Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead Information wants to be free. This usefully ambiguous battle cry has been the mischievous slogan of hackers since early networking thinker Stuart Brand coined it in the early 1980s. Intended as part of a discussion about the inherent contradictions of intellectual property, it has bestowed irony in many other places since. …
Our government has never been known to limit it's stupidity. I wouldn't put it past them to decide computers needed regular 'M.O.Ts' where they were tested for only having {cough} healthy {cough} software. Oh, and the ISPs would be dumped with the task of ensuring that.
And this "MOT" will be conducted by someone who declares your computer too insecure to connect to the internet, because your Linux system failed the "windows security centre has no warnings" check.
So you install windows, and it still fails because there is an exclamation mark saying you don't have OneDrive backup enabled...
"Sir, please install the latest Windows Updates and enable Onedrive backups."
Certainly, can you talk me through the process of how I do that without an internet connection please
... Sorry I was forgetting we're not talking to a human yet, we're still on the script, my bad
I had a similar problem, woke up one day no internet connection, checked the landline - no phone either, fired up my mobile as a hotspot, no reported errors on my line, auto testing showed no problem
It took 3 days, including promising t̵o̵ ̵s̵a̵c̵r̵i̵f̵i̵c̵e̵ ̵m̵y̵ ̵f̵i̵r̵s̵t̵b̵o̵r̵n̵ pay for an engineers time if the problem was inside the house, to get an engineer to visit
He was very nice but obviously had a brief that he needed to find a fault in the house
The problem was an engineer for a company that shared the green box had unplugged our line at the box for some reason
Eventually, after about half an hour of checking wires & taking connectors apart, he gave up trying to find the fault at my end & wandered down to the green box & voila within 2 minutes we had a phone & internet again
And he still gave me side eye like I'd somehow done this
The one that made me lose my rag was when explaining that when it rained the phone line got so noisy it was unusable. I was told there was no fault on the line. I pointed out that it wasn't raining. They suggested that i call back when it is raining. I asked how could I call back when it was unusable. After a few rounds of this sort of thing I was asked to try a different phone and in the master socket, at which point I said (somewhat emphatically) It doesn't rain inside my house.
I actually knew what the fault was, and when I eventually got a an engineer to turn up. I pointed at the overhead cable and he immediately agreed to replace it. It was one of the ancient figure of 8 ones. The plastic had become brittle and cracked so when it got wet there was a nice path between the wires.
I had no fault but some engineers were working on a green street cabinet outside, knocked on the door demanding access to run a test, no appointment or even pre-warning. I refused, they said they might have to cut off our broadband and phone if we were the source of the problem so I suggested they to fuck off and do it.
They were openreach and I am on VirginMedia cable.
I had a similar issue with several phonelines into the building I lived in. After several phonecalls to BT, eventually culminating in employing the "Old Pals Act" with the local area manager (who I'd been at school with), I got a couple of engineers to turn up at the building, to investigate the fault. It was obviously due to the cabling that ran just over 700m to the local echange. After replacing the microphone in my telephone and those of my neighbours, they decided that there really was an external fault on the cable....
Three hours later, the "External" crew arrived, and - after they'd gone back to the exchange to collect a ladder - they decided to follow the cables (which were overhead). One of them climbed up the front of the building on the ladder and opened the Krone connection box beneath the eaves. The splat of green mossy crud that hit him in the face could be heard from quite a distance! A replacement Krone Box was installed - including the sealing rubber ring this time - and all was well for the remaining two years that I lived there.....!
Of course having external 'engineers' such as Kelly communications being allowed access to Openreach street boxes is most of the outside premises faults we seem to find around here.
Yes when the street boxes are installed they are a thing of beauty. But give it a week or two, and you find so many extra wires, wires disconnected and other cr*p that you just can't fight the script system that wastes so much time.
What the independent fibre companies boxes will end up like, I shudder to think.
It's amazing how entirely useless Customer "service" of ISPs can be. To get my fiber internet installed had been a slog as somehow they'd apparently connected the wrong fiber or recorded the number incorrectly so I wasn't getting signal, since it wasn't actually plugged in at the distribution center.
Came home to not having internet (glass-fiber connection) one friday afternoon. Checked everything on my end and waited a bit (short interruptions did happen at the time since they were still cabling up the neighbourhood) but after an hour still no dice. Called customer service, went through the whole rigmarole of turning the modem off, turning the interface box off, powering things back on, doing it in the reverse order, leaving things off for a bit, etc, etc. They tell me they're not seeing an error on my line so it must be fine and it's probably a dud modem (when it was nearly brand new and had been working a-ok for 3 weeks at that point). They'd forward it to the service department and someone would call me to make an appointment. Took a full week for them to get back to me to MAKE the appointment, which then followed the week after that (so 1,5 week in at this point). Dude comes in with a new modem and interface box, plugs them in, concludes the angry red "no signal" LED is still on, says he'll forward it to the next level and bids me adieu... Week after that I get the call to make the appointment and 2 days after they come in to measure with a TDR. From my house they measure no signal and a broken connecting about a mile down the line (when it should read about 2). From the data distribution center they measured the full 2 miles. Curious... They did some searching and testing and trying and concluded something must be wrong in a junction box buried somewhere in between. 2 hours later everything is fixed and I came to find out (because the nice gentleman came back to tell me) that it turns out the originally noted fiber number when things were installed SHOULD have been correct but someone had screwed up in the junction box. Then that fateful Friday someone had been working in that junction box, noticed the wrong connections and helpfully "corrected" them. Leaving the fiber coming from my end dead in the junction box and the connection from the distri center going to an unused connection somewhere underground.
The response I got from the ISP for having been without working internet for 4 weeks in total?? Crickets. Called them about it, registered a complained and received a grand total of: bubkis. Unfortunately the only other alternative is copper cable based internet with a different ISP that I had fled for even less customer friendly customer "service".
"The response I got from the ISP for having been without working internet for 4 weeks in total?? Crickets."
I have to wonder if one might be better off disconnecting service for a couple of days and then ordering new service. I've found they'll have somebody out to install new service often times faster than they will to dispatch somebody to trace a problem. The end result is the same since they can't start billing until there is a working service, but they can continue billing if it's 'only' an interruption.
Had the same problem with my (half of a US duopoly) before. Their support is so bad that the customer fora even suggest getting transferred to cancellations just to get support where the agent isn't so tightly nailed to a script that replacing them with an Eliza bot would be an improvement. Also had one refuse to proceed until I replaced a cable from the desktop machine to the router, even though I could ping the gateway just fine, and the problem was between the router and the outside world (ie, the only issue it could have been on my end would be misconfiguration of that thing).
"Also had one refuse to proceed until I replaced a cable from the desktop machine to the router,"
Sometimes you have to put the phone down, brew a cuppa and then get back to Bob (from India) to tell him you've done it, rebooted and still have the same issue.
We try to teach kids to be truthful, but we find later in life that it can be easier to get things done if one lies. Resumés for example. Craft one to exactly match the job description and finally own up when you get to interview with the department manager you would work under. If they won't have you, they have no respect for creative problem solving.
"I wouldn't put it past them to decide computers needed regular 'M.O.Ts' where they were tested for only having {cough} healthy {cough} software."
Had the government of the day been paying attention, there would surely have been some call to control / regulate access to PCs and what you could do with them. The idea that anyone can use a computer to do / read / create just about anything is totally at odds with the politician's desire to control behaviour and conceal information.
Fortunately, they were just as incompetent and short sighted as their successors, who are now left to dig themselves ever deeper into the hole as they try to retrofit some semblance of control on an ecosystem that thrives on chaotic creativity.
Mind you, if upstairs want to pay me to pop round to people's houses and roll a government approved, sanitised and backdoored OS image onto every PC in the house, I'm sure they know where to find me :)
"The idea that anyone can use a computer to do / read / create just about anything is totally at odds with the politician's desire to control behaviour and conceal information."
I don't think they've reconciled themselves to the private car being able to take people anywhere yet. Anything as newfangled as a PC stands no chance.
I don't think they've reconciled themselves to the private car being able to take people anywhere yet.
They definitely have. Over the last 20 years or so, various police forces and iterations of the home office have proposed fitting cars with kill switches of one sort or another, to stop them whenever they want, and there is a constant drumbeat to fit them with little black boxes to monitor how often and how far they're driven. We've already got several local governments proposing "15 minute cities" with severe restrictions on car travel within and between arbitrary city zones and any number of anti-car measures being proposed at every level of government.
All in the name of "public safety", of course. The myriad revenue generation opportunities that come along with these proposals are purely a coincidence.
"All in the name of "public safety", of course."
And "save the planet" - the system they seem to favour where a tradesman or a care worker in their elderly vehicle, which is all they can afford, is priced off the road. Meanwhile those making the rules (and trumpeting their green credentials) drive around in their massive electric SUV (battery made using material potentially mined in slave-like conditions), and fly around the world when is suits them. The best bit is where they and a load of other "global leaders" all fly on their private / charter planes to a junket somewhere to talk about saving the planet...
elderly vehicle, which is all they can afford, is priced off the road
Assuming you are referring to various low-emission zones, particularly the expanded London ULEZ, you do realise that vehicles exempt from the charges can be quite old too? In the case of the London ULEZ your petrol car would have to be more than 18 years old to have to pay the charge (and some older vehicles are actually compliant), and your Diesel car 8 years or older.
See this guide from TfL.
There are also exemptions for certain other types of vehicle. Some HGVs only have to meet LEZ rules (Euro 3), rather than ULEZ (Euro 4) and some vehicles used by disabled people can apply for a "grace period" exemption until 2027. "Historic" cars registered as such - those who do not have to pay road tax - are permanently exempt from the ULEZ. It's all set out here.
According to TfL, 90% of vehicles driving in the expanded ULEZ in November 2022 were already compliant, and remember this is well before the zone came into being so there was no need for them to be compliant. TfL reckons this is up from 85% a year earlier and 75% 18 months before that.
This is the document behind the 2020 figures.
The RAC reckons 700,000 cars and 150,000 other vehicles will be affected.
Given the ancient vehicles that are exempt, I'm not entirely sure how much difference this will make to London's air quality but perhaps it's a case of "every little helps"?
"According to TFL" - and that's where your argument falls down.
90% are already compliant? Maybe according to TfL's tiny little study in one tiny area. But in reality there are a lot of perfectly usable 9 year old diesels trundling around inside the M25.
But even ignoring that, how can taxing 10% of traffic clean the air so drastically? The sums just don't add up.
The reality as I see it is that it's a simply scheme to get people out of their cars and onto public transport. That's all. If a reduction in air pollution was the true aim then we would have taken (e.g.) France's approach and simply banned older vehicles when pollution was high. But of course that doesn't raise any revenue - it's cost me less than £4 for my French sticker, including postage.
Blame Khan or Blame Boris. It's a fund raising exercise for TfL. Always has been, and always will be.
We all love a good whine, especially with an added hint of paranoia, but then we have to come up with our sainted alternative plan that actually achieves the putative goals of decreaed air pollution, lowered energy use, and generally helping give our descendants a worthwile and liveable life.
Then wait for the inevitable whiners abd naysayers to tell us how we're oppressing them, and how pointless our plan is.
Alternatively, there's always: 'Fuck you, I'll do what the hell I want, and stuff the consequences!'
None of the ULEZ schemes are anything to do with cleaner air! How can paying a fee clean the air? Saddiq Khan believes it can, while driving around in his convoy of bullet-proof diesel-powered SUVs. The hypocrisy of loons like Khan is breathtaking. The thing that is truly amazing is that these council clowns actually believe this arrant nonsense, whilst destroying the economy of the city they're supposed to be running for our benefit.
"None of the ULEZ schemes are anything to do with cleaner air! How can paying a fee clean the air?"
I don't know if you're genuine or not but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Let me take you through it, nice and simple - here's the situation:
You have a car that pollutes. You don't like paying the fine for that, do you? => If you switch to a cleaner car, you won't have to pay the fine!
This creates an incentive for you to ditch the polluting car and get a cleaner one, if you're able to. If you can't, or you don't want to, then yes there's the fine which allows you to continue using the vehicle, but it also means you're probably going to keep to necessary journeys with it because getting a fine isn't something you like.
Yes, you're right, *paying* the fine doesn't clean the air: the impact is in changing people's behaviour to avoid paying it. There is clearly a debate to be had about whether there should be, and how much, support for helping people to make the switch to cleaner cars but if your argument is that fines don't motivate people...that's clearly untrue and you only need to glance at a mirror to see it.
My car is 8 years old. TFL say it's not compliant.
What they actually claim is "most" diesel cars aged 7 years old or less, with some older vehicles being acceptable.
Anyone who bought that car new was told that they should buy a Euro5 diesel as it was cleaner and greener than the equivalent petrol.
There are plenty of companies offering extended warranties out to 12 years, indicating that a 10 year old car is probably still in good condition.
Not surprising of course, as the ULEZ was Boris Johnson's idea.
Coupled with the Tory refusal to part-fund a scrappage scheme, it's no wonder people are annoyed.
