The government is suggesting that it might ban some Apple security updates. Under the latest plans, tech companies would need to notify the British government before rolling out a security fix but might be refused permission if it blocks a vulnerability that’s being exploited by security services.
The uk has a serious surveillance state cultural problem.
And holy fuck is this dumb.
That’s what Tories in government gets you
In this case I don’t think it would matter. Labour are pretty authorial in some areas too
What about lib dems, green, etc? Those aren’t the only 2 parties
Totally. We’ve had a few decades now of successive governments that have taken increasingly centralising attitudes towards privacy and civil liberties - essentially going back to the 1980s.
But the one bright spot in there was the 2010-15 Coalition, who abolished Labour’s biometric ID scheme (people forget now, but the Brown government had passed legislation that meant that, if they’d won the 2010 election, then we would all have needed to register for these), deleted innocent people’s DNA records from the police DNA database, halved the maximum length of time the police could detain people without charging them with any crime (from 28 to 14 days - after Labour has earlier tried to increase it to 90), etc. The Coalition was the one truly liberalising government of my lifetime and that’s entirely a consequence of the Lib Dems’ role in driving its agenda.
I agree I vote snp myself.
Just to expand a wee bit
Lib dem who sold out their vote voters for the illusion of power.
The greens don’t stand here (the Scottish greens are a separate party from the one in eng/wales) the etc tend not to stand here with the possible exception of ukip and fringe people that are some how more insane
Independence issues notwithstanding, the SNP seem to have a pretty authoritarian streak of their own, especially under Yousef. Their attitude to free speech is quite lacking.
You ate absolutely correct in that regard.
They get my vote for a couple reasons.
They are the least bad option outside of what I used to do and vote for an independent.
Some of their policies that have been implemented have directly benefited me and mine. Annoyingly with policies that Labour should be pushing.
They are never going to be in government at the UK level with labour’s policy of rather having a tory government than work with them.
They are a means to an end without being as bigoted as the lot that split off with Alex for the most part.
I find yousef very bland but I would say if the other nutter got the job I’d ho back to independents
Labour isn’t the only other party in the uk
With FPTP, it might as well be.
No shit it’s almost like I said that in another coment probably over an hour ago responding to someone else making the same comment.
But the reality of the situation is qe at best have a 2.5 party system with lib dem ensuring the tories get in when Labour can’t quite get an outright majority.
Labour at least have at least one MP not clueless:
Yep. Unfortunately I have no doubt that Labour would also implement something like this too, they didn’t have a good track record for civil liberties when they were in power.
There’s a reason why 1984 took place in Britain, they have a massive cultural issue.
It took place in Britain because it was written by a British author for British audiences. It was written at a time when totalitarianism (both fascist and socialist) was a major threat in the world outside Britain.
IngSoc wasn’t meant to suggest that Britain was somehow uniquely vulnerable to totalitarianism. It was meant to be a warning to Britons of how the totalitarianism that we could see dominating continental Europe and Russia at the time could also hypothetically develop here - IngSoc was meant to be a sort of ‘totalitarianism with British characteristics’.
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It’s like they watched V for Vendetta and thought “awesome, but let’s prevent people like that masked
dudechap”.In principle it’s dumb, but we’ve also seen big tech companies push updates that are not security related under that guise.
It doesn’t sound like this is regarding non-security related updates though.This seems very strictly towards blocking actual security updates.
This sounds like a clandestine way to force cooperation of backdoors, otherwise asking for permission to patch your own software is bonkers …
It’s not even clandestine. They’re openly admitting they’re using the vulnerabilities as a way to spy.
Agreed, I meant rather than asking for a back door or making it law, they could make it really difficult for the software vendor that the vendor actually volunteers a back door so they can be freed of the burden of asking permission for a patch and explaining what that patch does and what files it modifies etc…
I realize I really have no right to say this as an American surrounded by fucking Republicans, but y’all have a batshit crazy government over there
At least the politicians over here pretend they’re not illegally spying on everyone. I swear man, governments read 1984 and instead of being appalled, they said “oh, I want that!”.
My stupid fucking government everybody.
As opposed to the EU legislating tech companies, the UK is so. much. worse.
This is probably one of the reasons Tories pushed for Brexit
To be fair I think they were quite split on the issue, I think the back benchers were more pro Brexit but the more prominent Tories were remainers.
The EU are trying to backdoor E2E encryption too. Ipersonallyy think the EU is great but don’t be so sure that everything they do is so benign.
If I suffer financial loss due to a patched, but blocked by the government, vulnerability can I sue the government?
