Originally published at: UK passes "online safety" bill | Boing Boing
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Hmmm. Why don’t they “think of the children” by forcing their builder and rentier cronies to remove the fire hazard cladding from the non-Fire Code compliant high rise apartment towers first?
I remember reading all sorts of British dystopian science fiction novels as a kid in the 1960s about an overbearing and intolerant government monitoring and oppressing its citizens.
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You read Hansard?
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one step closer to the Great British Firewall
of course they were going to use “won’t somebody think of the children”, the emotional argument that cant be rebutted
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The thing that no-one wants to really think about yet, because it’s a colossal pain in the ass, is the prospect of being unable to trust any platform that continues to operate in the U.K., because it’s all of them
I’m not sure which platform you could trust before this.
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… more like 1984, I expect.
Of course! When all your other reasoning has been shown publicly to be nothing but lies, damned lies, and outright grifting for whoever stands to profit from the pile of fecal matter pretending to be a law, fall back on that excuse and it’ll all be better. /extreme sarcasm
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Not satisfied with passing that bill. Home Secretary Suella Braverman has moved seamlessly on to accusing Meta of protecting paedophiles by its plans to enable end-to-end encryption in its messaging systems.
Braverman isn’t very smart. But she is thoroughly nasty.
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Yes, the answer to suicidal ideation is to just hide ways to kill yourself. Not properly funding mental health care and making sure people who need it can get it. This crap is as effective as criminalizing suicide, but it sounds like ‘doing something’ and is a lot easier than actually offering people the support they need, so of course that’s what they decide to do. 
-signed, a mentally ill person who can’t afford a therapist because it’s not covered by medicare.
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Some concession to not breaking encryption, for now, but the bill still allows a huge amount of leeway to do just that when they see fit. It’s still an absolute dog’s mess of a bill that started with good intentions and mutated into this draconian legislation (yet again) drafted by clueless ministers who think tech companies just need to “nerd harder”* to give them the keys only they can use.
*Credit: C. Doctorow.
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They always bang on about kids “seeing porn on their phones” and, to my knowledge, NSFW is autoblocked unless the handset user proves they’re 18+. I play www.torn.com (for my many sins) and it was blocked until I could prove I was 18+.
Or are they using their parent’s WiFi?
Of course shutting down access to your satellites for a country at war is fine. As is spreading misinformation. Or any of the other things our Corporate Overlords do. But I, a child free middle-aged bloke, can’t play a game where I fly to the UK and buy up stuffed toys to sell at my bazaar for Not Real Money? Jings, no!
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That should fill people with horror, considering how the cabinet think that Ron DeSantis is wonderful and want to copy him.
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That would cost the Government 20-30 billion on top of all the other money the NHS needs, if they were to do it properly. I doubt Starmer’s Labour would do it, so there is no chance that the Tories would.
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I am aware that it’s not politically feasible, but this law will do literally nothing to help mental health or prevention of suicide despite them selling it as such in the article.
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The manufacturers of Signal and some similar privacy services have flagged they might have to stop providing service in the UK. It would be cool if they took the step of denying access to their service by all politicians supporting this bill.
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Maybe the anger I felt when typing it didn’t translate to text. I am past caring what is politically feasable.
I have failed to get NHS treatment for my PTSD for 20 years, partly because of a lack of funding, party because of transgender broken arm syndrome. This is the second time I have fallen through the cracks in Britain’s social care system, once under Labour and once under the Tories. I managed to hold things together, but my GP retired one year ago and I am convinced that her replacement is a TER. He is trying to remove drugs from my perscription one by one and I fear that my hormones will be next on the list.
I never expected anything good from the Tories, they have always been bastards, but I feel betrayed by Labour. They will never have the backbone to do what is neccessary. I didn’t become an anarchist-communist through immaturity, I became one because I don’t expect the government to really care about the most vulnerable people here. Someone persuaded me to join the Labour party during the last days of Corbyn, told me I could make a difference, I now think it was one of the worst mistakes of my life.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to rant at you about this, but I’ll put it up as an example of how fucked the UK is.
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