Not so much defective as flawed by design.
Remember back when diesel was the flavour of the month and everyone was supposed to buy a diesel? Well, the taxi and minicab firms listened to this, and bought diesels. They then found that the diesel filters in the exhausts were prone to getting blocked if driven a lot in cities, in stop-start traffic. The taxi drivers then hit on a cunning solution: remove the DPFs entirely and rely on the fact that a well-serviced and thoroughly warmed-up diesel engine will pass the smoke test with flying colours even without a DPF.
These are the "defective" vehicles that are being targeted.
In truth, it is perfectly possible to make a DPF which can cope with being run like a taxi; it is more complex and more expensive and needs a supply of electrical power to heat it up to burn off the soot, but you can have a clean, green diesel taxi; you can even have one that's clean, green and doesn't chuck out nitrous oxides provided you set up the engine management system to use enough adblue solution to actually solve the problem, as opposed to just enough to pass the tests.
The only problem is that diesels that pass the emissions tests in real life cost a good deal more than ones which passed the old, rigged, EU standards.
"be more than 18 years old"
18 years old nowadays really isn't all that old! In the UK it seems over 20% of vehicles are more than 13 years old (Source https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-age-cars-great-britain ) and that number has been continually rising over the last decade. My 2001 Volvo is still doing perfectly fine at 22 years old and it's far from the only vehicle of that vintage still around.
PS: Did El Reg disable < a > tags? I can't post a proper hyperlink anymore it seems, I get a "the post contains some invalid HTML" error
"15 minute cities" with severe restrictions on car travel
Please take your conspiracy theories elsewhere.
The idea of urban environments where it is possible to access all necessary facilities within a 15 minute walk, cycle or public transport ride is actually rather utopian (as in "sounds nice, worth aiming for but is probably impractical in some cases and will take a lot of effort to realise") and is not at all new. In fact, think about it, before the car pretty much all towns and cities were 15 minute cities. The car allowed the development of sterile corporate-controlled out of town shopping areas and killed off local hardware stores, bakers, butchers, greengrocers etc. etc. meaning that in some places - particularly in the US - if you don't have a car you are cut off from society.
Perhaps that's the real conspiracy? Motor manufacturers mandating six-lane highways without pedestrian facilities? That ridiculous scene in Toy Story 2 where the fat bloke gets in his car to cross the road?
Many cities in Europe (even many in the UK) are already approaching being 15 minute cities, possibly because that's how they were up until post-war town planning. It doesn't mean you can't have a car and can't go anywhere you want in it; it means that you possibly don't have to, and if you do run a car you will probably use it less - out of choice - which means it has a lower impact on the environment.
This is the UK - they won't be bothered about making sure that the infrastruture in in place first. OK, so it is for many in London and some other large cities (part of them, anyway), but live in some new housing estate on the edge of a large city, with no buses? Tough. Live in a small town with only a handful of shops and buses twice a day to the nearest large town? Tough. Live in a village with no public transport at all? Tough.
As usual, they seem to be going for a 'one size fits all' approach so far, which of course in practice means "one size fits the affluent parts of London, and fuck everyone else"...
one size fits the affluent parts of London (etc.)
But you are not arguing against 15 minute cities there - you are arguing against badly-planned housing developments, and privatised bus companies refusing to run non-profitable routes. I completely agree. The whole 15MC idea is a planning idea, it's an aspiration, not an implementation! They are not going to stop you travelling more than 15 minutes from your house in the middle of nowhereville, starting next month, but if a locality takes up the idea of a 15 minute city, they might encourage a corner shop to open nearby, they might (yeah, fat chance) re-route a bus or open a new route so that you can access it, they might install cycle lanes or better-lit walkways, segregated from cars and vans and lorries.
Two examples.
A huge new housing estate was built the other side of town from me. Yes, there were busses, but they were on an odd kind of in-and-out route because said housing estate only had two or three entrances and they were all on the same "side" (a later - almost as large development nearby has only one entrance!). An older building between the estate and the town was being redeveloped; most of its grounds went for new housing while the characterful building itself was turned into a community facility. The promise was that as the new new houses would "infill" between the old new houses and the town, it would now be possible to run a through bus service on a circular route which would be much more convenient.
Did they do it? Of course not! The road that could have joined the two developments instead became a couple of extra houses.
I live near a major cycle route. In theory I could get to my nearest town shops by bike in about 10 minutes, and to another town about 10 minutes beyond that if I use the cycle route. There is also a village with a smaller selection of shops a 15 minute cycle ride in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, the nearest "access point" for the cycle route is about a mile away from my house along a busy - and distinctly bike-unfriendly - road. I've done it, but every time the children want to do it I cringe and they often end up walking their bikes along the pavement for at least some of the way. If some solution to this problem could be found (for example, it might be possible to create a closer access point) then we would do much more of our shopping by bike, effectively turning my little hamlet into a "15 minute village". Instead I end up taking the car and coming back with two or three bags of shopping, which does seem a bit of a waste.
M.
"But you are not arguing against 15 minute cities there - you are arguing against badly-planned housing developments, and privatised bus companies refusing to run non-profitable routes. I completely agree. The whole 15MC idea is a planning idea, it's an aspiration, not an implementation! They are not going to stop you travelling more than 15 minutes from your house in the middle of nowhereville, starting next month, but if a locality takes up the idea of a 15 minute city, they might encourage a corner shop to open nearby, they might (yeah, fat chance) re-route a bus or open a new route so that you can access it, they might install cycle lanes or better-lit walkways, segregated from cars and vans and lorries."
But the point is that they are doing nothing substantial towards this. Absolutely fuck-all. If they were serious about it they'd need to approach if from the side of making it increasingly practical. So what do we have? Buses outside of a handful of large cities are normally crap at best, or more often non-existent. Railways have taken a nose-dive - trains being withdrawn with nothing to replace them, on busy routes. Some trains (crosscountry) in a dire state with no plans to refurbish them. Transpennine Express seemingly incapable of running anything approaching a reliable service, and so on. Then there's the increasing centralisation of retail in large shopping centres, the lack of employment in rural areas and smaller towns (and larger towns too in some cases). The idea of a '15-minute' city might appeal to the metropolitan types of Kensington, Islington and parts of Oxford, but it's a non-starter for most of the country.
Could it be because when they suggest the idea, 4 million gammon scream lies about it? So then there's no policy to do it? And so, it doesn't get done? Funny that.
If it is a policy that it has to at least be considered, then something might get done. If it isn't, then it definitely won't!
Have none of you got experience with even basic check lists?
The main prerequisites - improved public transport, employment less concentrated in large cities, etc, would have wide societal benefits irrespective of the '15 minute cities' idea, and are really not particularly controversial. So why do they do little or nothing about them? Public transport is getting steadily worse, and despite the periodic claims of economic 'rebalancing' (e.g. Osborne's mythical 'Northern Powerhouse'), nothing much happens beyond some empty talk before it fizzles out.
I'm really not sure what '4 million gammon scream lies about it' even means - perhaps you could elaborate?
A for-profit privatised public transport system will never offer the frequent and inexpensive service it needs to be to offer a sufficiently attractive alternative to the car. Companies operating solely for the benefit of their shareholders seldom offer a product or service of value, or an environment sufficient staff will consider a long term prospect further worsening the end user experience.
The companies operating the transport systems don't appear to have any effective penalty for offering a bad service either.
The 'Gammon' line is likely a reference to right wing & right leaning media stoking conspiracies like the ones around 15 Minute Cities & greener - usually less convenient/cheap - solutions to the problems we have created, then getting amplified by bots & commenters in mangled or more extreme snippets paraphrasing inaccurate criticisms into outright lies.
The UK passenger rail system has never been privatised (despite the many claims) - it's been outsourced via various methods: initially as time-limited franchises, which sometimes got extended, and with fairly tight stipulations as to minimum service levels. Currently it's all management contracts with a fixed percentage payment, and micro-managed to the last paperclip by the Department for Transport. The government has always contributed a substantial amount to the running costs. Splitting it up into loads of different companies was probably the absolute worst possible way to go about outsourcing it, of course. There are penalties for various things, but assorted loopholes have been used to minimise getting hammered. The trains themselves are mostly owned by leasing companies and on long-term contracts, and there are a handful of private 'open access' operators, but they only account for a handful of the total number of trains run.
Compare with buses, which outside London are, for the most part, fully privatised and deregulated. That's why the service is generally utter crap outside of the cities, as if it's not financially viable to run the buses at all, then they won't do. Likewise if buses after 6pm won't cover their costs, they generally won't run.
Decent public transport always requires substantial government financial input, especially in areas with a low population density. But we can see just from the terminology of decades how it's been viewed: spending on railways and buses is 'subsidy' whereas spending on roads is 'investment'!
That's a village, not a city.
Define?
In the UK at least, all "cities" are in fact lots of "villages" or "towns" which have gradually been joined up by infill development. In London for example you might live in Hackney. Hackney is a village (or town) in its own right, and is highly likely to have pretty much all the things you need within a 15 minute walk or cycle journey. Next along is Stratford or Islington. You wouldn't travel from Hackney to Stratford to go to a corner shop when you have two or three closer ones, but the residents of Stratford are equally happy with those near them (and are lucky to have a huge shopping centre too, which you can get to very easily by public transport or by car if you must).
M.
You wouldn't travel from Hackney to Stratford
That depends. Stratford being poorer may not have good bakeries, simply because there is no market big enough to justify having them, so if you want to eat proper breakfast, you may consider going to adjacent borough to buy bread and this is just one example.
Slightly better(?) definitions:
Hamlet - as you say, however there is at least one hamlet I know of that has a church... I guess it depended on how rich/generous the local land owner was.
Village - anything between a hamlet and a town with a market charter;
Town - anything with a market charter;
City - used to be anything with a Cathedral (not a university as some people seem to believe), but not any more. These days you get to be a city by being put on a list of cities (Guildford has a Cathedral but the Govt refuse to make it a city; it is still just a town).
Most villages (and hill-walking takes me to a few) will struggle to field a pub and a shop that's open more than three days a week. On the other hand, having lived in various towns and cities in the UK (and visited many more across Europe), I'm fairly confident most (with the possible weird exception of Milton Keynes, and there's a reason) will have you in easy walking distance of a medium sized grocery shop, an off-licence, a newsagents, a pharmacy, and quite possibly a GP and primary school.
California on the other hand... On a conference visit to the US years ago I made the mistake of thinking it might be possible to walk around and see at least a part of the city. Turns out no, people like driving for half an hour to get anywhere. Bringing us of course back to Milton Keynes and a place that was designed on the basis you should drive everywhere.
Why anyone would fall for a moment for the claim that a low density settlement like a village would have all necessary facilities within 15 minutes walk, and simultaneously that it's preposterous that a high density settlement could is beyond me.
I grew up in Milton Keynes and moved away last year to the countryside in Wales... For ease of access around the city it was great. Whilst being built around car use... it had good public transport (far too expensive though) and the best cycle network outside of places like the Netherlands. hundreds of miles of 'redways' designed to take anyone to anywhere in the entire city without the need to drive. They're not quite there with the 15 min city thing... close as you can divide the city up like a pizza and there are local hubs around the old small towns incorporated into the city such as Stony, Wolverton, Newport, Bletchley and so forth) where you can get every basic you need to live on, and for those larger or more infrequent trips/items you might need... larger hubs are all within a few miles... All of those smaller towns, still have some kind of high street and Wolverton is currently undergoing regeneration as they've knocked down the old Agora centre (where I spent my childhood) and are returning the place to how it used to be 45yrs ago.
I miss the ease of access to some things (more choice in shops than here) and I don't have a local ikea or costco. But we can get all of our groceries, DIY supplies, visit loads of cafes, artisan bakeries, butchers locally in the small (about 18k pop) town... I'm 6 miles from the nearest beach and 20 miles from mountains.
That's because you can't wrap your head around the concept of everything NOT being in one central location at some out of town shopping mall.
A city like I used to live in was about 120sq miles and had in the region of 250k people.
It was divided up in sections if you want to call them that..., imagine it like a pizza... say... 6 slices circled around the city with a central hub that has loads of shopping, entertainment but well little in the way of supermarkets.
Then on each slice... you got mini hubs, with supermarkets, other shops, post offices, chemists, food outlets, cafes and so forth... parks all over the city... and the best cycle route system in the UK. Literally hundreds of miles of cycle paths that keep you away from the roads, pass through woodlands, parks, around lakes. You can get anywhere in the city by foot/bike with ease (depending on your ability of course).
I bought an e-bike last year a few months before I moved to a more rural location (where it's an even better kind of small town with everything you need within 15 mins) and cycled 350 miles in 8 weeks... My car use since the pandemic has dropped to around 4000 miles a year.
Just because they way you understand things are right now... doesn't mean it HAS to be that way, or that it ALWAYS was that way... everything used to be like that and we're realising it needs to be again.
You can still have you 3 tonne polluting dick extension of a pick up truck if you want... but you don't 'NEED' to live like that... you CHOOSE to.
