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| ▲ | GaryBluto 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I wouldn't give up. When it gets to the level of mandatory government rootkits there are bound to be underground organisations circumventing this and/or trading old hardware. I'd even go as far to say that if things become this authoritarian, certain "direct" acts would be justified in preventing or fighting it. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | An illegitimate underground scene running on life support, using old unlocked computers which are a finite resource they will eventually run out of. Utterly depressing... We used to be free... If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. Billion dollar fabs are single points of failure and they will be exploited, subverted, regulated and controlled. The only possible solution is to democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. We must be able to make free computer hardware at home just like we can make free computer software at home. Anything short of this and it's over. | | |
| ▲ | pjc50 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | In practice, import them from China like we used to with region unlockable DVD players. > democratize and decentralize semiconductor manufacturing to the point anyone can do it. Physics makes this completely unrealistic. | |
| ▲ | Gud 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When did the UK use to be free? Seems to me this is a cultural issue that runs deep. You are his majesty’s loyal subject, like it or not, and more importantly, you are a subject of his bureaucracy. The US works in a similar fashion, except the deep state has slightly different excuses to exist. I work extensively in the UK(past 5 years, I’ve worked there maybe two years in total). Nothing gets done without endless approval from people with cushy office jobs in the bureaucracy. It’s in the bureaucracy’s interest to extend its power, and who is going to stop them? CSAM is an excellent excuse to control the digital world. I wonder what took them this long. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not british. "We" refers to computer users worldwide. The UK is just the beginning, this will spread to other countries. My country loves to copy whatever Europe is doing. | | |
| ▲ | Gud 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Europe is not a homogenous thing. There are wast cultural differences (although the Americanisation has been in full swing for a long time). |
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| ▲ | qcnguy 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The obvious answer (that HN hates) is that the right can stop them. The only party in the UK against the Online Safety Act is Reform. The only party that wants to shrink the state is Reform. Every other party is supportive of this kind of thing. This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing. This isn't a problem of one country's specific culture. Australia and Canada are doing the exact same thing, the Democrats would absolutely do the same thing if the libertarian Constitution weren't in their way. The rest of the EU is doing the same thing. It's a left vs right thing. In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > This makes sense because every other party in the UK is left wing. Definitionally not. Left and right are always relative to the local average, "left wing" and "right wing" are nothing more than a seating arrangement turned into a badge. The Conservatives are, famously, right wing by British standards. If you think the Tories are lefties, you're so far to the right you can't even see the UK's Overton Window from where you are. The votes I seen on parliament.uk about the Online Safety Bill show the split being usually the Tories vs. everyone else: https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons?SearchText=Online+... > In fact everywhere is going the same way except the USA, because the USA has a constitution that encodes libertarian values (a minority position) in such a way that it requires a supermajority to overturn. I have bad news for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M | | |
| ▲ | cbeach a day ago | parent [-] | | It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation. The OP was correct. The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service. Only Reform have made a stand against the Online Safety Act and other creeping dystopian measures. I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029. The next General Election cannot come soon enough. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w a day ago | parent [-] | | > It’s mostly the Tories that were responsible for the drafting of the Online Safety Bill, and let’s not forget the downright evil Investigatory Powers Act. Another Tory creation. Read enough of my old comments, and you'll know that the Investigatory Powers Act is a big part of why I left the UK. The other half was how I expected Brexit would be used as an excuse to leave things like the European Court of Human Rights and thereby make it harder to fight such things. Pleasant surprise that the UK is still bound to the human rights stuff, especially given Theresa May's opinion of such things and prior reputation the Home Office. > The Tories were left wing and authoritarian. No, they're right wing and authoritarian. Or at least, there's enough of an authoritarian streak in it to be a problem. > They raised taxes, and failed to shrink the UK’s bloated state and civil service. You didn't notice all the austerity policies, I take it? Their approach to the civil service was basically a government self-lobotomy, reducing state capacity to be competent. Not that size of government is hugely important to the left-right split in the UK; that seems to be a much more American dividing line, from what I see in the American stories that make it across. > I don’t know if I fully trust Reform to deliver, but by a country mile, they’re a safer choice than Conservatives, Labour or Lib Dems in 2029. The other things Reform (or, given that it's owned by the leader, he) have called for include, to quote the Wikipedia page: leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 and replacing it with a new law; disapplying the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention (ECAT); creating detention powers without Hardial Singh constraints;
To be against these things is not the indication of someone who dislikes authoritarianism.The only thing I see him calling for that I actually agree with is basically an example of "left wing" by UK standards: the nationalisation of the steel plant in Scunthorpe. Not that I expect him to succeed. His experience of politics combines is much the same as Jeremy Corbyn: to be the one who opposes everything, not the one who has to take responsibility. Look how bad Corbyn was for Labour, that's my median for how bad Farage would be for the UK. |
