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Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? When government or industry makes i

Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? When government or industry makes it nearly impossible for consumer needs to be met we inevitably see a grey and black market spring up to meet those needs. My prediction is that if legislation like this becomes widespread we'll see a freely distributed application rise to prominence among a gaggle of others, it'll dominate the chat and social market until even grandma is using it and the establishment will have a right proper freak out as other social media giants implode and everyone is communicating anything they want with zero oversight from the government or industry. This is roughly how I remember the Napster affair going when DRM was pushed hard by the recording industry, it eventually collapsed but not before dealing a massive blow to the status quo and forcing a transition to streaming.

namlem 4y ago
It will probably just lead to a rise in VPNs to access services that block British users.
- antonymy 4y ago
  My immediate thought as well. As this law will apply to ANY service available to UK users the only feasible solution for smaller websites and app developers will be exclusion to avoid liability. So UK users will simply start using VPNs to by pass region blocks.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    Ah, the familiar HN bubble, where people instinctively think of "simply start using VPNs" as the solution. No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.
    - iasay 4y ago
      I don’t think that’s the case. I know someone who has no involvement in anything technical in his entire life and is using VPNs and torrents fine. He can surely work it out if demand requires it.
    - chongli 4y ago
      Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. They even rotate among many different VPN services when the ones they’re using get blocked. I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.
      - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
        >Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. For what it's worth, in my experience when I was in China it was trivial to bypass the firewall using a VPN service.
    - vorticalbox 4y ago
      > If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.
    - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
      Are there any YouTube users who still haven't heard of a VPN? They seem about as niche as TikTok at this point.
      - flir 4y ago
        Funnily enough I had to explain what a VPN is to one of my kids this weekend. But... if the need's there, people figure it out (as he's doing right now - for him it's something gaming related).
    - oxfordmale 4y ago
      My twelve year old son told me very casually a few months ago that he had installed a VPN to bypass the schools internet filters. It was clearly no big deal to him, it sounds like that is what all his friends are doing. At home they are of course doing this to bypass any parent filters to allow them to look at certain content.
  - corobo 4y ago
    Sucks to be us idiots that happen to be working on tech businesses in the UK. I wonder if I can put an IP block on my own site and just ignore it all too. Dumbass country.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Congratulations Britain, you are now the Peoples Republic of China.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer This horribly written law can easily be interpreted to apply to ISP's as well - so if the ISP is allowing these peer-to-peer systems that allow "unsafe" content to be shared, they're liable for it too, or they have to shut down the peer-to-peer systems. Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.
- cowtools 4y ago
  Sure, but there is some limitation to what they could feasibly restrict. Tor with WebRTC bridges?
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    You could conceivably implement a fully encrypted p2p social network over WebRTC within the browser. You would obtain the app by simply visiting a website that hosts it making it nearly unblockable since anyone could stand up a page. Public key crypto could allow you to verify your identity or send private messages across the network. The hardest part is establishing the initial connection but since this can be done with a variety of methods I'm sure a sufficiently creative person could come up with something fun and easy for people to use. Maybe some form of steganography where you post an image to your social feed and others can point their phone's camera at it and get the SDP offer and then post the answer as a reply or something. A more automated method would probably be better but that's left as an exercise to the reader.
    - cowtools 4y ago
      I've looked into this the other month. There are a number of obfuscation networks that have tried this to some extent (including IPFS and GNUnet), but I am yet to find a network that works exactly as you've described: where you can just access a "tor web portal" in your browser or something. I think an obstacle would be preventing fingerprinting inside a non-fingerprint-proof browser. You might be able to do this if you ported something like tor's fingerprint-proof browser to emscripten and have it render to an HTML canvas! So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network. [0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/ P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general. Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users. If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts. So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2] [1] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel [2] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm
guerrilla 4y ago
> Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? Simple, because if that because popular, new laws will be drafted to ban all of that from all app stores for circumventing this or some other reason.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  There are other methods of distribution than app stores. People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day, they downloaded it from a website.
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    > There are other methods of distribution than app stores. And all of them are completely irrelevant because only us nerds would even know about them let alone how to use them. > People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day Those days are long dead.
    - guggleet 4y ago
      There isn't some magic bar of comprehension or indecipherable encoding. People will gravitate to acquire what they desire, regardless of prereqisites.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The logical next step would be to require devices sold in the country to only be able to use legal app stores, where "legal" is defined as "complying with the requirement to block any E2E apps without backdoors". Everything is already in place for this, both hardware- and software-wise.
    - guggleet 4y ago
      What, and mandate you have some authorization to maintain your ability to access software or to use electronics of any sort that doesn't have a compliant application store?
zhte415 4y ago
Facebook will be easier than what you mentioned. Napster took off because it meant not spending 10 or 15 pounds or dollars or euros on a CD. THhe DRM came later, and what really killed DRM was the change in business model to iTunes with individual songs, the transformation of the 'star' from a face on a CD to a bigger product.
getSood666 4y ago
[dead]
fguerraz 4y ago
Don't worry, blocking p2p is the next step and is extremely easy to do. China has done it already and it's very effective: * Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use) * Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government. Problem solved.
- darepublic 4y ago
  Autonomous pirate satellite internet
  - swayvil 4y ago
    High altitude balloon laser net
  - jerf 4y ago
    Men with guns. Yeah, they can't 100% win. They don't need to. In fact, even if they did 100% win, they'd still find reasons to need to crush some people just to keep people reminded of who has the guns.
    - omginternets 4y ago
      The “men with guns” bit cuts both ways, though.
      - jerf 4y ago
        Not in the UK.
        omginternets 4y ago
        I wouldn’t be so sure. Riots don’t require guns to have an effect, as the UK has seen quite recently. Point being: an analysis that draws its conclusion from the presence of state violence is incomplete if it doesn’t also consider violence on the part of citizens/subjects.
stickfigure 4y ago
More likely it will result in crippling the domestic UK tech industry while everyone else in the world ignores it. I really don't see most countries extraditing someone for the high crime of "let british users access a website without verifying their age".
- solarkraft 4y ago
  This has been said about the EU, but the market has proven to just be too big to ignore. It could also be the reverse (see authoritarian countries), with international players leaving the market and local ones filling the space.
  - rarec 4y ago
    The EU's a bit bigger than the UK by a fair margin.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Probably by about 5x. If the UK makes things difficult, they can just be ignored.
      - toyg 4y ago
        It's actually 7x (65m vs 450m).
        citrin_ru 4y ago
        Depends on what consider a proxy for market size. EU GDP to UK GDP ratio is about 4.5
  - stickfigure 4y ago
    By "ignore it" I mean "ignore the law", not ignore the UK market. At some point the idea that countries can regulate the internet outside their borders falls apart. The US succeeds in enforcing its gambling laws WRT Americans, but that only works because other nations agree to do the enforcement. I just don't see that happening here. So maybe the UK becomes a no-travel zone for anyone in the worldwide tech industry? That would be sad, but it's a plausible outcome.
__alexs 4y ago
Because the bill will never pass. It will be quietly swept away when new Tory leader is elected.
- flir 4y ago
  I dunno. There's always a chance it's Braverman.
muyuu 4y ago
at some point e2e encrypted comms will be grounds for getting swatted don't think this is a bridge too far, covering your face in the presence of public CCTV got you fined/arrested the week before covering your face with feel-good masks was compulsory don't @ me telling me it's stupid, I know it is, but this govt doesn't believe in free and private communications and it's working hard in progressively eradicating what's already out there, with full support from the main opposition party
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Fortunately, where there is a will, there is a way. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791730031X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791...
  - muyuu 4y ago
    only a tiny fraction of the people will bother with the immense overhead of steganography it would much more practicable to resort to alternative channels outside the internet, like mesh networking using direct comms (typically ad-hoc wifi modes and other radio protocols to avoid the liability/detectability of cabling), sneakernet, IP over Avian Carriers - those are all cumbersome and rather slow typically, but still orders of magnitude better than trying to pass stuff over ISPs using steganography
