Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

theengineeringmanager.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#21

Post by arethuza »

jdietrich wrote: post #15

More mundanely: 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 enf…

Why they can't just implement the measures that seem to have worked in Scotland to address knife crime seems a mystery - NIH at a political level?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45572691

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#22

Post by [deleted] »

dangerface wrote: post #16
cs02rm0 wrote: post #9

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…

[deleted]

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#23

Post by NeedMoreTea »

pjc50 wrote: post #20

The lesson of Brexit is that all attempts at asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose" have been abandoned, and we're governed by pure short-term sloganeering. 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.wikiped…

The most comical part was the words were still spoken by an actor trying to lip sync. Which made a mockery of the intent to deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity - in every news broadcast. They didn't think that one through too far. :)

> asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose"

I think that's been steadily dying since the mid and later Thatcher years, and accelerated rapidly under Blair. This current lot have just achieved peak "strong and stable" absurdity. It really takes some doing to achieve a slogan the journos are taking the piss out of on the first and second day it's used.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#24

Post by ChrisSD »

dangerface wrote: post #17
ChrisSD wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the "censorship" amounts to at the moment is ISPs redirecting DNS queries. This is trivial to work around.

Not any more now they block the ip and use active attacks to kill proxies.

I'm in the UK with BT as my ISP. I've not had a problem accessing blocked sites.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#25

Post by Veen »

jdietrich wrote: post #15

More mundanely: 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 enf…

This is an interesting and plausible narrative, but there's no reason to think that Javid doesn't believe that reigning in social networks is a genuinely good idea on its merits.

Everything else you have said is interesting but irrelevant (when it isn't outright mind reading). Of more importance than the possible motivations and causes is whether this is a good idea, whether it will achieve its aims, and whether those aims are desirable.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#26

Post by NeedMoreTea »

arethuza wrote: post #21
jdietrich wrote: post #15

More mundanely: 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 enf…

Why they can't just implement the measures that seem to have worked in Scotland to address knife crime seems a mystery - NIH at a political level? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-45572691

Scotland? That's in the distant colonies to the north of Watford Gap isn't it? (And near me)

As far as Westminster governments are concerned we don't exist, have good ideas or get infrastructure. Just somewhere to park nuclear things and fracking.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#27

Post by dangerface »

EvilGrin wrote: post #18
dangerface wrote: post #7

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.

However, the censorship requires enforcement. Post austerity the UK police force is overstretched and undermanned by its own admission. For example, the Manchester Police Commissioner stated just the other day that 43% of real world crimes are not investigated due to budget cuts. 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…

> However, the censorship requires enforcement. Not true, if you censor a problem exists then no one knows you are doing nothing about it. Censorship is always cheaper than enforcement.

This has been the UK governments stance toward child pornography they could do something about it but like you said enforcement is expensive, its easier to just censor the child porn and pretend the problem doesn't exist.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#28

Post by dangerface »

g-erson wrote: post #19
dangerface wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Is there any evidence of this?

Yes in 2012 GCHQ installed black boxes in every uk isp that all internet must be routed through[1]. While no one knows what these boxes do, it was thought that they decrypt https requests and log the request header, which seems to be confirmed by snowden[2]. In 2016 the investigatory powers act is what gives them the legal authority to do it[3].

They have never claimed they send fake ssl packets to drop the stream but they have done it to me and the uk governments stance is kind of against modern tls greater than 1.2 which fixes the drop stream packet bug [4].

There is plenty more detail about what they are doing out there, search snoopers charter and GCHQ snowden to see what they have been doing and are now trying to make legal.

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/u-k-spy-agencies-plan-to-insta... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encry... [3] https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.uk/human-rights/privacy/s... [4] https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/blog-post/tls-13-better-individuals-...

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#29

Post by Veen »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #23
pjc50 wrote: post #20

The lesson of Brexit is that all attempts at asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose" have been abandoned, and we're governed by pure short-term sloganeering. 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.wikiped…

The most comical part was the words were still spoken by an actor trying to lip sync. Which made a mockery of the intent to deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity - in every news broadcast. They didn't think that one through too far. :) > asking difficult questions like "how will this work" and "will it achieve the stated purpose" I think that's been steadily dying since the mid and later Thatcher years, and acceler…

It is a good thing that it made thugs like Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams look ridiculous as they attempted to represent themselves as peaceful politicians rather than the terrorists they actually were.

Re: Does the UK Think It Can Police the Internet?

#30

Post by inflatableDodo »

Funes- wrote: post #14
inflatableDodo wrote: post #3

>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.

Why do they have to be mutually exclusive? Why would safety be contrary to business opportunity? If anything, I would say that users' safety should be present in any legally viable business endeavor. Edit: I want to clarify that I'm not in favor of surveillance or opaque mechanisms run by any State.

>Why would safety be contrary to business opportunity?

They are a balancing act, you can't maximise both. If you maximised safety in recreation, for instance, you would make things like horse racing illegal. If you maximised business opportunity, you'd be allowed to feed the horse pcp before the race.

Post reply on HN