311–320 of 409 posts
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I don't think you understand anything about the British system if you think that "removing laws from the books" matters at all. As demonstrated by COVID regulations in emergency the law can be changed very quickly. Modern armies (like NATO members) have really got very little to gain by conscription. Being a modern soldier has very little to do with being cannon fodder.
Modern warfare against insurgents, where CNN broadcasts the night vision green victory footage. Unfortunately, in Ukraine both sides are cannon fodder again because modern anti air defenses are so good that the fighting relies on 155mm howitzers again. Which NATO has just run out of and has no capacity to manufacture in sufficient quantities.
That’s scary. If 31 countries cant get their act together to manufacture basic weapons then we are in no better shape than russia. Should they win the war in ukraine and decide to attack other countries we’d be caught with our pants down.
Governments seem to want to have it both ways. As new technologies are introduced they assume that capabilities and practices available to analogous predecessors must remain available to them (e.g. wire-tapping phones => undermining cryptography) but they don’t feel the same way about public benefits or rights associated with other technology that is being replaced (anonymous cash transactions => ???) It also seems l…
What’s happening right now is much worse than the first crypto wars. In that case the government was just trying to gain occasional access to suspected criminal communications, usually with a warrant. Systems like the Clipper chip even codified mechanisms to limit access to communications. What’s happening this time around is very different: policymakers are demanding the ability to perform real-time scanning of mess…
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We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate. And a system that requires a 3/4 supermajority of not even the population but the state legislatures (with the net effect that some states have a much greater say in pushing through or blocking amendments than others) is hardly a sane or sensible way to gauge public sentiment on such matters.
> We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate. By the letter of the law, no. But in practice we do. The federal government is thus-far unwilling to defend their turf on this issue; they have de jure sovereignty but not de facto sovereignty. If a government finds itself politically incapable of exercising a sovereign power, then in a very real sense they no longer…
This is the lasting legacy of Apple’s CSAM photo scanning debacle. Apple mainstreamed the concept, demoed the dystopian tool, and legitimized the discourse of this dystopian insanity. Apple executives should be ashamed of their direct role in this.
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Nah, this has been coming (and inevitable really) since Snowden prompted the tech companies to introduce e2e messaging. Note that similar laws are being proposed in the UK, EU Australia and Canada (not sure of the latter two tbh).
The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse, and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E. Apple provided the answer for the how.
What does exit the UK market mean here though? Presumably that it won't appear in the Apple App Store or Google Play? Presumably that's more of an issue for the iOS ecosystem... But for android you just switch from using play to FDroid or an APK, right? I presume a sufficiently irked UK wouldn't be able to do anything more, as Signal already as ways of circumventing traffic blocking within specific states? Doesn't th…
> What does exit the UK market mean here though? Maybe just disable all accounts registered with +44 telephone numbers?
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That’s what Constitutional amendments are for, and it’s happened 27 times in the history of the US, most recently in 1992. The corporate media doesn’t typically like to talk about that process since it is a threat to the entrenched powers that be. The ombudsman of the American people is their state legislatures. We have sovereign states in the US. Let’s not add any more power to the federal apparatus to solve a perce…
We don't have state sovereignty even on matters as trivial as which recreational drugs to regulate. And a system that requires a 3/4 supermajority of not even the population but the state legislatures (with the net effect that some states have a much greater say in pushing through or blocking amendments than others) is hardly a sane or sensible way to gauge public sentiment on such matters.
The Constitution is supposed to be stable and only change in response to broad political consensus. Requiring a supermajority for amendments is entirely appropriate.