King Charles III signs off on UK Online Safety Act, with unenforceable spying clause With the assent of King Charles, the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act has become law, one that the British government says will "make the UK the safest place in the world to be online." The Online Safety Act, which began in April 2019 as the Online Harms White Paper when Theresa May served as Prime Minister (before Boris, …
"make the UK the safest place in the world to be online"
So great, because we can't be safe on the streets. It's comforting to know you won't get stabbed while browsing Facebook.
"This landmark law sends a clear message to criminals – whether it’s on our streets, behind closed doors or in far flung corners of the internet, there will be no hiding place for their vile crimes,"
Why would they need to hide? The UK can't even catch a burglar.
It's not criticism of the government they are avoiding, it's criticism of the permanent establishment.
If the government of the day goes against net zero or any of the establishment's policies, you'll be free to criticise the government for that.
If you call for Jihad in the streets or suggest people should throw battery acid at Nigel Farage then you're absolutely fine.
Suggesting that Kahn's "stop the proles from travelling" cameras are a bad thing will get you on an alt-far-extreme-mega-right watchlist.
Quote:
"Suggesting that Kahn's "stop the proles from travelling" cameras are a bad thing will get you on an alt-far-extreme-mega-right watchlist"
Well it will make a change from being on the alt-far left commie watchlist for suggesting that companies share their profits with their workers...
A couple of things.....
-- Workers create the profits by their labor. Its a simple transaction, selling skills and labor for money. This has to be periodically revalued since individual and collective skills and so value changes over time. In the US unions negotiate fixed length contracts. When these run out then a new contract is negotiated, or not as the case may be.
-- Buying shares in a company is a very Old School way to get a cut of the profits. Especially are shares tend to be in classes often known as Ordinary and Preferred in the UK. Due to the increasing sophistication of financial engineering over the last couple of decades owning Ordinary shares and expecting dividends from them is more a pipe dream than reality, in practice the only profits to be had are from share price appreciation.
Kahn's "stop the proles from travelling" cameras
First you have to recognise the proles. Here's an excellent Twitter post on the effectiveness of CCTV cameras.
No. They've ignored the repeated report of the cockend round the corner from us selling stolen airpods. "We're under staffed and there is no clear victim". I'm round the corner but one of my windows is on the corner of the street looking down it. The CCTV picks up all the action when in zoom mode. Doesn't help his case advertising it as an "Unwanted gift" on facebook. The unwanted gift thats sold about 20 times so far.
"This landmark law sends a clear message to criminals – whether it’s on our streets, behind closed doors or in far flung corners of the internet, there will be no hiding place for their vile crimes,"
Wow, that's taken sound bites to the next level. Very nice sounding and zero reality.
"Math: Not even once."
Apparently, in Baltimore and the State of Oregon that statement is law. I've found out recently that those places have taken away basic maths requirements for high school graduation as it's racist and puts "people of color" at a disadvantage.
"Apparently, in Baltimore and the State of Oregon that statement is law. I've found out recently that those places have taken away basic maths requirements for high school graduation as it's racist and puts "people of color" at a disadvantage."
Nope, this is simply nonsense peddled by right wing "news" outlets (like the Daily Mail) in 2021.
"Oregon state law requires that, in order to obtain a high school diploma, students must obtain at least 24 credits between grades nine and 12, including: at least three credits in math; at least four credits in English; three in science; and three in social science, among other prerequisites. In order to obtain those credits, a student is required to achieve at least a passing grade in each class. SB 744 will not change or remove those requirements.
Although not codified in the same way as a standardized test, passing all those classes and obtaining the 24 credits required to get a high school diploma can quite reasonably be regarded as de facto proof that a student possesses the basic academic competencies at the heart of media coverage of SB 744 in August 2021."
Oregon Senate Bill 744 has three principle effects:
It orders the Department of Education (DOE) to conduct a review of the statutory prerequisites for obtaining a high school diploma in Oregon (including diploma options such as the "modified diploma," "extended diploma" and "alternative certificate"), and to make recommendations by September 2021
It orders the DOE to conduct a review of statewide requirements for demonstrating proficiency in academic areas, with an emphasis on Essential Learning Skills, and to make recommendations by September 2021
It suspends, until the end of the 2023/24 academic year, Essential Learning Skills as a prerequisite for graduation where a student has otherwise met the credit requirements for obtaining a diploma.
This was done after the covid disruption to schools, the "essential learning skills" package was suspended (as explained above) but the existing 24-credit requirement for obtaining a high school diploma remains untouched.
And nowhere is "disadvantage to coloured people" mentioned - this says rather a lot more about you, dont you think?
But "math" is also short for mathematics! It just depends on how you wrote your regexp (and, yes, now you have 'n' problems…). I can see a fairly valid argument either way.
