Why always bringing back everything to racism? The people of Switzerland want to maintain the look an feel of their country as it is. How is racism the first thing you think of when no one mentionned race?
What happens when the governments around the world decide to ban something that you care about? Will you be so eager to agree with them or will you cry that your rights and your freedom are being taken away?
Don't like social media, fine, nobody is forcing you to use it.
> Direct your anger at the geriatrics in government who don't understand the risks of these laws first.
No offence but I think you are being extremely naive if you think that the people in power and the lobbyists who have spent the last 10 years relentlessly pushing for ID verification online and mass content scanning in the US and in the EU do not know what they are doing.
Here is the thing, most people are increasingly unhappy about the way things are going whether they are on the right or the left of the political spectrum. Governments can see that and don't want to see what happened in Nepal recently repeat itself. So they are getting ahead of the curve.
First require everyone to ID themselves online, then tie everything you say to your ID then use that against you one day if you decide that enough is enough.
The western countries are looking at what China is doing and simply iterating on it. They wrap it in a nit little bow to either "fight terrorism" TM or "protect the children" TM.
This is a pure power play meant to save their asses and the people who have been warning that this was always going to be going in that direction have been ridiculed and called conspiracy nuts but here we are.
Look at OFCOM in the UK. First it was to protect children form porn. Now they are looking to expand their powers to moderate speech online based on what THEY think is acceptable. If the EU gets it's way, you'll have client scanning in all messaging apps across the EU. And it won't stop.
This sort of thing is never about protecting kids, reducing harm or whatever they call it. It's about control about what you see, what you write, all done with the purpose to determine if you as an individual will become a problem for them in the future.
This is just pointless whataboutism. There are smart devs and crypto experts designing a sound, privacy-friendly system that is open source. It does what is supposed to do and how everybody would want it to be implemented. Yet people reject it on irrational grounds for whatever negative aspect they associate the EU with.
No matter how open source something is, as long as you can only run it on a non-rooted Google or Apple device, and it’s hardcoded with remote attestation features exclusive to these two platforms, it suddenly isn’t much better than a bro asking you to trust him.
Btw the other guy has a point, by definition you can’t support both privacy and something that obliterates it.
It's funny how pointing a fact is called whataboutism.
You trust the EU's pinky promise a keep their word that your ID will be safe and secure and never tied to what you say, the content of your messages or who you send them to. If that is so, then go ahead and use it. That's your business.
> whatever negative aspect
The EU literally wants to read your personal messages because it doesn't trust that you are not some criminal in disguise. Instead of the state having to prove that you are criminal breaking the law, it wants to read everything you send and store the data permanently in case you break the law one day. If you think that is acceptable and that is an entity that can be trusted, then I don't know what to tell you.
If I understand correctly how this works, it doesn't require trust or knowledge. The service gets exactly 1 bit of information (over/under the required age), the government system gets nothing.
"Don't trust, verify". It is an open protocol based on cryptography for everyone to verify that simply does not allow to submit identity information when you perform the age verificaiton check. There is no opinion here, no "you have to trust X not to do that later" - it is the property of the used technology to just submit the verified age. You can't derive identity information now or in the future just if you age-verified yourself. You are being paranoid and talking about a fantasy, non-existing system that is not the one I linked to.
On a side note, whataboutism is not about "stating a fact". It is when the stated fact has nothing to do or does not interfere with the original point being made. As in "Why would I trust the EUDI act when the EU does shenanigans like come up with stupid norms of the shape of bananas" - Stated is a fact, but it has nothing to do with the actualy EUDI act.
At this point, it's just something stupid people say. It used to mean that when you pointed out that my people were desperate for the freedom of living under capitalism, I would point out that you lived in an apartheid state.
Somehow, here, "whataboutism" means that if after you point out that the EU is coming up with an age verification system that they claim preserves personal privacy, I point out that the EU is also very much, openly, against any sort of personal privacy. Somehow that's some form of communist propaganda. Or Russian propaganda. Terrorist? Whatever. The important part is that I'm someone who should be watched or arrested if I continue to question your motives on behalf of our enemies.
They already exists except that most people don't know about it and also it is extremely hard to move over all the existing users from Whatsapp to something less popular and less user friendly.
Until that changes, then the governments around the world are going to keep pushing to get access to all our messages in order to "protect the children" TM and ask you to prove that "you are not a child" TM
> When big tech tosses money at Republicans and the Trump inauguration, they get what they paid for.
This has nothing to do with republicans in particular. This is concerted effort by lobbying groups around the world who want to get more of your data.
Case and point: all the EU countries that are currently banning teens from using messaging services and social media apps which can only be enforced if you force everyone using these services to provide some form of ID to prove that you are allowed to use them.
Not too mention the EU itself trying force a backdoor into every messaging app "to protect the children".
Be mad at the US politicians if you want but just know that the situation is not better in the EU, on the contrary it's going downhill very fast and that has nothing to do with Trump.