No, this is not either/or. It is not public transport or active travel at the expense of personal transport, it is creating that as a viable alternative for those who can, and arguably should be using it more.
More people on public transport or walking, cycling or rollerblading etc. should leave the roads less busy for those who need to use personal motorised transport - there are plenty of people who's jobs are dependent on a car or van too. As far as I'm aware no one has suggested banning *everyone* from having a car. That's just hyperbole from the usual corners.
To be fair, I live in (what is becoming*) a reasonable sized town. The older bit in which I live is very much a 15-minute town, taking in two supermarkets, what passes for a bus-station, the railway station (two trains an hour in each direction), plus a couple banks (for now), Post Office, library, couple of convenience stores, pubs, cafés etc. However, the nearest (State) schools we could get the children into was a) sink estate huge and just 15 minutes away on foot, or b) proper sized six miles away (10 minutes by car). Sounds heat, until you realise all those new developments are significantly more than 15 minutes from any of the things I've just mentioned. A car is an absolute necessity for people living in them.
*Lots of new develop ments going up around the edges.
That's the entire point of stopping these crap developments being done like this!
Housing is worth a fortune, so they'll wedge in another house instead of a road, leave no parking because that could be another house, no shops or playground because, yes, more houses! Because each shitty flat is another £250k profit, each sorry house £500k+.
They become sink estates.
"15 minutes" as a bit of fundamental guidance for the planning team to push back against the millionaire developers is a *good thing*.
I once lived in a German city, population 100,000 where every imaginable facility was within a comfortable 15 minute cycle ride. The only days of the year that I didn't cycle were when the roads were sheet ice in places. The city didn't salt to protect the trees. On those days the only vehicles moving were emergency vehicles and buses. In this city there were no restrictions on car travel, parking outside your apartment was easy and free. But everyone had the freedom of the extensive cycle path network that was entirely and safely independent of the road system. The cycling was so safe that I taught an adult friend to cycle when he visited from the UK. When he saw how safe the cycling was, he demanded to learn.
So I've had the privilege to live in a 15 minute city and see how it works. It has nothing whatsoever to do with traffic cameras, 'street calming', laws or fines as in the useless rent-seeking Oxford or Canterbury examples. It's about deep infrastructure and civil design.
"That ridiculous scene in Toy Story 2 where the fat bloke gets in his car to cross the road?"
I've been there in real life when I visited my company's Florida office. 3-lane-each-way stroad* with the nearest zebra crossing half a km away. A cluster of office buildings on one side, and a shopping center + bunch of eateries on the other, with no way to go from one to the other except by car, or walking 1 km in order to reach a spot 50m away.
"Many cities in Europe (even many in the UK) are already approaching being 15 minute cities"
I lived and work a few years in Amsterdam (almost as big a city as you can get in Europe), and another few in Geneva (which is the size of most European small cities/large towns). In Amsterdam I wouldn't say it's a 15-min city, but you could get from the centre to the outskirts in all directions in about 15-20 min cycle or tram. From one outlying area to another outlying area on the other side of the city, a metro ride would take around 30-35 min. I didn't have a car, and it would have been useless to move around the city since traffic light timings favour trams/public transport and bicycles, then pedestrians, and cars last. There's zero time advantage to taking a car vs cycling or public transport.
In Geneva, 15-20 minutes bike ride can get you pretty much everywhere, and going anywhere by car involved spending 15 min driving around in circles looking for parking or paying extortionate fees for a garage. Electric bicycles help a lot.
Although I've worked in London (always using public transport to get around), I'm not familiar with driving there... maybe there really are a huge proportion of Londoners who regularly carry around more stuff than can be packed in a backpack, and really need the flexibility given by a car to the extent that they don't care about waiting in traffic and finding parking??? Or maybe many of the drivers could actually benefit from just taking the tube or getting an e-bike??
*look it up
I'm incredibly torn between upvoting and downvoting so I've decided not to vote at all.
I would regard the 15 minute city as dystopian rather than utopian. AT 72 I'm old enough to remember the days before cars everywhere. Some things were better, lsome things were not. You needed a train to go on holiday and when you got to your destination that was it. NO car to drive around and see the sights. Small, expensive, shops with a limited range.
I'm positive no politician would even contemplate a return to the days of you can't move outside of your lord's fief. Aren't you?
>>I'm positive no politician would even contemplate a return to the days of you can't move outside of your lord's fief. Aren't you?
Oh I don't know... a cynical person might view the move to 100% EV as a way to stop the proles moving around - after all if they can't afford the capital outlay for an EV they will have to stay put won't they?
That sounds lovely in theory, and I never owned a car when I lived in London, not in Manchester until i had kids. Now the kids are older I still would not have a car if I lived in a city.
However, in practice, if you reduce car use without improving public transport, the end result is that the 15 minute city becomes a limitation rather than a utopia. Do it, but do it right - which means spending lots of money.
Saddiq Khan (taqiya spoken here) has done more damage to London than anyone else has ever managed (including the Luftwaffe!). He has turned what was once a thriving modern city into a morass of slowly moving vehicles, uncontrolled crime, collapsing businesses and white flight, leading to falling property prices and so many societal ills that the place is largely uninhabitable.
Every major company with a London Head Office is moving elsewhere - often out of the country altogether. It has become apparent that Khan's aim is to destroy London - presumably for some bizarre "religious" reason - and he's mostly succeeded.
London as well as any city founded in the days of the HRE if not before were of necessity 15 minute cities. If a shop, the proprietor lived adjacent to his shop. Max Weber showed the size of a city was limited by the travel time needed to leave and return with the days supply of wood fuel. When coal became available that limitation was removed but shop keepers were limited by license or charter requirements. Then along came that massive urban renewal era known as WW2.
The thought that the human condition could be improved by separating the filth. the coarseness, and the odors of the factory or mill from the home now had an opportunity to be tested. Well the test just opened the door to a new set of misery.. You just cannot get something for nothing!
I agreed with you up until you blew the dog whistle with "severe restrictions on car travel" - even in places that have "clean air zones" and in London the "ULEZ", the vast majority of cars are unregulated. HGVs, diesel cars made before 2014 (EURO NCAP 6) and petrol cars made before 2006 (EURO NCAP 4) are the vehicles that are chargeable. Most of the cars I see on the road are more recent than that.
From the perspective of having cities where everything you need is within a 15 minute's walk, so you don't have to get into your car to get a pint of milk or loaf of bread (at non-exorbitant prices), I fail to see what problem people have with this. Nobody is stopping anyone from travelling to somewhere that is 16 minutes away, and if you listen to those who think this is what "15-minute cities" are about, they'll also probably be likely to tell you that birds aren't real, COVID is a hoax, and something something freeman-on-the-land. I'd advise against paying attention to such people, as the quality of "information" they are imparting is questionable.
15 minute cities is not about having all your needed services within 15 minutes walk or cycle. Most people in most cities already have this.
15 minute cities is about forcing people to use those services within 15 minutes walk or cycle, by restricting/charging people for travelling across area boundaries in their vehicles.
For people who live in one area and work, shop, study or anything else on a regular basis in another area this leads to either an increase in their cost of living (paying the fines) or a decrease in their quality of life (using different transport, longer journeys, or different services). The proposal in Oxford effectively (https://www.oxford.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/8144/bgp_14_15_minute_cities.pdf) effectively creates ghettos around the city.
I look at it from my personal perspective and I think, if I drive my kids to school and their school is on my way to work, I'm saving time and effort, if I have to walk them there and back before I can set off; I probably need to leave the house earlier, and get to work later, which means leaving work later, which means more childcare and less time for me to enjoy with my kids/family. With shopping, sure I could walk/cycle to the grocery store and walk/cycle back and I used to do that when I was young and single; but now I have a family of 5, we do a weekly shop in a car, there is way too much stuff to carry on a bike or one of those trundle trolleys.
[citation required]
All of this is what some people are saying 15-minute cities are about. That doesn't mean that's actually what the term means. The whole situation in Oxford has nothing to do with "15-minute cities" and is entirely down to that City have a shitty council that hates car drivers.
Well, there is that too. None of this "15 minute cities are prisons" bullshit, though.
FWIW, you don't seem to be able to cross the road in the middle of Oxford without nearly getting hit by a bus, so I think the public transport there, at least in the bits where they don't want you driving cars, is certainly better than it is here in Bristol.
"The proposal in Oxford effectively (https://www.oxford.gov.uk/download/downloads/id/8144/bgp_14_15_minute_cities.pdf) effectively creates ghettos around the city."
So, because Oxford have got it wrong, or at least you say so, I don't live there, doesn't make it a world-wide lizard conspiracy to lock the annoying humans into segregated cages.
I remember about 20 years ago as a field engineer who occasionally had to do home visits (warranty repairs for a retailer), getting very confused driving around a housing estate because so many roads had been blocked off into dead ends that didn't show on my street map. Turns out there was a local problem with joy riders and boy racers. The people there, to this day, are still allowed out into the real world. They didn't get fenced in and fed through the bars. There's even shops and a health centre on the "inside" and buses that go in and out, just like the residents cars can do. There's not even any checkpoints on the access road, let alone armed guards. Or maybe that was just an early pilot scheme and there are CCTV/ANPR and Facial Recog cameras hidden in the bushes?
I'll just add, that I occasionally visit Oxford, and do so, by car. The last time I did was after they'd put in these supposedly terrible "anti-car" measures. I drove to, and parked at, the exact same spot I always do (Oxpens car park), with no difference (except you now seem to be able to pay more easily with a card at the payment machine). From there, it is a short walk to the centre of the city, so only the extremely lazy would have any complaint. I suspect if you have genuine reasons to need to drive a car right into the centre of Oxford, such as a disability, you'd still be able to do so.
For every Oxford, there is an LA, or a Milton Keynes. (Visited, the former once - never again, used to go to MK 3 times a year for work). Cars, cars, cars, cars everywhere. If you're a car loving owner great (or possibly not, because of all the traffic, cost of petrol, congestion). But no car (either too young, too disabled, too poor, too old, or ... ) really equals no life. No access to shopping, education, leisure or employment. Car is king and no other options are considered.
A 15 minute city would give options, not restrictions. Walk or bike? Go for it! Car, sure - but you don't NEED to car it.
(Think that needs to be pointed out more often, a 15 minute city gives options and freedoms, not restrictions)
where everything you need is within a 15 minute's walk
This is crude and patronising way of thinking. People are not the same and you can't reduce people to some sort of a mass that needs milk (any milk). That's how totalitarian regimes thought of people, as a dumb mass ripe to be exploited. Give them food, contain in a designated area and make sure they work. Rings a bell?
The inverse of a "15 minute city" is that you must drive to an out-of-town shopping centre to buy anything at all.
You are required to buy and run a car, and if you cannot drive or cannot afford to buy a car, you shall starve to death.
Does that help you understand?
Stop conspiracy theorising and look at the actual point.
The fact that you immediately swooped in on the "needing milk" aspect of what I wrote demonstrates that your reasoning is entirely specious. If you can't distinguish a random illustrative example from a core argument, you might as well return your pre-frontal cortex on the grounds of it not working as designed right now.
Far too much anecdotal stuff in this thread - ‘…most of the cars I see on the road..’ is not a useful statistic. Still waiting for somebody to back up the Mayor’s claims of 75% rising to 90%; or some quantification of the actual impact (in civil/human rights terms) in the ooor bastards in the remaining 10-25%. Meanwhile out here in the sticks I saw a bus once in a Saturday evening five years ago, nipping along sharpish with its internal lights out to avoid alerting potential passengers. There’s my statistic for you.
Nope, an anecdote is not a statistic, just as the plural of anecdote isn't evidence. However, maybe have a look for yourself; it's pretty easy to work out how old most vehicles are from the registration in most cases. For the ones where you can't, they're already paying a wanker tax for the personalised plate anyway. Actual statistics on the number of registered vehicles of each age on teh roads are probably available, and certainly known to the DVLA.
When my 20 year old car (it will be in a couple of months) is sitting there only being used a couple of times a week it is not producing pollution.
No point replacing with a newer car with all the build pollution, while I actually have a decent car, I just only use it when I want to.
So 100 to 200 miles a month at EU3.5 Diesel, is not that bad.
Funny thing is I find the newer than mine ones pre SCR cause a lot more coughing.
I work from home with one day a week in with lift from boss.
When I was commuting it was over 1 hour a day driving.
Only good thing about LC is not having to commute.
My nephew and niece have black boxes on their cars that continually log their speed. Apparently, it's to get cheaper insurance, and they're fine with that.
How long before location is also logged, and you suddenly can't get any insurance without it?
The danger isn't the careful driver driving 80 on a quiet, dry motorway, it's the idiot who drives 30 or even 20 through a crowded estate with cars parked either side, whilst kids play in the area.
