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

UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 320 posts

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#141

Post by monksy »

makingstuffs wrote: post #75
ajb wrote: post #5

It's a little unclear, but my reading of this is that the power to do it will still be in the law, requiring at most secondary legislation to put into effect (perhaps not even that) if they think they ever have enough leverage over messaging providers, or are willing to spend the political capital. Not a great place to be in really, but better than it actually being deployed.

I’d bet my life we start to see a massive influx of bad press aimed at messaging providers, focusing on how criminals are using their services, over the next few years. When the general sentiment of the average Dave is ‘encryption === bad’ this BS will rear its head again. Seems to have been the standard play for governments of this country for decades now.

Great example

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-csam-scanning-heat-initiat...

Heat initiative is basically non existent on Google. Not much of said about how they're funded or who is apart of it

Their website is protectchildrennotabuse.org

Has a CEO with experience in running charitable orgs

They're explicitly focused on client side scanning and reporting on the iPhone.

Honestly if you're reading this archive the website and I think that's a smoking gun

Archived http://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://protectch...

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#142

Post by _bohm »

pydry wrote: post #95
makingstuffs wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d bet my life we start to see a massive influx of bad press aimed at messaging providers, focusing on how criminals are using their services, over the next few years. When the general sentiment of the average Dave is ‘encryption === bad’ this BS will rear its head again. Seems to have been the standard play for governments of this country for decades now.

They already deployed M&C Saatchi against it: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/01/19/uk-has-voyeuristic-new-p... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/revealed-u... All about saving the children. From everybody except Prince Andrew, it seems.

Some anonymous entity has been putting up posters in my neighborhood decrying Apple for "allowing" CSAM to be stored on iCloud. Very creepy propaganda campaign.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#143

Post by seabass-labrax »

b800h wrote: post #40

That bit isn't as bad as the part that says you can't run an interactive service without age verification though....

What's weird about that is how it has leapfrogged law in 'real-life'. Minors aren't prohibited from talking to adults face-to-face, and you don't need to show proof of age before starting a conversation with someone! This new bill would turn the internet from an environment where nothing is age-restricted (in practice, if not in law) to one where everything is^.

^ Again, in practice if not in law: since no service provider could fully identify and restrict all 'adult' material in real-time, they will be effectively unable to serve any interactive content to minors. Only if the penalties for non-compliance were low enough would the largest of companies take that risk.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#144

Post by seabass-labrax »

aembleton wrote: post #116
traceroute66 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do we know how effective our campaigning and emails to MPs were? Campaigning to your MP is and always has been a waste of time. In addition, the "safer" their seat, the more of a waste of space the MP is because they know their constituents would vote for a pig if the right coloured rosette pinned to it. Most of the time they don't bother replying, and then if they do reply, you get a two-page party political broad…

Depends on the mp, but I've had success emailing them after getting all that standard blurb. They actual seen human then.

I know someone who writes very frequently to her MP with very reasonable criticisms of government activities. The MP always takes the time to respond, despite not actually changing her position in Parliament on any topic. Poor women to have to endure that - both of them!

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#145

Post by anonymous_sorry »

basisword wrote: post #119
anonymous_sorry wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or too busy? In plenty of families both parents have to work hard to make ends meet. Not helped by the fact that children are growing up in a completely different environment to the one their parents remember. Familiarizing myself with TikTok or whatever the kids are into these days would fill me with dread. And the way platforms work means my experience of them would differ dramatically from a child's anyway.

>> Familiarizing myself with TikTok or whatever the kids are into these days would fill me with dread. You don't need to. Don't give them devices until they're 16, and then implement the built in parental controls that come on every smartphone. When they are 18 and can buy their own, they can do what they want. I'm guessing your actual issue isn't familiarizing yourself with TikTok etc, but is instead facing conflict…

No, I'm just trying to empathise with busy parents rather than write off parents who struggle with this stuff as lazy.

I know some parents give their children devices for safety reasons. For others, I guess they don't want their children to be socially isolated if all the other 14 year olds are chatting on messenger.

My only point was that it can be hard, and that not everyone who fails at it is lazy. It sounds like we are mostly in agreement.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#146

Post by markhahn »

unbelievable how pols never seem to get it. the purpose of making new laws is to further protect the public - not damage the public to make LEO jobs easier.

sure, it sucks that they can't sit in their office and wiretap anyone, or might seize a phone that they can't crack. all it does mean they have to get off their asses and investigate at point-of-crime, possibly in person.

to society, the great thing about that is that direct investigation is not scalable, which means that collateral damage will be less common among the innocent and bystanders.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#147

Post by yafbum »

Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting.

Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once everyone was connected as part of a global network, we'd see an inevitable global rise in liberal forces that would make governments unable to control speech. See Bill Clinton's on "nailing Jello to the wall". Clinton whose administration did liberalize encryption quite a bit.

That "end of history" mindset was wrong. We are back in a quasi cold war, with an active proxy war on top of it and a few more smoldering. And so my prediction is that we will see a reversal to the mean of history, and cryptography become again a govt granted privilege with conditions attached. (Yes yes I know public implementations of every algorithm exist, but China showed the blueprint of the machine that nails Jello to the wall anyways.)

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#148

Post by bryanrasmussen »

yafbum wrote: post #147

Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting. Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once eve…

>Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege.

no, throughout history has always been the privilege of those with the ability to encrypt, which was often governments, big businesses, or in some cases very clever individuals.

with the ability to encrypt becoming simpler it follows that the cleverness of individuals to achieve it has decreased.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#149

Post by jupp0r »

yafbum wrote: post #147

Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting. Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once eve…

There's no way bad actors will adhere to these restrictions anymore. Unless one's view of government is a very cynical one (they only care about controlling the general population vs actually fighting crime), tightly controlling cryptography is just not the effective tool anymore that it had been in the 90s.

Re: UK pulls back from clash with Big Tech over private messaging

#150

Post by [deleted] »

yafbum wrote: post #147

Unpopular puffin opinion ahead, for the sake of argument only. Pls respond with arguments vs just downvoting. Throughout history, encryption has always been a government privilege. Only very recently, and then only in the West, practically speaking, is encryption that is safe from the eyes of government available. The liberalization of encryption has been concomitant with a naive "end of history" belief that once eve…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN