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Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private

theregister.com

251–260 of 292 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

But the voices call for "robust" systems... And some parties are trying to implement that, and from there difficulties I mentioned in the other post.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is?

I favour random selection. You end up with a perfectly representative parliament.

That's not universally true. It will, eventually, produce a comically unrepresentative group and the time it takes for that to happen will depend on the size of the pool of representatives compared to the population.

Fifty representatives randomly selected from a pool of a 300 million has a high chance of being supermajority non-representative.

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

#253
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they would have to prove that there was incriminating data on the phone. However, destroying potential evidence before there is suspicion of a crime is also a crime if done with intent to undermine a future investigation. It's quite unadvisable to destroy data in front of any sort of law enforcement. Last ditch effort? Sure, you better your odds but it's not ideal. If you have evidence of a crime, you know, wipe…

You keep saying "potential evidence." What does that even mean? If I factory reset my phone right now, am I guilty of destroying "potential evidence?" Do you have "potential evidence" on any of your devices? Let's not make up phrases to help justify what they were doing. There was either an actual crime committed, and wiping the phone destroyed real evidence. Or there was not. You can't just consider all data everywh…

The implication they are making is that the person _intended_ to destroy potential evidence on the phone. That the person felt there was evidence on it that needed to be destroyed to hide a crime.

IMO, even if that's actually illegal, there's zero way to prove it that the fifth amendment doesn't address.

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 But the voices call for "robust" systems... And some parties are trying to implement that, and from there difficulties I mentioned in the other post.

Those are the ulterior motives people I referred to. Asking on installation is robust enough because parents buy devices for their children and set them up. You could make it even more robust if you required a cellphone store employee to do it. Whatever way someone is authenticated as a cellphone store employee would surely leak, but again: robust enough. An example of something not robust is asking the child upon access to the site. Brits tolerate ID checks for cigarettes, even though parents can buy cigarettes for their children.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If we want a good thing we should push for the good thing instead of remaining silent while worse people push for the worse thing.

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

#256
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages and disadvantages of being in one state or another. There is a symmetry here, one you remarked on earlier, but it maps the Brexit referendum not to itself with roles reversed but to earlier EU-rel…

The definition of major is completely subjective. Adopting the Euro if the UK remained is major. What was a ‘major’ change when leaving? Everything has been mitigated by slow change. Euro migration was overnight in 1999 (I worked on it) that was major . And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?

Obviously majorness is a matter of degree. And, yes, different people can weight things differently when deciding what's major. But you can't escape having to decide that sort of thing -- after all, you can't hold referenda on everything and so you have to decide what things are "major" enough to need a referendum.

(I am inclined to think that most things major enough to need a referendum are also major enough that if there's a "change" and a "don't change" option the latter should need some kind of supermajority.)

> And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?

If it was set up with a 60-40 threshold then 59.9-40.1 means no change, just as if it was set up 50-50 then 49.9-50.1 means no change. I'm not sure what the problem's supposed to be here.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair (a) I don't think he was trying to do that, and (b) I'm struggling to think of an argument that would shine good light on brexit voters ? Perhaps that they're wonderfully trusting people who believe whatever politicians that Gary down the pub thinks are the best ?

To take my mother as an example she hadn't thought about it properly at all. She was surprised that her daughter (my sister) had voted Remain because apparently my mother who knows about the EU funding which enabled what my sister did, hadn't connected "EU funding" to the EU she was voting to Leave. "Oh" was basically all she had to say about that. In the broader scheme of things you could also see this in the respon…

If voters can't understand ranked choice voting or similar, how could we possibly expect them to understand the impact of what they are voting on? It's a self-defeating argument.

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

#258
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does that work with courts that work to the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law? That rule based on the exact text instead of the history of what went into the drafting and passing of the bill, and refuse to even ask legislators what the intent of the law would have been under certain conditions?

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

#259
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is how autocracy governments get hold of countries without military action, it only needs enough patience and uninformed electorate to win the election. They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship.

> They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship. Is there an example where "they" have not done that?

Plenty, ask AI friend about military coups.

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

#260
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship. Is there an example where "they" have not done that?

Plenty, ask AI friend about military coups.

Aren't they still claiming, that they do it for and represent the people?
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