Hacker News Reader

Comment by finned | Hacker News Reader

Sounds alright to me. Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks. This seems like a reasonable compromise that won't affect most users, while also not mandating any specific technical solution, leaving the implementation up to subject matter experts.

These type of restrictions are always going to be somewhat difficult to fully realise due to the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Internet, but at least the UK is trying to do what's right for its own citizens. Which is quite an unusual yet welcome action for the current Government.

View on HN

With this type of measures, uk's internet will be just as safe as china's!!! What an achievement! Uk should also implement social score, this will also be done to protect the citizens from dangers! Maybe even some camps where people that are potentially dangerous/unwanted (afaik party said this about migrants, one of the reasons reason Brexit happened) would be isolated from good citizens. This internet act is also a perfect first step for detecting ill intented journalists, how they dare uncover corruption schemes, everything parliament does is for their citizens! Long live the queen!(ups) Long live the king(I mean parliament)!

> Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content, and terrorists and paedophiles using end-to-end encrypted chat systems to cover their tracks

When you come up with an approach that doesn't involve breaking the system for literally everyone else, please let us know.

There isn't anyone who would dispute that these issues are serious but hammering backdoors (of which clientside scanning is effectively one) into encrypted chat systems is not and never will be the answer.

It is not the case that if you put a backdoor into WhatsApp that the criminals suddenly have nowhere to go. They will simply move to lesser-known and possibly even more effective platforms instead, ones that are outside the scope of regulation. Perhaps they'll just build their own. It isn't exactly difficult to do — all of the necessary pieces are out there as open-source.

What we absolutely cannot accept is that all of the mass-market platforms become broken to the point that everyone else, including the less technical users who don't know about the alternatives, can no longer trust them.

>Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content

The solution for this exists. It's the same solution that prevents young children from accessing a bottle of bleach and drinking it. Parental responsibility and education.

> Something needs to be done about young children accessing pornographic content,

Does it?

At least some other countries don't seem to have a problem with children accessing pornography. I don't know if the children simply don't do it or that they are sufficiently well educated and secure in their society that they can see it and understand that real life is not like that.

Children in the UK are born without parents, so it's a valid point by OP.

Children, who don't experience sexual desire, are not interested in pornography. Whenever I encountered lewd content as a child, my reaction was always "uggh... adults are so gross" and I'd skip over it if I could. Children don't seek out pornography, and they spend almost all their time online on platforms like YouTube that don't host pornography that they might see inadvertently. And if they did see porn for whatever reason – why is this supposed to be such a big deal? As far as I can tell, the harm that comes from a child seeing porn is that they'll be grossed out. It seems roughly as bad as seeing the corpse of a rabbit that was run over by a car – a shame, but not something that we need to Do Something About. People act like encountering sexual content will somehow warp children's minds and make them homosexuals or deviants or something, but as far as I know this isn't based on any scientific evidence. It's entirely about adults' feelings.

I guess the fundamental is that pornography is embarrassing for the adults (as in, the collective of adults). So we try to hide it?

Subject matter experts have unanimously said such a technology is not possible to implement safely.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com