11–20 of 65 posts
Nope. Censorship is damage. The Internet just routes around it.
If only, the UK government might consider technology and magic the same thing but when it comes to censorship they are serious about it. It has taken them the better part of 20 years to figure it out but they are now doing real china style censorship that can not be easily circumvented.
>The ambitions of the UK government are bold. They want the UK “to be the safest place in the world to go online, and the best place to start and grow a digital business.” Pick one.
Edit: I want to clarify that I'm not in favor of surveillance or opaque mechanisms run by any State.
Sajid Javid, the current home secretary, clearly has ambitions to lead the country. Within the purview of his ministry, he is attempting to position himself as a decisive strong-man, in contrast to the weak and ineffectual prime minister. His ability to actually reduce crime is hamstrung by years of austerity, which have led to a substantial reduction in the number of police officers and other law enforcement resources. He wants more money, but he doesn't really have the influence to get it. He needs to look tough on crime, but he can't do anything that costs money.
Silly legislation is practically free, even if it doesn't achieve much. We've had a worrying increase in knife crime over the past few years. How should the government respond? More police patrols in violence hot spots? Better intelligence on gang-related disputes that might lead to violence? Social work interventions to work with troubled young people who are at risk of becoming involved in violent crime? No, because all of those things would cost money.
The government's only substantive policy has been the creation of "knife crime prevention orders", which restrict the civil liberties of people who are suspected of carrying knives with violent intent. It's illiberal, there's no evidence that it'll work, but it looks tough and it doesn't really cost anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/24/sajid-javid-...
The internet censorship agenda plays into this perfectly. It costs almost nothing to force foreign internet companies to censor their content, but it looks tough in the headlines. Terrorist attacks? Blame Facebook. Sex offences? Blame Google. Gang crime? Blame Snapchat. It's free, it distracts the newspapers for a couple of days and you get to make some vague but tough-sounding pronouncements without actually being accountable for anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only, the UK government might consider technology and magic the same thing but when it comes to censorship they are serious about it. It has taken them the better part of 20 years to figure it out but they are now doing real china style censorship that can not be easily circumvented.
What censorship are they doing that cannot be easily circumvented?
But their latest methods are scarily effective.
They now do a man in the middle attack to decrypt ssl, and store all of it, if you use openvpn as a proxy without accounting for this they own you.
They also have the ability to send fake a close packet (I think its a corrupt packet and most ssl / ssh will just drop the connection) to stop you tunnelling out and around their censorship.
The average citizen could not possibly hope to overcome this censorship and I find my own abilities more and more challenged to stay ahead of them, they have a whole army of people that understand the internet better than me, eventually they will exceed my abilities, its only a matter of time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only, the UK government might consider technology and magic the same thing but when it comes to censorship they are serious about it. It has taken them the better part of 20 years to figure it out but they are now doing real china style censorship that can not be easily circumvented.
All the "censorship" amounts to at the moment is ISPs redirecting DNS queries. This is trivial to work around.
Nope. Censorship is damage. The Internet just routes around it.
If only, the UK government might consider technology and magic the same thing but when it comes to censorship they are serious about it. It has taken them the better part of 20 years to figure it out but they are now doing real china style censorship that can not be easily circumvented.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-47963134
So British government can write all the laws it likes, until it starts paying for enforcement I don't see how it matters.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What censorship are they doing that cannot be easily circumvented?
For piracy sites they first blocked the dns, dumb easily circumvented use the ip. Then they blocked the ip, dumb easily circumvented spawn multiple versions. They made linking to pirate sites illegal so they could block alternative versions. They used to sniff all plaintext looking for tracker announces which look really distinctive. But their latest methods are scarily effective. They now do a man in the middle atta…
Is there any evidence of this?
But the restriction of free speech in the UK in the name of anti-terrorism has a long history. I'm old enough to remember when the Sinn Fein MPs were prohibited from speaking on television: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988%E2%80%9394_British_broadc...
It's not clear how best to campaign against this, since the legacy print media know that no matter how bad their hate content gets the law is unlikely to inconvenience them, so they're happy to campaign against free speech for their enemies.