Regarding the spy in a bag -- the person involved was a GCHQ mathematician seconded to the SIS and studying Russia, whose "naked, decomposing remains were found in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom, inside a red sports bag that was padlocked from the outside, with the keys inside the bag. [...] Inconclusive fragments of DNA components from at least two other individuals were found on the bag. A forensic examination of Williams's flat has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or of DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of his death.
Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body"
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)
It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
Nothing highlights how pointless e-sports items are more than a real dollar value for a player base of all of them. The entire global GDP is as an order of magnitude roughly $100 trillion. So this $340 trillion figure is 3.4 times planetary total economic output - meaning the theoretical value of Rainbow Six cosmetics exceeds what the entire human civilisation produces in a year. Multiple times over. You'd be valuing pixelated gun attachments higher than annual agricultural output across all nations, all manufacturing, all services, everything.
I bet it appears unchallenged at some point in a court (or insurance) document though.
While I understand what you're saying, it's pretty clear what is meant is "$X worth at the price they currently sell for". When there's a story about an object in space made of gold worth 100s of trillians of dollars, nobody believes it would really sell for that much if we captured it and mined all the gold; because the value of gold would plummet based purely on it's existence.
But I agree with you that it would be put into a court document as "it cost us this much" for the full amount, vs the amount they were likely to ever be able to sell (and can't, now that everyone got it for free, so the value is $0)
The market cap is unambiguous, a more correct estimate of "how much to buy all the shares?" is situational and would just distract from getting the point across.
Not really. If a company were to manufacture a substantially large number of shares out of nothing (no additional investment money or other value entering the company) then the market cap would not go up. It would stay the same and per-share value would go down.
The market is mostly reasonable about who can and will sell their shares. If a big mover does sell a lot of their shares at once, the price will fall. Most big holders will slowly sell off shares for this reason.
In the other direction, it’s also understood that the cost to acquire all shares of a company is more than the market cap of a company. This is why you see acquisition prices being significantly higher than the last funding round valuation, or public shares popping on announcement of an acquisition attempt.
The valuation is based on them hypothetically selling the same quantities that the hackers gave away at their retail prices, which of course no one believes they would ever actually sell that much.
What are the symptoms of being shadowbanned? I see an awful lot of "click here to prove you are human" boxes, click then, the page reloads, and I'm left with the captcha again. It's been very very frustrating.
This just isn't really true any more. The Scandinavian countries have become net green energy exporters including over winter (lots of wind power and biogas in municipal heating networks) and the block as a whole is banning Russian gas imports from next year. (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20251211IP...)
The price per kWh has dropped sharply in recent years compared to the invasion peak, though they are about double what they were before COVID (not inflation adjusted) - see https://skilky-skilky.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Househ.... It's the UK that's up the shitter but that's far from uncommon....
Scandinavian electricity won't fire my gas-based boiler, not will it light my stove.
Power in general is doing just fine (though the oil countries are doing another squeeze to drive up the price again), but specific power sources quite a few European countries are currently relying on like natural gas are still hard to come by. Prices did drop after this summer, but are still higher than the standard rate before the Russian invasion.
I'd love to go all-electric, but the chances of being able to afford a place of my own before the end of the Trump presidency are slimmer than the probability that my government gets its electrical network in order (current estimation: 2035).
I'd be interested to know what the material differences are between the US DoD standards and FAA/ICAO standards (the article hints that there are) - and also what the difference is between these and a "landing zone" where I imagine it's a grass strip somewhere distant. That's a scenario that naïvely to be seems to be more likely to be temporarily made and therefore in need of standards documents...
there are various earlier, and perhaps current designs for grass strips, where differnt species mixes, and work are prescribed for different zones, as the ends of the runnways where landings occur can be reenforced, but taxi and take off runns can be less heavy duty.
agricultural colleges were(are?) tasked with this sort of thing.
we have a very large formerly paved airport localy, that has gone back to grass all by itself, and is now mowed, but it generaly only sees light planes, but the underlying gravel bed and drainage systems are still intact, and so could be used for landing a heavy jet in an emergency, but with a number of 9000' paved runways quite close, that has not happened yet.
in any case,the load bearing capacity of different soils and terains is quite well understood, and heavy jets have emergency landed in crop fields unharmed, and then been flown out after some modest preperations
Everyone is born and at some point will die. The costs associated with this vary hugely but the certainty of those two end points are inescapable. Almost every other developed country in the world recognises that and shares both the risks and the costs recognising that health is a golden crown worn by (and invisible to) those who have it. As someone with a spinal injury who would be most likely bankrupt and unemployed in the US I just don't understand why you don't get a proper, profit-free healthcare system. You spend the most on it in the world and don't get the greatest outcomes!
