Live data from Hacker News

UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

alecmuffett.com

231–240 of 499 posts

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#231
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While figures show that the total number of arrests for online posts fell to 9,700 last year, down from a record 13,800 in 2023... https://freespeechunion.org/daily-mail-investigation-exposes...

[flagged]

the process is the punishment

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#232
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> 12,000 arrests per year Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial. > So they are currently trying to get rid of juries, which they will do Huh > a leader that has styled himself as a more extreme Nigel Farage I’m sorry, what? > The UK is actually a scary place right now It is?

>Arrested is not the same thing as being charged. The latter is what would lead to a trial.

Often the entire point of the arrest is to get restrictive and onerous bail conditions imposed on people. Frequently restricting their speech on social media by threat of imprisonment for violating their bail conditions.

That the charges are later dropped isn't the point.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#233
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am reading these wrong, but it doesn’t appear to me these sources indicate that a significant number of people are being arrested for “speech offenses,” which I’m guessing you are using as shorthand for statements akin to those that would fall under “free speech” in the US. If I’m not seeing it or I am not correctly defining what you mean, feel free to correct me. I’m having to make some assumptions here

It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-6... (arrested for post wearing a Manchester Arena bomber costume) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 (arrested for posting "the only good British soldier is a dead British sold…

And in many other countries those would get you prosecuted for hate speech or incitement to violence.

The lie here is you've picked too examples of atrocious behavior, but you're trying to pretend that actually all the rest are just people posting dank memes and so "it could happen to you!!".

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#234
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought Daily Mail was close to tabloid status (or a bit above). Aren’t they banned from being a citation on Wikipedia?

They are a trash paper so skepticism is warranted but care should be taken not to dismiss facts just because of who reports them. Thankfully, we don't have to depend on the word of the Daily Mail for evidence that the UK doesn't value the ideal of free speech and are far too comfortable punishing and silencing online speech. It's a problem, and it makes their efforts to tie people's online activity to an individual w…

[flagged]

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#235
post #36

On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes (it's NOT just a single-service login across government + a linking ID across government services, which is how it was sold by the BBC). They're pretty close to completely de-anonymising the internet for UK citizens. Say they introduce an Australian-style social media ban for under 16s, then requires all social media to link…

[flagged]

When the ratchet only goes in one direction, it doesn’t matter that each click isn’t the worst thing ever, it only matters where it’s headed.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#236

Will probably work as well as their prohibition of knives for underaged people (That is, none at all)

Reminds me of my favourite UK totalitarian politician fantasy story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ianmorris/2019/03/14/yes-a-poli... The UK went culturally off the deep end a long time ago.

Orwell wrote 1984 after working at the BBC

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#237
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On a related note, they built their digital ID so that third parties could verify attributes Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? The only reason anyone ever asks to see ID is so they can use it verify attributes of your identity, such as name and age. Otherwise what’s the point of an Identity Document , if it’s not to document something? Digital ID has always been sold as something approxim…

> Isn’t that the entire point of government ID of any variety? Ideally this could be done without deanonymizing accounts to service providers unless the user wants to for a 'verified' account linked to their identity publically but I don't think any digital ID system has been built that way. Imagine it acting like OAuth but instead of passing back an identity token it's just verification of age, platforms would store…

You're totally right that it would be easy from a tech perspective to do that. it's a shame that:

(A) most people cannot grasp how it could be that "GovSSO" can attest "This person you just sent our way just logged into GovSSO [with biometric 2FA], and they are at least 16 years old" without the receiving system having any way of knowing who that citizen is or even whether they're 16 or 99.

(B) very real terrible government policies the UK has (like jailing people for speech, and like demanding encryption backdoors that compromise the security, at minimum, of the whole of every British citizen's devices, and at worst every device in the world) incline anyone who's paying attention to assume that the government will somehow use anything related to "ID" and "internet" to do idiotic things like figuring out who owns a Twitter account that committed some wrongspeak so the bobbies can come round them up.

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#238
UK House of Lords are a buncha of Jimmy Savile pal types, if you get my drift. The same blackmail and bribery networks that exist in the US largely were learned from the Brits, who of course gave Palestine to the zionists on behalf of dragging America into a war they mostly engineered via Edward the 7ths diplomatic intrigues and the pre-war formation of the entangling alliances.

So for a long time, I traced most roads in the US back to London... (for example Star Chamber origins)...

After a while though, as I dug into the real history of banking, I realized when William of Orange was installed it was shortly after that the Bank of England was established to take them over the same way they later influenced us (Jekyll Island) to establish the Fed, the main trojan horse for a country being monetary countrol.

So I now understand just like the masons, or intel dudes, etc, many of them are just so compartmentalized they don't know what they are a part of. I now view the UK the same way.

So lets keep following the strings up the chain...

"You win battles by knowing the enemy's timing, and using a timing which the enemy does not expect." - Miyamoto Musashi

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#239
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-6... (arrested for post wearing a Manchester Arena bomber costume) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 (arrested for posting "the only good British soldier is a dead British sold…

[flagged]

Okay, so I see we've arrived at fantasyland now. Just because someone probably posted an idiotic idea like that on Twitter one time does not mean it has any path to becoming law. Do you know how difficult it is to get a constitutional amendment passed?

Re: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16

#240

It's also worth stating that the worst part of that proposed amendment [1] isn't even necessarily the VPN ban, it's the next clause, on page 20: "The “CSAM requirement” is that any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device."…

It's already the law in Brazil that online services and "terminal operating systems" must perform age verification in a secure, auditable manner. This presumably includes smartphones and computers, meaning you can't just run an arbitrary Linux distro in Brazil anymore. I expect similar laws to pass in at least a few U.S. states by 2030—places like Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, maybe Florida... When I say "the future…

While that's really terrifying about Brazil, is it actually enforced? I can't really imagine there being a "Linux Police" kicking down the door of a hooded teenager and prying the Ubuntu DVD from his clammy hands.

I mean this is the country of favelas where even the police don't dare to enter.

Post reply on HN