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UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

bbc.co.uk

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Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just factually incorrect.

which part?

I was slightly mistaken in that it's 42% [1], not 50%+. But that's still a derisory figure. The cruelty of the UK towards children is absolutely real.

The two child limit, and associated rape clause, is punitive. If we look at UK families with three or more children, two million of those kids are in poverty [1]. Scrapping the limit would cost a token amount, and lift 270 000 [2] children out of poverty.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-av... table 4_5db

[2] https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/61220/the-twochil...

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#122
post #60

It’s interesting. This gigantic legislation is misconceived at the same time I think it’s easy to see why it has been deemed electorally popular enough for the government to proceed with. Tech companies do not provide a carriage service. It’s something more than that. The behaviours they permitted, and even encouraged, on their platforms have incurred large amounts of harm on individuals and society as a whole. There…

>With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping Encrypted communication is always…

Sure, two technically capable people that control their whole stack including hardware that they can ensure has not been backdoored and that it’s in no other way being monitored for unencrypted versions of the data.

100% banning encryption is stupid. But encryption not being banned doesn’t mean they can’t know what’s in those messages. There are other attacks.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#123
post #60

It’s interesting. This gigantic legislation is misconceived at the same time I think it’s easy to see why it has been deemed electorally popular enough for the government to proceed with. Tech companies do not provide a carriage service. It’s something more than that. The behaviours they permitted, and even encouraged, on their platforms have incurred large amounts of harm on individuals and society as a whole. There…

> With that said I think the existence of the unregulated internet was likely anomalous. If ever you wanted privacy, you always have had to ensure the only two beings with access to the information communicated were yourself and the intended recipient. Is it really possible for a society to permit the existence of any large organisation for private communication without eavesdropping? It wasn’t feasible to open up ev…

We have seen large letter censorship apparatus before. We have seen mass spying before. Implementing these systems (with just humans) has been done more than once at large scales (think Second World War, East Germany).

But regardless secure communication had to be undertaken between individuals. If the state wished to spy on people who did not have the ability to encrypt and decrypt their communication securely all they had to do was target them. Now the computer has made encryption into a technology rather than a skill.

I would suggest that’s just as anomalous as the ability to monitor electronic communication.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#124
I can't help but feel sorry for the children and the adults of the UK. People around the world will mostly ignore this bill (and rightfully so) but the people living there will have to live with this broad, poorly defined mess.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#125
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our country is crumbling and people are starting to realise it’s the Tory’s fault. 13 years of Tory rule, cutting services to the bone and making themselves rich at our expense is seriously taking its toll. Councils are going bankrupt, schools are falling apart, public transport is in managed decline in a lot of areas, various sectors regularly going on strike, people can’t afford their bills, mortgages sky-rocketed,…

Labour has largely supported this -- one of the originators is Lorna Woods (University of Essex) who was an advisor to Blair.

I expected the “Labour bad too” reply but that’s a different topic (not one I wholly disagree with). But it is not Labour who have been in power the past 13 years. The subject of the topic was the Government (and by extension recent governments)

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#126
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh? That is definitely nor what's going on with this bill.

Indeed. This is not corporate regulation, it's social regulation. Social authoritarianism is the driving force in English politics, and it's a big vote-winner in the tabloid- and telegraph-reading constituency. It's also the message that's easiest to flog on social media, since all you have to do is trigger outrage and critical thinking goes out of the window. Liberality is probably more popular, but it's erased by o…

> Liz "Lettuce" Truss

I think she was on-brand for the Johnson era, but not a reversion to type.

Rishi Sunak? I can't really tell, but the vibes are similar to David Cameron.

Still, I remain glad I took the opportunity to move to Germany easily before Brexit made it much harder. My Overton Window only just about brushes up against Labour's actual position, and doesn't include the Conservatives at all.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#127
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the bill is appalling, don't downplay the issue. Voluntary euthanasia is a total strawman. "kys" is widely-understood netspeak nowadays. It means "kill yourself". Children are cruel. Mostly because they are mentally insufficient - it takes time and mistakes to learn human values. (Although cruelty lingers into adulthood in some.) The new(ish) problem is that, previously, ideally, bullied teens could come home a…

Get children off the internet. Seriously. This is an adult place and it's insane that we ever let them on. Children aren't allowed in adult places for very good reasons. Not just for them, but for us too. Children ruin adult places, as can be see here. Letting a child on the internet should be considered abuse in the same way as letting them into a strip club or drug-taking establishment would be. There must be ways…

I wonder how difficult it would be to convince people that children only need access to certain sites, like wikipedia, encyclopedia brittanica, wolfram alpha, etc., and that you need to reach a certain age to get access to the wider internet.

Even if it's not something enforced, it would be a nice social opinion.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#128
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah bollocks. Guy Fawkes was attempting to reinstate a monarchy that the people roundly, and almost universally, despised. The Jacobins were, exclusively, Catholic landed gentry. Lopping off Chuckie's head set the stage for Britain's golden age, which goes to show: Tories have always been stupid as well as evil.

The Tories didn’t exist until probably 50 years after Guy Fawkes was killed and when they did come to be they were quite anti-Catholic.

The late 17th was an exciting time in England, and far more complex than I could describe, no matter how long my comment.

The Tory party was not formed in a single day, not was every Tory born on a single day. There was continuity of actors and motivations.

It would have been politically inadvisable for an English nobleman in the period to be openly Catholic; nonetheless, many of them were, and this was certainly a factor in their favour of James, whose Catholicism was an open secret.

Remember that many of these tories spent a long time in exile, primarily France, a vigorously Catholic country.

Remember also that Catholicism was the state religion in Britain until disestablishment, a scant hundred years prior. Not all of the nobility converted - Mary found plenty of supporters.

I don't have the scholastic chops to back up this idea, but it seems fair to say that crypto-Catholic noble families would have been biding their time, nursing their resentments, and waiting for a chance to restore Catholicism to England. That was surely a factor in their support of James, who was clearly not a desirable king on his own merits - being raddled with syphilis and detested by the commoners.

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#129

This is genuinely terrible for people living in the UK who care about their privacy and freedom on the internet. I do wonder whether this bill was caused by sincere misunderstanding of how tech works on the part of the legislators or, more cynically, a government agenda to crush privacy on the internet. Either way, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"The government, however, has said the bill does not ban end-to-end encryption.

Instead it will require companies to take action ... as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages...

Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible."

Any questions? You can't make a bill for what is impossible, and this debate is going on for how many years now? It is agenda.

You know you are screwed when someone repeats apparent lies over and over...

Re: UK Parliament passes Online Safety Bill

#130
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which part?

I was slightly mistaken in that it's 42% [1], not 50%+. But that's still a derisory figure. The cruelty of the UK towards children is absolutely real. The two child limit, and associated rape clause, is punitive. If we look at UK families with three or more children, two million of those kids are in poverty [1]. Scrapping the limit would cost a token amount, and lift 270 000 [2] children out of poverty. [1] https://w…

£1.3bn a year a year is not a token amount.
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