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      With network enabled SoC's costing $1 and associated charge controller, battery and solar cell coming in around $5 I could definitely see a future where people roll out their own clandestine internets in order to route around the centralized and regulated internet. The simplest form of this is a single access point set up as a piratebox allowing people within range to connect and download/upload files. It could be scaled to a large mesh network covering an entire city.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Peer to peer needs a business model. E2EE social media involves storing tons of large binary blobs (images and video) for people, and they need to cover that cost somehow. Since it's already been established that social media is supposed to be free, a lot of people aren't going to want you to charge for it, no matter what advantages you have over other market participants.
gravitate 4y ago
It could mean choosing a life of crime if the regulations are too draconian. Now that your legit business enterprise can’t succeed because of Stasi tactics by the UK government, you are forced to go underground and build something to sidestep the measures.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." (A certain Cardinal Richelieu). The truth is that we already are all violating laws, every day we live, mostly without being aware of them. That is exactly why there are so many of them. The only thing more draconian laws do is make people decide actively that they commit them.
mfincham 4y ago
"We will just use technology to bypass this bad law" is a very convenient position for a technology-focused group to take. It feels weirdly privileged to just say "ah we will abdicate ourselves from the problem by using ever more complicated technology" rather than working to improve the legislation to benefit everyone.
- maskil 4y ago
  Sometimes technology is the way out. Sometimes the only way to fix the system is to create an alternative that circumvents it. Tools matter.
- sircastor 4y ago
  I don't think this sounds weirdly privileged at all. The trouble is people will solve problems typically through the path of least resistance. It's much easier to find legal loopholes than it is to try and comply. And contrary to the rhetoric, it's expensive and uncertain to simply buy law-making through lobbying. Consider how hard it is in the United States to lay new fiber (and this is an imperfect metaphor). The ideal solution would be to get legislative branches to solve the telcos oligopoly problem. That has not and is not working. So what's happening? Wireless internet over LTE, and 5G being deployed everywhere. Route around.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Deploying 5G doesn't involve laying new fiber?
- etherael 4y ago
  If you were taken hostage and had access to a teleportation device that would extricate you from the situation, but was extremely difficult to use such that the vast majority of people would be unable to do so, would you be ethically obligated to risk your life making it more easy to use so more people could get out, or negotiate with the hostage takers, rather than just making use of the escape avenue you have clearly available to you? Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future. I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.
joshspankit 4y ago
I certainly hope something results in a renaissance of truly private social spaces. Yes there were risks, but zero oversight is how we built the internet byte by byte. Anyone know if that “two computers talking directly to each other” patent has expired yet? Hard for companies to make those apps while patent-encumbered
aahortwwy 4y ago
"Well, the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian Prime Minister. This is their attitude. They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that. They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt. The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control. TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.
- etherael 4y ago
  While you're absolutely right that this is their attitude, what they will do, etc. The laws of mathematics steadfastly remain consistent despite your latlon and it doesn't matter what random idiot politician thinks about it. This too will remain constant.
  - aahortwwy 4y ago
    That doesn't really matter. The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too. It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.
    - etherael 4y ago
      Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.
mathieubordere 4y ago
Which appstore is going to allow apps that implement these protocols? They will just be forbidden. Back to square 1.
pSYoniK 4y ago
Fully agree with your point on the grey market aspect of things. I'm also curios about the actual implementations that they hope to see not to mention how they would hope to regulate "internal" chats and other internal communications channels which are, as far as I know, not in the scope of this bill. I had some thoughts on some of the many issues this type of thinking result in - https://psyonik.tech/posts/thoughts-on-the-uk-online-safety-bill/ https://psyonik.tech/posts/thoughts-on-the-uk-online-safety-... TL;DR for the article: 1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised 2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented) 3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work 4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope 5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc). 6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect. This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.

