Theresa May promises a British version of Iran's Halal Internet

boing
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With you on that one. My own father is very intelligent (he used to teach efficient factory design to Germans) but supports the encryption ban and refuses to listen to my two decades worth of experience in the IT industry when I try to explain it’s an incompetent, damaging piece of legislation that will make it nigh-on impossible to implement even the simplest, globally-recognized best-practice security schemes in this country. He is actually willing to take the career and passion for computing he himself kindled and supported in his own son for 30+ years and burn it on the altar of terror-fear.

I’m not proud of my father anymore.

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o thank good… i mean smash the patriarchy!

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Deep in my gnarled lefty heart I have this fantasy of some whey-faced censorious heartless, brainless, soulless husk of a supposed human being screetching for a Great Firewall and all the coders, all the network engineers peering at their self-appointed taskmaster, and then, as one, getting up and leaving.

You code it. What? You can’t? You can’t because you possess no skill of any good to anyone on this Earth? You can’t because all you do is lie?

Well fancy that.

—[quote=“anon24181555, post:34, topic:101276”]
The first thinker to advocate for the primacy of the national interest is usually considered to be Niccolò Machiavelli.
[/quote]

Don’t diss Machiavelli, given the ambient morality of his time, the man was a saint. And his devotion to the service of his city is something we can only dream about in our own elected officials.

Ah, but at least the trains all run on time.

(But they don’t go anywhere.)

I’m thirty, and my fifty five year old parents seem to get it, while some of my peers seem not to. I don’t think it’s age.

Alas, no. It used to be decentralized and immune to this sort of thing, at least in theory, but as time goes by it gets more centralized by the second. Cow Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft (and they don’t take much in the way of cowing) and you have most people’s internet world in a vise. Add to it intimidation of hosting providers and, already, the ability of TCP/IP to route around it all is weakened.

When techies like me wail about shadow-bans and the like people chant ‘freeze peach’ and throw things at us because, yeah, the first people this sort of thing gets tried on are odious toads. But the iron rule of censorship tools is if it can be used, it will be abused. No exceptions, no stays of execution, no good guys, not even when they are on your side. They never are. I firmly believe that censors and their ilk are what they used to call hostis humani generis, common enemies of us all.

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Davis is the fig leaf of a nasty unpresentable party. No wonder he was handed the brexit hot potato, he’s expendable.

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I’m not just talking about the TCP/IP node architecture which interpreted censorship as damage, but all the ways since devised to tunnel through and around and inside that architecture. If you want it, you can still get outside news and dissident discussion and porn in China or Iran – heck, in the Castro family’s Cuba where infrastructure was virtually non-existent they would sneakernet in nice chunks of the Internet on hard drives and find interesting ways of distributing it. Only a totalitarian hermit kingdom like North Korea can clamp down to the extent needed.

But for your run-of-the-mill authoritarian, it’s not happening. Yes, there’s serious latency and inconvenience and sometimes required technical chops to get to the open Internet, but those who want it badly enough will find their way there. And yes, governments will push back and try to enforce their laws and try to shut things down using their own technology, but that’s an arms race they’ll lose in the end given all the free and accessible tools that build tools that build other tools that are already out there and used by hackers.

The real issue is the fact that 80%+ of Internet consumers would voluntarily limit their experience to Facebook and Twitter and other centralised (as you say, easily cowed and regulated and censored) walled gardens without a law requiring it. Even so, a huge number of those people will still want their porn, and that’s enough to create demand for holes in the system to get at it.

It’s the dessicated May’s prudish demand that Britons forego their recommended daily allowance of dirty pictures and videos that ultimately will make this wall useless for the Tories’ hidden purposes.

Authoritarians who want to benefit from the Internet are better advised to read Huxley rather than Orwell, forego the walls and look to Putin’s Russia: porn galore (with tut-tutting lip service to the concerns of the EO Church) and a lack of enforcement against gay porn from the outside, despite it being technically illegal; a constant free-flowing flood of disinformation and fake news to bury the legitimate and true, which is also allowed to flow; and centralised companies like Vkontakte and Yandex in thrall to the Kremlin in the rare cases they must prevent truly damaging information from reaching the undiscriminating masses. You don’t have to build a wall around your country’s Internet or enforce clumsy censorship when you can create an atmosphere of FUD inside a seemingly open Internet.

Satellite connections, yagis aimed at nearby offshore nodes, sneaknets if need be. Encrypted and TORed as necessary, meshed inside the country for distribution. Whatever it takes to deliver the nudie pics.

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I certainly agree that most politicians don’t understand the internet. They, like many boards and senior corporate managers don’t have a clue how much commerce is completely reliant on the internet. I’m not talking Amazon or EBay either. I work for a financial institution and losing the internet as it is now would shut us down.

At best if such a scheme was implemented we would end up with some kind of software/hardware bandaid that big tech companies would sell as “totally secure”.

I think it more likely that politicians like Theresa May don’t give a damn about the evils of the internet. They are simply trying to use people’s fears and ignorance to get them into power. Plus I often wonder if they aren’t using a large sweeping concept like this that they know will get cut to ribbons just to get some small boring-looking piece of legislation passed that will feather their nest by allowing some telecom Corp to sell out their customers.

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I think that may be an over-generalization. I was introduced to BASIC in high school, probably around 1972, then Fortran in college shortly thereafter.

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You think the British are weird now, wait till they all switch to Tor.

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Diss him? He was one of the main good guys in my 1995 screenplay

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The ultimate irony being that david davis and tom watson originally brought the snooper’s charter to the attention of the european court of justice which they subsequently ruled illegal. They both get into positions of power, along with shami chakrabarti, and they can’t wash their hands of it fast enough. No fucking principles.

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I’m sure you father has other sterling qualities.

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She’s very religious in a downlow kind of way, no talk about GAWD and JEEBUS but plenty of Puritan high collars and censorship.

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Harper was the same way, very stealth dominionist.

I used to think that personal beliefs were irrelevant for a politician, but when they keep those beliefs hidden in order to push the political goals of that belief, well, whip them out and let’s see them!

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I think the calculations were made, and the opposition is so weak they can get away with (freedoms) murder

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Yeah, I don’t like over-generalising, hence the “elements of” qualifier.

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True, but neither of those things is the Internet, or social networks. I’ve known math PhDs who can program in BASIC or Fortran or maybe even C++, but aren’t that computer literate compared to an average person. I’ve also known quite a few people who were tech savvy up into their thirties, but then fell behind the curve.

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Why stop there? You could include email, or anything posted for personal communication. Only non-social businesses would be exempt.

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It probably exempts the alt-right. That’s anti-social media.

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Can’t we just replace Theresa May with a different May? Like maybe of the Brian or James variety?

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