281–290 of 357 posts
The UK gov is just getting worse and worse at law making
The UK should just be banned from modern technology until their government has evolved socially enough to respect privacy. Companies need to pull out and stay out, because that's the only way the UK government will learn a lesson.
So, in this order: 1. You need a camera on your computer to allow a third party to verify your age before viewing adult content 2. It applies to social media too 3. It applies to your operating system too 4. Unless you age verify, the law demands your computer must be powerful enough to run an AI, or be internet-equipped and send your private photos to a third party, to detect and prohibit nudity. It must be capable…
The fear towards adult content is so insane. I know it’s mostly a pretext, but a meaningful portion of the population will accept pretty much whatever restrictions because they are so afraid of their kids seeing naked bodies
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Why as an Apple user in the UK am I considered too dumb to use a 3rd party app store but if I were 30 miles away in France I would be considered intelligent enough to cope? Because this was never about my safety. It was about their 30% as correctly supposed above.
Why in the UK Billy is considered a civil engineer but if he were 30 miles away in France it would be considered illegal for him to sign off on a bridge design? Different places arrived at different consensuses.
I sometimes wonder whether the people in the tech industry who worked on things like secure boot, attestation, and DRM saw this as the inevitability open source advocates always saw it as. Did they think, as they worked to transfer final say from users to corporations, by technical means, that politicians couldn't transfer that control to themselves by political means? Did they think they could lock things down to ex…
My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This i…
That said, I'm not going to pretend I'm one of those people who say "this law doesn't make sense, we must change it." it's more like "this law is not convenient to me right now and I am willing to suffer the consequences of breaking it" but frankly I'm not going to start a grassroots effort to try to change it.
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My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This i…
> The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". Indeed. I can't understand the people who blindly believe any law is good just because. Stop, think. Is the law good? What's good about it? What's bad about it? Can it be abused? Then maybe it should be changed? I advocate that every law should have an annual review to catalog every c…
I like this idea but frankly I don't trust our lawmakers to do a fair assessment of this. Maybe there's an independent, non-partisan committee that does this.
Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance. The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.
Detection, even if "on-device, fully private". Is meant to notify others, the person viewing the image already knows what they are viewing. I would argue that the notifying of others of what (kind of imagery/category) you are viewing, is the main violation of privacy, even if the actual imagery is withheld. Actually withholding the image may make it harder to fight the accusation (in court) if wrongly categorized. Fo…
Are any of us expecting that there are safeguards in today's global political environment? in tomorrow's?
Honestly, the only safeguards against abuse of surveillance are that the surveillance not happen in the first place.
Once it has happened, the only safeguards keeping the owners of the system from using it to coerce and control the masses exist in the form of pitchforks and ropes wielded by the masses, and the days when that was a real potential for repealing any such coercion and control are fully in the distant past.
These systems are made possible and installed beyond the reach of any constituent based consent - see the current condition of Ring cameras, Flock, and the many tools created by Palantir et. al and much like the boiled frog analogy the citizenry has sat in their movie theatre and restaurant seats telling each other soothing lies about how the goal was to make us even safer from ourselves and now we are steps away from the fully immersive per-person verified identity and 24-7 observation of what everything, everyone read, writes, says, and does. Exactly as the 'foil hats' have been telling them would happen if they didn't speak up sooner.
Tough cookies, we all get exactly what we deserve for letting it get this far out of hand. It's no use crying over spilt milk.
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My impression is that people who can work on stuff like that are the kind who just take the stuff in the world for granted. "This is how the world is, we need digital restrictions so now we need to implement them." "I don't have a say about whether DRM or remote attestation is standard business practice or not, it is just how it is." This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This i…
> This is akin to how two kinds of people respond to law. The first kind think "This is the law, we must follow it" and the other kind think "This law doesn't make sense, we must change it". There exist more kinds: - the "rebel": "this is a law/rule, so I have to trespass it". This often holds for people who are either annoyed by rules or red tape or for people who see no hope of changing the law. An example are the…
The evil is just a subset of the first type, abuse and use are functionally the same action within a poorly or properly constructed law/policy.
Is it possible the child nudity detection could be done on-device, fully private? This wouldn't amount to surveillance. The statistics on global child porngraphy rings are quite shocking. The UK is a big market consumer for these images/streams.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid. They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the se…
There is (seriously) agitation in the UK to ban pointy kitchen knives ... first hit on DDG for example https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...
Some people will tell you that they need a pointy knife for cutting tomatoes but they should try using a serrated knife instead: it's much better.