namlem 4y ago

It will probably just lead to a rise in VPNs to access services that block British users.

antonymy 4y ago
My immediate thought as well. As this law will apply to ANY service available to UK users the only feasible solution for smaller websites and app developers will be exclusion to avoid liability. So UK users will simply start using VPNs to by pass region blocks.
- jfk13 4y ago
  Ah, the familiar HN bubble, where people instinctively think of "simply start using VPNs" as the solution. No; some tiny minority of UK users may do that, but the overwhelming majority will just use whatever services are "approved" (follow whatever rules they have to, to stay in the market) and remain available by default.
  - iasay 4y ago
    I don’t think that’s the case. I know someone who has no involvement in anything technical in his entire life and is using VPNs and torrents fine. He can surely work it out if demand requires it.
  - chongli 4y ago
    Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. They even rotate among many different VPN services when the ones they’re using get blocked. I see no reason UK users couldn’t do the same. All it takes to get grandma on a VPN is for an enterprising grandson to set her up.
    - JacobThreeThree 4y ago
      >Loads of people in China use VPNs every day to bypass the great firewall and access foreign sites. For what it's worth, in my experience when I was in China it was trivial to bypass the firewall using a VPN service.
  - vorticalbox 4y ago
    > If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Are there any YouTube users who still haven't heard of a VPN? They seem about as niche as TikTok at this point.
    - flir 4y ago
      Funnily enough I had to explain what a VPN is to one of my kids this weekend. But... if the need's there, people figure it out (as he's doing right now - for him it's something gaming related).
  - oxfordmale 4y ago
    My twelve year old son told me very casually a few months ago that he had installed a VPN to bypass the schools internet filters. It was clearly no big deal to him, it sounds like that is what all his friends are doing. At home they are of course doing this to bypass any parent filters to allow them to look at certain content.
- corobo 4y ago
  Sucks to be us idiots that happen to be working on tech businesses in the UK. I wonder if I can put an IP block on my own site and just ignore it all too. Dumbass country.
LAC-Tech 4y ago
Congratulations Britain, you are now the Peoples Republic of China.

commandlinefan 4y ago

> won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer This horribly written law can easily be interpreted to apply to ISP's as well - so if the ISP is allowing these peer-to-peer systems that allow "unsafe" content to be shared, they're liable for it too, or they have to shut down the peer-to-peer systems. Which again, is the point - to turn the internet into the easily regulable cable TV that they already understand.

cowtools 4y ago
Sure, but there is some limitation to what they could feasibly restrict. Tor with WebRTC bridges?
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  You could conceivably implement a fully encrypted p2p social network over WebRTC within the browser. You would obtain the app by simply visiting a website that hosts it making it nearly unblockable since anyone could stand up a page. Public key crypto could allow you to verify your identity or send private messages across the network. The hardest part is establishing the initial connection but since this can be done with a variety of methods I'm sure a sufficiently creative person could come up with something fun and easy for people to use. Maybe some form of steganography where you post an image to your social feed and others can point their phone's camera at it and get the SDP offer and then post the answer as a reply or something. A more automated method would probably be better but that's left as an exercise to the reader.
  - cowtools 4y ago
    I've looked into this the other month. There are a number of obfuscation networks that have tried this to some extent (including IPFS and GNUnet), but I am yet to find a network that works exactly as you've described: where you can just access a "tor web portal" in your browser or something. I think an obstacle would be preventing fingerprinting inside a non-fingerprint-proof browser. You might be able to do this if you ported something like tor's fingerprint-proof browser to emscripten and have it render to an HTML canvas! So far Tor has implemented WebRTC[0], but that's just for bridging to their main network. [0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/ P.S. I've also considered the "decentralized p2p social media" idea myself, but mostly because I believe the ideas we have currently behind online voting, ranking and moderation are completely at odds with IRL discussions which are P2P and based on "forwarding" ideas to known peers (friends, family, community members, countrymen) rather than posting and ranking content with anonymous peers (which are susceptible to Sybil attacks). The fact that so much discussion takes place on corporate-owned forums (Including this one, regardless of how benevolent ycombinator may be) presents a major threat to democracy in general. Instead of "liking" or "upvoting" a post on a centralized forum, why not "rehost" or "forward" a post on a decentralized forum: essentially seeding it like in BitTorrent or "pinning" it in IPFS. "Followers" of a user donate their storage and bandwidth to them, combating bureaucratic attacks like delisting and DDoS against popular users. If you could port IPFS to run completely in a browser you would have this complete "pseudo-social-media" functionality. They have something called "IPNS" where instead of giving someone the hash of a file like in BitTorrent's DHT, you could give them a public key which you use to sign the latest version of a file that is to be fetched. The Public/Private keypair could represent a user's identity, and the file in this case could be a blog or account page which is updated with new links to the user's posts, or links to other user's posts. So if you ported IPFS to work within a web browser, it would just be a matter of implementing a user-interface. Boom, social media solved. You could maintain parity between desktop and web versions by using libraries like libdatachannel[1] and datachannel-wasm[2] [1] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel https://github.com/paullouisageneau/libdatachannel [2] https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm https://github.com/paullouisageneau/datachannel-wasm

