very poor because even against rising rates of criminal gun use, the UK and the ROTW apart from the USA continues to have substantially lower levels of gun related deaths and suicide by police, against the USA.

So true: gun use and ownership in the UK rises and is mostly criminals. It's still less of a problem per capita than promiscuous gun ownership in the USA by all measures I understand.

This has nothing to do with the "war on encryption by the state" topic

>The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand that there are no boarders on the internet, and it'd be impossible to impose any without the kind of extreme restrictions of a totalitarian regime.

Why would the latter stop them? They have no problem with these.

>Any measures without broad international cooperation

Don't worry, other governments are just as shitty and want the same BS.

>The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand ... impossible to impose

Yeah but it's never worried them much in the past. As a Brit I occasionally come across the effects of them requiring ISPs to block piracy sites. Something comes up saying "this site is blocked" so you click like one or two buttons to switch to a different connection or turn a VPN on (VeePN is good and free). I imagine their encryption ban will be similarly tricky to avoid. I think it's more about looking noble to the electors than actually achieving anything.

>The UK Government repeatedly fails to understand that there are no boarders on the internet

Don't know what universe or timeline you're from, but on this earth today, the internet definitely has borders.

That's why we have those EU cookie banners and GDPR consent forms, and why some of my favorite piracy websites are blocked by all ISPs in my country, or why I can't watch Top Gear on BBC's website because I'm not from the UK, or why Facebook had to remove some politically spicy content worldwide because the courts where I live forced them to, etc, etc.

Mainstream web companies have to conform to local laws in each country or they'll get fined or blocked. Sure, there's VPNs to circumvent that, but the days of the lawless and borderless internet are a thing of the past.

My choice of interpretation is that those aren't internet borders, they're copyright borders, commercial borders, layers on top of a borderless internet.

This argument tends to break down at The Great Firewall of China, however, due to its thoroughness.

Unfortunately, we see those EU cookie banners and GDPR forms even if we live and visit a non-EU web site from outside. It doesn't target only the people inside the EU. So for this particular case is has no borders.

The international network we used to know has been destroyed. It is fracturing into smaller regional networks with heavy filtering at the borders as countries seek to impose their little laws on it.

I'm glad I was able to experience the true internet while it lasted. Truly a wonder of this world.

Encryption respects no authority...

... which is why they continue to come for encryption.

It's Charles II banning coffeehouses all over again.

The central problem with the UK is that they've never fully embraced, or taken the time to understand, an inherent, universal, unconditional right to freedom of speech by all of their citizens.

Kings respected it... when it was convenient.

And so the democracy they begat also only respects it... when it is convenient.

But freedom of speech when another permits it is no freedom at all, because the right's value increases precisely with its ability to stand up to other, more powerful interests' disagreement with speech.

I see no failure to understand. The UK is a pragmatic imperial power, not a collaborative cooperative peer. They built Empire upon the asymmetric application of technology. When time to surrender Empire, they did so. When time to build a Financial Empire, they did so. When the time comes to build an Internet Empire, I'm sure they will do that too, by applying whatever technology they have at hand.

When is the time to build an internet empire if not 20 years ago?

Good point. I'm not right now privy to their rarefied machinations, but I'm sure they have some aces in the hole.

Legislators, courts and bureaucrats (in this order) always fail to grasp such things. That's an idea erodes their jurisdiction and authority, and abhorrent to thee ethos.

No borders (from their POV), puts internet businesses above the law... which it sort of does. The global village happened, but global authority did not. There are no clean resolutions to some of these tensions.

They might even understand that but if they think that they'll get more votes by banning e2e encryption, they'll ban it. If people will sideload WhatsApp, they might not go after them. They'll keep the extra votes coming from "we care about the children" and lose very little votes for the small inconvenience of sideloading once.

By the way, does a sideloaded WhatsApp on Android still update from the Play store? And what will iPhone owners do?

