Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? When government or industry makes it nearly impossible for consumer needs to be met we inevitably see a grey and black market spring up to meet those needs. My prediction is that if legislation like this becomes widespread we'll see a freely distributed application rise to prominence among a gaggle of others, it'll dominate the chat and social market until even grandma is using it and the establishment will have a right proper freak out as other social media giants implode and everyone is communicating anything they want with zero oversight from the government or industry. This is roughly how I remember the Napster affair going when DRM was pushed hard by the recording industry, it eventually collapsed but not before dealing a massive blow to the status quo and forcing a transition to streaming.
More likely it will result in crippling the domestic UK tech industry while everyone else in the world ignores it. I really don't see most countries extraditing someone for the high crime of "let british users access a website without verifying their age".
By "ignore it" I mean "ignore the law", not ignore the UK market. At some point the idea that countries can regulate the internet outside their borders falls apart. The US succeeds in enforcing its gambling laws WRT Americans, but that only works because other nations agree to do the enforcement.
I just don't see that happening here. So maybe the UK becomes a no-travel zone for anyone in the worldwide tech industry? That would be sad, but it's a plausible outcome.
The US can enforce it for Americans because it's comparatively easy to see that somebody is making money from gambling, compared to visiting a website.
Very few websites comply with GDPR. Based on recent interpretations, it's essentially impossible for any US-owned or US-hosted site to comply with GDPR. The EU is just being extremely selective about its enforcement. If they ever decided to follow the law to the letter, most of the Internet would have to disconnect the EU. Theoretically the EU could make clones of all international sites like China has with Baidu and Weibo, but it's hard to see how that would be good for them.
The UK's law is obviously a bit different as international companies can comply with them, but it would essentially just limit legal websites to big tech who have enough market reach that all that compliance could pay for itself.
Well, the EU itself adheres to law very selectively itself. For example for surveillance. They retroactively legalized mass surveillance by European authorities to make the impression that the law is more relevant than it actually is.
Not really as GDPR has specific provisions for governments to collect data for national security/defence, prevention/investigation of crimes, etc . So they did not have to retroactively change anything as it was written into the law from the beginning.
> Theoretically the EU could make clones of all international sites like China has with Baidu and Weibo, but it's hard to see how that would be good for them.
We would have real privacy protection, and presumably in the very long term we'd see the benefits of that (more creative new ideas coming out of the EU, wealthy people preferring to live in the EU...).
Seeing how the EU political set also is trying to get rid of E2EE messengers and such, I get a feeling it will not shake out that way either. It might make it worse, because they would have full legal and extra legal thumbscrews to apply to these EU only companies.
> If they ever decided to follow the law to the letter, most of the Internet would have to disconnect the EU
It's worth noting that it's the US that would be isolated here, not the EU.
A very large number of other non-EU countries have implemented/are currently implementing extremely similar legislation to the GDPR, including Brazil, Israel, South Korea, Argentina, Canada, Japan, India, New Zealand, Indonesia, etc.
If the world eventually splits into "privacy-required" vs "privacy-optional" internets, the US will be one of few major countries in the latter camp. Yes, clearly the US-based internet is a large chunk, but long-term isolating the US internet entirely from most of the rest of the world will have a meaningful impact.
Regarding GDPR, citation needed - do you have actual links you can share to those claimed "recent interpretations", and whose in particular they are? I'd be quite interested to see them, if true ,which I seriously doubt - for the time being, as an EU citizen, my understanding is, and continues to be, that it's totally possible for US corpos to adhere to GDPR; it would just require some money and effort to be spent by companies that blatantly hoover and hoard personally identifying data in hopes of squeezing some monies from it. And having to spend some money on anything that is not an investment into more money in the future seems to always trigger over-the-top allergic reaction in corporations. Until they feel the teeth of real law in painful fines, when suddenly "impossible" things will magically become possible.
So far they've just been enforced against companies that use Google Analytics, but the reasoning behind it has been that having users connect to a US server enables that server to know EU users' IP addresses (which are legally PII), which would be subject to US government subpoenas to collect such, and the US government has not agreed to handle data in compliance with the GDPR, therefore it's illegal to have users connect to any US servers. It has nothing to do with "hoover[ing] and hoard[ing]" data.
The only way for an American website to comply would be to form a separate company not subject to US control at all. However, at that point it's not really an American website, since no data or control can go to the US.
Theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
Doesn't seem so clear cut to me yet, but I see what you're hinting at. The first one seems about Google Fonts specifically, together with IPs indeed, but not mentioning US govt subpoenas at all (at least in the English translation of the abstract). Personally, I long believed Google Fonts are a risk from privacy standpoint and not really necessary, just easy - this seems to basically be reflected in the abstract and makes me quite happy. Interestingly, it seems to mention severity of the privacy abuse potential vs. benefit, which again sounds great to me. Now, the 2nd one mentions GA and subpoenas, so this becomes more tricky and I wonder what will come of it. Though for the time being, GA is exactly a target I hoped would be regulated, so again rather happy for now, though I see how this seems indeed a concern dealing with any US company. And how connecting the two (i.e. IPs as PII + US govt subpoenas) becomes a concern as well. IANAL, obviously, though. But interesting, thanks!
I don't really think being a good 'worldwide' business can exist when longterm there are conflicting views held by governments about what is right. The fact is some governments and societies values are objectively better than others
How does any of those things make it "essentially impossible for any US-owned or US-hosted site to comply with GDPR"? Is it legally required in the US, for example, to use Google Analytics?
No, but that's irrelevant. It's illegal for an American to host a home server with EU visitors for the same reason it's illegal for them to use AWS or Google Analytics. A GDPR-compliant website can't embed Google Analytics or Google Fonts or a US-hosted image because then the host could log those IP addresses and the host could be subject to a US warrant. Likewise, a GDPR-compliant site can't be operated or hosted by an American because then the operator/host could be logging visitor IP addresses and be subject to a warrant and be compelled to give the government the evidence.
> Likewise, a GDPR-compliant site can't be operated or hosted by an American because then the operator/host could be logging visitor IP addresses
Because you "could" be logging visitor IP addresses? First, why would you have to log them? Is this a legal requirement in the US? You can't serve a page over HTTP unless you log a crapton of stuff for the government? And second...I don't believe it's illegal to log IP addresses under GDPR as log as the user consents to it...or is it?
Yes, the EU says it's illegal if you could be logging them, regardless of whether you are or not.
And yeah, it's not illegal if a user consent to it, but the issue is that the user has to connect (with their IP address) to give you his consent or not. That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper, but I'm not aware of such a service at this time.
> Yes, the EU says it's illegal if you could be logging them, regardless of whether you are or not.
Wait, what? Where do they say that?
> That's why I said theoretically you could use some international service to handle all primary routing and get users to waive their rights under the GDPR before connecting to your website proper
Because no US company can exempt itself from complying with US warrants. Thus, the EU always views data as being potentially shared with the US government. The GDPR prohibits even making a log of IP addresses if there's any US control over it.
This definitely seems like a likely outcome, especially considering how the world has responded to GDPR: ignore it if you're out of the EU or throw resources at the problem to meet a bare minimum requirement (and cross your fingers) if you're in a country where it can actually be enforced.
This horribly written law can easily be interpreted to apply to ISP's as well - so if the ISP is allowing these peer-to-peer systems that allow "unsafe" content to be shared, they're liable for it too, or they have to shut down the peer-to-peer systems.
Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.
> Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.
Unless the UK significantly increases its military capacity and sets up world government, they will not be able to shut down the internet. The internet will still exist. The best they can hope for is a great firewall / North Korea type situation which would require a much more authoritarian (moreover functioning) government than even the UK can muster.
1) The point isn't to regulate the internet, it's to regulate what UK citizens can see.
2) The great firewall was complicated by the design goal of accessing some, but not all, foreign websites. The UK could accomplish their goals in a day or two by just cutting all the underwater cables. That sounds like an impossible crazy thing, but so did Brexit a couple years ago.
A large amount (if not the vast majority) of fibre optics from Europe to Americas, go though the UK and cutting them off cuts off the biggest parts of the world from each other.
Piggie in the middle submarine cables, not all go through the UK, but it is good to point out the covert politics & nationalism of entities providing tech services or infrastructure, strangely dominated by the US mil funded US tech sector. I wonder why?
The UK not. But if anything can be done against Google, Meta, Apple all ideas are welcome for the EU. Those don't pay enough taxes in the EU in relationship to the megaprofits they make and have no respect for the legal framework the EU stands for.
Conservatives all over the world dream of setting up a chinese-style firewall in their countries. They are angry that it was first done by a clearly authoritarian regime which brings some resistance to the idea, but otherwise, in the name of fight against terrorism or child pornography, they would have set it up already.