(Although, yes, when referring to the UK the world outwith leftpondia, proper English spelling should be used: it will irritate the rest of the world far less, and the leftpondians don't care about the world beyond their borders anyway «ducks» ;-) )
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Surely this is more an example of a US reporter using a US phrasing.
I find The Reg better for having a broad range of journalists happy to write for it, any minor differfence in phrasing is just part of the rich tapestry of life - except when it comes to lego/legos.
SCP
personal nouns : maths/lego
OP's comment- as I read it- was a joke implying that the government themselves were a bunch of criminals who didn't want the competition.
My comment wasn't a direct reply to theirs- it was a separate criticism of the same original phrase they'd drawn attention to. In this case, that the usual cliché about "sending a clear message to criminals", is- as always- tough-on-crime grandstanding whose "message" was only ever aimed at the electorate, not the criminals they wanted to pretend they were being tough on.
Agree or not, I'm pretty sure that's a somewhat different point and not just what "he said, you dummy".
The good news is that this falls into that new category of policy making so ably demonstrated by the Tories over the last decade, a "law in name only" which for any number of reasons (to take a recent example, when they conflict with the home secretary's personal beliefs) will serve no practical purpose.
Between all this and the arse grabbing, cock flashing, (alleged) raping and constantly interviewing themselves on GB News, one wonders how there's any time left for effective governance.
Between all this and the arse grabbing, cock flashing, (alleged) raping
I'm quite happy this this stuff is getting called out now, as they've probably been doing it with impunity for many decades.
"what's the world coming when you can't sexually harass your staff?"
No, this labour leader is the one that had all-night courts to deal with protestors
No - this is the Labour leader that failed to prosecute any number of well-known kiddie fiddlers, can't define what a woman is, and changes his "mind" every hour.....
It wasn't "the Tories" it was a single MP, who happens to be a Tory.
He took exception to the method being used to introduce the measure you mentioned as it was technically breaking the rules for making new laws.
He is quite well known for doing this as he is keen to ensure that correct process is followed. He did not object to the intent of the proposal itself.
Except he's also explicitly admitted that he lets bills proposed by his (inevitable right wing) friends in parliament sail through, so mysteriously it's only the progressive bills with a social justice angle that fall foul of his parliamentary games. He's a pompous bellend of the highest order.
"covering child safety, pornography, and protecting women and girls"
Get them to define what they mean by "girl", and explain the obvious sexism in not wanting to protect boys as well...
...that ought to tie 'em in knots and keep 'em busy for a while so the rest of us can get on with living in reality.
"If only we had a conservative party to rail against this."
You do - you just have a conservative party that's adopting more and more far right populist policies in order to desperately cling to power. In the past they'd have trashed the country then bunged the proles a 1p income tax cut to keep themselves in power but they have finally realised this isn't going to save them this time, so now they are trying to pretend that the readership of the Mail is enough to keep them elected.
I'm sorry I suspect he was well intended but this will not work, will not be enforcable and Parliament will shred it into meaningless nothing before it is done.
And our kids will still NOT be protected one iota and parents will continue to NOT educate their spawn
Not that I'm a fan of the monarchy, to put it bluntly. But I'm pretty sure that Prince Charles'... sorry, The King's "signing off" of this was the usual formality, and he wouldn't have had much involvement or choice in the matter unless he wanted to go beyond his supposed role as a figurehead and interfere in the democractic process. Something which would, in turn, have almost certainly resulted in a constitutional crisis.
> The King's "signing off" of this was the usual formality,
That is indeed the usual case, my understanding is that He is supposed to be the last bastion of democracy and if a law was clearly going to turn us into a Dictatorship or totally bypass parliament then He would be duty bound to reject it.
Perhaps the Online Safety Act, with even more restrictive successors to be on the cards too, will provoke a flurry of workarounds. At the simplest level, the UK will see major uptake of foreign (outside Five Eyes jurisdictions) VPN services. The other Internet technology, one rapidly maturing in ease of use, to gain a boost shall be 'darknets'.
The lead will come from bright young folk, starting with teenagers and college students. They will mature into people unwilling to submit to ridiculous diktat from, mostly, ignorant politicians. Privacy is becoming important in people's lives in respect to generally accessing information available on the Internet, but hidden behind paywalls or blocked by copyright rentier interests.
That's the nice thing about the law. When circumvention is a crime, we're all criminals
So the next time the Met accidentally shoot somebody for treading on the cracks in the pavement or possession of an offensive wife - they can produce evidence of VPN use to show he was a child abuser/terrorist/drug smuggler.
"At the simplest level, the UK will see major uptake of foreign (outside Five Eyes jurisdictions) VPN services. "
There's a lot of countries that you've rarely heard of with little in the way of natural resources that could earn some piles of money selling VPN services and numbered bank accounts.
Quote: "...the Act's language could still be interpreted in a way that precludes private communication..."
