UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
ORG warns of threat to privacy and free speech as Online Safety Bill is passed - https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/org-warns-of-...
> Open Rights Group has warned that Online Safety Bill, which has been passed in parliament, will make us less secure by threatening our privacy and undermining our freedom of expression. This includes damaging the privacy and security of children and young people the law is supposed to protect.
Also other noteworthy discussions on HN,
Your compliance obligations under the UK’s Online Safety Bill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32055756) (July 2022 | 462 comments)
Signal says it'll shut down in UK if Online Safety Bill approved (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34936127) (February 2023 | 302 comments)
The Online Safety Bill: An attack on encryption (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34727082) (February 2023 | 179 comments)
Ask HN: Online activities to be made impossible by the UK Online Safety Bill (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36919175) (July 2023 | 105 comments)
Google's Statement on the UK Online Safety Bill [pdf] (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37443634) (September 2023 | 47 comments)
UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37408196) (September 2023 | 302 comments)
children
women
the vulnerable
much like the content of the 2010 CIA memo that wikileaks released[1] stating that the best way to increase public support for US military actions in Afghanistan is to emphasize the oppression of women
[1]https://wikileaks.org/wiki/CIA_report_into_shoring_up_Afghan...
Even forget spending hours stewing over facts and data, there is just an instinct inside me that picks up that it is a ruse, a fallacy, a cynical ploy.
While that sounds like tooting my own horn, and I admit I've been taken in by some tricks before, it just isn't easy to stand by and watch. And even if you argue and make the case for online freedom, someone else just needs to come along and go, 'AH!, but what about the children!' and the masses are swayed.
The two child limit, and associated rape clause, is punitive. If we look at UK families with three or more children, two million of those kids are in poverty [1]. Scrapping the limit would cost a token amount, and lift 270 000 [2] children out of poverty.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-av... table 4_5db
[2] https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/61220/the-twochil...
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Instead it will require companies to take action ... as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages...
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible."
Any questions? You can't make a bill for what is impossible, and this debate is going on for how many years now? It is agenda.
You know you are screwed when someone repeats apparent lies over and over...
Water? Energy? Everything else?
Man, this is going to be fantastic ...
The UK has an problem with regulation ... amongst everything else in this sh!thole.
Social authoritarianism is the driving force in English politics, and it's a big vote-winner in the tabloid- and telegraph-reading constituency. It's also the message that's easiest to flog on social media, since all you have to do is trigger outrage and critical thinking goes out of the window.
Liberality is probably more popular, but it's erased by our ghastly electoral system. (Scotland may as well whistle for a say, and I would advise them to secede.)
The tories are generally anti-worker and pro-big-business. There was a blip as the Brexit nutters seized power - brexit being anti-everything - but the tories reverted to type with Liz "Lettuce" Truss and Rishi "literally a billionaire" Sunak.
Upshot? Forget regulation that might impinge on the free market or protect workers, but prepare your anus for a sequence of civil-right-ectomies.
In fact, in my middle age, I cannot recall a home secretary that has not been more illiberal than the last. David Blunkett; John "Dracula" Howard; Theresa "culture of hostility" May; Chris "remove books from prisons" Grayling; now we're up to Suella "ship asylum-seekers to Rwanda" Braverman. These people are FUCKING CUNTS, ffs, when they were dropped at birth they should have been dropped from much higher.
I despise Westminster, the two-party system, the capture of media by capital interests, and the vegetative English electorate. I could get myself an EU passport... but where is better? Fascism is close to the surface, everywhere in the first world I look.
Unfortunately we’re having our own problems here in Scotland (i.e. poverty, economy, low births, alcohol/drugs deaths). But I do now feel like we should drop our anchor that is England. The population is too polite to revolt and voluntarily mind controlled by a rotten press.
It’s a shame, being from the EU, I always looked up to Britain. Now while living here, I’m just astonished that people just accept or don’t care that Britain is going backwards. Westminster is a clown show.
We’re speed running towards a bleak future.
Truly I am tickled by the image of a garbage-barge lugging around a giant golden anchor only to cut it loose during a great storm.
I think she was on-brand for the Johnson era, but not a reversion to type.
Rishi Sunak? I can't really tell, but the vibes are similar to David Cameron.
Still, I remain glad I took the opportunity to move to Germany easily before Brexit made it much harder. My Overton Window only just about brushes up against Labour's actual position, and doesn't include the Conservatives at all.
I thought they dropped that part of the bill, I may be mistaken though.
The bill just passed as it was.
The British establishment is occasionally infuriating.
* promoting or facilitating suicide
* promoting self-harm
Serious question - how will this affect discussions around euthanasia? Can people just not discuss that online in the UK anymore?
For harm to others we have the bright(er) line of consent, but for harm to oneself, who is to say?
Look forward to animal welfare issues being hidden in the same way too.
"kys" is widely-understood netspeak nowadays. It means "kill yourself".
Children are cruel. Mostly because they are mentally insufficient - it takes time and mistakes to learn human values. (Although cruelty lingers into adulthood in some.)