From what I can tell it’s more the progressive wing of most countries who are pushing for authoritarian censorship of the internet. Just look at Canada
I agree that the Liberal's current push to degrade Canadian's privacy is worrisome - and their excuse is "we need expanded surveillance powers to make sure your privacy is protected..."!?!
I disagree that this is a partisan thing however. Whether it's Canada, the UK or anywhere else it seems each party in power just pushes for more surveillance and more censorship, just using different excuses to justify their actions.
For example, Harper's conservative government put forth bill C-13 (online crime excuse) and C-30 ('think of the children' excuse), which arguably laid the way for much of the spying apparatus that is currently in place against Canadian citizens. And while Obama allowed the NSA's warrantless internet surveillance program, Trump extended it until 2024.
All governments want to spy on you, and all governments want to be able to control what you say, period. They just want you to beg for it first.
Both big government conservatives and big government progressives are pushing for more censorship. The only difference is the topics that they want to be censored.
(Side note: the American Republican party is big government conservatives. Their rhetoric is irrelevant - look at what they do, not at what they say they want to do.)
Pre-Elon Twitter compared Canada's proposed regulations to North Korea and China.
>Newly released documents reveal Twitter Canada told government officials that a federal plan to create a new internet regulator with the power to block specific websites is comparable to drastic actions used in authoritarian countries like China, North Korea and Iran.
Progressives currently threaten internet freedom far more and it isn't even a competition here. They demand hate speech laws, people and content to be banned. They are just the new conservatives with their own dogma, sensibilities and aversion to free information exchange.
Conservatives are, by definition, people who want to conserve the status quo. They believe society is good as it is (or as it was in sine possibly imagined past) and seek to use the power of the state to prevent changes, and to revert any changes that are pushing society away from what they believe is the status quo. Conservatism has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with "being conservative in application of government". In the USA, it happens that part of the status quo that many conservatives want to conserve is a weak federal government. In the UK, conservatives are typically monarchist, which is essentially the opposite position.
Either way, many conservatives are collectivists: they believe the needs of society and preservation of tradition outweigh the desires of individuals, and so they tend to be in favor of concepts such as the traditional family excluding gay people, the rule of mothers in child rearing being more important than the freedom of women to pursue careers and so on.
The opposite of conservatives are progressives, people who believe the status quo is not generally good, and who seek to use the power of the state to change the status quo in a direction they believe is progress.
There are also many collectivist progressives, and as such tend to want things like egalitarian schooling even if certain extraordinary kids may be kept behind, or supporting progressive taxation such that those who have more have to give more to the collective.
On a different axis, we have liberals, who are the opposite of collectivists. Liberals can be conservative or progressive, but they ultimately believe that the most important value is individual freedom.
An example of a liberal conservative is someone like Ron Paul. He believes the status quo is generally good and shouldn't be changed to much, except where he thinks government has over reached. However, he also believes government shouldn't involve itself in people lives, even to preserve societal values, so he tends to support the legalization of Marijuana and perhaps even gay marriage (though given electoral realities, in not sure of his public position on the second). Contrast this to a more collectivist conservative like justice Clarence Thomas, who believes the state should ban gay marriage and even sodomy and contraception.
The fundamental core of conservatism is exemplified in Chesterton's Fence, the meaning of which comes down to "make changes with extreme caution", not "don't make changes at all". The inverse of conservatism is the desire for revolutionary change, which is not the same as progressivism (though it's certainly a popular idea with some). Anti-industrialism (e.g. the Ludites) was conservative. Environmentalism can be conservative. Politics has muddied the true meanings of "progressive" and "conservative".
I've heard the fundamental position of conservatism slightly differently: "if something doesn't have to change, then it must not change". As such, the opposite may well be "let's change this and see if it helps".
But behind this fundamental position, there still lies the position that the current state of affairs is fundamentally ok, or very close to it (or if not the current one, then some previous one that you aspire to return to). You can't truthfully be a conservative while believing everything is rotten and always has been - you would have no reasonable reason to oppose change, even change for change's sake.
You don't need to believe that the current state of affairs is "fundamentally ok, or very close to it", quite to the contrary. What you need to believe is that the current state of affairs could be made much worse if one is not careful.
I think most people agree that through history we've made a slow climb up a mountain. And it's always easier to fall down, than it is to continue climbing. One could look down into the abyss and say "we must be careful not to trip", or one could look up at the top of the mountain and say "we must get there at any cost". In this metaphor I'd say the revolutionary would be looking at another peak in the mountain range and say "we must descend into the abyss if we want to make it there".