Really?
Me and my mates do private encryption. So the spooks are welcome to read our emails and our Signal messages.
All they will get out (even if Signal give them a "backdoor") is more encryption.
Triple encrypted AES...no public keys...no transmitted keys.....
Good luck with that in Cheltenhan or Fort Meade!
> Nice to know that violence is suggested as a way of subverting PRIVATE PRIVACY!!!! Well done!!!
Cut the hyperbolic, manufactured outrage.
It's bloody obvious that neither OP nor the cartoon they linked to are "[suggesting violence] as a way of subverting PRIVATE PRIVACY!!!!", and are mocking the blinkered failure of those who don't understand how something is likely to play out in the real world.
>Ha!........innocent until proved guulty.......
But you are guilty of failing to hand over your passwords when asked
"Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) allows law enforcement to demand a suspect hand over the password to encrypted files (which they refer to as “key to protected material”), or to provide unencrypted copies of the material that agencies are after. If a suspect refuses to do this, it is considered an offence and, under section 53 of the same law, carries the possibility of up to two years imprisonment, and up to five years if the case is one of national security."
I know they were told, but did they understand?
My MP is wilfully ignorant on many things. I know he's required to maintain that state in order to keep the Tory whip, but one would hope the concept of personal criminal consequences might get through.
(Eg in 2021 he told me that minimum wage care workers still have the advantage that they can be instantly deprived of 90% their income for two weeks by taking a free lateral flow test. Wilful stupidity.)
Anecdotally, the prevalence of actual criminality seems to be remarkably high within politics compared to other industries. Has anyone done a study?
"serious cases such as checking if people lived in the right school catchment area"
My youngest sister "lived" down the road at a friend of my mother's so she could go to a much better school. My other sister moved into a flat more expensive than she could really afford so my niece would be in a better high school. In both cases, the alternatives were rather seedy schools with mostly low-income students that had poor statistics when it came to standardized test standings.
You'll get 2 to 5 years in chokey if you don't hand over your encryption keys when requested:
"Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 part III (RIPA 3) gives the UK power to authorities to compel the disclosure of encryption keys or decryption of encrypted data by way of a Section 49 Notice. A suspect instructed to disclose keys can be prevented from telling anyone else about it, outside of their legal representative. Refusal to comply can result in a maximum sentence of two years imprisonment, or five years in cases involving national security or child indecency."
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000/Part_III
"You'll get 2 to 5 years in chokey if you don't hand over your encryption keys when requested:"
More sane countries, like the one I currently live in, do not obligue me to disclose my private encryption keys / passwords. They only try to steal it - but it costs a lot more.
It does leave open the question, do the police have to prove they are encrypted files, or do you have to prove they aren't ?
I used to work at a physics project that spent years generating insane quantities of random numbers mathematically indistinguishable from encrypted data
Leaving them to trawl through less well curated East European and Asian image boards instead.
Maybe British kids' Japanese and Serbian will improve as a result.
Brexit will only be complete when the Great British Internet ends at Dover.
Almost none of the Japanese stuff will past muster with 'protecting women and girls' in the second set of codes. We'll have to watch that edgy American stuff where they beat up homeless men instead, because presumably that's still okay.
> We'll have to watch that edgy American stuff where they beat up homeless men instead, because presumably that's still okay.
I'd expect that to remain legal, since I can easily imagine it being the sort of thing that the benefits/underclass-demonising Tories in the Home Office and beyond would get themselves off to.
"it will begin consultation on illegal harms (e.g. terrorist content .. etc.)"
I'm old enough to remember most Tories calling mandala & the ANC terrorists (& being filmed by the police & security forces when I attended demos opposing apartheid "white" SA govt back in the day)
.. Yet years later, plenty of tory politicians fawned over Mandela almost as if he was a latter day saint (which he certainly was not).
Terrorist will often be used for someone the govt (and / or their allies) dislike or is a risk to their geo political interests (look at current Israel / Palestine issue, where most of the world opposing the genocide inflicted on Gaza by Israel & a small number of countries (but pertinently, mainly the "western" countries) supporting Israel war crimes.
..the classic one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter scenario.
e.g. in the UK Hamas would is treated as a terrorist group, but not in e.g. China.
Lets go back to Mandela, given one of his famous quotes was
"We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians."
Then in the current UK political climate he would probably be branded a terrorist all over again.& the wheel would have turned full circle.
The bill is far too easily warped into a way to persecute anyone dissenting from the mainstream "approved" viewpoints as scope for all sorts of things to be deemed "illegal harms" nad used to suppress dissent (but ominously in step with recent anti protest legislation, lots of legislation that would not be out of place in a tin pot dictatorship) .
