Can’t you guys tell your MPs to get that shit out of here?
Oh believe me we will, but we have to wait for them to call an election (likely autumn 2024). They’re roundly despised and they know it. They’re just milking as much as they can before they’re flung out of Parliament.
They’re a disgrace.
Is there any indication that Labour would be any better on this particular issue?
Idk. Im very pessimistic that this county is capable of any reasonable decision making tbh.
Very very very little indication they would be better, and I’m very left of center in politics.
Starmer is very suss as far as I’m concerned, I’m not at all comfortable with his purges…if he gets in, we’ll see.
Which makes you wonder what the point in this bill even is. They will barely get an opportunity to make use of it.
They just like swinging their dicks to show they did something.
Oh, they’ve done things. That’s the problem.
Just two years ago the politicians fearmongered that quantum computers will break every encryption without delay. This bill speaks quite different story.
They will… when they finally get invented. For now though, law enforcement will have to do annoying things like “following the word of law” and convincing judges who clearly do not understand the national security implications of kids going to the wrong school to give them warrants.
Tell me that pushing this sort of 1984 inspired stuff wasn’t one of the reasons for Brexit.
It was.
Username checks out
Yeah sadly. Used to be a bit of a joke, but in 2023… Noone is laughing.
They said tell them “it wasn’t”!
NWO is happening before our very eyes, guys
No. It‘s the opposite of a new world order.
It‘s the old order doing everything to preserve its power.
This is why I’m worried about Signal. Signal is designed as a central service, which means its easy to block/kill. If similar laws are brought to the country Signal operates from then it could be shutdown. Centralized applications are easy to monetize and easy to kill.
Alternatives that aren’t so obscure you can’t get your family/friends to switch?
SimpleX is the new thing to watch imo. Even protects your metadata while still feeling modern and compfortable
Simplex chat is the only one I was able to popularize and its based in the UK
Perfect doesn’t have to be the enemy of good. Signal is Good, it could be better. There is a architectural weakness. There will be some other messenger that ticks all the boxes in the future, hopefully they will take what signal has done and continue to improve it.
Signal is the easy for adoption because of the phone number as identity, but its weak because of the centralization. Its currently the best option. I don’t want to spend effort moving normal people to Briar or Session until its absolutely necessary, or those applications improve the onboarding experience.
You can’t send voice messages and videos or any type of file except for photos on Briar. I don’t have a problem with that myself, but it uses a lot of battery power.
Briar is a long way from being generally useful to typical users, but i think its a gold standard example of something that is unkillable.
There are so many trends with technology that seem to favor another 1930’s Europe situation. The 1940 film “The Great Dictator” describes it pretty well, and it is sad how much love and compassion seem to be out of favor as people march more and more towards mechanized hate-driven systems of society. I really hope a pro-humanism civil rights movement takes hold, like Martin Luther King Jr’s kind of teaching, but it seems to not happen that a popular person like that comes to the top. Even a Carl Sagan type person with mass popularity to much of what Sagan shared in his books and speeches would be a good direction.
Is there anything we can do about it?
Refuse to use any software that bows to this bullshit.
Keep using software that doesn’t bow. Let them struggle to enforce any encryption ban. Safety in numbers.
Aye. The logical conclusion to this if left unchecked is restriction all the way down to the OS level. Don’t let them take this first step. If they do, the others will follow.
Or even worse, locked bootloaders and a crack down on jailbreaking.
I think Mental Outlaw did a video on this. He said we should use foss forks of projects or something.
When it isn’t the USA it’s their daddy Britain, ffs.
Privilege breeds idiocy
@igalmarino @privacy it won’t erode encryption worldwide - any more than China did. They’ll just pull out of the UK
In a selfish way… I’d like for the UK to do this and for it to go horribly horribly wrong for them. Maybe that would finally get the US reps to get their heads out of their butts so l don’t have to keep signing petitions and writing essays about why weakening encryption is a horrible idea.
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UK hermit kingdom speedrun, especially with the rumors of Scotland getting independence.
especially with the rumors of Scotland getting independence.
Yeah, that’s not how it works.
Scottish Indy movement has been put back by 10+ years after the political and possibly illegal financial fuckups of the main indy party SNP.
They still have control over most of Scotland, but their political power in Westminster is still fairly small, this might change next election though
Or we could all just vote for people that aren’t corrupt… or at least, yet!
If you don’t know who isn’t corrupt, vote for independents that understand technology. I know it’ll never happen so things will continue to go downhill but gees, what do governments have to do to get people to wake up? 🤬
Hell, i’ll be happy if people just stopped believing ‘for the sack of the children’ crap and realise its all about controlling the population! 🙄🤦♂️
Yea voting is great, but when was the last time the UK had a prime minister that anyone voted for?
We’ve had four unelected PMs in seven years. (Although TBF two of them did then won elections.)
The answer to your question is Boris Johnson, this time last year.
we could all just vote for people that aren’t corrupt
Audiences who flock to liars and deceivers seems to be trending in bad direction. Business leaders, politicians. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed as mass psychology tactics in 2014 may be very difficult to undo.
corrupt… or at least, yet!
Things like term limits seemed to help stop some of the problems of people corrupting once they got into positions of power. But now it seems crowds of more and more people are choosing pre-corrupted, cheering on corruption.
xmpp + omemo => good luck
Worldwide? No they aren’t. This is clickbait.
Sure, the title sounds like clickbait, but the point is: if a big enough player passes these laws, then the other countries may follow.
If this, then that. Ok.
yeah, it doesn’t destroy anything on the worldwide scale.
but it weakens.erosion is a rather perfect term for it
If they force messengers to implement backdoors into the protocol, I doubt they will limit it to UK users. Also, conversations with UK users won’t be private anymore even if the other party is from another country.
Client-side scanning might not be enforced for other accounts but when the infrastructure is there other governments will want to use it, too.
I wonder if it will be analogous to the situation in China. Is an iMessage conversation safe if one party is based in China and their data is stored in data centers there?
That definitely won’t happen. Full E2EE apps like Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp aren’t going to risk the worldwide backlash that would come with implementing backdoor access. The UK market isn’t that big and definitely not worth it, they’d pull out of the UK entirely first.
I hope they will. My guess is that a nonprofit like Signal will pull out. They have nothing to gain and a reputation to lose. The others will probably comply by implementing some form of client-side scanning.
I get the importance, but the global implications are being slightly overstated. It may be the thin end of the wedge in terms that it may lead other governments to follow suit. But all that will happen in the short term is that many IM clients will withdraw from the UK. Apple will probably just disable iMessage in the UK.