The new(ish) problem is that, previously, ideally, bullied teens could come home and have respite from cruelty and experience love. But nowadays the bullying follows the mobile phones. And love is quiet but cruelty is vigorous.
And parents and schools don't have the equipment to deal with it - there is no parental rule or technical solution that can't be bypassed, and, if there were, it would separate teens from their peers. (At some point, children require their peers for their social development, and they need to get out from adult supervision.)
And I'm merely describing online bullying amongst children. I could go into the normalisation of throatfucking and gangbanging, or ideological grooming (which is also a problem amongst soft-headed adults such as boomers and incels).
For clarity - I don't like children, I don't have them, and this is not a problem close to my heart. I'm trying to see the other side's perspective here.
Letting a child on the internet should be considered abuse in the same way as letting them into a strip club or drug-taking establishment would be.
There must be ways to allow children to learn to use computers and information technologies without letting them anywhere near the internet. It's just extreme laziness on our part that we don't bother trying.
But, of course, the children argument is the real strawman here. Nobody is interested in the above solution because this is really about preventing adults from using the internet as they currently do.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of the stuff the internet enables is abhorrent and harmful but let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater here.
Even if it's not something enforced, it would be a nice social opinion.
They have heaps of friends IRL, and hang out at the skate park, and in the mall.
They may have access to social at school, but when they're at home, online bullies have zero access.
Getting un-plugged is very easy. They've never been plugged. It's my job as a parent, and honestly nokia phones are way less expensive.
Also what form of government ID would be required? I have mates who have really crappy passports from small 2nd/3rd world countries, and that's all they have. Would they be able to visit CBC?
Allow me first to apologize for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of everyday routine, the security of the familiar, the tranquillity of repetition. I enjoy them as much as any bloke.
But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone's death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the fifth, a day that is sadly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat. There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way.
Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.
How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well, certainly, there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. They were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent. Last night, I sought to end that silence.
Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than four hundred years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the fifth of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words; they are perspectives. So if you've seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then I would suggest that you allow the fifth of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a fifth of November that shall never, ever be forgot." - V
The Jacobins were, exclusively, Catholic landed gentry.
Lopping off Chuckie's head set the stage for Britain's golden age, which goes to show: Tories have always been stupid as well as evil.
The Tory party was not formed in a single day, not was every Tory born on a single day. There was continuity of actors and motivations.
It would have been politically inadvisable for an English nobleman in the period to be openly Catholic; nonetheless, many of them were, and this was certainly a factor in their favour of James, whose Catholicism was an open secret.
Remember that many of these tories spent a long time in exile, primarily France, a vigorously Catholic country.
Remember also that Catholicism was the state religion in Britain until disestablishment, a scant hundred years prior. Not all of the nobility converted - Mary found plenty of supporters.
I don't have the scholastic chops to back up this idea, but it seems fair to say that crypto-Catholic noble families would have been biding their time, nursing their resentments, and waiting for a chance to restore Catholicism to England. That was surely a factor in their support of James, who was clearly not a desirable king on his own merits - being raddled with syphilis and detested by the commoners.
Timeless observations. The most powerful force controlling a democracy is, simply, us. And the root cause of all the most damaging policy errors is us, with our banal inadequacies: our stupidities, our fears and angers, our irrationality.
This truth is entirely vanished from modern democratic narratives, because no one wants to hear it, and no one benefits from advancing it. Democracy means you're in power; civics means you're responsible.
So because Facebook, tiktok, YouTube et al start over-censoring, people just think fuck it and start hosting their own content again?
Something like Twitter cannot be as easily replicated, but it's never been about privacy ad encryption.
Another thing that's hard to replicate is a global namespace. Federated namespaces (see email. mastodon. matrix) work acceptably well though.
The UK police love to go after "soft" targets and there's no-one softer than someone who's life can immediately be ruined by arresting them and thus getting them fired due to missing work.
Edit: I now see you mean "host their own personal content" but the point still stands.
Big white-collar crime is a different, and much more resource-intensive, set of challenges to investigate and prosecute. As such, it is not a constabulary remit - it needs bodies such as the SFO, which depend on extensive budgets to be effective. Blame the government for not prosecuting the big white-collar fish.
I'm sure it grinds every copper's gears that the bastards get away with it.
Very few people outside a small clique want or care about self-hosting anything.
And I have to use WhatsApp because of its network effect (all my friends and family are on it). I have tried recruiting them on to Signal and Matrix, but the mental fatigue for them of doing that; means I have only have three friends on Signal, and ~100s stuck on shitty WhatsApp.
Hopefully the more tech savvy friends of mine will ditch WhatsApp and choose Signal. And I'm not saying Signal doesn't have its issues (meatspace identity tied to your number etc) but it's far superior to WhatsApp which collects too much metadata like, it knows your contacts, when you talk to them, IP and other metadata.
Does anyone else have this issue of recruiting friends and family onto more privacy-respecting messenger apps?
Branding a privacy app "as a privacy app" is a mistake. We need the next messenging app to be private by default AND better at making people popular and giving attention and securing relationships for the end user and all the rest of it..