> Or that terrorist Gandhi, "one anorexic bloody loony in a loin cloth and we lost a whole sub-continent"
Water (1985) Handmade Films
One of those films you have fond memories of, but suspect would be a disappointment if you watched it again.
my comrade (Billy Connelly!) will not speak until he can say Cascara is free.
American: Is that a political posture or a speech impediment?
The phrase used to be "[...] demonstrates that we take [whatever] seriously". But many years back a very wise peer of the realm said "criminal legislation should never be enacted merely to demonstrate that we take something seriously". Same applies to 'sending a message'.
If laws that cannot be enforced effectively accumulate, the entire body of legislation falls into disrepute, and that actually encourages lawlessness. We lost the plot with the GDPR (which was actually reasonably enforceable if the appropriate effort had been made) but this one is pure Monty Python and can never be truly enforced. I envisage a plethora of interpretative issues and challenges but no concrete improvement in behaviours. And the predicted response of the criminals? Something on the lines of a two (UK) or one (USA) finger gesture.
BTW, Royal Assent is a pure formality, so it's not Charles' fault.
.
You would think that King Charles would personally be very aware of the importance of encrypted communications.
Exhibit A. One phone conversation, one sentence, which included the following word: "tampon".
(Yes, I know that the UK monarch does not in effect really have the power to decline to give royal assent to Acts of Parliament.)
Compliance obligations won't reverse the trend; they'll just pull out of the UK market if the UK goes nuts. So many nations think they have power over the megacorps; they don't. Those businesses are _protected_ from interference by US policy and governance, and an unhealthy number of purchased politicians.
The vast majority of people worry about being mugged in the street and robbed in their homes. It seems like so much effort is being put in by government to look after all of the children, they aren't paying much attention to the 'youths' hanging about on street corners after dark jus doin nuffin.
"This landmark law sends a clear message to criminals – whether it’s on our streets, behind closed doors or in far flung corners of the internet, there will be no hiding place for their vile crimes," said Home Secretary Suella Braverman in a statement.
Out of touch, clueless, fuck whit.
Its all about shaking down Internet companies. You pass a vague law that's easily violated and then you fine the entity megabucks (literally) for violating it, or rather for failing to catch the violator.
Easy money. Especially if you keep your penalties just low enough that it can be hidden in the 'cost of doing business'. (The only snag being that the UK may not represent enough of a business to be worth bothering with any more......)
> Easy money. Especially if you keep your penalties just low enough that it can be hidden in the 'cost of doing business'.
Well, 10% of global turnover dertainly can't be hidden anywhere, so, I think it's not unlikely that companies may come to the conclusion that...
> the UK may not represent enough of a business to be worth bothering with any more
And good luck to anyone looking for votes, who 's opponents slogan reads "Remember that instant messaging you no longer have?"
a) The major selling point of many messenger apps is that they are E2EE
b) Any kind of backdoor means it's no longer E2EE
c) Such a backdoor could either ...
c.1) Be implemented in UK clients only, necessitating that UK users can no longer talk to non UK users, or...
c.2) Be implemented globally, ending E2EE for ALL users of the app, or...
c.3) Not be implemented at all, because the provider simply stops offering their services in the UK
I have a hunch which option providers will chose when push comes to shove.
Seriously, that's what this ridiculous bill amounts to.
There is only one way to even begin to make this bill and thus online safety possible and that is to employ the same level of blocking and monitoring that China does.
Of course, there is another way - it's called education.
It's also called parental guidance.
When I was a nipper in the 1970's, our parents hammered home to us to NOT talk to strangers, to understand the warning signs, to be cautious - above all, to be street wise and savvy.
That was enough to keep most of us relatively safe - within reason.
It's a harsh world, bad things happen.
Education is the ONLY way to protect children online - to arm them with the know-how to avoid, as best they can, the bad things.
The moment any government decides they have a better plan, is effectively the end of democracy.
I think we're relatively safe right now though - the government we currently have are all about making noises rather than taking action.
The signing of this bill will be very much "we've done our job".
It will NEVER be enforced - it's just a bunch of hot air so government can say they've fixed it, simply because they say they have.
Actions are not required, just saying you're doing it is good enough.
Phew, for once, government incompetence saves the day...
"Education is the ONLY way to protect children online - to arm them with the know-how to avoid, as best they can, the bad things."
Parental monitoring is a good idea too. I was no angel when I was younger and often was pushing boundaries. Now there's the virtual world where "bad shit" is readily available. When I was young I couldn't visit an adult bookshop or cinema. I'd be grabbed by the collar on the way in. It was difficult (but not impossible) to buy beer and spirits. These days you can have all the pr0n you want just by clicking the yes box when a web site asks if you are over 18. Want some weed? Order online and have it delivered. Beer, again, order online and have delivered. The delivery driver has a quota to meet so isn't going to fret about ID if you will just scribble something on the signature line. YMMV, not available in all locations, consult your physician before doing anything, have your attorney on speed-dial.
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