(1) This is a good overview, but conservatives don't believe in the status quo for the status quo's sake. They believe that our traditions are highly optimized, essential components to living a fulfilling life. We don't even know why many of the rules even exist, the exact problem they solve has long been forgotten to history; so we should be careful when changing these rules.
There is an element of caring for your long-term health as well as the larger society, and raising the next generation of humans, which most everyone agrees with in some form (even libertarians argue that absolute individual liberty is what produces the best outcome for society). This not necessarily make you a collectivist, in the way that progressives push for labor unions, economic planning, and intersectionality.
What you're missing is a description of when conservatives support use of force to promote social values. Modern American conservatives think that rights come with responsibilities, that neither unfettered libertinism nor enforcement of responsibility with police power is legitimate.
(2) Clarence Thomas has never spoken from the bench about what laws the state ought to pass, he is careful to emphasize he is not a lawmaker and that is not his job. When he dissents in Obergefell and other cases that rely on "substantive" due process, it's because i legal rationale invented to uphold slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Clarence Thomas believes these things should be prohibited. He has stated some of these things before, especially about gay marriage - he doesn't believe it should be permitted in the United States, regardless of how that permission is achieved. He doesn't necessarily believe that the Supreme Court should or can ban it, but he certainly believes it should be banned, in an ideal world.
He doesn't believe that the Supreme Court has power to prohibit them, so he's trying to do the next best thing: make sure that the Supreme Court doesn't prevent the federal or state governments from prohibiting them.
Also note that Roe v Wade has nothing whatsoever to do with the federal government. It has everything to do with individual rights, which don't come from the government, they are natural rights. The government can only recognize or fail to recognize them.
His predecessors recognized that these wildly popular natural rights exist and are compatible with the Constitution, so they made sure all states are compelled to recognize them.
The current highly partizan court has decided to ignore these natural rights in favor of their political agenda. That they couch this in the language of overreach is just an obvious rhetorical ploy.
If the federal government makes a law prohibiting abortion in any state, this same Supreme Court will argue that is obviously in the power of the federal government to regulate. If the federal government possess a law guaranteeing abortion, they will find that it is unconstitutional, tidying done other legal reasoning.
You may choose to fall for the rhetoric of demagogues like Thomas, but most people who think critically quickly see past it.
Longer version: this is a discussion of a bill in progress in the British parliamentary system, where the current government is by a party known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, or "Conservatives" for short. This should not be confused with any colloquial meaning of the term "conservative" that might be familiar to you from American vernacular usage.
Note that political party names undergo drift from whatever they originally described over a period of decades to centuries. For example, the Australian Liberal Party is anything but "liberal" in the US context -- they're roughly equivalent to the US Republican mainstream in terms of ideology. Nor is the Australian "Labour" party a party of organized labour. Neither is the British Labour party -- it used to be, but the party leadership embarked on a protracted and mostly successful campaign to cut it off from its grassroots over a decade ago.
Anyway: the Conservative and Unionist Party has a very specific policy platform, which is described by the word "conservative" in British political discourse and which does not map neatly onto the American concept of conservativism because large chunks of American conservative culture simply don't exist in the UK. Yes, there are out-of-the-closet libertarians and objectivists and Christian dominionists in the Conservative party, but they're minor factions. The main faction can loosely be described as post-Thatcherite free marketeers, with a recent influx of hard-right racists and xenophobes who migrated en masse from UKIP, the UK Independence Party, after the Brexit referendum in 2016. There is no equivalent of the US Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, so there can be no equivalent of Constitutional Originalism in British conservativism. It's a different animal.
I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms. The idea that the US is culturally divided makes a lot more sense to me now, reading all of these responses.
> I'm impressed with how many people really do not understand the meaning of these terms.
When multiple people tell you that you’re wrong and no one else is taking your side, the rational response is to consider that you may be wrong. But, as humans, we sometimes lack the willingness (or perhaps ability) to do so.
Actually the cable providers can and do track everything about what you watch. There are also no rules or regulations about how they can use the data they harvest from you.
You could conceivably implement a fully encrypted p2p social network over WebRTC within the browser. You would obtain the app by simply visiting a website that hosts it making it nearly unblockable since anyone could stand up a page. Public key crypto could allow you to verify your identity or send private messages across the network. The hardest part is establishing the initial connection but since this can be done with a variety of methods I'm sure a sufficiently creative person could come up with something fun and easy for people to use. Maybe some form of steganography where you post an image to your social feed and others can point their phone's camera at it and get the SDP offer and then post the answer as a reply or something. A more automated method would probably be better but that's left as an exercise to the reader.
