Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
Do they want to lose access to… everything on the internet? Because this is how you lose access to everything.
Haha yes definitely something to follow. I'm looking forward to lists of companies that left UK because of this (as announced) and lists of companies that stay and thus prove that their end-to-end encryption isn't a real one
I keep forgetting that the UK left the European Union. When I originally read that title I was like how the fuck could that happen? Oh Brexit. That is going to set them back decades.
Don't you worry, EU votes on killing end-to-end encryption in private messaging next week.
Digital Brexit
Not even the United States is as determined to become a third-wonld shithole as the UK is.
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.
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.
" 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.
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
Okay so how would this be enforced? Highly unlikely any messaging service that offers E2E is going to release a version without it just to satisfy the UK government. So this will basically be easily thwarted by using a VPN?
The bill was changed so it no longer bans e2e encryption, it's now the responsibility of tech companies to provide protection "where technically feasible" which basically means fuck all
where technically feasible
It gives something that can be argued about later, right? After other parts of the bill have begun to be implemented. So, further down the road if gvmt considers e.g. WhatsApp or Signal as having CSAM and not taking appropriate steps, then they can put pressure and WA/Signal can argue back about feasibility and merit.
That's the lovely bit about putting a bill out there. The enforcement and feasibility is not the problem of the politicians anymore.
We made it safe by making it so nobody can be safe. What are you people mot understanding?!
/s
There must be exceptions for banks. Otherwise, brb gonna steal some easy £
Uh it’s not impossible, just illegal.
If governments the world over were as obsessed with solving things like the climate crisis and cost of living as they are with undermining encryption techs, we'd be living in a utopia by now.
They tried this here in Australia, luckily for us it got voted down. Iirc there's been other countries trying the same BS
Very 1984 of them
Literally facial recognition cameras at every single stop light in UK.
"we want to break https, SSL, TLS, SSH..."
Man, operating servers in the UK is going to be FUN!
First of all, these protocols don't allow for backdoors so good luck with that. Are they going to ditch all those and run their own private internet or something?
Seriously, what they want isn't even possible, and even if it were, it won't. fix. anything.
Real criminals will just continue using these real encryption protocols that you cannot break, so this just ends with the state being able to spy on the common people.
And nobody will abuse this, if 50.000 pounds disappears from yout bank about then fuck you, shut up, you never had that...
Politicians are stupid.
First of all, these protocols don't allow for backdoors
Doesn't matter, tbh. The entire problem of giving governments (or whoever) a backdoor is that there's no way to make it only available to the "good guys".
If Apple and co did put in backdoors to satisfy the Brits, the first thing every other government on earth would do is legislate itself access to the backdoor.
With or without a proper backdoor, this law breaks the tech.
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.
So, looking at this article, there is no mention that they made end-to-end encryption illegal.
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".
So they would basically be scanning information WITHOUT end-to-end encryption
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.
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.
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!
Is there anything I should be doing to protect myself from this bill if I live outside UK?
And something as bad (if not worse) is coming to the EU too https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
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.