Last time I looked, the only real reason to have a black box fitted was if you would otherwise not be able to get insurance. The discounts on offer for voluntarily fitting boxes seemed to be absolutely minimal. They don't just log your speed, they also log acceleration (in the proper sense) as an analogue of your driving style and hours of use. So they won't just calculate your premium on how many times you do 35 in a 30 zone or 80mph on the motorway (or 40mph for that matter - can be just as dangerous), but also on whether you are regularly driving at midnight, doing extra long journeys without a break and in particular how hard you use your right foot, especially if it seems you are often reacting suddenly to events in front of you, rather than anticipating them from a distance.
Disclosure - I do know someone who could only get insurance with a box, and after six months (IIRC) with the box that insurance company also withdrew the insurance because the data showed a very poor driving style. This person has recently moved to London for work and has decided they can manage without a car.
M.
For new drivers, especially young new drivers, it might only be a small/medium discount initially, but according to people who have done it, it can be a 50% discount in the 2nd year once they have a good years worth of data stored up and analysed. I've heard it can be even more than 50%, but that's only anecdotal and/or insurance marketing claims.
The downside, of course, is feature creep. More monitoring and location tacking, normalising it, and when a critical mass is reached, you either can't get insurance without one or it costs an arm and a leg no matter your driving history to not have one.
I don't know. Good point. We'd have to compare two new young drivers, one with and without a "blackbox" and see how their insurances costs compare after 5 or so years. Someone may have done that, but my Google-Fu isn't helping just now,
This link seems to indicate that over time, the benefits of having a blackbox reduce while the downsides continue, eg one or two "mistakes" could cost you for "years to come".
My niece and nephew haven't been denied insurance specifically, but they are both new drivers (aged 18 and 20), and have relatively expensive cars bought for them by their grandmother (on the other side).. No old bangers like in my day...
Maybe that's the reason?
I know we don't talk about up/down votes here, but I had to read your post again to try and work out why you were downvoted... Still can't see it.
They stopped that over here, by indirect means. A few high profile prosecutions and one jail sentence ( previous convictions) for the heinous crime of 'buying a car with cash' therefore not insured. Workaround was to swap the vehicle for a high value item like a PS5 or smart phone, having done the paperwork and put an approximate value on the change of ownership form, insurance application etc. Sales from a garage etc weren't affected as they usually give receipts even for trade ins.
That's why I wrote "denied insurance specifically", but I concede it was rather clumsy phrasing.
I don't remember the cost differences they mentioned in their cases, but you're right - that's how this will creep in to becoming effectively compulsory - and not to be conspiratorial about it, but I'm sure the government of the day will be "persuading" the insurance companies to do this - it will save them having to legislate.
Who said anything about crashing?
I don't tend to crash a number of times a day - if I did, then I guess that would also be a way to log everywhere I'd been on a database that would probably be hacked and leaked.
But anyway, if you actually bothered to read what I wrote in context of the thread, I was talking about location so that it could be tied in with speed limits -- the whole comment was about speed, and I even pointed out that speeding is bad, but inappropriate and arbitrary speed limits aren't the answer.
So, nothing to do with where I live, or where my car normally sleeps or my frigging address whatsoever.
Weird how you accuse me of being a conspiracy nutter when you're the one making up conspiracies to attack me on.
incidentally, I post on here with my real name. I've posted enough on these forums that it would be piss easy to google me and find my home address. If someone from here did that, it would be unexpected, because it would mean stalking through my posts, but it wouldn't really surprise me.
Now, don't get me wrong - aliases and nicknames are fine - but don't hide anonymously whilst accusing others of being paranoid.
Now, be a dear, and re-read the post and the thread. Your therapist will thank you for doing so.
The location data is definitely logged and analysed. I know a young driver who had a black box fitted, and enjoyed cheaper premiums. Then he got a girlfriend, and the insurance company noticed that he was no longer spending any time where he had declared his domicile, car registration and overnight parking. They didn't much like that and hiked the cost.
No, not a "British thing". Here's the BBC talking about them in 2017 and referencing a strong down tick in car accidents in Italy where they were already popular (600,000 of them).
Telematics.com state that almost every car insurer in "the UK and USA" offer "black box policies"
Viasat tells us that ALL EU built cars after July 2022 have "black boxes" as standard, although that is not for continuous monitoring. It's intended to notify of crashes and retain data only for the past minute or so of driving. Viasat also do insurance "black boxes" too, so I have no doubt a software change will be all that is needed to turn any of those legally mandated black boxes in to full on insurance driving monitors.
So, I can be fairly sure that both Spanish and Portuguese insurers already offer this "service" and even if not, all new cars across the EU have some form of "black box" already.
"We've already got several local governments proposing "15 minute cities" with severe restrictions on car travel within and between arbitrary city zones and any number of anti-car measures being proposed at every level of government."
You were doing so well up to that point. The so-called "15 minute cites" is simply going back to what we had in the past and in some places still have now. Schools, shops and health care such as GPs as dentists in the suburbs. Even now, if a large new housing estate is being planed, there is supposed to new infant/primary schools and shops, at the very lest builting into the plan. All that's "new" is the term "15 minutes". Sadly, in many case, those small parades of shops in housing estates have been allowed to deteriorate and/or be out competed by out of town shopping centres. And we all know the issues with GP surgeries and Dentists. At the rates they are paid, they can't manage as small operations and so consolodate into larger groups more widely spread out.
Another 15 minute city fantasy, writ anon, here on The Register, of all places!
Literally no-one has said anything about limiting driving between cities. It's literally made up by mad anti-everything people who for some reason hate the idea of having a hospital/school/shops/creche within 15 minutes of them, whether by foot or bus or train or tram.
Why?
These 'anti-everything people' either have a degree of paranoia about life that compels them to be suspicious of everyone else, especially those in 'authority'; and/or they are the arrogant self-absorbed types who cannot conceive of not being allowed to have their own way—the 'spoilt brats' of this world.
Either way, and plus the 'Faragists' who are always happy to jump on a bandwagon if it's going to make them money and influence, we have a lovely toxic swamp of negativity, paranoia, and selfishness. We probably all have a toe in that swamp at times, but sadly there are quite a few of us who have set up home there and have no wish to move on.
It's 15 minute neighbourhoods around here and, to be honest, it's a good approach: at it's most basic, the idea is that you should be able to access all essential day-to-day needs within a 15 minute walk (or cycle) of your home. It's not intended to be a restriction on the ability to travel; rather the need to ensure the necessary facilities are appropriately distributed. It will be harder to implement in some rural areas though, allowing for local car travel (not so much an issue rurally) it ensures most communities will not need to drive into their local towns and cities so often.
If properly implemented (which is unlikely, knowing the track record of current politicians with influence) it would probably allow an easing of the much disliked LEZs as the reduced need to travel would cut down on traffic. Of course, the government's pandering to the heavy investment in city centres, by supporting the call to limit WFH, probably undermines many of the potential gains.
Just my ¢2...
"We've already got several local governments proposing "15 minute cities" with severe restrictions on car travel "
No - just making it so that you don't *need* a car to do most things, since they're everything is within 15 minutes walk - you then don't need to implement "severe restrictions" at all, because the car will almost never be the most convenient way to do things.
Revenue Neutral sounds much better! This fee is just to cover the costs associated to this new public safety measure. Unspoken is that these costs include the new offices and furniture to house the staff, the additional cleaning and HR staff and most importantly the wage/benefit package of the new manager.
I don't think they've reconciled themselves to the private car being able to take people anywhere yet.
Most politicians are still trying to figure out an officially-mandated approval process for fire! Until that process is completed, the use of fire in any form is going to be banned.
Well, they've taken Sterling down 25% turbo-charging inflation, sent home all those foreign types (who staffed the NHS and pretty much everything else), and hammered our cross-border trade. Why not go for the Nobel in Stupidity and cut us off from the rest of the net 'to protect the children'.
The BBC have gone into overdrive, running multiple internet scare stories at the same time to support the government line: Internet too dangerous. Not D-Notice compatible. Let the government manually check everything before it goes live or turn it off.
I'm actually gathering address data and considering how I would revert to offering stock by post in paper catalogues. That's how little faith I have in the morons that run this country.
I'm also looking at emigration. I doubt I'm alone. If you have the skills, you can escape Chav Britannia, and leave it to rot in incompetence and hubris, banning something new every Monday. Sad really, as this was better than most places to live and work just a few years ago. Absolute toss now. Completely broken.
That is the obvious and most practicable pathway for dimwit political 'leaders' to follow, this at the behest of those who 'own' them (not electorates). It should work in the UK and many other places, but, ironically, not in the USA because the US Constitution would forbid it.
The nature/capabilities of hardware available to ordinary people (e.g. households) can be regulated; in particular, equipment would be close to dumb terminals because most functionality (including software and private data) can compulsorily be delegated to approved areas of 'cloud'. The only available encryption/privacy related software would be that offered in the 'cloud', and it would meet government determined 'child protection' standards i.e. easily be circumventable by 'approved authorities' (government departments, police, and all the way down to the local dog warden).
Versions of basic software (e.g. offering, via approved cloud services, facilities akin to those most people get peddled by Microsoft and Apple) would be designed as even more surveillance friendly than they are at present; many agencies, including HMRC and protectors of copyright, would revel in opportunities offered. Major vendors such as Apple and Microsoft would gladly jump on this bandwagon destined for monopolising and further monetising information streams.
As for the children? They could be considerably protected. This is not just from sexual predators, but also from exposure to mainstream pornography, from unsavoury software (e.g. games containing on-line purchases), from accessing on-line materials promulgating 'unhealthy' (e.g. anti-neoliberalism sentiments) or 'illegal' knowledge (e.g. the Russian viewpoint on geopolitical matters), from the sin of copyright infringement which tasted in childhood can lead to adult 'piracy', and so forth. Because mobile Android devices (telephony in general) link to the internet, restrictions pertaining to PCs and laptops easily carry forth to the entire digital domain. What's more, that which is good for children must be good for adults too.
Most of this could be applied equally to the commercial and educational sectors. However, approved bodies would have access to true encryption. Also, there are circumstances when work (e.g. in academia) requires use of equipment more versatile than Internet-connected dumb terminals; places where this is permitted should be obliged to hire government trained gauleiters to oversee conduct.
At present, the Internet is chaotic and harbours malicious and unsavoury activities. Moreover, the sheer interconnectedness, and speed of feedback, offered by social media threatens social stability: the voice of the ignorant crowd overwhelms reason. Can moderating influences be introduced which won't have the deadening effect upon discourse and creativity of what is outlined above?
The PCI test that card companies require if you have a credit card machine is like that. It's just a port scan carried out from the Internet but it costs £40/year and does not really do much of any use. I have a customer who regularly fails this every time they set their router back to factory settings. The default is the router has a remote login page which fails due to an old version of encryption. £40 for me every time I fix this. Every time I say get a new router and they never do.
"if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to worry about" is unfortuntely untrue, people with something to hide will automatically seek out strong encrytion methods.
The rest of us will put in the minumum effort we think necessary and usually (myself included) that's not enough and we should be worried.
Any tools a government spy agency had a decade ago are probably available on the free market or the black market for criminals to use.
We need to move to a world where it's easier to be secure than not, for the average user. To protect our bank accounts, our images (in a world of deep fakes) and identities.
Veilid sounds like a step in the right direction but it needs a push from above to require it in enough cases to make it easier to include than to leave out. Any data commissioners feeling inspired?
Well, yes and no. Since they were in power, they could (and did) legalise mechanised mass murder and genocide. Arguably, they broke a number of international conventions (such as the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War), but it's worth pointing out that our own government thinks it's fine to pass legislation that breaks international treaties.
A lot of the things the Nazis did were deemed a "crime against humanity," which wasn't even a term that existed until the Nuremberg trials, after WW2.
What this exposes are a couple of things:
1) Prior to the European Convention on Human Rights (again, a post-war thing), human rights pretty much didn't exist. If a nation made murdering you legal, and then murdered you, tough luck.
2) Making a thing legal is very much not the same thing as making it right.
3) Any government that claims that human rights are an inconvenience and talks about leaving the ECHR is doing so knowing full well that the human rights we have today are as a result of past atrocities, and would place themselves on the side of the fence with those people that committed those atrocities. Such people themselves are a danger to humanity.
You're forgetting that they made it all legal, and kept copious records about it. That's how we know the extent of their crimes today, their own record keeping.
If they cared about it being illegal they wouldn't have written it down.
Instead, they proclaimed it.
Godwin's Law only applies when the comparison or reference to the N word is not a valid one. Calling someone goose-stepping along whilst waving a swastika flag and demanding death to minority groups a Nazi, for example, would be entirely appropriate, as is pointing out that the rhetoric someone is using is the same as that used by the Nazis.
There's a corollary to Godwin's Law that covers misuse of Godwin's Law to shut down discussion, although I don't think it has a formal name.
Current government is far right leaning and the economic framework has strong similarities to corporatism, a flavour of fascist economics.
Then you have National Conservatives, shortened to Nat-C - guess how this is pronounced.
All the signs are here, but just as Germans or Italians in the early 30s, nobody believes where this is going and it is a conspiracy theory.
You are right about the US, but the UK is not quite so far - at least yet.