> don't understand why you don't get a proper, profit-free healthcare system. You spend the most on it in the world and don't get the greatest outcomes
American healthcare for the top 10 to 15% (about $150k+) is the best in the world. By a long shot. (The bottom ninety-something percent of the world's top 1% get their care here for a reason.)
Another 40% are covered by Medicare or Medicaid [1] which, while nothing to brag about, exceeds the median OECD healthcare experience.
That leaves half of the population with crappy employer-provided healthcare, the VA, scams or no insurance at all. For most of them, until they have an accident, this coverage is fine.
In summary, you have a system that works terrifically for the rich, well for the poor and old, and well enough for the rest that reform is challenging.
"In summary, you have a system that works ... well for the poor".
You don't actually know any poor people, do you? Their lives are not governed by your theoretical models.
And as the GP said, our healthcare - not the best of the best of our healthcare, as you cherrypicked, but the kind ordinary people have - is appalling overpriced for its mediocre quality.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but the simple answer to your question is that most American households are happy with their current health insurance and don't want it to change, so we keep patching the current (severely flawed) system as "needed" rather than starting over with a new one or making what would be seen as radical changes.
That poll doesn't say they're happy with their health insurance, it says they're at least somewhat satisfied with the coverage. You'd see very different results if you asked about health insurance prices.
I believe most people would incorporate the value received into their satisfaction rating.
Most people also don't have any idea how much their insurance costs in total or how it compares to alternatives, so that would be a challenging question to write with any reasonable expectation of getting a coherent response.
> The problem is the cost.
You could say this about almost anything that isn't free, and could still say it about a number of things even if they were free.
Feel free to look at the many, many, many alternative polls over the years. This is well known to anyone who has done any research into the topic at all.
Take the poll in 2026 after ACA subsides evaporate and Medicaid cuts. Highest satisfaction is for government run insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare).
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-are-sati... ("Overall, 82% of Americans said they’re satisfied with their health care coverage, including a third who said they are very satisfied with their current coverage. The group that reported being the most satisfied were older adults, with 9 in 10 Americans over 65 years old saying they were satisfied. And 42% in that age group reported being “very satisfied.”. Roughly 9 in 10 of those who have public health insurance coverage through Medicare or Medicaid also reported being satisfied with coverage, compared to 77% of those with private health care coverage.")
https://www.citizen.org/article/public-support-for-medicare-... ("Support for Medicare-for-All continues to rise, whether in Congress, state legislatures, or among the American people. Recent polls indicate that six in ten Americans support Medicare-for-All. In addition, more than 60 percent believe that government is responsible for ensuring health coverage for all Americans. And nearly 70 percent of all voters, including battleground voters, identify health care as an important issue in upcoming elections.")
Yes, it's noted in the poll I linked (which is the same one as your first link) that the highest satisfaction is with government run insurance.
Not enough people are on ACA with subsidies to move the poll results that much, and Medicaid cuts aren't going to make people less satisfied with their private insurance.
I have no idea why you and so many other people seem to be taking my explanation as to why the US doesn't adopt universal socialized medicine as some sort of endorsement of the status quo.
Recently, friends and family in other countries have asked about health care in the US and I've been very surprised by what they imagine is going on here.
Let's compare notes? If I go to a hospital (emergency) for any reason, I will be seen within an hour at worst. If I'm bleeding or something I'll be seen immediately. A clinic for surgery might be same day or up to a couple of weeks, depends on severity. More specialized surgery could be 5-6 weeks. American average monthly cost for health insurance is around $600 for a family. Individuals without a family are around $450 so they kind of get screwed. The expenditures for health care, including the $600/mo are tax deductible. This number can go as high as $1200 in places like New York where income is significantly higher as is cost of living.