The people who care about privacy are "trying to get away" and going to "get off the map". In the eyes of some average joes.
That's basically anti-marketing.
Signal also collects your contacts and it permanently stores that data in the cloud along with your name, photo, and phone number. If didn't know they were doing that, that alone should tell you how much you can trust Signal.
I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
They're banking on big tech accommodating them. Once they have all the data, they can sell it to the US gov, who then can target it's citizens by circumventing 4A.
I’m interested to know if it passed with the (ridiculous) requirement of a third party age verification service
This gigantic legislation is misconceived at the same time I think it’s easy to see why it has been deemed electorally popular enough for the government to proceed with.
Tech companies do not provide a carriage service. It’s something more than that. The behaviours they permitted, and even encouraged, on their platforms have incurred large amounts of harm on individuals and society as a whole.
There can be no compromise on the government with encryption but they are able to do this because online companies are yet to figure out how to best protect the vulnerable that use their services.
With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping?
It wasn’t feasible to open up every letter and scan it before resealing it outside of prisons then or now, but it is for electronic communication, and it will be done in the name of safety. The same is true of monitoring every conversation you have with friends; impossible before outside prisons, easy now electronically. This is what is entirely anomalous.
But regardless secure communication had to be undertaken between individuals. If the state wished to spy on people who did not have the ability to encrypt and decrypt their communication securely all they had to do was target them. Now the computer has made encryption into a technology rather than a skill.
I would suggest that’s just as anomalous as the ability to monitor electronic communication.
Encrypted communication is always going to exist, even the Chinese government can't prevent two technically capable people (or people with technically capable friends) from communication securely, and it has the most powerful internet filtering system in existence. If you ban encryption, then only the criminals will have encryption, and that's much truer for encryption than guns because anyone with a bit of knowledge and a few kilobytes of source code can setup encrypted communication that's mathematically unbreakable.
100% banning encryption is stupid. But encryption not being banned doesn’t mean they can’t know what’s in those messages. There are other attacks.
Seriously though, this just feels like the walls closing in on the freedom we had online. There’s no way these powers won’t be extended into more surveillance and censorship generally, now that they’re in the door. We all lose.
And it won’t make the lives better for miserable children whom this bill is supposed to help - if anything, by controlling online content more they have even fewer places to reach out and find help without ‘somebody watching’.
The children prone to “online harms” will just find another outlet, and the parents (probably responsible for their misery in the first place) will switch to blaming that and demanding legislation to control it. Rinse and repeat.
Or, your OS.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/today-uk-parliament-un...
What are they possibly going to do with yet another law?
Edit: spelling.I use a swipe keyboard on my phone due to arthritis, and weird misspellings are a side effect. Sorry to the pedant below who couldn't see past one typo well enough to address the point.
The US government is designed to be inefficient and requires bipartisan agreement or a majority in both chambers to do stuff.
The UK government has significantly more executive powers, far more than the president, and normally has a majority to pass things that can't be done by the excutive.
the problem is that brexit and bad party leaders has been exceedingly disruptive and killed both the conservative and labour party. This is because it ripped apart the coalitions inside both parties. Suddenly the us and them was not our party and thier party, but people within the same party.
The competent have been driven out by the populists, and then they've burnt up and been replaced by the "tim, nice but dims". (populists were boris and corbyn)
Until we actually "deal" with or defuse brexit, and actually begin to structurally reform large parts of the country (education, industrial relations, health and local government to name but a few) we are going to be stuck
populism is a response to discontent, nothing more, nothing less. Populists need an in. If the country thinks that the government is doing ok, or they are happy enough as they are, then populism can't spread. Populists need a cause and a scapegoat.
boris was brexit. corbyn was "enough shitting on the poor and young"
That discontent can be caused be anything. As long as a demagogue can lie about it and use it to kill rights and laws to empower themselves.
It's a common refrain that people don't engage with politics because they feel disenfranchised. Which is perhaps unsurprising, because to a large extent they are!
In the UK you only have to win the commons (lower house) to run a government. the US you need both and the president.
It’s widely accepted that Labour are a government-in-waiting.
Brexit changed all that. All that mattered was whether you believed in One True Brexit. Lots of heretics were hounded out. Behaviour didn't matter. You could say terrible things, as long as you were a BeLeaver.
Then Brexit was over. There was nothing left to believe in, but the cult were still in charge...
The above is basically why the UK is currently swirling down the shitter ...
Maybe those in power have always felt that way, but it certainly seems more pronounced in the post-9/11 surveillance and security state.
I don't see how that is implied by my comment.
So why collect all this data? They do it so they have a massive backlog of information, so that when someone decides you need to be taken care of they no longer have to figure out something to pin on you, they don't have to navigate around that pesky 4th Amendment. The purpose is so that when they decide you need to be taken care of they can go through the backlog find whatever they want and then boom. You're done.
Nice, start with an insult!
> they don't have to navigate around that pesky 4th Amendment.
They got around that in the UK already by not having a 4th Amendment...or indeed a written constitution.
> They do it so they have a massive backlog of information,
This implies a level of competence I do not recognise in the UK government.