Many EU countries provide digital frameworks for privacy preserving age verification. Yet, Discord made an active choice to avoid using them and is asking the users to upload their photos and ids.
Those same methods of identification are created by the same people who just a few months ago were arguing if it was legal to read all your private messages in case you are criminal of some sort without warrant , without due process. You'll understand if I don't trust them.
I am surprised to see the positive takes on this sort of thing on HN considering that we all know that is just the first step of many steps that the current governments worldwide are rolling out.
Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?
You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.
The slippery slope is real.
We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.
Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?
And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
However good this news is, it means nothing if the average household is not seeing any price decrease in their bill.
It's well and good to say that eventually sometime in the future prices will be lower but in the meantime it doesn't help that the prices continue to rise.
While a bill reduction is definitely useful and important for the people of the UK, energy independence is also important for the nation.
Exposure to international fossil fuel markets has been a problem for many nations in recent years, as turmoil upsets supply. And greater energy independence also means handing less money over to countries and governments with conflicting defence goals.
> energy independence is also important for the nation.
None of this matters to people who can't afford to heat their homes in the winter.
The price reduction was a Labour campaign promise and on that front it has failed dramatically.
This is why people lose trusts in politicians and what has fueled the rise of the far right across Europe, when politicians make promises that they know they won't be able to keep.
Price and energy independence are both important. Renewables are an important way to both (1) drive long-term cost down and (2) reduce reliance on foreign states.
I wouldn't say Labour have failed here. In fact, efforts like this are steps towards lowering prices. Let's see what the long-term trend is. Prices aren't going to plummet overnight.
I understand but I am telling you that this argument is basically useless when people see their bill at the end of each month.
> I wouldn't say Labour have failed here. In fact, efforts like this are steps towards lowering prices.
I don't mind splitting hairs when necessary but you are clearly not arguing in good faith. Labour pledge repeatedly that it would lower the prices by hundreds of pounds each year for good and this has not happened and Labour is running out of time.
If the promise could not be delivered on, why make it? That is just giving ammunition to the other parties who will use it against them not to mention make them look like liars.
The BBC just like any other news organization is not neutral. It sometimes leans left and it sometimes lean right. The problem is that this "leaning" is never disclosed.
If a newspaper is comfortably right-wing/left-wing and so on, I don't care about their biases because at least you know that if you read it, you are going to get a "version" of a story that fits the overall narrative of the outlet.
When it comes down to publicly funded news outlet though, their neutrality is disputable and on top of that you end up paying through your taxes for "news" that have either been downplayed or exaggerated depending on who is reporting on it.
So as a tax payer, what is there to gain from being manipulated (at best) or lied to (at worst) by an organization who is supposed to be neutral but who isn't?
I wish it wasn't the case but there has been too many stories in the past in the mainstream media that turned out to be either misrepresented or made up and there was rarely any retraction/apologies on the subject.
And just in case you think that only right wingers have problem with the BBC (for example), the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.
But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.
† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.
> the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right
> of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
It's impossible for any media outlet to be considered truly neutral. Reporting that doesn't align with your own (biased) partisan viewpoint is, to you, biased.
It's often said that when both sides accuse a media outlet of being biased towards the other side, they're probably being pretty objective. It shows they're reporting accurately rather than pandering to one side over the other.
By contrast, nobody is accusing the Daily Mail of left-wing bias, nor The Guardian of being right-wing.
Public funding is not the solution. Too many conflicts of interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds them?
Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
You may say that things won't go that way but since there is no way to check then we need to rely on trust and the trust in the mainstream media for good or bad reasons has plummeted in last decade.
And don't take this comment as an endorsement of paid news media, they have the same exact problems.
Currently the most succesful method of assaulting the "marketplace of ideas" is by overwhelming channels with content. Most of our guard rails and fears were around government over reach, not through the attrition of attention and via the production of overhwelming amounts of content.
As a result, more competition (more speech) has been defanged as a solution.
Producing Local news is never going to be more interesting and attention grabbing, and thus revenue generating, than pure dopamine stimulation.
To keep local news alive, it needs money.
A public news option may seem sub ideal, but the option is on the table because the other avenues have been destroyed. Hell - even news itself is losing. The NYT is now dependent on video game revenue to keep itself afloat.
The common ground of the eralier information ecosystem was a result of chance. New factors are at play, and if we want it to survive, then we need to address the revenue issue, some how.
> Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. It is possible to do, though given the current state of US politics it doesn’t seem remotely likely.
> This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration.
That is a very nice solution but it doesnt work in practice. If the budgets are decided by the government then there is always the possibility that neutrality on some subjects may be missing or that some amount of pressure will be applied in order to get some stories buried or on the contrary exacerbated.
Since there is no way to know which is which then how can you trust it? Personally I don't.
It's as if many of you have never really understood the concept behind separation of powers. There is a very clear reason why the branches of government are constructed in partial opposition to each other, and the validity of that reason is readily demonstrated every day. Who cares if one branch of the government doesn't want to fund a particular story or slant: another branch should be happy to write that check to provide a counterbalance.
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