I've looked into this the other month. There are a number of obfuscation networks that have tried this to some extent (including IPFS and GNUnet), but I am yet to find a network that works exactly as you've described: where you can just access a "tor web portal" in your browser or something. I think an obstacle would be preventing fingerprinting inside a non-fingerprint-proof browser. You might be able to do this if you ported something like tor's fingerprint-proof browser to emscripten and have it render to an HTML canvas!
So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network.
P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general.
Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users.
If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts.
So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2]
> The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts.
I built a small proof of concept along these lines a while back. The implementation was similar to what you're describing with peers seeding and forwarding messages. I didn't get as far as name resolution since that's a tough nut to crack in p2p but building off of IPNS would probably be the way to go. The prototype worked but it wasn't very attractive to use since it was only good for passing notes and there are better services out there with more features. I think something like it would only be worthwhile building if there really was a concerted effort to lock down all social media in a fairly heavy handed way.
Don't worry, blocking p2p is the next step and is extremely easy to do.
China has done it already and it's very effective:
* Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use)
* Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government.
I imagining a post-apocolyptic plot... nodes of dense dendridtic clusters consisting of low-range meshes connected to eachother via hijacked defunct, satellite ISPs
Yeah, they can't 100% win. They don't need to. In fact, even if they did 100% win, they'd still find reasons to need to crush some people just to keep people reminded of who has the guns.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Riots don’t require guns to have an effect, as the UK has seen quite recently. Point being: an analysis that draws its conclusion from the presence of state violence is incomplete if it doesn’t also consider violence on the part of citizens/subjects.
Please don't use this thread to shill a shitcoin that doesn't even remotely attempt to solve the issue being discussed in the thread. Even if the shitcoin itself weren't stupid, it's specifically targeting low-power iot devices, not general internet usage.
"Well, the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian Prime Minister.
This is their attitude.
They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that.
They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt.
The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control.
While you're absolutely right that this is their attitude, what they will do, etc. The laws of mathematics steadfastly remain consistent despite your latlon and it doesn't matter what random idiot politician thinks about it.
No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.
You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.
Sure, but that will happen no matter what given the public are idiots and the authorities are authoritarian. And that goes double for places like Australia where both of these things are particularly so.
And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.
at some point e2e encrypted comms will be grounds for getting swatted
don't think this is a bridge too far, covering your face in the presence of public CCTV got you fined/arrested the week before covering your face with feel-good masks was compulsory
don't @ me telling me it's stupid, I know it is, but this govt doesn't believe in free and private communications and it's working hard in progressively eradicating what's already out there, with full support from the main opposition party
only a tiny fraction of the people will bother with the immense overhead of steganography
it would much more practicable to resort to alternative channels outside the internet, like mesh networking using direct comms (typically ad-hoc wifi modes and other radio protocols to avoid the liability/detectability of cabling), sneakernet, IP over Avian Carriers - those are all cumbersome and rather slow typically, but still orders of magnitude better than trying to pass stuff over ISPs using steganography
With network enabled SoC's costing $1 and associated charge controller, battery and solar cell coming in around $5 I could definitely see a future where people roll out their own clandestine internets in order to route around the centralized and regulated internet. The simplest form of this is a single access point set up as a piratebox allowing people within range to connect and download/upload files. It could be scaled to a large mesh network covering an entire city.
"We will just use technology to bypass this bad law" is a very convenient position for a technology-focused group to take. It feels weirdly privileged to just say "ah we will abdicate ourselves from the problem by using ever more complicated technology" rather than working to improve the legislation to benefit everyone.
If you were taken hostage and had access to a teleportation device that would extricate you from the situation, but was extremely difficult to use such that the vast majority of people would be unable to do so, would you be ethically obligated to risk your life making it more easy to use so more people could get out, or negotiate with the hostage takers, rather than just making use of the escape avenue you have clearly available to you?
Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future.
I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.
Improving legislation is a dead end strategy. Look at politics in the last 2 decades after 9/11. We have increased surveillance in every part of life. Sure, the largest amount of users doesn't understand or mind surveillance because the dangers are abstract right now. They will understand later when the owners of information use it against them. You could never achieve a success that way. We increase security without there being a problem, it is an intrinsic characteristic of old and aging democracies it seems.
No, the only strategy is to create realities just like the internet did with its inception, just like encryption was established. We would never have it if we tried to legislate it into reality.
