This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON, Sept 19 (Reuters) - Britain’s long-awaited Online Safety Bill setting tougher standards for social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok has been agreed by parliament and will soon become law, the government said on Tuesday.
“Today, this government is taking an enormous step forward in our mission to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online,” she said.
Once the bill receives royal assent and becomes law, social media platforms will be expected to remove illegal content quickly or prevent it from appearing in the first place.
They will also be expected to prevent children from accessing harmful and age-inappropriate content like pornography by enforcing age limits and age-checking measures.
Instead it will require companies to take action to stop child abuse on their platforms and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages, it has said.
Earlier this month, junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground, saying in parliament’s upper chamber that Ofcom would only require them to scan content where “technically feasible”.
The original article contains 334 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
" Safety Bill " the fucking irony of it Tories making sure we’re the biggest clown show in the world. Well time to shutdown all those https end points and spool up jhonlewi5.co.uk to my offshore account.
“If companies do not comply, media regulator Ofcom will be able to issue fines of up to 18 million pounds ($22.3 million) or 10% of their annual global turnover.” Yet thier mates can quite happly steal tax money under PPE contracts and pump literal shit into our waterways.
Not even the United States is as determined to become a third-wonld shithole as the UK is.
I don’t get it - where did all these idiots come from in the western developed worlds? It’s like half have forgotten history, and are hell bent on sending us into this fascist dystopia where we’ve forgotten that freedom comes with a price. Nobody likes the darker side of the internet, but punishing regular users and businesses isn’t the answer. Everyone loves to pick on the USA, and we deserve it, but it’s happening seemingly everywhere.
Because these people are always there, always waiting. We got lazy about stomping them down.
Where there is money to be made, and influence to be pedaled, Capitalism will find the person to do it for them. If you are doing it because you are evil you are a conservative, if you are doing it because you think you are actually helping the children, you are a liberal. But the outcomes are the same either way.
republicans: “hold my beer”
The common thing here is conservatism. It has no borders and thrives on hatred, which is fundamentally human. It will alway exist as an evil. It just varies on how much power they have and is under slightly different names, but they have a common thread of beliefs that always come back. No country or person is immune to this as morally superior they think they are.
“Today, this government is taking an enormous step forward in our mission to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online,” she said.
Somebody tell her that “online” in the UK and anywhere else in the world is the same “online”.
Not really. Different websites will treat you differently depending on what country you’re accessing them from.
Ah if Internet was only websites, life would be easier.
It is! That’s what the w in www stands for.
Also a totally real fact: putting the “s” at the end of https:// is what makes it secure and it works on other things as well. Eating a brownie is unsecure and dangerous, but brownies has better security and should be consumed frequently.
Here’s some more examples of other everyday items that you can easily secure:- Oreo❎ Oreos☑️
- Sock❎ Socks☑️
- Fart❎ Farts☑️
- Douche Canoe❎ Douche Canoes☑️
Items that can’t be secured without modification:
- Potato❎ Potatoes☑️❔
- Hamburger Patty❎ Hamburger Patties☑️❔
- Fish❎ Fishes☑️❔
- Serial Killer With a Knife❎ Serial Killer With Some Knives☑️❔
Please note that for every rule, there is an exception. Take Deer for example. Deer can’t be secured. Fuck Deer, the lazy unencrypted bastards…
Haha yes also incredibly that they had to point out this sentence “Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.”
Very astonishing how there are some fundamental lacks of understanding from politicians advertising this. Or all on purpose
I’m not surprised at all
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
That’s not a given. Imagine messaging is like you trying to pass a note to a classmate in school. End-to-end encryption is like using a cypher based on your friend’s social security number, crumpling up the note, and then shoving the note up Tommy’s ass for them to deliver it to your buddy. Pretty standard note-passing stuff.
Adding the ability for the government to scan your messages is like being that kid who can’t write without mouthing or whispering what you’re writing. Then the teacher says “got it! Don’t worry, I definitely definitely won’t discuss this in the beak room with the other teachers!” And then gives you a big reassuring wink and a smile while you shove the note up Tommy’s ass.
See how everyone gets to have fun in the second scenario? The best part is knowing that no teacher ever has ever done anything bad. The end.
Why must you shove things up my ass? Please stop. I am in pain.
Add more RAM.
Oh, wait…
Sounds like a skill issue
I have no idea what your point was but I’m still laughing.
Earlier this month, junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground, saying in parliament’s upper chamber that Ofcom would only require them to scan content where “technically feasible”.
Big if true.
It depends how they interpret “technically feasible”. It’s technically feasible to force everyone to compromise their encryption.
Cant you just make a keyboard app that encrypts it for the recipient while you type it? Will they even ban that?
No they won’t. The bill is against social media companies, not your own encryption measures. Where the line exactly falls between hand-coding your own cypher; using good old PGP; using an app to encrypt but sending via a separate service; using an e2ee messaging app+service; being on a community/group-focused e2ee service; normal unencrypted-on-server social media… Going by the Reuters article (I haven’t read the actual bill) it seems mostly aimed at main social media platforms, with a to-be-explored relationship with private messages.
There are logistical problems with that. Such as how you plan to get the key out to recipients.
