Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private • Hacker News Board

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#241

Post by mdp2021 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #236

mdp2021 wrote: post #230

Inconsistent with the implicit acceptance of age verification laws (forbidding YouTube to minors, may Diderot and D'Alembert and all the democratizers of knowledge raise from their graves and sneer and taunt). Or was there a large turomoil against keir starmer that did not properly reach the news?

Why do you think that a website asking how old you are and politicians reading your private messages are the same thing?

How do you prove your age without either sharing your identity (or using twisted ways entailing other possibly unacceptable compromises like the eu is trying to do).

Remember that the australian side (which moved first) framed it as "no underage access to encyclopedias, no underage access to search engines": age verification, i.e. identity verification or other "nonsense" to access encyclopedias and search engines. In the USA, some voices would include LLMs. Remember that in the uk Wikipedia had to win against the state to get exception under the mandate from keir starmer - it "exceptionally won", and after having lost at a first stage.

The privacy of online browsing and the privacy of messaging are equally critical, yes.

(Edit: if you wish to really rank them, then a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are reading a book is more dystopian and farcical than a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are writing a letter - yes.)

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#242

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:31 PM UTC

mattlondon wrote: post #103

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #2

Well, they would have loved to stop migration and voted in droves for brexit for that. Cant have that though, democracy or not, can vote for any party, but cant have that result they all promise before the vote closes and never deliver once the vote is in.

The sad thing of course was that the people coming across on boats or clinging to the underside of lorries etc are not EU citizens arriving legally. Plus it's not like EU is the only source of migration (hellow commonwealth). I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with…

There were all of the negative feelings caused by general alienation and wealth inequality, but people don't blame alienation and wealth inequality - they blame immigrants. Because the people causing the alienation and wealth inequality told them immigrants were the real cause.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#243

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

whackernews wrote: post #118

jen20 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not supposed to. There is no light that can present anybody who voted for Brexit as anything other than a fuckwit.

Haha, so dogmatic. You reckon calling half of the UK fuckwits is a smart position? Maybe you’re the fuckwit.

Britain is failing because half of it are currently fuckwits.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#244

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #6

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost as if democracy isn't real and all statecraft is driven by intra-elite conflicts.

Britain leaving the EU purely because a majority voted for it in a popular vote is a pretty bad example to use in support of the claim that democracy isn't real. It's probably this sort of vague cynicism about democracy that led Cameron to call the referendum in the first place, only to discover that people can actually vote however they like!

It happened because it was voted for and the elite wanted it.

Several counterfactuals are plausible: either the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go, or they would've brexited even if remain won, or they don't care either way. What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote, because in that case they simply wouldn't have left.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#245

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

lores wrote: post #22

foldr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works better with an informed electorate. However, one of the reasons that voters don't bother informing themselves is the campaign of cynicism aimed at convincing them that all political parties are the same, that their vote doesn't matter, etc. etc. One might just as well say that an informed population requires democracy: why bother keeping track of national policy if you have no control over it? In the days af…

Yes, you're entirely right. One further, I was at a talk from a law professor at a big uni once, where he had printed the entire text of the Medicare bill on a giant pile of paper. He explained that it had taken him, a professor, several months full-time to understand everything at stake; what chance has a representative to do so, let alone on every bill? What chance has a voter? What does it mean for democracy that…

Representatives should vote no on everything they don't understand then, until the bills are short.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#246

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:39 PM UTC

hn_submit wrote: post #197

dofm wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Online Safety Act has broad support from the people of the UK from the left and right combined. Nobody is stopping anyone protesting against it, but it is not imposed by some imaginary uniparty fascist regime, it is something people want.

Most Brits have no idea what's in the Online Safety Act since it expressly mandates the neutering of end-to-end encryption in messaging apps. And protesting is very difficult when everyone doing so is branded a child molester. Britain isn't a true democracy. Neither is Australia. They're Orwellian societies where the populace has been trained to believe that "the government knows best."

Brits want something roughly akin to the online safety act - they want liability for online unsafety. I doubt many of them care about the requirement for platforms to register or the fees for doing so, and would still support it if that wasn't in there.

We should be trying to give people what they want in the best possible way. Otherwise, other people (with ulterior motives) will give it to them in the worst possible way.

For kid's online safety, it would be sufficient for each device to ask upon installation if it's for an adult or a kid, and send that as an HTTP header to each website. We should recommend that, so we don't get a much worse solution to the very real problem - such as UKOSA.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#247

Post by inigyou » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:41 PM UTC

mdp2021 wrote: post #241

inigyou wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think that a website asking how old you are and politicians reading your private messages are the same thing?

How do you prove your age without either sharing your identity (or using twisted ways entailing other possibly unacceptable compromises like the eu is trying to do). Remember that the australian side (which moved first) framed it as "no underage access to encyclopedias, no underage access to search engines": age verification, i.e. identity verification or other "nonsense" to access encyclopedias and search engines. I…

You don't prove it. Under California AB1043 (often called the "age verification law" by propagandists) it's illegal for a social media website to demand you to prove your age.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#248

Post by basisword » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

DrBazza wrote: post #226

basisword wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-read the sentence. It wasn't referring to an entire generation.

That’s doesn’t make it better. You’re still rude and dismissive of part of an age group simply because their views and opinions differ to yours.

The country is demonstrably worse because of their 'views and opinions' and many of them don't need to worry about it - because they're dead. Fuck them.

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#249

Post by mdp2021 » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 6:01 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #247

mdp2021 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you prove your age without either sharing your identity (or using twisted ways entailing other possibly unacceptable compromises like the eu is trying to do). Remember that the australian side (which moved first) framed it as "no underage access to encyclopedias, no underage access to search engines": age verification, i.e. identity verification or other "nonsense" to access encyclopedias and search engines. I…

You don't prove it. Under California AB1043 (often called the "age verification law" by propagandists) it's illegal for a social media website to demand you to prove your age.

> Under California AB1043

We are talking about "Brits" here. But you seem to be stating that California has tackled the issue and deliberated that - do I understand correctly? - somebody installs an OS on a machine and sets manually, without verification, a date of birth for the user (setting that will be shared with relevant servers).

Are you sure that that would be the way Britain is going to implement it? Why have not britons raised to get that crucial detail very, very clear? We understood that past limitations involved people using webcams in the uk to access forbidden sites.

And the eu? That Californian decision does not seem to have conditioned the eu much: the eu idea is that you should have an "official OS" with the technical capabilities required by the open source age-verifying "app" to get access.

(And I would insist: forbidding access to the video museum to those in the formative age is one of the most blatant events in history. That happened in britain, it just happened. To call the world reaction disproportionately absent is an understatement.)

Re: Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

#250

Post by stanleykm » Sun, Aug 30, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #238

stanleykm wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dictatorship of the bourgeoisie seems like a salient concept right now.

But that's Marxist.

Yeah good point, I better direct my frustration at the “upper class” that earns more than $125,000/year.