Overall, averaging co-payment and deductible with accidents, you should expect to spend around $3,000 / yr on average per person in total for health care as part of a family in the US. This number varies greatly by age, and both income and health care in the US is socialized so your wages determine your healthcare liability. (Make more money? Get less social services.)
This should cover everyone, but you have issues where poor people don't file taxes, and don't file for health care. Those people will still be seen in an emergency room.
Conversely, my friends and family in other countries with "free" healthcare pay roughly the same total for their medical portion of tax liability as I pay for health care in total. But their wait times are astronomically greater when it comes to receiving care.
I've often helped financially because their wait time for something like shoulder surgery might be 10 to 12 months or even longer, but the same doctor will see them in a week if it's paid privately. So I've worked out payment plans where I contribute $1k/mo for their "add-on" private care so that they can be seen in a reasonable amount of time. That's in addition to what they already paid in medical tax.
Maybe that helps to understand. From my perspective, in a lot of countries you are told that you have free healthcare, but in fact you're paying for it in taxes, and then someone in the US will still have to pay for it when you actually need it anyway. Double payment. Hope you've got friends. (Maybe that's not true for everyone, I'm just going by what I've seen and paid for myself for my own family.)
I personally think that Europe and other countries don't have better health care, it's much worse. I've lived in several countries for 1-2 months to years in each and I've never seen health care remotely on the level that I see in the US. I would venture to guess it's the best in the world.
If it's hard to understand how people live in a modern high tech country without healthcare, it's because they don't. It's just about which rich person is paying for it. Health care is very expensive, and that's true around the world. And around the world, if you don't file/register for health care, your outcomes are generally much worse. The US is no different in that regard.
I believe you need to compare notes on a societal level, of course that richer Americans will have great healthcare. The quality of care is not the problem, it's the accessibility of it.
Waitlists do mean this is not as comparable as you make it out to be. With a 1-year waitlist for heart surgery ... you effectively do not have heart surgery cover, because you'll be dead before it happens.
Now of course, mostly people just lose a few years of life and have a number of very painful months due to delays, that it is the direct cause of death is fortunately rare.
Oh and before you say it, most of the difference in life expectancy is due to the the difference in overweight people, not medical care.
But of course people have voted everyone has care and can claim everything's great and they've done everything needed. That it doesn't translate into reality ... "is not their fault". Meanwhile you read there is such a doctor shortage in for example Southern Italy that seeing a doctor in under and hour is outright impossible ... because there isn't a doctor less than an hour's drive away from some villages, even without waitlists. And the doctor shortage is getting worse, not better.
You need to compare Southern Italy to a similar impoverished area of the USA which might have the exact same doctor shortage. Of course different parts of a country will have different availability, seeing a doctor in Torino will be much faster than in a village like Saliano...
A 1-year waitlist for a necessary heart surgery where? Every country in Europe has their own healthcare system, each one of those have their strengths and weaknesses, exactly as it would be in the USA.
Notwithstanding there are private facilities you can pay insurance or out of pocket, the difference is no matter what you have decent coverage somehow, the richer the country the better it is, the richer the region of the country the better quality it is, exactly as in the USA...
So if we're comparing, I personally know only two people here without healthcare. They don't have jobs, and won't get them because they just don't want them. They live by buying and selling trash on eBay or similar. They could get free healthcare, but they don't want to file their taxes or fill out forms. I've offered to help them.
And I've known at least as many living the same way in Europe.
You can lead the horse to water, but you can't stop bureaucrats from discouraging it with paperwork.
Same, same.
To be fair, the paperwork is annoying enough that I'm actually paying a dentist $5k for one of them to get work done, just because I'd rather do that than fight this person to file their taxes and fill out the healthcare forms before their teeth rot out of their head. And it would cost at least as much to get an attorney do it for them.
It's just not worth it to fight with them, and the reality is that if it was easy to fill out the forms, then my healthcare costs would just go up anyway to cover all those additional people.