Governance of the internet is not something individual nations should be able to do. It’s international and their restrictions would the. Be applied to companies who don’t operate in their country and eventually may conflict with laws in other countries forcing people to choose between countries they don’t care about wrapping people and companies who are just trying to provide a service into political wars. It’s just not good for anyone. Let NATO do it or only limit your own country’s companies/datacenters.
Signal already said that they’re willing to leave the UK if the UK goes ahead with their E2EE backdoor law. I can see more companies doing the same if the government keeps insisting that every foreign company complies with their bullshit.
Not taking away form your point htere, but one country forcing its regulations on other countries’ internet users is not really a new thing, the US does it all the time and a lot of countries are somehow okay with it.
The US is where the internet began and has a lot of nukes so it’s ok.
But in all seriousness the US needs to stop too. they will still have a lot of power as they control so many major global internet companies. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, etc are all massive across the globe, potentially all in the top 5 biggest companies in the world (haven’t done my research on this front). And the US is and should absolutely be allowed to govern its companies, it’s just that that spills over to the internet since they control so much of it. All of their explicit internet management laws etc need to go though.
No, I didn’t mean the implicit soft power stuff, I mean the explicit overreaches such as when Kim Dotcom (who might be a dumbass, but still) got arrested for crimes he allegedly committed in the US while not being a US citizen, hosting his site in New Zealand and living in New Zealand, where the offenses he’s committed are not criminally punishable.
The thing is, with modern web technologies, this really ISN’T something the U.K. can actually do. There is nothing preventing me from connecting through Tor or a VPN and hitting a web endpoint that offers encrypted messaging. The whole thing is SO dumb that it’s hard to believe politicians are actually dumb enough to think they can outlaw E2E
What does the british think of this?
Why are they(thr elected politicians) ruining their country?
Most people here probably don’t care, or take the stance of “I’ve got nothing to hide”.
Because they’re rich and want to get richer
There’s no way most people are rich, and if they are, then something’s going right at least.
Most of my fellow countrymen are too thick to understand anything about this and couldn’t care less.
It’s an island of neanderthals and I hope I can get highly skilled enough to leave it.
same. where you thinking to bail out to? my top 2 picks are netherlands and norway atm. got any ideas?
You realise the EU is trying to pull the exact same shit with E2E encryoed chat right?
i got searching, and i understand your concern, there’s a lot of chatter in EU countries about doing this too
however - it looks like it’s all chatter. i managed to find the specific proposal from the EU that people seem worried about, but it hasn’t got out of council yet. seeing major countries like italy and germany coming out against an E2EE ban, means that i have confidence this proposal wont get past a qualified majority vote. (germany + italy = 31% eu pop, qmv pop threshold of 35% to reject)
on the other hand, we have the UK, which has already demonstrated that, when presented with a seriously stupid choice, it has the capacity to actually take that bad choice. the Online Safety Bill is real, it’s in UK parliament now, will likely pass, and it will start hurting us by the end of this year
it’s this second reason really, that the UK has the capacity to pull the trigger on dumb issues, that has put me on the path to leaving. it’s not so much “EU good”, rather it’s “UK bad”. this encryption thing is icing on the cake for me, but it’s not the root cause.
Agree, I just worry that these ideas keep coming back again and again. No government or entity can be trusted and we need to keep an eye on them haha.
Obviously the UK is much more concerning at this specific point in time.
As with everything else done by our current incumbents, it’s fucking moronic.
I think the Tory government are a shower of self serving cunts. That’s business as usual though.
I’ve honestly no idea why they keep getting voted in again and again. Baffles me even more why folk are voting Tory here in Scotland. “Fuck you, I’ve got mine” seems to be a big factor.
I’ve honestly no idea why they keep getting voted in again and again.
The voting system (FPTP) is undemocratic
They’ve been trying this shit for years and it always gets defeated. Problem is they keep pushing the issue every few years.
It’s fucking dumb. They’ve been making similar noises about having back doors in the encryption in WhatsApp too.
The politicians probably genuinely do think that is good for the population as they’ll think it’s for our safety or some bullshit, but know fuck all about technology or civil liberties to understand the consequences.
As for the population, I doubt most would even be aware of this or even care if they do.
We are used to everything just getting worse.
Same thing everyone else thinks. What a bunch of dipshits. Same reason your elected politicians are doing it. Either they think it’s for the greater good or they’re corrupt.
Wonder if Apple are running the numbers and seeing whether pulling out the UK altogether wouldn’t lose them much money.
I believe Apple’s flat out told them that if they push these restrictions they’ll disable iMessage and other services for UK residents.
Given that the vast majority of people use whatsapp this isn’t really a big threat.
Well, China and Russia do the same.
China (and the US for that matter) don’t need to stop security updates because they can just directly “ask” companies to put in backdoors.
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