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Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

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Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#181

Post by _delirium »

nailer wrote: post #174
wfo wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed the neoliberal consensus is that he and anyone who rejects it should not have any say in the government and extremist neoliberal ideology has taken over much of the elite power structures in the UK (as well as the US!) If saying nice things about bad people were actually a problem, no politician in history in any western society would ever be allowed to rule. Pick any politician and you will find them endorsin…

> To have any "serious" position in modern foreign policy is to support evil. Saying the trial of the Brighton bomber is a "show trial" and protesting it has very little to do with foreign policy. The IRA did not represent a foreign government and the five people killed were neither military nor government ministers. Neither does mourning Fidel Castro, after he's dead. Also: - The mainstream left people you'll find n…

I can believe some people (perhaps you!) genuinely object primarily to Corbyn's viewpoints on foreign policy, Northern Ireland, etc., but much of the media commentary seems disingenuous to me. Do people really think if Jeremy Corbyn took over from Theresa May, it would lead to him instituting gulags in the UK or something? This feels like trying to stretch disagreeing with something he said about the Cold War into some kind of actual worry about 21st-century policy he is likely to enact, for mostly election-campaign point-scoring reasons.

My usual assumption is that people focusing on those issues among the large media companies and especially the Blairite Labour-right, are mostly people who actually object to other parts of Corbyn's views. Namely the ones that are in the Labour manifesto and most likely to be enacted if he's elected. But such opponents don't want to attack those openly stated policy positions head-on, so they try to change the subject to Fidel Castro, as if talking about Fidel Castro in 2017 is relevant. For example, some people think re-nationalising significant parts of UK infrastructure is extremist, a return back to the bad old days of sclerotic state-owned companies. And if you did think that, it is completely fair to attack Corbyn on it, because that's something he supports, is in the manifesto, and would have at least some likelihood of enacting if in office. But many of Corbyn's opponents, even among people who call themselves Labour, seem allergic to debating his proposals to nationalise the rail system, i.e. to debating the actual policy direction the UK should or should not take. They don't like those proposals, but they would rather attack them indirectly, by debating something else.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#182

Post by topranks »

felipelemos wrote: post #13
hardlianotion wrote: post #4

This is something else the UK could outsource to China - these guys have the state-of-the-art on monitoring and blocking technology. Something is very wrong here.

And even there it does not really work if you have the means to circumvent it. And guess what? The terrorists have, but the everyday man have not.

In fairness we all have access to the tools.

Understanding and implementing them right can be tough though.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#183

Post by topranks »

sangnoir wrote: post #128
iDemonix wrote: post #73

The more and more Theresa May talks about the internet, the more and more I think I should start a VPN business, it's going to be a big sector in the UK once the great firewall of the UK goes live.

It is obvious to me that VPNs will also be declared illegal (for users and proprietors) in short order. This will be in addition to ISPs being asked to block VPN connections and log and report any VPN connection attempts along with the associated user account. If your organisation has a 'legitimate' requirement for using VPN, your VPN software will have to use some government-backed key escrow where they can decrypt…

This is a scarily realistic prospect.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#184

Post by nebabyte »

zebrafish wrote: post #153
nebabyte wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how long it's going to take for people to realise: the government is not your friend Slow your roll there m8. Government as an aggregate will of a people can do good. (I say this because a libertarian utopia would basically endgame into gang leaders oppressing people in a similar manner.) "The government" when it is just the people is probably the best way to collectivize problem-solving efforts. (Whic…

Government as an aggregate will of the people is just a hivemind. There has to be push and pull; give and take. The 51% cannot completely neglect the wishes of the other 49%. However, on the other hand, I agree with you. Who's to say that private conglomerates have our best interests in mind moreso than the people we elect to represent us? In order to maximize personal freedoms, I believe that there can be no utopia.…

> The 51% cannot completely neglect the wishes of the other 49%.

In these cases, the only non-gridlocked solution is fragmentation. It's the survivorship bias - the only issues that continue to paralyze a region are the ones that couldn't be decided one way or the other.

In the US' case, this would be granting certain issues to be within states' power to decide upon, and incentivizing people to move and live under the system that works for them. Ultimately, though, that won't happen - because the people who believe in these issues (be they taxation, abortion, LGBetc rights, etc) are in an all-or-nothing mentality whereupon changes have to be enforced federally.

America will never admit to itself that it's too diverse and that its various extremes cannot be reconciled, so it's stuck moving at a glacial pace with the eventual hope that the 'average' will move in the direction of progress.