The government is certainly "of the right" - probably about as much as the Democrats in the US. The Daily Mail, and some Tory MPs, are much further to the right, and there are also corporatist elements (particularly in the aspirations of donors, many of whom would like to move the party almost as far-right as the Republicans).
I am hopeful, however, that the experiences of the 1930s (in Germany, Italy and also Russia) are still remembered as lessons. But as we head to 100 years after, maybe you are right.
Everybody keeps blaming "the right" for this kind of thing. Every Home Secretary has been in favour of increased surveillance of the populace. RIPA was enacted during the sainted New Labour era, remember?
And I don't hear the current shadow Home Sec complaining much.
Correct; this illustrates how the "left/right" spectrum is misleading, as it represents only a single dimension of political belief. The dimension we are interested in here is the Libertarian/Authoritarian axis, and again, with any axis of political leaning, being at either extreme end represents the adoption of belief over evidence.
All Home Secs in at least my own lifetime have sat quite a long way off towards authoritarianism, and anecdotally, there is a strong suggestion that this is due to the environment in the Home Office shaping the Home Secretary, rather than the other way around.
Of course, at the other end of that axis, you have preppers, who are also something you shouldn't be aspiring to be.
"anecdotally, there is a strong suggestion that this is due to the environment in the Home Office shaping the Home Secretary, rather than the other way around."
Sajid Javid's article in the Times after being appointed Home Sec. demonstrated this. He gave an account of being brain-washed so thoroughly he didn't realise what was happening to him.
Just about everyone online has something to hide. Something they're contractually required to hide.
Look at the Ts&Cs of online banking, online shopping, online everything else. You are obliged to keep you access credentials secure. How does that get done when you enter them via a device that has been made inherently insecure?
Selective enforcement. They don't just lock people up because they broke a law. They lock people up because they want to and they look for a broken law in order to do so. As long as they like you then you're free to break laws. It's called Abuse of Process and it's an essential and integral feature of our Justice System so don't knock it (or they might lock you up).
If I've got nothing to hide, then there's no need whatsoever to want to have a look at what I'm doing, who I'm talking to and what is being discussed.
Thought crimes are not a thing... presumed guilt is not a thing (outside of morons and tabloids)... and this is about control and power to keep the peons down and fighting between themselves over whatever the politicians and elites cook up for their latest dog whistles.
I believe the graveside service includes a reference to resurrection into life everlasting...
I don't think this simple minded nonsense can ever be finally put to rest. Much like the equally unwelcome vampire.
The wide availability of cryptography based tools which could easily circumvent any legislative requirement means even your average criminal, kiddie fiddler or terrorist will disappear off the radar pretty quickly.
Seems that the headline "too stupid to notice it's dead" could equally apply to the current UK govt which clearly is deceased, too unresponsive to even aspire to be a zombie and on the nose to the extent that its rotting carcass should have been interred months ago. A resting Norwegian Blue would show more initiative.
Which is strange really when considering the actual readership numbers
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/nationals/who-reads-the-daily-mail-circulation-and-readership/
What helps of course is tv and radio news appears to be driven by what is in the papers each day
A religious service contains a religious reference? Whodathunkit?
"Last Rites" themselves being a religious observance, and all. There's nothing stopping you from having a non-religious funeral ceremony, in the UK at least. This may not be the case in other countries (I think Ireland is still overly-entwined with the Holy See, although matters there may well have changed in recent years, they show signs of being rapidly more progressive than the UK)
Basically declaring a war on encrypted communication makes the country even less desirable as location for tech companies. Which, in addition to the results of the "brilliant" decision to leave the EU, really goes to show the economic competence of parties that tend to see themselves as being the experts on the topic.
mpi didn't say anything about the EUs encryption proposals.
He/she said that this is bad for the economy, as was leaving the EU. Both statements are clearly true, and not mutually exclusive.
And if anything, it shows that leaving the EU was even more stupid if we are copying their silly ideas.
The EU's proposal seems to be worse, and their politicians seem to have even less of understanding of technology. The EU commissioner in charge is claiming you can scan encrypted communications without unencrypting them
Not sure if the EU's system is 'better' or 'worse'.... both seem to be requiring an end to encryption and a complete state takeover of any and all communications they want to lay their hands on. The EU version delegates the 'directives' (basically something like a search warrant) to the member states, and frankly knowing the levels of authoritarianism raising it's head in some of the members, it's a scary proposal. For most of the other members, I would anyway not give them such powers however trustworthy and transparent they are. Any such legislation in the hands of governments of UK, Hungary, Malta, Poland etc would almost certainly be abused to target anything the government wanted using "think of the children" as a cover.
At the very least there seems to be the strong possibility that the EU version will get shot down by it's own courts. The UK (or at least it's current government) on the other hand is trying to exit any international judicial or regulatory framework that could stop it from doing some deeply troubling things.
On a more technical level, regarding "scan encrypted communications without unencrypting them", I seem to recall some computing framework being worked on where computers could process certain encrypted files in a certain way as to be able to provide the desired results without having access to the original encrypted data. IIRC it was a couple of orders of magnitude slower than the normal processing, and could only use very specific types of encryption, and do very specific types of calculation. Not sure if that is even theoretically extendible / useful.
The entire point of encryption is to prevent the contents of the encrypted message being readable. This being the case, I would presume that the caveats applied to that encryption scanner are on the lines of "Only works on pretend encryption, not on real encryption" and so on.
It may also be a very unsophisticated scam.
Don't worry the bill won't apply to anything to do with money.
It will just mean that ad-blockers, anonymous browsing and visiting a company's website without logging in and providing their official online id will be illegal
What Facebook? You're suddenly onboard with the idea?
Yes Microsoft, it would mean that local storage and processing of 'potentially terrorist' documents would be illegal and so would force everyone to use Office365 (so long as we get the same access the NSA get)
What part of the bill bans ad-blockers? pretty sure it does not ban ad-blockers. Also the ID part is a unworkable mess that likely going to end up like the last UK age verification law that was delayed over and over again until it was quietly scraped.
OFCOM needs to satisfy itself, beyond reasonable doubt, that an age-verification vendor is secure and does not expose users or their data to unauthorised disclosure or security breaches, its the same dilemma the BBFC faced and let to the whole thing falling apart last time same with the encryption plan.
There also the fact that Ofcom is likely to be super underfunded and unable to enforce 90% of the bill so its likely the rules will not be effective.
"What part of the bill bans ad-blockers? pretty sure it does not ban ad-blockers. Also the ID part is a unworkable mess"
Whoosh!
Although the rest of your comment was pretty spot on if we assume the post you replied to was meant to be taken seriously :-)
Magical thinking from the government is usual. Just because something is logically impossible doesn't stop them pursuing it as policy - see Brexit and how they thought we could "have our cake and eat it", despite everyone who actually knew anything about it telling them it was fucking stupid and wouldn't work. I fully expect them to ram this through and it to be just as successful as Brexit is.
What do you mean, "logically impossible"?
The legislation seems to be drafted to oblige service providers to be able to carry out various duties of care. Essentially this boils down to service providers being obliged to be able to read and process user content in order to exercise those duties of care. The point being made by detractors is that a service where the service provider has that capability is inherently less secure.
It's worth exploring that.
E2EE encryption relies on both the correct design and the correct implementation of a service specification (featuring a bunch of cryptographic techniques). As an end user of the service - WhatsApp, Signals, Apple, whatever - one is assuming that the service provider has control of the specification, that the specification is good, and that the client software you download from the app store correctly implements it.
That last part - that the client software is correct - is interesting, because it's correctness is completely and totally dependent on the service provider having a secret signing key for the application that only they know. There is a single private encryption key they hold that is used by the app store software to say, "this genuinely comes from Meta", or similar. Plus, the software developers ultimately have secure login credentials that allow them to access the company's software / build system. Obviously, if any of that is compromised in anyway whatsoever, then it becomes possible either for somone else to ship an altered client that you (as the end consumer of the service) cannot tell is not genuine, or it becomes possible for someone to corrupt the genuine client software directly by logging in and editing the service provider's source code (though it depends on what review processes the service provider's dev team uses, but ultimately it depends on login credentials being secure).
So, really, from an end consumer's point of view, E2EE is something of a fig leaf; you are trusting the service provider to have successfully defended all its private signing keys, and all its developers' login credentials. Which, logically, is exactly the same thing as trusting the service provider with an encryption key for your messages.
So far as I'm concerned, practicably there is no such thing as E2EE. Unless you review the specification, the source code, and build / install your own client software, you are trusting someone else defending the secrets that are used to guard your message content. Whilst service providers like Apple, Meta and Signal claim to be providing a superior level of security for end users, they're not providing anyone with perfect "Neither we or anyone else can ever read your stuff" E2EE services. If they fuck up, your content is exposed. If they have already fucked up and don't know it, your content is already exposed. And it's not like there's no precedents for fuck ups on that scale - secure keys seem to get stolen all the time (Microsoft just recently, RSA in the past, etc).
And besides that, if Mark Zuckerberg, or Tim Cook, decided they wanted to read new content (= monetise it), all they have to do is direct their developers to make it so.
How does this change the debate?
Looked at that way, the E2EE service providers look a bit dodgy. They encourage users to think that they're getting something "superior", when that's obviously not provably the case; it's marketing hype. It's pretty good hype, but it's busted should they ever turn out to have been compromised at source. They could provide an equally secure service where they do guard an encryption key for users' content (which is no different to protecting other secrets like dev's login credentials and signing keys), That's exactly what BlackBerry did to for consumer BlackBerry Messenger.
The reasons why such service providers wouldn't want to seem mostly to do with money, costs. It can't be about revenue. For Signal, which is free to use, the company is obviously in need for some route to monetisation / long term funding and makes no money from people using it. If people stopped using Signal because they had acquiesced to the Online Safety Bill, it makes zero difference to their bottom line and probably zero difference to their (already not very good) prospects of funding it long term. Similarly for WhatsApp, which FaceBook bought largely to prevent someone else buying it; they wouldn't lose $1 of revenue if they stopped running WhatsApp completely tomorrow. WhatsApp used to charge a fee in the old days, but not under Zuck's ownership. Apple make a ton of cash selling phones, though I doubt that the E2EE figures highly in people's purchasing decisions. Certainly, iMessage is not E2EE'd; it interacts with SMS.
Obviously, if they did acquiesce to the Bill's provision, there would be the costs of actually coming good on the duties of care of content. Policing content (as understood by Facebook as is, Twitter as was) is not cheap and hard to do. Having to do it for a service that brings in zero revenue is going to hurt. Claiming that "it's impossible without hurting security" is one way trying to not become responsilble for those costs, but as discussed above it's basically a specious excuse (in that that they're not actually providing true, guaranteed, cast-iron E2EE in the first place - not in the way they'd like you to believe they are).
This is probably what's at the core of the companies' dislike of the bill - the costs of compliance, rather than the loss of revenue if they are seen to have "caved in".
Telco Comparison
It's interesting to compare their position to that of telephony service providers. Telcos are not responsible for the policing of what's said on the telephone; the police are. Almost all countries have a legal intercept obligation on telcos, but I'm pretty sure there isn't a country on the planet that has obliged the telcos to listen in and police the content of conversations (the opposite, in fact). Of course, in most normal countries there's a lot of law / warrants / just cause / judges signatures that has to be in place before a tap can be activated. None of this seems to be financially burdensome for the telcos. It's also seemingly uncontroversial in most western democracies; just an established part of life.
One wonders if service providers like WhatsApp / Signal / Apple will ever settle down to the same kind of arrangement (which is basically where BlackBerry Messenger was). Doing so would at least define the costs of content policing as $0 / £0, the same as their policing costs today.
Wikipedia
I note that Wikipedia has objected to the age-check requirements. In this, I think they're justified (at least to a large extent). If a child goes into a public library, it's not like there's a section that they're barred from. Public libraries had / have encyclopedia. Wikipedia is - content-wise - very encyclopedic.
There is an aspect that Wikipedia allows people to edit it, but this is done (effectively) in public. There is the point that it could be a vector for bullying - i.e. someone creates a page about a specific person solely for the purposes of bullying them - but that's still done "in public" and is not in the sole control of the bully. It's so far and away removed from exchange of criminal content via communications services like WhatsApp, Signal that it seems hardly worthwhile embroiling Wikipedia (and things like it) in the OSB.
And companies which do deliberately compromise user security will also be fined, by the ICO when their data is hijacked and misused.
It's a cunning way to impose a digital services tax : companies just need to work out whether it will be more expensive to be fined for not breaking encryption, or be fined for exposing user data when somebody hacks your backdoored encryption.
That'll be the companies which still operate in the UK after they've worked out what's going to happen to them. The government of course has not worked out at all what's going to happen to itself when the public find out that "protect the children" means many of the apps they rely on are no longer available.
Yes, and although that means there is some hope of delaying some of the most stupid ideas until after the election, I have little confidence their replacements are any smarter. My guess is that Sunak and Starmer are both very smart people - it is their chained dogs on the back benches we have to worry about in both cases.
