Posts by Infused

Record labels gang up to sue AI music generator duo into utter oblivion

AI is clearly going to lead to an evolution of copyright law & it will likely be decided by one of these court cases.

US standards agency reports back on just how good age verification software is

Re: How does it cope if a child has an older friend ...

Problem is western governments are extremely keen on age verification as a means to protect minors from unsafe internet content. This happening even in the US at the state level where things like the First Amendment & Section 230 don't seem to deter state legislatures from passing internet safety laws. Age verification will be everywhere online in the next decade.

UK's Investigatory Powers Bill to become law despite tech world opposition

Internet Connection Records

Basically they want to see what people are browsing in real time (or that's how it was sold to politicians).

Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned

Verification Required

There are also rumours that users will have to verify themselves with a video & government ID, though it might just be Premium users. Twitter/X is definitely going downhill. Running it clearly isn't rocket science.

Now Apple takes a bite out of encryption-bypassing 'spy clause' in UK internet law

Re: Ofcom....and partial solutions to personal privacy.....

The government wants the scanning to happen on your devices to avoid the problems encrypted traffic brings.

Re: So, we're back to square one again

Theatre censorship took 231 years to repeal: 1737 to 1968.

FOSS could be an unintended victim of EU crusade to make software more secure

Re: Hurrah for Brexit

The UK's Online Safety Bill will likely affect GitHub & other free software projects that allow user interaction. The next decade is probably going to see a lot tighter regulation of the internet & a lot more bureaucracy around software development.

Scanning phones to detect child abuse evidence is harmful, 'magical' thinking

Re: If people in the 1960s knew what computers and the Internet did to our freedom

The UK has hardly been a bastion of freedom. The Parliamentarians regularly opened letters under Cromwell to search for plots in coded language. The British government took fright during the French Revolution period & regularly prosecuted people for seditious libel. In the 19th century knowledge taxes (e.g. taxes on paper) prevented the widespread publication of cheap radical newspapers to a working class readership. During both world wars censorship of newspapers & letters was enforced. I'm sure I remember reading during WWII doctors reported conversations they had with their patients so the government could gauge the mood of the nation.

British intelligence recycles old argument for thwarting strong encryption: Think of the children!

Re: Child porn existed before the internet

The US Post Office photographs the outside of every envelope sent: 160 billion letters in 2013.

Re: "Her Majesty's Government has no intention of picking up the tab"

The irony is that Tory MPs use WhatsApp groups extensively to gossip & plot.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Re: Hoping

Ironic as WhatsApp is the Tories' preferred messaging app.

Re: Three Impossible Goals In Search Of An Attractive Political Posture!!

They want client-side scanning on the device. I think that defeats most encryption.

Re: Three Impossible Goals In Search Of An Attractive Political Posture!!

You can Johnson is an adult because he's wearing a suit.

Re: The British Internet....

Neil Brown (a tech lawyer on Twitter) who's been blogging about this for several years thinks the internet will resemble Teletext.

Even Politicians Recognise the Bill Isn't Perfect

Even Lucy Powell admitted in a Twitter thread it may need more amending. The Times today had an opinion piece stating it shouldn't be scrapped, but then at the end said the new PM should start again & get it right (so does that mean they want it scrapped?) My guess is politicians know it's not a good piece of legislation, but since the last failure to enact age verification for porn in 2019 under the Digital Economy Act, they don't want to end up being accused of failing to act by campaigners & look like they've wasted years talking without result They'll look foolish if they give into the "free speech" lobby. Even if the bill is dropped (which I doubt), something will replace it.

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

Re: Will it happen?

She's still Culture Secretary & the third reading of the Online Safety Bill is next week.

Re: We have your children

The proposal may actually refer to client side scanning on your computer or phone, using perceptual hashes. So it'd be searching all your images on your hard drive. This is similar to the EU proposal for chat control. They want this plus detection of grooming conversations. Apparently they would accept 10% false positives.

Re: Will it happen?

The Online Safety Bill's third reading is next week & despite the government implosion, if is likely to still become law.

California's attempt to protect kids online could end adults' internet anonymity

Re: I can see this working

Exact same thing in the UK is being proposed. Indeed, I believe this is the inspiration for the Californian legislation. The internet is going to become unusable.

