Originally published at: UK's sweeping digital censorship bill becomes law | Boing Boing
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Psst. Don’t worry. Just remember HS2.
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I’m a board member of a small non-profit social VR game, and we have at least two users from UK. Some parts that bill are impossible for us to implement and would be illegal in EU due to privacy laws. We have no legal presence in UK and the non-profit is registered in Germany. I wonder if we need to block UK completely or are their fines and prison sentences unenforcable outside of UK?
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I, for one, have full confidence that a government that can’t keep bullying out of the cabinet will be able to keep it off the internet. It just seems so plausible.
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It’s complicated because of [yes it’s that word again] Brexit; but broadly court judgements from the UK may be enforceable in the EU - but there are lots of reasons where the judgement might not succeed. Some information about enforcement in various EU nations here:
Always worth remembering - it will be slow, expensive and national courts will get involved; the UK law is going to be pretty much unenforceable inside and outside the country.
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“… an historic moment that ensures the online safety of British society not only now, but for decades to come.”
Narrator: It did not. Nor did she believe that it would. She was simply reading a script that a PR flack had handed her, possibly written by ChatGPT. In reality …
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As always with laws that enable surveillance and censorship, consider the UK a test market for American policy.
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And European Union too:
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I wonder if these laws were lobbied by large social media corporations. If burden of staying compliant with them and especially developing the required scanning algorithms is extremely high, it would grant them monopoly on communications.
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Now come on, she is fully qualified to speak in an authoritative manner on all aspects of technology because of her degree in - erm - history and politics and a previous career working for [squints] Marie Claire magazine and the WWE.
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What’s grimly ironic about the EU’s overall approach to online regulation is the combination of deep distrust of, and period fines against, hegemonic American outfits and things like the chat regulation or “cyber resilience” acts that more or less imply(if they don’t already imagine) a more or less China-style arrangement between EU regulators and the comparative handful of (all hegemonic, substantially American) outfits who have compliance budgets big enough to hold up their end of a fairly complex and demanding relationship.
I can’t tell if they are clueless and not listening; or if they have despaired of the possibility of a market not dominated by hegemonic vendors and have decided that further entrenching the ones they have is an acceptable price for gaining a measure of control over their behavior.
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Cyber resilence act worries me a lot to be honest. It may effectively make open source software illegal, especially borwsers and operating systems.
I can’t tell if they are clueless and not listening; or if they have despaired of the possibility of a market not dominated by hegemonic vendors and have decided that further entrenching the ones they have is an acceptable price for gaining a measure of control over their behavior.
I think this is about eliminating competition to products like Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows.
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I’m starting the timer to see how long it takes the TERs to weaponise this.
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I’m sure that you’ll be able to get category Critical Class 2 compliant EUnix from Oracle, Amazon, or IBM(probably even from Microsoft; though only for Azure VMs); see, robust competition!
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It also means the same thing for web browsers and webengines if I understand properly.
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Browsers are Critcal Class 1 rather than 2(never you mind about whether it’s your browser or your OS that is the entry point you need to worry about more 90+ percent of the time…); but as best I can tell it covers a lot of the things as Critical Class1 or 2; and covers basically everything either at a lower level or because they include CC1 or 2 elements(eg. the giant swath of software that has an embedded browser engine because that’s an easy tool for cross-platform UI painting that has plenty of available devs).
I’m honestly a little curious where Europe is planning on getting software under those sorts of requirements.
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My previous post was hidden as spam, so I will try to post it again without links to any articles. These can easily be found online.
What I was saying is that in European Union a law is being worked on that is very similar to Online Safety Bill, and just as privacy-invasive, including scanning of all private communications. The bill is getting a lot of criticism. I’m sorry if posting about it is not allowed - in such case please delete this message, but there is still time to contact representatives about it and the harm it will cause, so I think it’s really worth mentioning here.
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