Either way, someone has to pay. There is no free lunch.
No, all parts of Italy (and frankly all of Europe) have a doctor shortage. It just goes from "2 months waitlist for primary care physician if it's not urgent" all the way up to "over a year even for critical care". And yes, richer areas have more doctors though the country is by far the biggest factor.
And this all gets confused by the fact that countries have regulations and make their own situation, making everything complicated. So, for instance, despite bad primary care in Southern Italy, the mental care is actually supposed to be pretty good. By contrast, Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, has terrible mental care but good primary care, including areas that aren't so wealthy.
It's also worth stating that the worst part of that proposed amendment [1] isn't even necessarily the VPN ban, it's the next clause, on page 20:
"The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK
must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at
preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming)
and viewing of CSAM using that device."
"Regulations under subsection (1) must enable the Secretary of State, by further
regulations, to expand the definition of ‘relevant devices’ to include other
categories of device which may be used to record, transmit or view CSAM"
> any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software
It's happening. Computer freedom, everything the word "hacker" ever stood for, will be officially destroyed if this passes. We're about to be robbed of control over our computers by force of law. It's just the UK now but eventually it will be every country.
This is a very dark day. I've been prophesizing its arrival for a while now. I was secretly hoping I was wrong about everything, that we'd turn this around, that we'd enshrine a right to control our computers into law. The opposite is happening instead. It's so sad...
I wouldn't give up. When it gets to the level of mandatory government rootkits there are bound to be underground organisations circumventing this and/or trading old hardware.
I'd even go as far to say that if things become this authoritarian, certain "direct" acts would be justified in preventing or fighting it.
An illegitimate underground scene running on life support, using old unlocked computers which are a finite resource they will eventually run out of. Utterly depressing... We used to be free...
If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home.
Seems to me this is a cultural issue that runs deep. You are his majesty’s loyal subject, like it or not, and more importantly, you are a subject of his bureaucracy. The US works in a similar fashion, except the deep state has slightly different excuses to exist.
I work extensively in the UK(past 5 years, I’ve worked there maybe two years in total). Nothing gets done without endless approval from people with cushy office jobs in the bureaucracy.
It’s in the bureaucracy’s interest to extend its power, and who is going to stop them?
CSAM is an excellent excuse to control the digital world. I wonder what took them this long.
I'm not british. "We" refers to computer users worldwide. The UK is just the beginning, this will spread to other countries. My country loves to copy whatever Europe is doing.
The obvious answer (that HN hates) is that the right can stop them. The only party in the UK against the Online Safety Act is Reform. The only party that wants to shrink the state is Reform. Every other party is supportive of this kind of thing. This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
This isn't a problem of one country's specific culture. Australia and Canada are doing the exact same thing, the Democrats would absolutely do the same thing if the libertarian Constitution weren't in their way. The rest of the EU is doing the same thing. It's a left vs right thing.
In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
> This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing.
Definitionally not. Left and right are always relative to the local average, "left wing" and "right wing" are nothing more than a seating arrangement turned into a badge.
The Conservatives are, famously, right wing by British standards. If you think the Tories are lefties, you're so far to the right you can't even see the UK's Overton Window from where you are.
> In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn.
It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures.
I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The next General Election cannot come soon enough.
> It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation.
Read enough of my old comments, and you'll know that the Investigatory Powers Act is a big part of why I left the UK. The other half was how I expected Brexit would be used as an excuse to leave things like the European Court of Human Rights and thereby make it harder to fight such things.
Pleasant surprise that the UK is still bound to the human rights stuff, especially given Theresa May's opinion of such things and prior reputation the Home Office.
> The Tories were left wing and authoritarian.
No, they're right wing and authoritarian. Or at least, there's enough of an authoritarian streak in it to be a problem.
> They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service.
You didn't notice all the austerity policies, I take it? Their approach to the civil service was basically a government self-lobotomy, reducing state capacity to be competent.
Not that size of government is hugely important to the left-right split in the UK; that seems to be a much more American dividing line, from what I see in the American stories that make it across.
> I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029.