Which is all well and good as long as you don't mind the periodic risk of government shutdown or terrible policy precedents being set by lobbyism/financed-campaign promises in the interim.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#185

Post by nebabyte »

discombobulate wrote: post #117
nebabyte wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure how long it's going to take for people to realise: the government is not your friend Slow your roll there m8. Government as an aggregate will of a people can do good. (I say this because a libertarian utopia would basically endgame into gang leaders oppressing people in a similar manner.) "The government" when it is just the people is probably the best way to collectivize problem-solving efforts. (Whic…

OK. I'll just fire up my VPN to route around the 'problem-solving'. I'll use crytocurrency when I can to mitigate the 'good'. > Which is why people have not and will never "learn" that lesson you are hoping they will I don't think anyone will learn anything. We don't walk down the current path because people are learning. I avoid the shitshow the best I can. Money, tech, metathinking. You all can do what you want.

> OK. I'll just fire up my VPN to route around the 'problem-solving'

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374926

Nonparticipation and avoidance are stopgaps; don't expect stopgaps to save you. Those who participate and invest themselves in making their systems work (and find a place within such system) are not the ones who get stranded without recourse when the governments continue to act in accordance with their own precedents.

In this instance, if you were a citizen of Britain and decided your response to this was plugging your ears and using a VPN, I would not put much stock in your success with that venture going forward, as you'd be at the mercy of the gov't not implementing one of the contingencies I listed in that comment or any number of others they could easily justify given their precedent and direction.

Cryptocurrency is as vulnerable to the will of the people as anything else. At some point, the point of sale is discoverable - oh hell, I've written on this before too.

Head-in-the-sand-ism only gets you so far :)

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#187

Post by mdekkers »

wanda wrote: post #129

Honestly, it's like Theresa May watched the first hours of V for Vendetta and Children of Men respectively, and mistook them for instructional films.

You forgot "Read everything Orwell wrote as a starter", specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#188

Post by mstade »

Retr0spectrum wrote: post #30
mstade wrote: post #16

Every day there are news coming out of the U.K. that just makes me even happier that I left it. This is no exception.

Which country did you leave to? I'd like to get out of here ASAP.

Sweden. I love it, but it's my home country so I'm biased. I lived in the U.K. for about five years.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#189

Post by discombobulate »

nebabyte wrote: post #185
discombobulate wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. I'll just fire up my VPN to route around the 'problem-solving'. I'll use crytocurrency when I can to mitigate the 'good'. > Which is why people have not and will never "learn" that lesson you are hoping they will I don't think anyone will learn anything. We don't walk down the current path because people are learning. I avoid the shitshow the best I can. Money, tech, metathinking. You all can do what you want.

> OK. I'll just fire up my VPN to route around the 'problem-solving' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374926 Nonparticipation and avoidance are stopgaps; don't expect stopgaps to save you. Those who participate and invest themselves in making their systems work (and find a place within such system) are not the ones who get stranded without recourse when the governments continue to act in accordance with their o…

I'll move countries if they get too egregious. I'm not tolerating that bullshit when I'm the one doing the productive work.

You call it head-in-the-sand-sim, I call it fuck-off-ism.

I'm already to the point where I'm going to have to pay for health services, which are free on the NHS (National Health Service). I pay twice. Once for the govs incompetent service & again for a reasonable service. They are a waste of space in my estimation.

Re: Theresa May Wants To Regulate The Internet

#190

Post by nebabyte »

mattkevan wrote: post #125
nebabyte wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I often find myself in subconscious denial ("oh, surely it's just a fluke and they'll get back on course soon") over news of the direction our British friends are headed, because of the self-affirming echo chamber net communities often form. I've only ever sometimes heard (but fortunately tried to keep in mind) the fact that the reason for it is that it's not seen as dystopic by the British public, and tha…

The thing is, I don't disagree with those parents' concerns. There's a lot of horrible horrible crap on the Internet, stuff that I don't want my child anywhere near. And if I wasn't tech savvy, having the government do it would probably sound like a good idea However, enforcing a nation-state firewall which blocks stuff 'for our own good' – and records every aspect of our lives in the process – is not the right way t…

Right, which is why I said this

> If only adblock lists (content subscription in general) were a more common model. You could tell your neighbors they can just "not subscribe to those channels" without affecting others. Hmm

Content subscription is a relatively easy model to understand. A stratified net is easier than DIY filtering but still is 'handled by the government' and affords the flexibility of a (somewhat) open internet.

Far sight better than wholesale blocking.

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