The U.K. Parliament is pushing ahead with a sprawling internet regulation bill that will, among other things, undermine the privacy of people around the world. The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backd...
Oh believe me we will, but we have to wait for them to call an election (likely autumn 2024). They're roundly despised and they know it. They're just milking as much as they can before they're flung out of Parliament.
I might be cynical af but I believe China is a market they can't ignore, but the UK, well...they can afford to send a message there. With some quick google-fu it looks like Apple sells more iPhones about every 8 days than it sells in the UK in a year. That's comparing 2023 numbers for China to 2019 numbers in the UK for the record, I'm too lazy to look past the first few links really, and doubt that math would change enough to ruin the point.
They also wouldn't pull out of the UK, they would likely just revert to SMS there in the messages app rather than give the UK a back door into their encryption.
In a selfish way... I'd like for the UK to do this and for it to go horribly horribly wrong for them. Maybe that would finally get the US reps to get their heads out of their butts so l don't have to keep signing petitions and writing essays about why weakening encryption is a horrible idea.
@Dark_Arc this is generally referred to as accelerationism and I think it's a cromulent ideology.
If you think the only way to get to a sane world is to achieve and pass through the insane one first, then doing it as quickly as possible makes sense.
If they force messengers to implement backdoors into the protocol, I doubt they will limit it to UK users. Also, conversations with UK users won't be private anymore even if the other party is from another country.
Client-side scanning might not be enforced for other accounts but when the infrastructure is there other governments will want to use it, too.
That definitely won't happen. Full E2EE apps like Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp aren't going to risk the worldwide backlash that would come with implementing backdoor access. The UK market isn't that big and definitely not worth it, they'd pull out of the UK entirely first.
There are so many trends with technology that seem to favor another 1930's Europe situation. The 1940 film "The Great Dictator" describes it pretty well, and it is sad how much love and compassion seem to be out of favor as people march more and more towards mechanized hate-driven systems of society. I really hope a pro-humanism civil rights movement takes hold, like Martin Luther King Jr's kind of teaching, but it seems to not happen that a popular person like that comes to the top. Even a Carl Sagan type person with mass popularity to much of what Sagan shared in his books and speeches would be a good direction.
Just two years ago the politicians fearmongered that quantum computers will break every encryption without delay. This bill speaks quite different story.
They will... when they finally get invented. For now though, law enforcement will have to do annoying things like "following the word of law" and convincing judges who clearly do not understand the national security implications of kids going to the wrong school to give them warrants.
Or we could all just vote for people that aren’t corrupt… or at least, yet!
If you don’t know who isn’t corrupt, vote for independents that understand technology. I know it’ll never happen so things will continue to go downhill but gees, what do governments have to do to get people to wake up? 🤬
Hell, i’ll be happy if people just stopped believing ‘for the sack of the children’ crap and realise its all about controlling the population! 🙄🤦♂️
we could all just vote for people that aren’t corrupt
Audiences who flock to liars and deceivers seems to be trending in bad direction. Business leaders, politicians. What Cambridge Analytica unleashed as mass psychology tactics in 2014 may be very difficult to undo.
corrupt… or at least, yet!
Things like term limits seemed to help stop some of the problems of people corrupting once they got into positions of power. But now it seems crowds of more and more people are choosing pre-corrupted, cheering on corruption.
I get the importance, but the global implications are being slightly overstated. It may be the thin end of the wedge in terms that it may lead other governments to follow suit. But all that will happen in the short term is that many IM clients will withdraw from the UK. Apple will probably just disable iMessage in the UK.
Welp I don't live in the UK so there is not much I can do. I would encourage any UK citizen to protest this immediately. If it still passes openly break the law to make the UK government into a laughing stock