The other things Reform (or, given that it's owned by the leader, he) have called for include, to quote the Wikipedia page:
leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and replacing it with a new law; disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT); creating detention powers without Hardial Singh constraints;
To be against these things is not the indication of someone who dislikes authoritarianism.
The only thing I see him calling for that I actually agree with is basically an example of "left wing" by UK standards: the nationalisation of the steel plant in Scunthorpe.
Not that I expect him to succeed. His experience of politics combines is much the same as Jeremy Corbyn: to be the one who opposes everything, not the one who has to take responsibility. Look how bad Corbyn was for Labour, that's my median for how bad Farage would be for the UK.
Your obvious solution is wrong, though. The right wing is just as eager to implement a police state.
The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
> The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population.
Sufficiently well educated and also willing to read carefully and without partisan (or other) fear of favour.
How many of us read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree"? How many support a side only because it's their own side?
I don't know how to fix this. The "obvious" solutions (seen in various government systems over the world and the centuries) all have demonstrable problems.
Yes. Like I said, this works well in Switzerland, where stupid decisions are at least made jointly, not by some career politicians. Makes it easier to slowly make changes. The key point is to keep things local - what works in Zürich doesn’t necessarily work in Appenzeller.
> If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages.
How feasible is this really? I'd feel a lot better if it were possible to produce chips free from backdoors even if the resulting CPUs weren't even as fast as an old Pentium III, but my guess is that any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
Lithographically fabricated integrated circuit in a garage. Whatever this is, we need a lot more of it to stand a chance at resisting governments.
> any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government
The whole idea is to make this so easy and ubiquitous that they can't shut it down completely. They can shut down some but not all. I believe this is the only way a law like this can be resisted. Promote civil disobedience by making it easy.
It's not. And any effort to do this at scale would be quickly shut down by physics and economics, not the government. Modern computing technology is a wildly complex supply chain, with extremely specialized manufacturing equipment and facilities. Billion dollar fabs are worth billions of dollars for a reason, and it's not for the real estate or the views.
Trying to determine the best "diy chip" sounds like a fun project and an admirable goal, but if you actually wanted something useful I'd wager you'd be better off buying esp32's in bulk so you'd have all the spares you might need.
The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc.
In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open.
Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to.
Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked.
Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries.
They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything.
It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits.
The other side of this coin is that, disgusting horrific pedophiles, terrorists and drug smugglers also have access to this stuff too.
I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society.
For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
There is no paradox. The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. You must tolerate some crime in order to keep your humanity and dignity. Orwellian dystopias with omniscient surveillance can reduce crime to zero but you wouldn't want to live in one.
This is just something people need to accept no matter how angry they get about it. If they don't, they will be manipulated through their fears into trading away their freedom for a false sense of security.
What about when a group of individuals forms an institution that's self serving and harmful to other citizens, and they're able to do a lot of this under the guise of "privacy"?
All operations as a public institution should be transparent. We fund them through taxes, we have a right to know what is going on.
I don't know what you are getting at with "self serving and harmful to other citizens"? Like a private institution? a company? Of course private companies are self-serving. All of them could be described as perpetrating some subjective and nebulous "harm". There are already transparency requirements for businesses, and they are subject to warrants. To the extent that they are public institutions (monopolies, publicity-traded companies), there are increasing demands for transparency and vice-versa.
Individuals have a right to privacy and protection from undue search, regardless of scare quotes employed, unless they are living on a prison island such britan.
The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm.
Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't.
Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either.
If what they did is never revealed to someone else, what is the problem here? It is not like we have no way to hide stuff without cryptography, and people are not advocating for police to search every apartment once in a while to look for illegal stuff.
Authorities cannot tap into your brain, cannot tap into physical face-to-face conversations, and people can plan out crimes using these means. It is not like there is no way to hide stuff before the born of modern cryptography.
And who want everything to be open and transparent? I am not aware of anyone who wants this.
The US was tested for tyranny during Covid, election interference, and BLM burning down cities. You sat at home, utterly impotent. You're gonna stop VPN bans? Please.
This post shouldn't have been dead. It's right. There's an American meme that sidearms create freedom. When has that actually been true in practice in the past 100 years?