When someone wants to start a conversation they send their public key unencrypted (no need for it to be encrypted) and then you send your public key It will be one more message but the keyboard could have some sort of “profiles” for every persons public key, that you could select (This is just an idea, I have no coding experience)
Okay, but how do you then make sure that key isn’t intercepted? Anyone who has the key can read your messages
They are talking about asymmetric encryption which has a keypair, private key (kept secret only by the owner) and a public key that is used by everyone that would send them a message. You can’t decrypt the message with the public key when it is encrypted using the public key, you must use the private key to decrypt it.
Ah, I missed the public key part.
That is true, you could do that
Yeah, they’re a bit cart ahead of horse on that one.
Like this one https://github.com/amnesica/KryptEY?
Yes, like that, thanks for it. was thinking about something that captures the screen and uses OCR to take the encrypted text and then decrypts it. But that would be complicated and would need to be adapted for every app
So did Signal and others actually leave the UK market or did they fold like a wet paper napkin like we all knew they would?
By the looks of it e2ee isn’t actually banned, and if e.g. Signal says “we can’t technically scan people’s messages” then they’re given a pass… maybe. The Reuters article reads like the UK gvmt are going to be going after more Facebook-like media first, rather than encrypted private messages.
I’d love to know that as well. So if you guys have any news let’s have it
Is there anything I should be doing to protect myself from this bill if I live outside UK?
Yes, don’t move to Slough
This is general life advice too
David Brent reads ‘Slough’ by Sir John Betjeman
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LQOJoGx3QyQ&pp=ygUWc2xvdWdoIHBvZW0gdGhlIG9mZmljZQ%3D%3D
Well, they already left the EU, now they want to leave the internet, too.
Well all you can say is bye bye and good luck
Will this lead to companies ditching E2EE?
Unlikely; more likely it will lead to UK politicians finding out that, like Russia, the UK isn’t as big a deal internationally as they assume it is at home.
To take a recent example, Microsoft considered just completely leaving the UK gaming console market if it fully blocked the buyout of blizzard activision, as it already won elsewhere and had good trial against the FTC in the U.S.
Big corporations threaten shit all the time and then they do a complete 180 two weeks later. Take any “threat” from a corporation with 5 metric tons of salt. They’ll all whatever PR statement they think will generate the most shot term buzz.
This is openly misleading. This sucks, sure, but it doesn’t ban e2ee as the title suggests.
and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages, it has said
Right there in the article, my guy.
If you can scan encrypted messages then you’ve no longer got e2ee
The title here said E2EE is made impossible, I was simply saying that is untrue. Clarity matters. It says in the article they removed the bit about banning encryption or requiring back doors to it before it passed.
The rest sucks, as I acknowledged, and they want to make it easier to scan devices that would include messages that have been decrypted upon arrival. There’s already spyware they does exactly that. However, that doesn’t make it so that E2EE is impossible.
1 line below, you can read
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible. Earlier this month, junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground, saying in parliament’s upper chamber that Ofcom would only require them to scan content where “technically feasible”. Donelan said in response to questions about Parkinson’s statement that further work to develop the technology was needed but government-funded research had shown it was possible.
In practice, I doubt this will have any consequence on encryption, as the title of this post suggests.
Backdoors make it “technically feasible” to scan “e2ee”. See, it’s all a matter of perspective.
Fucking doublespeak (not you). If you can scan it then it isn’t e2ee. Words mean things. E2ee means that the two parties are the only two who can read the message. If there is a way to do any analysis on the message at all then it isn’t e2ee.
While I largely agree with you, technically it is still E2EE even if the encryption is very poor (e.g. hey look I shifted every character by one along the ASCII table).
Poor encryption could then be broken by a party in the middle.All of that said this is a bit irrelevant, if the encryption is so poor the provider can break it at will, so can bad actors. We don’t use broken (bad) encryption for a reason.
Companies also advertise e2ee while they generate and store the encryption keys on their server. So, it is encrypted all the way, but still easy enough to decrypt when needed. Very technically feasible and still strong against third parties.
But they’re not mandating such backdoors it seems.
Removed by mod
The thumbnail for this article really bothers me. They just copy pasted the same string of 1’s and 0’s throughout the entire screen and colored it lime green on a black background for that Matrix effect.
I thought it was apropos… just as fake as the encryption solution now enshrined in law in the UK.
Very 1984 of them
Literally facial recognition cameras at every single stop light in UK.
Literally not. Unless you think the UK doesn’t exist outside of London.
I wonder where the book was written and set, i wonder
Kinda makes you wonder
Very 1984 and also very 1894
I like your PROBLEM light.
It’s on! It’s off! It’s on! It’s of! It’s on! It’s off!
Sigh, that’s called blinking!
We made it safe by making it so nobody can be safe. What are you people mot understanding?!
/s
Are VPNs in the UK getting banned? If e2ee is getting banned for “online safety,” many apps are at risk, but doesn’t that mean that you could just install the apps via a VPN?
Encryption isn’t banned. The government could just ask service providers to decrypt content at any time, allegedly so that it can be scanned for child abuse. This is impossible with e2ee, so such services may become impossible to operate in the UK.