I don't think the thing driving this initiative is public sentiment. The public, obviously hates child abuse and that's a convincing argument. Child protection organisations might be vocal proponents... but law enforcement, mi5 and whatnot are also probably strong advocates and tend to have the ear of governments.

This is a security/law enforcement issue.

I think a large majority of the "non technical" population would have no clue how to sideload apps, or even that it was possible, and that the more likely result of WhatsApp being withdrawn from the UK would be massive screaming from the public of such intensity and wrath that the government would be forced to backtrack.

> If meta refuses there is very little they can do. Facebook can continue to operate without a single person on the ground in UK

If it came to it, Whatsapp could be blocked at the network level. All the gov need to do is impose regulations that forbid ISPs and other infrastructure hosts to carry the traffic.

And then you present commercial VPNs to people who might have never heard of it.

Now you need to block VPNs, and the cat-and-mouse game gets in full action!

Also, at this point you've basically implemented the roots of a British version of The Great Firewall.

As GP pointed out:

> such regional restrictions are easily bypassed and WhatsApp is popular enough to make people try it. So that would then normalise the practices such as side loading / jail breaking and avoiding regional restrictions.

If people would be doing this (using a VPN, for instance), they would know how to bypass those restrictions.

Breaking encryption is not good for anyone and won't solve absolutely any problems, except the "problem" of right to privacy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_privacy

Sure, it can be circumvented. But 95% of people won't be bothered / wont know how / wont want the hassle.

I think it's dangerous to assume they fail to understand. These are smart people with good advisors. They just want to do it anyway. Which puts them in the category of evil.

Who would you rather be in the public eye, evil or stupid?

> They just want to do it anyway.

some background here.

the opposition in the UK is accusing the government of dragging their feet over this law, and are pushing them to adopt it sooner. they are also criticising the government for watering it down.

various NGOs are also attacking the government for watering it down and not moving as fast as possible.

basically the whole political spectrum is not only for this law, but wants it strengthened even further. there are also calls from the public for the government to go even further.

this is why there is no real backlash against this law. everyone no only wants it, but wants it to go a lot further than what the government has proposed.

> These are smart people

They really are not. The current crop of UK politicians of all stripes are thick as they come - intellectual lightweights who can bullshit their way through a media appearance thanks only to an abject lack of shame. No one can look at people like Mark François, Liz Truss or Dianne Abbott (just to take three) and think “ah, there’s someone playing dumb for the camera”!

Unfortunately, the current crop of journalists are largely ineffective if not broadly enabling if this kind of behaviour, and politics is not a field anyone not already independently wealthy can afford to be in (a junior developer in the Bay Area can easily make more than the Prime Minister) so it does not seem likely to self-correct.

It's not impossible. The pandemic showed that you don't need a Hitler or Stalin figure to be ruled with an iron fist. The oligarchy could just make the pro encryption people the new ivermectin.

> The oligarchy could just make the pro encryption people the new ivermectin.

Can you elaborate?

Encrypted files? You're obviously a money laundering, drug trafficking, child abusing terrorist. I pronounce you guilty and off to the waterboarding room with you.

They can create a whole new narrative around anything and you reward people with some power that would subscribe to that new story.

OK, but I was referring to the "ivermectin" part.

Ivermectin had every institutional accolade that a drug could have but because authorities wanted to take power away from doctors (took away their agency) to offer off-label use they had to "nerf" it to the point of horse paste. Do a Google search for Ivermectin for before:2020 and after:2019 and you will see the narrative change.

Ivermectin has legitimate uses for humans and other animals for various invertebrate parasites (mites, lice, and worms); it is in fact prescribed to humans for those parasites. There is only in vitro evidence for it being effective against the virus causing COVID-19; if there is in vivo evidence for it being effective against that or any other viral invection, I'd love to see it.

The bigger point is that they took away the agency of some doctors. The vaccine and ivermectin both didn't have enough time for testing for safety and efficacy.

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” Thomas Sowell

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