For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE.
Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance.
The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style.
What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS.
In the end, effectiveness is irrelevant. Basic human dignity requires that you always have the option to resist.
> Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it?
Drug gangs in latin america.
In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges.
All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference.
Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity.
They just won't stop. We needed to have laws in place to prevent digital IDs being continuously pushed on people because the powers that be want total control of all information.
It's happening in the US now under the guise of AI data centers for consumers but I suspect it will be instead used to surveillance everyone who doesn't agree with the fascist government. This is Larry Ellison's public vision but Musk and Thiel also play a role.
It's already the law in Brazil that online services and "terminal operating systems" must perform age verification in a secure, auditable manner. This presumably includes smartphones and computers, meaning you can't just run an arbitrary Linux distro in Brazil anymore. I expect similar laws to pass in at least a few U.S. states by 2030—places like Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, maybe Florida...
When I say "the future is signed, verified code from bootloader to application level" I mean it will likely be backed up by force of law. No one complains about the mandatory safety features various governments require cars to come equipped with. The voices of a handful of nerds will go unheard when the law starts insisting computers come equipped with safety features also.
While that's really terrifying about Brazil, is it actually enforced? I can't really imagine there being a "Linux Police" kicking down the door of a hooded teenager and prying the Ubuntu DVD from his clammy hands.
I mean this is the country of favelas where even the police don't dare to enter.
No, but Brazil can (and did) exercise strict import controls over what kind of electronics can get into the country. For the longest time the only game consoles you could legitimately get in Brazil came from Sega through special arrangement with Brazilian manufacturer TecToy—in particular, the Master System and Mega Drive. When the market finally did open up, import consoles were subject to stiff tariffs. Piracy was rampant. That's why the Brazilian gaming market is... weird to this day, and until recently was generally avoided by major manufacturers creating openings for also-rans like the Zeebo.
So while police arresting a kid for having an Ubuntu DVD is unlikely, the Brazilian government twisting the arm of PC manufacturers to prevent the installation of any but approved operating systems on hardware sold to the Brazilian market is highly plausible. Since this already aligns with Microsoft's eventual goals, Microsoft and the PC manufacturers will just hasten the rollout of Palladium 2.0 and nothing will stop it.
Wow thanks, I didn't know any of that. It feels alien to me and yeah I'm sure that MS wants this to happen. Now that windows has only become an advertising vehicle for their cloud services, Linux is a way for customers to avoid that tax.
The modern societies run via those devices and the enforcement will move to the mostly free Internet that was "a long time ago, when it didn't matter as much".
Apple tried to do it in a way where nobody would see your personal data until they had multiple confirmed matches against known CSAM - and even then a human would check the results before involving any law enforcement.
But the internet had one of their Misunderstanding Olympics and now we're here again - with an even shittier solution, being formed into actual law.
Law never had anything to do with reason, but this is one more law that mandates an unreachable goal. This will trigger an untold amount of brain-rotten despotism.
They're probably thrilled with themselves because everything will have to be closed, locked down platforms and devices.
IMO the solution to child safety is education with strong user controls. Hell, just delete the social media apps from existence if the other option is dystopian control of our communications.
This is a clearly terrible idea. It's clear to us, at least, not to them. As is on the public record, there are three proponents behind this amendment. They and their contact details are:
If you're reading this website and are either living in the UK or are a British citizen I strongly urge you to write a personalised and above all polite email stating with evidence why they are misguided. The "think of the children" brigade is strong – you may well be able to persuade these individuals why it is a bad idea.
Oh. Cass. She was given the peerage for constructing the Cass Review, an extremely one sided anti trans "review" of the science around puberty blockers. I suspect she's against VPNs and in favor of total information control of children because of trans panic.
Indeed. My understanding of modern powerstation gas turbines is that they all basically run _at_ the Carnot efficiency eta = (1-T_cold / T_hot) and that rather than chasing marginal gains in how close to that theoretical limit you actually are the biggest differentiators are on maintenance intervals and reliability, which collectively have quite a large effect on eta...
Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body" (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)
It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
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