The Real Web 3.0

Reading things like Quora you'd think the internet will just keep getting better & better. This doesn't reckon with the approaching tsunami of government legislation. The idea that the internet is evil & that freedom to say or read or interact with others is dangerous seems to have taken root amongst ruling elites. So, in response, just about every western country is introducing similar laws revolving around age verification, screening of content before it's uploaded, the profiling of users, undermining encryption, etc. When Eric Goldman says it'll finish casual browsing, I believe that's the point of these laws, to make using the internet a lot less inconvenient. In the UK, it's the Online Safety Bill. The worst case scenario here I've seen suggested is that the Britnet becomes a Teletext-style information service (if anyone remembers that) with minimal interaction between users. While I doubt the internet will disappear, I do think the online freedoms we've all gotten used to are going to disappear in the next five to ten years. You can probably say goodbye to all those creative communities based around anime & fan fiction; they'll be no more viral videos of sea shanties on Tik Tok or ice bucket challenges. I don't think this is hyperbole.

Govt suggests Brits should hand passports to social media companies

Claire Fox is pretty much the only Lord who had any idea about the impact of this bill.

Re: What is "social media"?

Critics & analysts of this bill have being saying this since the bill was introduced in last year's Queen's Speech. It's going to blow apart the British internet; indeed all that may be left will be Big Tech (e.g. Facebook), newspaper websites, Gov.uk & Porn Hub. The regulatory burden could drive to the wall 300,000 micro & small online businesses according to one report I saw (the government reckons it'll affect 24,000 providers). The platforms themselves will probably be damned if they do & damned if they don't remove content. The whole bill is a massive disaster that could wreck the British tech sector for years to come, all driven by a ridiculous moral panic whipped up by a declining newspaper industry vengeful over lost ad revenues & lost readers.

I believe the social media details are now compulsory in the ESTA.

Re: They want a passport ...

Biometrics of your face is what Yoti are using to verify porn users' faces.

Re: Is there an online petition against this stupidity?

On the Parliamentary petitions page.

Re: Yeah sure, what could possibly go wrong with this idea!

I'm pretty sure you can find most of that info on Wikipedia.

Re: Crazy Idea

The Online Safety Bill has been pitched to the public as holding Big Tech to account, but it really affects the entire internet (gaming, messaging apps, search engines, etc.) The only real exemptions (as far as I can tell) are the government & newspapers (which tells you a lot about which interest groups lie behind it). A lot of these kinds of small websites (e.g. hobby discussion groups that aren't hosted on a major site like Facebook) are likely to disappear as a result due to the compliance threshold. It seems to me ID checks will become the norm for accessing any kind of content. Overall the British internet will become less user-friendly by design.

Re: 'F' that for a game of 'where's my directorship'?

That does seem likely from what I've read. Every website will have to prove they're child-friendly or establish the age of their users.

Full-time internet surveillance comes to Cambodia this week

The Internet is Dying...

The great dream of an open internet seems to be fading away. 2022 looks like a pivotal year to me as we have a regulatory backlash in the west against the tech giants with "online safety" being the current buzzword. Maybe because we've had dire warnings before that if something like net neutrality ended then it would be the death of the internet people aren't paying as much attention. But the EARN IT Act looks like it'll seriously disrupt the fabric of the internet in the US. The UK looks like we're getting our own national firewall with the Online Safety Bill (a seriously messy piece of legislation). The EU are questioning the legality of data transfers to the US & want to scan everything for illegal stuff. Australia & Canada are going down the online safety route as well. Literally every country in the world seems to want to outdo each other on how far they can go in restricting free expression.

Re: How long...

My understanding is these still require ground stations to work & I'm sure this would be strictly controlled if Starlink comes to Cambodia.

UK.gov threatens to make adults give credit card details for access to Facebook or TikTok

Re: Dead Cat

Bluetooth messaging apps (Briar & Bridgefy) would work perfectly in a setting like a school as they can form a mesh network. I can see them becoming the future of messaging as they don't rely on WiFi or mobile signals. Not so good if you live in a remote area far away from others. Of course they'll probably put Bluetooth jammers in schools then.

Re: One word.