Additionally legislation is completely ignored by state actors that put the population under surveillance. The battle for legislation was lost.
I don't think this sounds weirdly privileged at all. The trouble is people will solve problems typically through the path of least resistance. It's much easier to find legal loopholes than it is to try and comply. And contrary to the rhetoric, it's expensive and uncertain to simply buy law-making through lobbying.
Consider how hard it is in the United States to lay new fiber (and this is an imperfect metaphor). The ideal solution would be to get legislative branches to solve the telcos oligopoly problem. That has not and is not working. So what's happening? Wireless internet over LTE, and 5G being deployed everywhere. Route around.
You mean like what the Pirate Parties, FSF, EFF, Mozilla, and countless others are trying to and failing? I never thought I'd see "well we have no political power to change things, but as disastrous as these laws are, for us specifically, maybe we can evade them for a little while longer if we're clever" described as "privileged".
My immediate thought as well. As this law will apply to ANY service available to UK users the only feasible solution for smaller websites and app developers will be exclusion to avoid liability. So UK users will simply start using VPNs to by pass region blocks.
Ah, the familiar HN bubble, where people instinctively think of "simply start using VPNs" as the solution.
No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.
Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. They even rotate among many different VPN services when the ones they’re using get blocked.
I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.
My twelve year old son told me very casually a few months ago that he had installed a VPN to bypass the schools internet filters. It was clearly no big deal to him, it sounds like that is what all his friends are doing. At home they are of course doing this to bypass any parent filters to allow them to look at certain content.
A VPN is a service that people who are not privacy conscious (which is most people) tend to only use if they have a particular need for it, such as circumventing a region block for some service they want to use. This isn't a very common problem for the average person living in Britain right now, but it's about to be. So I think it's pretty fair to assert VPN usage is going to become more common, as it is a pre-existing, ready-made solution to the problem millions of British people are about to have.
I don’t think that’s the case. I know someone who has no involvement in anything technical in his entire life and is using VPNs and torrents fine. He can surely work it out if demand requires it.
Are you living under a rock? Do you not see whats happening in China? Go checkout youtube... You can see clearly what happens when the gov finally has total control... (after a few years of everyone bypassing, they will make using a VPN the punishable by death). First they did it with illicit drugs, created a wide wide laws to control the social classes, now the socail classes are easier to target more wholistically via the internet because everyone is dependant on it.
There are other methods of distribution than app stores. People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day, they downloaded it from a website.
The logical next step would be to require devices sold in the country to only be able to use legal app stores, where "legal" is defined as "complying with the requirement to block any E2E apps without backdoors".
Everything is already in place for this, both hardware- and software-wise.
What, and mandate you have some authorization to maintain your ability to access software or to use electronics of any sort that doesn't have a compliant application store?
Nope, just ban importation of such devices. Existing ones will join the waste heap soon enough, and then why bother banning the activity if any device capable of it is inherently contraband?
Napster took off because it meant not spending 10 or 15 pounds or dollars or euros on a CD. THhe DRM came later, and what really killed DRM was the change in business model to iTunes with individual songs, the transformation of the 'star' from a face on a CD to a bigger product.
I certainly hope something results in a renaissance of truly private social spaces.
Yes there were risks, but zero oversight is how we built the internet byte by byte.
Anyone know if that “two computers talking directly to each other” patent has expired yet? Hard for companies to make those apps while patent-encumbered
It could mean choosing a life of crime if the regulations are too draconian. Now that your legit business enterprise can’t succeed because of Stasi tactics by the UK government, you are forced to go underground and build something to sidestep the measures.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." (A certain Cardinal Richelieu).
The truth is that we already are all violating laws, every day we live, mostly without being aware of them. That is exactly why there are so many of them. The only thing more draconian laws do is make people decide actively that they commit them.
Peer to peer needs a business model. E2EE social media involves storing tons of large binary blobs (images and video) for people, and they need to cover that cost somehow. Since it's already been established that social media is supposed to be free, a lot of people aren't going to want you to charge for it, no matter what advantages you have over other market participants.
Fully agree with your point on the grey market aspect of things. I'm also curios about the actual implementations that they hope to see not to mention how they would hope to regulate "internal" chats and other internal communications channels which are, as far as I know, not in the scope of this bill. I had some thoughts on some of the many issues this type of thinking result in - https://psyonik.tech/posts/thoughts-on-the-uk-online-safety-...
TL;DR for the article:
1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised
2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented)
3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work
4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope
5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc).
6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect.
This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.