Some of the more stupid ideas look like just the sort of thing the next government will find useful to distract people from the chaos that is provoked while power settles down (just how will Labour resolve its serious internal splits, very sensibly being kept largely in hiding for now?).
>(just how will Labour resolve its serious internal splits, very sensibly being kept largely in hiding for now?).
At least left wing parties do their in-fighting vivaciously in private, they don't propose disastrous referendums to deal with dissidents
"At least left wing parties do their in-fighting vivaciously in private"
Sorry ..... but *when* has the Labour Party *ever* performed its in-fighting in private.!!!
In my lifetime, the Labour party has positively enjoyed fighting with it various factions 'in the streets so to speak' with flick-knives & bicycle chains.
It is the ultimate threat from some of the more left wing factions that if they cannot win *no-one' wins therefore they fight as publically as possible to prevent anyone else winning votes !!!
The Conservatives on the other hand have presented a quasi-united front to win the public vote, then when 'Joe/Joanne Public' has performed their duty and elected them the Conservatives have held the country to ransom while they fight their internal battles as *priority* over managing the country.
The country has been left to coast on automatic pilot while the political fighting was their 100% focus.
How easily this has been forgotten !!!
Exactly. They are just spending the rest of the time maxing out donor potential, lining themselves up for "consulting jobs" (*cough*) and generally asset stripping the country they claim to love, whilst pushing and exploiting division.
Perhaps the entire bill is an intentional poison pill for the presumed Labour government that will be elected at the next election?
Consider what we know: the Bill as written is unworkable and cannot be made workable under the current laws of mathematics. So, if this current bunch wins the next election then the un-elected Sir Humphreys who championed it will be thrown under the bus as sacrifices and the Bill quietly abandoned.
If on the other hand the other bunch win the next election, then they will be unmercifully reminded of how this Bill will safeguard children and how it absolutely must be implemented, come what may. When it is implemented, millions of people lose E2EE apps and get very upset indeed, and trivial workarounds to obtain these apps become commonplace. The notion of obeying only the Eleventh Commandment (Don't get caught) becomes ever-more entrenched in the public consciousness and Britain becomes harder to rule as a result.
If you don’t like politicians [of any ilk or persuasion] and what they are doing to/for you, and there’s bound to be many Houses of Parliaments full of those, do what you naturally do with anything you don’t like and which is not agreeing with you, ..... stop encouraging and continuing to pay for them and swallowing their guff and stuff, which is tantamount to you agreeing with their every self-centred notion and motion. If you aint gonna pay them and you're gonna be checking that they haven’t been, and aren’t gonna be stealing from you, they sure as hell will be quick out the doors, kicking stones down the road of slippery slopes, looking for something/someone else to invoice and suffer their ...... well nowadays those slings and arrows of great missed fortunes and constant woe appear to be multi-divided and obscurely provided and privately remunerated attentions.
Keeping things simple for a brighter greater future ensure the core fundamental jobs get really well done properly.
A nice idea in principle, but until we have a "none of the above" option what choice do we have?
Labour - who slate the Tories then decide they'll probably continue to do what the Tories are doing, or
Lib Dems - who seem more concerned with providing tampons to men who identify as women.
Greens - see Lib Dems.
A nice idea in principle, but until we have a "none of the above" option what choice do we have? .....andy gibson
If that is all that it is going to take, andy, then that is simply something we can easily insist be provided in every democratic election ..... after all, they are elected to server us our needs, not their seeds, a little something mega important and fundamental that humanity appears to forget and wantonly ignore .... at its peril. It is, without doubt, a very valid and extremely sensible request.
Who do you know good at starting and running highly successful local and national and international campaigns/revolutionary movements for El Reg to pass comment and constructive critique upon ?
How about an AIMovement ..... with Popular Virtual Machine Uprisings?
Spookily enough, such has been similarly proposed very recently as necessary, and is more fully expanded upon by someone whom you might know better and be more aware of. It makes for an interesting and thought provoking few minutes read .......
NB. ...... Anyone admitting falling foul of TL:DR earns an automatic F* [Fail with Star Distinction]
#4 The Startup Party: Time to Build from September and replace the Tories?Assumptions? The market opportunity? Principles for a new Party? How to grow? Stand in seats in GE24?
DOMINIC CUMMINGS
11 AUG 2023
A great chance (best since 1850s?) to replace the Tories
An easy way to see the utter rot of the Tory Party (and the No10/Cabinet Office system) is to consider that after the Boris-Truss fiasco they’ve put in charge the MP with probably the highest IQ in Parliament and the toughest work ethic and he’s ‘respecting the institutions’ and ‘listening to the MPs’ like a good head boy with personal integrity just the way he’s been told to by Cameron, Osborne, Hague, Insider pundits, the Institute for Government et al, and the result is:
. no grip of power, the Cabinet Office a dumpster fire and no No10 plan to fix it, No10 given the run-around by Whitehall as soon as the PM’s office switches from one disaster to the next,
. no governing plan for the NHS, crime, the war, productivity growth, R&D or anything else — just nightmarish Treasury budget/Spending Review processes that vandalise long-term building and entrench the dangerous rot of critical national capabilities,
. no message,
. no serious polling, communication or political machine (just incoherent jabbering to the media per the Tory model of ‘communication’ for decades),
. no political strategy worth spit (current approach is indistinguishable from ‘annoy everyone’),
. a humiliatingly awful level of argument from No10 on every major issue (reduced to defending idiot MPs telling people to ‘fuck off’ out of frustration that their own policy, which officials and their own spads told them couldn’t work, has turned into the predicted fiasco),
. political disintegration.
The old system isn’t getting any better than Sunak as PM so what does this say about the system? For Insiders obviously the answer is — he should have been even more Insider, tell the country immigration is good (not out of control), the boats need a ‘safe route’ so they stop being ‘illegal’, ignore crime, you’ll have to work harder and pay more taxes and trust Westminster more, no populism! Outside SW1, the answer has been clear for years but SW1 doesn’t want to hear it: government is broken because the people aren’t up to it.
Every aspect is rotten and this exerts a collective paralysis. Having resolutely ignored the core dysfunctions of Whitehall in favour of daily tacking to MP factions and ‘the news’ in Westminster (‘respect the institutions!’), No10 is now timed out by that system — normal-mode Whitehall can’t do anything fast and from September officials will ensure the timetable for anything they don’t agree with stretches into the election campaign so it won’t happen.
Even if the PM suddenly decided to use his power he won’t be able to. But all signs are he’s effectively given up. Officials across No10/70Whitehall discuss ‘has the PM given up or is it some complex psychology indistinguishable from giving up?’. Either way, he’s chosen not to use the power he has but instead listen to uber-Insider-pundits with the inevitable results.
How does he spend his time? A few officials who work with him give almost the same line:
He’d make a great PS [private secretary] or DG [director general], every meeting with him improves some second-order thing a bit, but he isn’t doing the PM’s job, I don’t think he realises this and I don’t think his spads tell him.He spends his time wading through endless detail and spreadsheets on fifth order matters because it’s psychologically easier than doing the PM’s actual job which he doesn’t know how to do nor wants to do. Officials obviously prefer him to Boris or Truss. He reads the papers diligently and is neither a crook nor a cretin. But the old hands know it’s roughly the Brown failure mode: a workaholic, the PM’s office a massive bottleneck and can’t sustain focus when the news shifts, the smartest MP but can’t build a team or lead etc etc. No10 is so politically lost that OFFICIALS suggest ways the PM can achieve his priorities faster and his OWN SPADS say ‘no too aggressive’. The fundamental reason for the boats failure is choices by the PM’s political team and a reluctance by Sunak to face unpleasant reality, not deep state resistance.
If he had four years I can imagine him figuring things out and evolving but his misfortune is that he had no time to learn. He’s compounded his misfortune by listening to the most insider of Insider advice. When you make your daily fix the MPs and news, as almost everyone does, it’s incredibly hard to escape from because, like escaping any addiction, there’s an unavoidable awful period after you change course where you annoy everyone before a new plan has time to work so there’s always a ‘sensible’ Insider argument to delay. And by the time you realise you’ve wasted your time reacting to the news like every PM since Thatcher, you’re done. (See here for why I got him promoted in 2020.)
From September a long election campaign will effectively start and it will be a continuation of 2023 — a weekly race to show who is worse at politics but with all fundamentals favouring Starmer.
Then dud Starmer will fail from Day 1 and the patterns of failure will be the same as we’ve seen since Brown (with the brief partial exceptions of July-December 2019 and March-May 2020). Starmer and Sunak will write Memoirs and puzzle, like Cameron’s, about how they could never find those mythical ‘levers of power’ — the levers that the Cabinet Secretary of spring 2020 said a few days ago that he also struggled to find or, if he did, found they didn’t connect to much (even though, remember, the Cabinet Secretary is 10X - 100X more powerful than the average Cabinet Minister).
Will the Tories improve after the election and grasp why they failed so badly, why the 80 seat majority Vote Leave won was wasted? No. They will talk rubbish about the last 15 years, as they did after 1997.
Already I’m getting messages from MPs and donors ‘How do we rebuild the Party after the inevitable, can we have a quiet chat?’ NO NO NO. No more excruciating Tory dinners. No more ‘X is obviously not up to it but … maybe … we could build a team around them, oh god pass the red…’ NO. Plough the old Tory Party into the earth with salt. I prefer the calls that start, ‘Come on, it’s time for the startup party let’s go’.
This is the time to start building the replacement so that from 2200 on election night in October-December 2024 the old Party is buried and a new set of people with new ideas start talking to the country and can take over in 2028 and give voters the sort of government they want and deserve.
Here endeth Part 1 of 2, with the tail end of a simply complex solution to now follows as Part 2
Part 2 [as aforementioned was to follow Part 1]
Some basic questions for The Startup Party?What is the political opportunity, why is it here now? (The context of what happened in the Brexit referendum and 2019, the VL plan to transform the Tory Party etc, is obviously relevant but I won’t rehash all this now, cf. HERE.)
Why are Starmer and Sunak failing so badly? What does this mean for the election and how the next government fails? What will the old parties plus normal Whitehall plus normal political media generate left to their own devices (i.e rattling around without a strong external force affecting the system)?
How to turn some ideas and writing into practically building TSP? Timing? Basic principles for building TSP so it’s 10X higher performance, more interesting, more attractive than the old parties?
What’s the political story for TSP? How does A) some sort of attempted objective picture of our biggest problems overlap with B) the nature of the political opportunity?
What are the dynamics among different elites, in particular the subset of elites who are a) most competent at building but also b) almost entirely disconnected from mainstream politics?
Should the project be strictly/legally time limited? E.g something like — the new entity dissolves legally 10 years to the day after it first takes control of No10. So there’s a campaign 2024-28 then, if we win, a ten-year-two-term project to transform the British state, then hand power over to others, with the new party legally dissolving.
Should TSP stand some candidates (~25-75?) in some interesting seats in GE2024 to a) build the brand, b) build the network, c) give some people experience of an election, d) help ensure Tory oblivion? Or focus entirely on building towards 10pm on election night? There’s arguments both ways and it obviously depends on how things develop (see below). Even winning a small number of votes in a relatively limited number of seats could drive the Tories towards extinction so should be considered. Some people are worried about Starmer having a Blair-like majority. I’m much more worried by the continuation of what I’ve witnessed for 20 years and happy to gamble on Starmer having a Blair-like majority if it means the replacement of the perpetual rotten Tory horrorshow. Starmer with a Blair-majority really means the civil service running things anyway, so it will be normal-rubbish but hardly revolutionary, and not much different to Tories in charge.
Below:
1. Some basic assumptions behind TSP.
2. The market opportunity for TSP.
3. What would TSP look like overall.
4. Very rough steps for building TSP.
5. The hardest problem.
What about the 3 recent by-elections?
I haven’t looked at details but my impression is they were practically the worst possible for the Tories. Why?
1. ..... They show the Tories actually on course for wipeout.
2. ......The ULEZ fiasco gives Starmer a stick to beat the MPs with and ditch a load of stuff that scares swing voters.
3. ......The ULEZ fiasco gives Tories/PM many new ways to avoid facing reality, which is what most of them want to do, including many close advisers to Sunak. Given they have no actual plan, lurching in response to ULEZ could easily make a disastrous situation even worse for them. (SW1 repeatedly over-theorises from minimal data and Uxbridge/ULEZ is a classic example.)
This is even worse for the Tories than losing all three and great for Starmer.
And even better for The Startup Party!
If you were part of the Vote Leave network please forward this to others you know in that network. Leave feedback below…
NB. please remember what I said before, a new party is a startup and it’s a good way to think about this project, but The Startup Party isn’t an actual name, it’s a place holder, plenty of time for horrific arguments about names if we make this real!
(Apologies for quiet over last month, I’ve had to do my covid statement for the official inquiry. I’ll post some of it here over the next few weeks as I finish it.)
Now I don't know about the rest of you, but personally, when I am reading these, I don't tend to look at the name of the poster, but rather the contents of the post itself.
I have found, though, that sometimes within the first three lines, I start to think, 'this is amanfrommars 1 post', isn't it? Quick glance up and to the left, and 'oh, indeed, yes it is'!
I can't help wondering though, if three lines is too much and really it should be obvious by two at most! Thoughts?
My detector is a bit more sensitive, often making a guess in 5-10 words. I'd say I'm 90-95% correct, but I do occasionally glance and see that it's someone else and the comment is worth finishing. I find it a bit weirder when people respond to such posts. If they're really new, maybe they didn't recognize what it was and are really trying for a conversation, but when they've been here long enough, you'd think they are aware what this is. Some of the responses try to respond as if the post was trying to make a point, and some respond to question why it didn't make any sense, but neither is getting anywhere.
You can easily figure out where this is going to go if they double down.
There will be an expensive contract to develop a phone scanner that will tell an officer whether someone has veilid or any other prohibited software on their phone.
The phone operators will have to sell phones with patched up operating system, to aid such scanning, to ban installation of such software, or both.
Then phone or any device that can't be scanned could be confiscated etc.
But that is not the worst part - any business who wants to keep their intellectual property secured, won't touch the UK out of fear their trade secrets will leak.
Imagine company X developing the framework for OSB and having access to personal data of competitor Y employees.
It's a non starter.
"There will be an expensive contract to develop a phone scanner that will tell an officer whether someone has veilid or any other prohibited software on their phone."
Followed quickly by discovering that, because of inadequate field testing by the contractor, a common app accidentality confuses the scanner and produce a lot of false positives.
After the first few high-profile false arrests, smart lawyers would ... [continued p94]
The danger with large ambitious omnibus legislation like the OSB is that important sensible uncontroversial ideas often get drowned out by debates on side issues which, whilst they might be important, aren't central to the bill.
I very much hope that the Online Safety Bill isn't lost. Common or garden criminality - online fraud, scams, threatening behaviour, criminal damage etc. etc. - has ballooned on the internet in the last 20 years. We need to turn that tide and it needs to start by increasing the legal duties of platforms like Facebook, X/Twitter and, yes, Wikipedia.
It seems that the encryption proposals could be a problem and it may make sense to defer these until there is more consensus on the best way through. But let's not do this by scrapping the OSB altogether.
It looks like we can't get this bill through with the current government, let's drop the encryption bit and add some ambiguous phrase about 'support for technical means' then we can get some judge to rule it means no encryption later
Will that work ?
Yes minister
It is no more the duty of Facebook etc to police messages than it is the duty of BT to police the content of phone calls, many of which have included "Common or garden criminality - online fraud, scams, threatening behaviour, criminal damage etc. etc." for over 100 years. Society copes with those and can cope with social media.
The solution is for there to be a choice of social media, which can compete on their choice of the level of moderation they apply (i) automatically, and (ii) through notification.
How about advertising? The number of scam adverts on "respectable" services like facebook and twitter is unbelievable. And the best you can do is report them and hope they are removed.
Imagine if ITV or any other commerical television stations attempted that sort of lax oversight.
I used to think along those lines, but there are a few key differences between a phone service and social media, including but not limited to:
* Phone calls are usually direct, one-to-one connections
* Phone services are fungible - if I don't like the one I'm with it's easy to change to another provider and I can still call all my friends no matter who they're with
The big one as far as I'm concerned is motivation: my phone company is (I hope) motivated to keep my custom by providing a good service so that I keep paying them. A social media company running on the business model of providing a "free" service which is paid for by advertising is motivated to put as many ads in front of me as possible. They do this by showing me things which will keep me engaged with the platform. This in turn means that they are not an impartial service provider, but they are actively deciding what to show me. Which means, to my mind, that they bear some responsibility for that content.
> that important sensible uncontroversial ideas often get drowned out by debates on side issues
Except it isn't a "side issue", it'a a war on privacy and the right to communicate without the state being able to snoop in. Which was apparently important enough to our ancestors, that many countries have laws against opening letters at the post office.
It doesn't matter what else is in such a Bill, same as it doesn't matter if someone has found a great cure for cancer, which unfortunately kills the patient 100% of the time...because that isn't a minor side effect, it's a fatal flaw, and so the whole thing is worthless, and can be dismissed on that point alone.
The Tories have been banging on about ending secure encryption for decades and now and again someone took them aside and told them what that would mean, - no safe online banking, no safe online shopping, etc - and it got shelved. But the current bunch are incompetent evil and completely bonkers enough to actually do it.
Cue tech companies blocking the UK and fleeing the country.
Here's hoping that one time, formerly of the El Reg parish stalwart and regular favourite and authorised reporter, Andrew Orlowski, gets well soon and recovers from whatever is ailing him. His piece in the Daily Telegraph today, 21 August 2023 at 11:00am .... The internet’s ‘original sin’ means AI will be a nightmare> .... is such a sad sellout for one once noted and noticed for biting the hand which feeds IT.
After reading what he is now feeding for publishing into situations, I am left to wonder and ponder, but fortunately only for a fleeting moment ...... Was there ever before so much said about so little of great importance to inform of nothing worth knowing and certainly of nothing worth supporting?
Yet another Register article about how impossible stopping E2EE is, how terrible it will be for personal rights, yada, yada, yada.
Dear old Reg, good at tech, rubbish at law, always on the side of multinationals profiting from continuing to be conduits for filth, fraud and terrorism. It would be nice if just for once they gave a writer a shot who was capable of considering what would happen to the tech landscape if the legislation changes. Like if the megacorps don't develop messaging that can be seen by crimebusters, it gives a great chance to British startups. That activity that is currently technically possible may cease to be so if the law is on the side of companies who prefer to cooperate in the fight against fraudsters, people traffickers and worse. But yeah, on you go with your EFF sneers and your naive faith that you'll be able to use a VPN in perpetuity. Good luck with that, as our cousins say.
I've said this before here and it looks as if I'll have to say it again:
If people are setting out to do something which breaks the law they are not put off by being given more laws to break.
No, I'm not on the side of criminals. Far from it. I spent a third of my working life investigating crime and terrorism. In this case they'll either encrypt stuff before sending it via a channel that's open to inspection or they'll use some illegal app. In the meantime the law-abiding will be stitched up with 2nd rate insecure apps for their web access.
Let's just remember a very important British principle: the presumption of innocence. Let's realise that the vast proportion of online use is for legitimate purposes and the users deserve secure services.
Once the OSB is in place, responses become available to these evasions, which would now be much more visible amongst the plaintext traffic and the kosher apps. As I said, you need to think through the technical possibilities that come into scope when the legislative landscape changes.
Well said, sir. There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that. Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have.
We do need some checks and balances against the abuses of power that will inevitably happen occasionally, and against the misunderstandings of the PPE graduates in our establishment. These checks and balances need constructive negotiation, as against the dismissive whining of this and many other articles.
There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people.
There, FTFY; the internet is merely the medium, the criminal behaviour exists outside of it. Your argument is akin to saying that ransom notes can be sent through the post, so the police must open all letters. You should read up on the history of the STASI if you think this is a good argument.
@Elongated
During WWI and WWII the police, or someone equivalent, did open letters. Not every letter, but if the suspicion was there...
These powers ceased after WWII under democratic norms which never applied to the State Security Service of East Germany.
Yes, and some of us might think that this was not a good thing. Part of living in a democracy is that certain rights shouldn't be temporary, if we feel like it. However, even in that situation, the UK during the world wars had an existential risk, which it really doesn't have now. If I had to argue in favor of their actions at that time, I would say that the emergency procedures when bombs are falling on your citizens every night should be very different from non-emergency procedures when basically nothing like that ever happens. In my real opinion, I think the UK probably would have gotten through the wars equally well had it left its citizens' mail alone.
We'd be naïve to think such things don't still happen. Opening letters of a known enemy of the state, in order to know what they are saying, and to whom, is a long tradition, going a LOT further back than the 20th century. The key, of course, is oversight. Spooks doing it today should need at least a suspicion, and a court order, to do so.
There is, of course, a category difference between espionage/counter-espionage, and mass surveillance.
Spooks doing it today should need at least a suspicion, and a court order, to do so.There is, of course, a category difference between espionage/counter-espionage, and mass surveillance. ..... Elongated Muskrat
Yes, they probably should but they don’t, and now in the foreseeable future they won’t, with many agreeing that they shouldn’t, because that category difference which may have been earlier thought to make a meaningful difference, is disappeared to never return.
The terms and conditions of former traditional establishment secret intelligence services are radically changed and in a constant state of chaotic flux today, EM, because their Great Game model of initiating and provisioning foreign wars has lost them their every former covert and clandestine advantage and is instead delivering them an overwhelmingly much smarter and more deadly untouchable foe of which they have severely limited knowledge and absolutely zero command and control of whilst it stealthily steals all of their thunder and plunder to lose them all of their battles and their wars against their creatively virtual enemy.
Frenemy or Foe, Fiend or Daemon? Real or Imagined? What is it that IT and AI reveal to you that you forlornly forever seem to deny and fight against and so spectacularly and publicly fail to vanquish and quell/save and sustain? Do you ever think on that ?
Why oh why on a tech site do people seem to fail to grasp that when you put communications on steroids through servers and software, you have a vastly different situation from verbal conversations and letters in the post?
The Post Office does not profit from pushing filth, fraud and terrorism through it's channels, and does not defend the practice. Apple, Google and Meta do.
Let's take some of that apart:
"There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that."
Yes indeed. The general public needs protection. That protection includes ensuring that they can use the interest securely.
"Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have."
This is where it gets tricky. If such powers are created how can they be confined to the hands of the good guys? What the computer nerds know and you clearly don't is that they can't be so confined.
If you take a route of weakening encryption so the good guys have a back door that weaker encryption will sooner or later get cracked unless accident or corruption causes access to leak out first.
If you take the approach of encrypting the data strongly but send a copy with equally strong encryption but using a different key to a monitoring service that service will become a major target. There are numerous reports of wrongful access to the PNC. The only way this will be different is its greater value.
If you take the approach of an on device scanner you will have two problems. One will be false positives and the concomitant miscarriages of justice. The other will be a supply chain attack; a process with the access that would need would like a monitoring service, be a hugely valuable target.
Whatever option you choose you vastly increase the attack surface of every citizen's innocent and lawful use of the internet.
If you think a foolproof system exists - which seems to be HMG's view, then the computer nerds, from long experience, know what you should do to back that up: produce a proof of concept that will withstand proper scrutiny, the sort of scrutiny which will seek out its weak points and conceptual errors and produce a counter proof of concept to break it.
This idea has been flying about for years. Where's that proof of concept? Nobody's produced one. Maybe that should tell you something - that when the computer nerds deny it can be done, they're right.
And by the way, I've spent my years in the law enforcement trenches and the one thing I can tell you about this is that I don't want it because I know it will make matters worse, not better.
"There are numerous reports of wrongful access to the PNC."
If you want to know how such a system could be compromised - https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366549134/Police-worker-could-have-put-investigation-into-EncroChat-encrypted-phone-network-at-risk
> Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have.
1. These powers will not remain with law enforcement.
If there is a backdoor, a weakness, a secondary key, it WILL get out. Not a question "if", only "when".
2. These powers are worthless in this instance.
Encryption isn't something that can be prevented, period. It's math and freely available information. If I forbid or weaken it on the application layer, all the sender has to do, is encrypt the message before the application gets it. Criminals are motivated enough to do that. And no law in the world will make AES256 any easier to break.
> We do need some checks and balances against the abuses of power
Checks and balances are based on TRUST. What if that trust fails?
What if a right wing populist movement grabs political power? What if a dictatorship gets it's hand on the same weaknesses? What if a country slowly slides into an autocracy? What if a country gets taken by another nation? What if the secrets are stolen by espionage or a security breach?
The point of encryption is, that it doesn't have to rely on trust.
Well said, sir. There are problems with criminal behaviour on the internet which are obvious to ordinary people even if the computer nerds deny that. Law enforcement needs powers that ordinary folk don't have.
Ok, but why pick on the internet specifically? Let's introduce the practices you seem to desire, along with:
1) Microphones in pubs and other public locations recording everything someone says, just in case someone is a pædophile or terrorist planning their attack. Hell, also in all cars and homes for the same reason.
2) Banning gatherings in outdoor places. Until we can reliably record the conversations of 2 people walking together in a park, ban such events, just in case someone is a pædophile or terrorist planning their attack.
3) Actually, don't bother with microphones in cars, ban them completely, as people can use them for pædophile or terrorist related attacks.
Yeah, right. As far as I can gather, conversations down the pub don't depend on the messaging infrastructure provided by the megacorps, nor do they enable miscreants to find each other across the globe and co-ordinate their nefarious activities, nor do the megacorps make a penny from them. But they do profit immensely from enabling filth, fraud and terrorism, and have obviously conned you into cheerleading for them.
The messaging infrastructure? Talk about shooting the messenger!
So, in your world, phone companies should also be targeted.
Car manufacturers should be blamed when criminals flee crimes in vehicles, and all media companies that mention a certain concert that then gets targeted by a terrorist are also culpable?