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| ▲ | Gud 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Your obvious solution is wrong, though. The right wing is just as eager to implement a police state. The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population. Works well in Switzerland. | | |
| ▲ | ben_w 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The correct answer is decentralisation of power, and put the government back in the hands of the people. That means frequent voting(multiple times a year), by an educated population. Sufficiently well educated and also willing to read carefully and without partisan (or other) fear of favour. How many of us read the terms and conditions before clicking "I agree"? How many support a side only because it's their own side? I don't know how to fix this. The "obvious" solutions (seen in various government systems over the world and the centuries) all have demonstrable problems. | | |
| ▲ | Gud 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes. Like I said, this works well in Switzerland, where stupid decisions are at least made jointly, not by some career politicians. Makes it easier to slowly make changes. The key point is to keep things local - what works in Zürich doesn’t necessarily work in Appenzeller. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If this passes, the only strategic move available is to somehow develop the ability to make our own computer processors in our garages. How feasible is this really? I'd feel a lot better if it were possible to produce chips free from backdoors even if the resulting CPUs weren't even as fast as an old Pentium III, but my guess is that any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No idea how feasible this is. When it comes to electronics in general I'm pretty much beginner level. Here's an example that was posted here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46178789 Lithographically fabricated integrated circuit in a garage. Whatever this is, we need a lot more of it to stand a chance at resisting governments. > any effort to do this at scale will be quickly shutdown by the government The whole idea is to make this so easy and ubiquitous that they can't shut it down completely. They can shut down some but not all. I believe this is the only way a law like this can be resisted. Promote civil disobedience by making it easy. | |
| ▲ | digdugdirk 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's not. And any effort to do this at scale would be quickly shut down by physics and economics, not the government. Modern computing technology is a wildly complex supply chain, with extremely specialized manufacturing equipment and facilities. Billion dollar fabs are worth billions of dollars for a reason, and it's not for the real estate or the views. Trying to determine the best "diy chip" sounds like a fun project and an admirable goal, but if you actually wanted something useful I'd wager you'd be better off buying esp32's in bulk so you'd have all the spares you might need. | | |
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| ▲ | ianmcgowan 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sounds like the plot of "Big Brother" by Cory Doctorow | |
| ▲ | ThrowawayTestr 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Don't worry, they'll make it a crime to open devices that don't have the rootkit. | | |
| ▲ | GaryBluto 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I meant underground as in the Samizdat, not attempting to operate under the law. |
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| ▲ | agwp 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The absurd thing is that the amendment only covers smartphones and tablets - which means those who the bill aims to target can easily break the law by using a laptop, desktop, camera, smart TV etc. In short, the Pandora's Box of automated surveillance and security risk on any smartphone or tablet is opened, while a gigantic loophole for serious offenders is left open. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Computers are too powerful, too subversive for us citizens to have access to. Give citizens computers and they can copy at will, making a mockery out of things like copyright, they'd wipe out entire sectors of the economy if left unchecked. Give citizens computers and they will have cryptography which can defeat police, judges, governments, spies, militaries. They cannot tolerate it. They will eventually lock everything down. PCs were left out because everyone is on mobile these days, not because they are opposed to locking them down. They will close the loophole if it becomes an issue. Besides, with remote attestation they can just designate those devices as untrustworthy and ban them from everything. It's a politico-technological arms race. They make some law, we make technology that subverts it. Due to technology, they must continuously increase their own tyranny in order to enjoy the same level of control they had before. The end result is either an uncontrollable population or a totalitarian state. We're heading towards the latter. I was hoping the government's limits would be discovered along the way, some set of basic principles it'd refrain from violating in its quest for control, thereby reaching the fabled "the ideal amount of crime is non-zero" state. Turns out governments know no limits. | | |
| ▲ | bamboozled 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The other side of this coin is that, disgusting horrific pedophiles, terrorists and drug smugglers also have access to this stuff too. I'm not in support of this bill, I'm just saying whenever I read these arguments, it's almost like you're entirely discounting the challenge the very tech your praising incurs for law enforcement and society. For me the paradox is simple, one the one hand people want everything to be "open and transparent" including their computers, but those same people often want the ability to completely hide everything in cryptography. Which one is it? If you were for openness and transparency in it's entirety, why wouldn't you by default be against cryptography ? This paradox is where the rubber hits the road on legislation like this and likely why the average Joe Smith doesn't really care about the cause. Because realistically, it all sounds suspicious. To a law abiding citizen, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There is no paradox. The optimal amount of crime is non-zero. You must tolerate some crime in order to keep your humanity and dignity. Orwellian dystopias with omniscient surveillance can reduce crime to zero but you wouldn't want to live in one. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra... This is just something people need to accept no matter how angry they get about it. If they don't, they will be manipulated through their fears into trading away their freedom for a false sense of security. | |
| ▲ | beeflet 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I support transparency for institutions and privacy for individuals. Not the other way around. | | |