How long will Tor be able to operate though if the EARN IT Act passes?

Re: Dead Cat

Having talked to some of the early critics of this on Twitter they did feel that VPNs could well be legislated against. Though it could be stopping payments to them more than anything else. Certainly the government was meant to be launching an advertising campaign against encryption costing half a million pounds. But I also read someone's blog yesterday that said that this would be easy to get round just using website's IPs rather than their names. The sheer scale of the internet simply militates against this kind of censorship. This won't be a Great British Firewall as Ofcom won't be given the resources of the Chinese authorities. If pop-ups annoyed you, then you'll hate the safest place to be in the world online. It'll make it a real hassle to get online for the ordinary & businesses will have hoops to jump through in terms of compliance.

Internet Society condemns UK's Online Safety Bill for demonising encryption using 'think of the children' tactic

Re: Criminals will continue to crime...

Criminals did create their own encrypted network: Encrochat. The authorities still managed to infiltrate it & bust hundreds of criminals. It's more likely criminals use more traditional, surveillance proof methods nowadays.

Verified: UK.gov launching plans for yet another digital identity scheme

This Wouldn't Be Anything to Do with the Online Safety Bill?

While not explicitly stated, age verification is likely to play an important part in the government's Online Safety Bill. Vendors are pushing the technology hard to receptive polticians. It seems likely the government will want widespread age verification deployed all across the internet, not just porn.

Campaigners warn of an 'algorithm-driven censorship' future if UK Online Safety Bill gets through Parliament

Re: Look at last time.

I'm not sure where we'll end up with this. One of the experts opposing this (e.g. lawyers specialising in technology, IT specialists, etc.) have stated that the language used in the bill indicates the hand of the security services & that the stated intention of the bill isn't the actual intention. It doesn't mention implementing verification or banning encryption, but both are likely strategies. With age verification you might end up with a de facto ban for under-18s. Australia has potentially mandated facial recognition. I don't foresee the banning of user-generated content or its sharing, but it will doubtless have a massive impact as companies seek to avoid huge fines. The pre-emptive scanning & filtering of private messages is likely as well (they're covered by the bill). The safeguards for free expression are weak at best. Overblocking will become the norm. People suggest a Great Firewall of China-style scenario, but it could be more like the South Korean internet. Porn is illegal & while can be found, it's a game of whack-a-mole. You need ID to use a lot of websites. There was a scandal a few years ago where people's biometric data got stolen.

Re: End of internet for all

Yes. They'll have a cosy relationship with Ofcom (who recently rejected Paul Dacre, former Daily Mail editor as chairman, but appointed an ex-Amazon employee as chief technology officer). I've mentioned it in another reply but a former Ofcom employee was discussing this in the Regulate Tech podcast. He said that this bill will almost certain affect the more "egregious" platforms (e.g. your Bitchutes & your Gabs). The big boys are already 95% compliant. I also listened to an Internet Society webinar & one participant thought that the tech giants would welcome this as it stops them doing the wrong thing all the time. Plus regulation tends to favour the incumbents & stifle start-ups. I certainly think the silence of Silicon Valley is indicative.

Re: Look at last time.

I listened to a podcast with a former employee of Ofcom discussing the OSB (the Regulate Tech podcast). He said that, yes, it is fully expected that medium-sized companies will probably not be able to afford the compliance costs & will likely withdraw from the UK. The bill's extra'-territorially reach is extraordinary. Any kind of service that can be accessed by someone from the UK will be in scope. Expect massive geoblocking. Using a VPN? If enough people use them to evade it, expect further government action. That's what he replied when I asked him on Twitter. He did highlight the risk of this accelerating the splinternet as other countries do the same though.

Re: Look at last time.

From what I'm seeing on Twitter from the experts & other interested parties is that safe tech companies are lobbying the government hard about verifying ID online. It won't just be age verification for porn; it could well be ID verification for all websites deemed not child friendly. The Australians have just passed their own version of the Online Safety Bill (they even called it that) so hastily it had spelling mistakes. They may well require passports & driving licenses to join social media. Yet their version of the law isn't as far-reaching as the UK's. This really is a frightening piece of legislation. It is really hard to understate how profound the impact would be to user-generated content (since that's what's affected most by this) online.