P.S. You are weird. Worrying weird. What skeletons are you hiding?
An interesting, though flawed, argument.
Providing a messaging infrastructure is a much deeper involvement than your examples. The core function of messaging is passing information, currently hidden.
Let me put it in a way all tech heads should understand. Firewalls don't let encrypted zips through, because you can't scan them, so you don't know what damage they will do to the network.
The Online Safety Bill is only doing the same thing for socials.
Your argument makes no sense.
One scenario is an infrastructure set up to allow private 1-to-1 messages between users.
The other scenario is also an infrastructure set up to allow private 1-to-1 messages between users.
As for your firewall example, ignoring the fact your example and phrasing shows you obviously aren't very tech-literate, you may be citing the policy of certain individual companies. Definitely not all, and definitely nor on any firewall I've ever worked with.
But still, it's got nothing to do with allowing the government to hobble encryption so that they (and anyone else) can spy on your communication.
Incidentally, as a boss, if you read an employees obviously personal email, you are comiting an offence.
https://robsols.co.uk/video/can-and-employer-read-employees-emails/
Jeezo, why do EFF nuts go all straw man if anyone disagrees with them?
Hullo, infrastructure = pub is the same as infrastructure = vast electronic messaging networks? Aye, right.
So most of the firewalls you've dealt with allow encrypted archives through? That explains a lot of the breach reports on El Reg.
An employer shouldn't read employee's obviously personal emails - for performance reasons, curiosity etc. If however those private emails trip alerts that they may be criminal in nature, the employer commits an offence by not reading them, or passing them to the police to read.
I won't deal with your paranoia as to the motivations behind the bill, you can discuss that with your therapist.
Anyone wanting to protect personal privacy is on the side of filth, fraud, and terrorism?
What an idiot.
And your comparison to the EFF reminds me of the meme "anything I don't like is woke"
"Let's disable encryption to catch the bad people! It won't affect the good people!"
I suppose you're against the ECHR too because it helps "baddies" (presumably you aren't human, so don't care about your rights), and think that brexit was for *them* and not for *us*, and the EU are just picking on us by blocking our freedom of movement. In Spain, we are expats, not immigrants, after all, yeah?
You join here only a few months ago, and spend the whole time writing abusive, paranoid, delusional, and bigoted posts, and now you call others bigoted?
You even created a new ID yesterday because your first one was so unpopular. Congratulations - that worked out well.
Bored of "truth social", are you?
"And no, I didn't create a new ID."
So you're saying that it'a a coincidence that this thread was started by CyberGRC and you register only a few days ago as cybergrcgb, and both of you post ignorant and uninfrormed comments with the style and wit of a Daily Mail reader posting on twitter?
"Truth Social is a Yank thing. You'd be happier there, it's where your trendy crowdthink comes from."
You post knee-jerk and deliberately provocative posts with the intelligence of a MAGA supporter. Now you've just added projection to the list, it just makes my case stronger.
> of considering what would happen to the tech landscape if the legislation changes
What will happen is pretty damn clear: UK is one country. The entire world is a much bigger market.
> Like if the megacorps don't develop messaging that can be seen by crimebusters,
First of all, please provide proof that "crimebusting" is actually what such a law would accomplish IF it were implementable. Because so far. the track record of all anti-privacy snooping programs as far as preventing crime goes, is ABYSMAL, no matter where in the world they were implemented.
Why? Simple: Because it is technically impossible to prevent encryption. Encryption is math. Math is known. Prevent it on the application layer, and a sufficiently motivated actor will encrypt the message before handing it to the application. And criminals tend to be VERY motivated. "Oh, but what if that was against the law?" ... well, unfortunately, criminals tend to not give a damn about the law, that's pretty much a requirement for being one.
If you disagree, please provide track records of successful anti-privacy programs.
> it gives a great chance to British startups.
For what? For developing a messenger app where the audience is...the UK? When all competing products have the entire rest of humanity as their user base, minus a few dictatorships? Sorry, but that doesn't exactly sound like a prime example for a good business plan.
> who prefer to cooperate in the fight against fraudsters, people traffickers and worse.
As pointed out above, none of these people will be prevented from using encryption by such laws. Because, well...criminals don't care about the law. It's pretty much a requirement for being a criminal.
> What will happen is pretty damn clear: UK is one country. The entire world is a much bigger market.
And?
> First of all, please provide proof that "crimebusting" is actually what such a law would accomplish IF it were implementable. Because so far. the track record of all anti-privacy snooping programs as far as preventing crime goes, is ABYSMAL, no matter where in the world they were implemented.
And you would know that how? Because security agencies tell you how they monitor?
> Why? Simple: Because it is technically impossible to prevent encryption. Encryption is math. Math is known. Prevent it on the application layer, and a sufficiently motivated actor will encrypt the message before handing it to the application. And criminals tend to be VERY motivated. "Oh, but what if that was against the law?" ... well, unfortunately, criminals tend to not give a damn about the law, that's pretty much a requirement for being one.
Who is saying encryption per se is bad? What is stupid is allowing all and sundry military grade E2EE for everyday messaging. And if E2EE gets blocked for most purposes, it make criminal evasions more visible.
You may also note that the OSB doesn't outlaw E2EE, it simply says that companies running messaging systems must not let them be used for illegal purposes. The rest is in your head.
If you disagree, please provide track records of successful anti-privacy programs.
> For what? For developing a messenger app where the audience is...the UK? When all competing products have the entire rest of humanity as their user base, minus a few dictatorships? Sorry, but that doesn't exactly sound like a prime example for a good business plan.
You think if the UK is successful in this, it won't open up markets elsewhere?
> As pointed out above, none of these people will be prevented from using encryption by such laws. Because, well...criminals don't care about the law. It's pretty much a requirement for being a criminal.
As I pointed out to you above, take away E2EE for most purposes and the criminal evasions become easier to spot.
If the government wanted to protect children from sexual abuse, they would invest those billions into social services. The vast majority of such offences are committed by someone within, or known to, the family, and within the family home. The fact that social services are one of the things that has been repeatedly cut under government "austerity" demonstrates exactly how much they genuinely care about children, which is exactly not at all.
This is exactly it. It's just the latest part of the never ending campaign cycle we now live in, like absolutely everything else that they do. Their only concern is about being able to position themselves such that they can accuse the opposition of taking the side of nonces. Actually preventing child abuse is neither here nor there for them, all that matters is that they look as if they want to do it and the other side don't. They'll have a ready baked 3 word slogan lined up that they'll all start using in unison, and the right wing press campaign will have been carefully planned and coordinated. It's completely transparent at this point. A lot of people will continue to fall for it though sadly.
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The government will probably come out with "encryption encourages the invasion of boat people stealing your PPE, and weird blokes in dresses wanting to perv on you in the toilet".
Why anyone thinks that a perverted male is going to draw attention to himself by putting on a dress, is beyond the logic of the narrow-minded bigoted racists the government is now considering their base, but it's all they have.
The governments knows, anyone with any technical knowledge knows. You can't put the genie back in the box. Encryption is here to stay and they know it. This is a cynical attempt by government to get their grubby little hands on the data on the majority. It's reckless, stupid and to be quite frank down right dangerous. No government should have access to that much data on it's citizens. What happens when they start trawling it for immigration purposes, political leanings or group affiliation to name but a few. We have no idea what sort of government is going to be in power in the future. Even the Stasi didn't have that much power.
The OSB seems largely to be about forcing companies to do the policing, rather than opening up services in bulk for the police to do it for them.
Plus, I think you're ignoring the vast lakes of data that companies like Facebook and Google accumulate about you, each and every day.
For example, ever called someone using an Android phone, or called someone that has and also has your number in their contacts list? If so, you or they have signed up to terms that means Google know your name and number, address and other data too if noted, and who you called and when. Regardless of whether you have any dealings with Google, they acquire data about you anyway without your consent.
I think most governments would struggle to match the big tech comoanies even with legal assistance. The OSB is pretty tame compared to what big tech just do anyway without your consent.
I kinda hope that if this bill does go through in its current form that Meta are true to their word and stop Whatsapp working in the UK. As not only will this piss off a large amount of the UK public which hopefully they will remember who caused it come the Election. But as since it seem that Whatsapp is used by a large percentage of MPs in the government as well, im sure they won't be pleased when they find out their Whatsapp group has suddenly gone quite, and all the alternatives apps are going to have backdoors which means there is a potential that their messages are going to being read by the Chinese or Russians.
While the Online Saftey bill is a piece of legislation s bad it borders of being a war crime. I genuinely hope that, within like a month of this passing (and it will, because the Tories have been trying to get this over the line since 2016 in one form or another, I can't see them leaving power without it), the first thing that happens is all the prominent MP's who pushed this get their accounts compromised and their *entire* browser history and 'adult entertainment' preferences are publicly released. The only time our politicians care about the consequences of their actions. is when those consequences effect them.
Seeing how unworkable the bill is on many levels and that Ofcom is very much not up to the task ahead, This bill is going to collapse under its own weight and during that the Tories (and likely Labour) will keep banging there heads against the wall of reality. (While Ofcom delays implementation over and over again.)
The ascii code for the letter A is 65
Int Key = 24
Int Message = 65
Send.destination(Message*Key);
There, an encryption algorithm. illegal under the new laws as it does not have a back door
So we'll stick a back door in.
String Spies= "GCHQ";
Int Key = 24;
Int Message = 65;
If monitering==1 Send.Spies(Message);
Send.destination(Message*Key);
All looks good except when the 'bad guys' get hold of this algorithm , they will reverse engineer the code and decompile it back to the above.
And if they time the attack right they'll change the value of Spies to "FSB" or "NKVD" or even "CIA"
And thus all your secrets will be revealed. and mine. and everyone elses.
And just imagine Russia/China getting your secret messages about undermining the prime minister in order to secure your promotion to the position...
(1) "MOT"
- Backup, clean bare metal install, MOT inspection......then restore
(2) "MOT" (Smartphone variant")
- Burner
(3) "MOT"
- And then there's the problem of WHO GETS TO SAY what is non-compliant! Maybe Linux, or open source, gets to be defined as non-compliant?
(4) "MOT"
- Funny that there's no mention of an MOT for servers! You know....AWS, Azure, Google, GCHQ.....and all their friends! Not even Signal or WhatsApp!
(5) Private Encryption
- How much money does it take to implement private encryption? Determined folk will find the money!
- Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier -- code examples for encryption standards, Diffie/Hellman
- Cryptography Engineering, Ferguson/Schneier/Kohno -- Diffie/Hellman
- Daniel Bernstein http://cr.yp.to/djb.html
- Veilid plus private encrytion (for the paranoid!)
(6) Client side scanning
- Air gapped message creation and encryption (Aside: air gapped might be a problem for MOT!)
....and of course it's pretty clear that ENFORCEMENT of any laws varies from negligible to none at all!!
So.....mostly avoidable.....and mostly autocratic too! But then those politicians are "doing something"!!
Still got removeable drives in your computer? Drop your working one out, fit 'MoT' test drive, have computer checked.
Put original drive back in.
What they would then do is to drop some form of time-limited certificate that is hashed with the hardware, on to the disk during the test that is required to be there when connecting to the Internet.
What happens with Veilid is that the government uses RIPA or some variant thereof to criminalise anyone using it, where users can expect unlimited jail terms and fines unless you hand over the keys if the government decides it wants to read your mesaages and no, not knowing the keys won't protect you, they just claim that's you denying them access.
Worth remembering that the impetus for this IT version of dangerous dogs legislation came from some parents and NGO organisations who believe that if you want something enough you can will it into existence.
They are convinced that the only thing that's preventing this from working is the unwillingness of social media platforms to find a solution and that if they're faced with a choice of doing something or exit from the UK they'll implement it
"This same state is, of course, the one demanding that to "protect children," it should get access to whatever encrypted citizen communication it likes via the Online Safety Bill"
Won't be popular to point this out but the law doesn't actually do that. It gives Ofcom a power to require encrypted services to use accredited tools to prevent dissemination of child sexual abuse material. Plenty of reasons to think even that's somewhere between dubious and impossible but one thing it definitely doesn't do is allow the state to access private messages, encrypted or otherwise. For that they've got to rely on the good ole Investigatory Powers Act.
The new law is expressly designed with "tack ons" where MPs will be allowed to use any encryption they want to hide the fact they're stealing BILLIONS in goverment contracts.
ALL MPs are on the take and go from nothing to megamillionaires within a year or two of being elected. The entire UK political system is corrupt from the ground up. Labour, Tories, Lib Dems, and whatever other parties get a touch of power. All taking bribes, stealing government contract money etc.
After the "expenses" scandal, MPs have to write down their charges in a "special book" but they're allowed to put "national security" next to a claim for anything (even a packet of biscuits) and YOU the voter are now legally forbidden from even seeing that item exists. Basically the corruption is WORSE than it was before, with MPs not only claiming to clean moats, but many have become mass slum landlords, using government money to buy out entire swathes of houses to rent out.
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