| ▲ | inference-god 2 days ago | parent [-] | | What about when a group of individuals forms an institution that's self serving and harmful to other citizens, and they're able to do a lot of this under the guise of "privacy"? | | |
| ▲ | beeflet 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | All operations as a public institution should be transparent. We fund them through taxes, we have a right to know what is going on. I don't know what you are getting at with "self serving and harmful to other citizens"? Like a private institution? a company? Of course private companies are self-serving. All of them could be described as perpetrating some subjective and nebulous "harm". There are already transparency requirements for businesses, and they are subject to warrants. To the extent that they are public institutions (monopolies, publicity-traded companies), there are increasing demands for transparency and vice-versa. Individuals have a right to privacy and protection from undue search, regardless of scare quotes employed, unless they are living on a prison island such britan. | | |
| ▲ | bamboozled 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The institutions you're talking about are under attack by online propaganda and smear campaigns by countries that want to see them taken down. Open online speech is important but it's also been hijacked to do a lot of harm. Personally I think we're cooked but I can understand why some people are trying to take action and destroy online anonymity. Ideally we'd just live in a world where people can run their own mail server and people would leave it a lone, but we don't. Maintaining the status quo means western democracy is fucked. There is no anti-dote to propaganda and lies being spread through social media. Maybe getting rid of online anonymity would help but I understand why people don't want a digital ID either. | | |
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| ▲ | pca006132 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If what they did is never revealed to someone else, what is the problem here? It is not like we have no way to hide stuff without cryptography, and people are not advocating for police to search every apartment once in a while to look for illegal stuff. |
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| ▲ | pca006132 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Authorities cannot tap into your brain, cannot tap into physical face-to-face conversations, and people can plan out crimes using these means. It is not like there is no way to hide stuff before the born of modern cryptography. And who want everything to be open and transparent? I am not aware of anyone who wants this. |
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| ▲ | Duwensatzaj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You already gave up your arms. Why are you surprised they’re coming for anything else they want? | | |
| ▲ | pixxel 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The US was tested for tyranny during Covid, election interference, and BLM burning down cities. You sat at home, utterly impotent. You're gonna stop VPN bans? Please. | | |
| ▲ | qcnguy 2 days ago | parent [-] | | This post shouldn't have been dead. It's right. There's an American meme that sidearms create freedom. When has that actually been true in practice in the past 100 years? For HNers who just automatically flag anything right wing and want left wing examples instead, right now leftists are outraged by deportations. And a tiny number have tried to assassinate ICE agents using sniper rifles, indeed. But it's making no difference, not even when they're protected by corrupt local prosecutors and juries. They have even accidentally shot migrants instead of ICE. Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Whether it's COVID or ICE, there's been no meaningful armed resistance. The reason the US seems to be less totalitarian is purely because the constitution and the culture that supports it stops Congress from passing the same kind of restrictive speech laws the rest of the world has. If it weren't for the Constitution the Democrats would have already passed lots of speech laws under Obama and Biden, then used them to harass and illegalize the Republicans to maintain a majority. For example they'd have banned Trump's campaign on the basis that it encouraged "hate" against immigrants, and then they'd have forced big tech to do what Europe is now trying already, to strip all anonymity from the internet so they can harass random individual voters who disagree with government policy online, Germany style. What protects America isn't guns, it's respect for the voting thresholds in the constitution and a right-leaning SCOTUS. | | |
| ▲ | matheusmoreira 2 days ago | parent [-] | | In the end, effectiveness is irrelevant. Basic human dignity requires that you always have the option to resist. > Where's the evidence that an armed population can resist tyranny, however you define it? Drug gangs in latin america. In my country, drug traffickers have become so organized they have established control over a quarter of Brazil's continental territory. They have armies, laws, tribunals, even taxes. They have essentially pulled off a stealthy unannounced secession. It's theorized that they control politicians, judges. All thanks to the fact they were willing to arm themselves and die in order to achieve their own ends. The rest of the brazilians constantly prove unwilling to do either, and as a result they are dominated by the people with guns. Police state, military dictatorship, drug gangs, makes no difference. |
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| ▲ | orangecat 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Give it time. The natural end state is that all computing devices available to the general public are dumb framebuffers that are only capable of displaying a UI running in the cloud. No more privacy for anything; even if the cloud OS lets you run Linux in a VM, everything you do will be visible and constantly monitored for suspicious activity. |
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| ▲ | socalgal2 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The answer is obvious, every engineer should leave the UK as a protest. Yea, I know that's never going to happen. Still, I can dream | | | |
| ▲ | brandensilva 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They just won't stop. We needed to have laws in place to prevent digital IDs being continuously pushed on people because the powers that be want total control of all information. It's happening in the US now under the guise of AI data centers for consumers but I suspect it will be instead used to surveillance everyone who doesn't agree with the fascist government. This is Larry Ellison's public vision but Musk and Thiel also play a role. | |
| ▲ | bamboozled 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn't a hacker someone who can subvert this stuff? Is it someone just just gives up because their iPhone has CSAM installed? |
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