guerrilla 4y ago

> Can someone explain why this won't result in a renaissance for peer to peer and e2e encrypted chat/forums/social media etc.? Simple, because if that because popular, new laws will be drafted to ban all of that from all app stores for circumventing this or some other reason.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
There are other methods of distribution than app stores. People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day, they downloaded it from a website.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  > There are other methods of distribution than app stores. And all of them are completely irrelevant because only us nerds would even know about them let alone how to use them. > People didn't buy their copy of Napster from GameStop back in the day Those days are long dead.
  - guggleet 4y ago
    There isn't some magic bar of comprehension or indecipherable encoding. People will gravitate to acquire what they desire, regardless of prereqisites.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The logical next step would be to require devices sold in the country to only be able to use legal app stores, where "legal" is defined as "complying with the requirement to block any E2E apps without backdoors". Everything is already in place for this, both hardware- and software-wise.
  - guggleet 4y ago
    What, and mandate you have some authorization to maintain your ability to access software or to use electronics of any sort that doesn't have a compliant application store?

zhte415 4y ago

Facebook will be easier than what you mentioned. Napster took off because it meant not spending 10 or 15 pounds or dollars or euros on a CD. THhe DRM came later, and what really killed DRM was the change in business model to iTunes with individual songs, the transformation of the 'star' from a face on a CD to a bigger product.

getSood666 4y ago

[dead]

fguerraz 4y ago

Don't worry, blocking p2p is the next step and is extremely easy to do. China has done it already and it's very effective: * Force every service provider to register their IPs and domains (for CDN use) * Force every ISP to do stateful firewalling and block every attempt to establish a new connection unless the destination IP is on a whilelist maintained by the government. Problem solved.

darepublic 4y ago
Autonomous pirate satellite internet
- swayvil 4y ago
  High altitude balloon laser net
- jerf 4y ago
  Men with guns. Yeah, they can't 100% win. They don't need to. In fact, even if they did 100% win, they'd still find reasons to need to crush some people just to keep people reminded of who has the guns.
  - omginternets 4y ago
    The “men with guns” bit cuts both ways, though.
    - jerf 4y ago
      Not in the UK.
      - omginternets 4y ago
        I wouldn’t be so sure. Riots don’t require guns to have an effect, as the UK has seen quite recently. Point being: an analysis that draws its conclusion from the presence of state violence is incomplete if it doesn’t also consider violence on the part of citizens/subjects.

stickfigure 4y ago

More likely it will result in crippling the domestic UK tech industry while everyone else in the world ignores it. I really don't see most countries extraditing someone for the high crime of "let british users access a website without verifying their age".

solarkraft 4y ago
This has been said about the EU, but the market has proven to just be too big to ignore. It could also be the reverse (see authoritarian countries), with international players leaving the market and local ones filling the space.
- rarec 4y ago
  The EU's a bit bigger than the UK by a fair margin.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Probably by about 5x. If the UK makes things difficult, they can just be ignored.
    - toyg 4y ago
      It's actually 7x (65m vs 450m).
      - citrin_ru 4y ago
        Depends on what consider a proxy for market size. EU GDP to UK GDP ratio is about 4.5
- stickfigure 4y ago
  By "ignore it" I mean "ignore the law", not ignore the UK market. At some point the idea that countries can regulate the internet outside their borders falls apart. The US succeeds in enforcing its gambling laws WRT Americans, but that only works because other nations agree to do the enforcement. I just don't see that happening here. So maybe the UK becomes a no-travel zone for anyone in the worldwide tech industry? That would be sad, but it's a plausible outcome.

__alexs 4y ago

Because the bill will never pass. It will be quietly swept away when new Tory leader is elected.

flir 4y ago
I dunno. There's always a chance it's Braverman.

muyuu 4y ago

at some point e2e encrypted comms will be grounds for getting swatted don't think this is a bridge too far, covering your face in the presence of public CCTV got you fined/arrested the week before covering your face with feel-good masks was compulsory don't @ me telling me it's stupid, I know it is, but this govt doesn't believe in free and private communications and it's working hard in progressively eradicating what's already out there, with full support from the main opposition party

orangepurple 4y ago
Fortunately, where there is a will, there is a way. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791730031X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209044791...
- muyuu 4y ago
  only a tiny fraction of the people will bother with the immense overhead of steganography it would much more practicable to resort to alternative channels outside the internet, like mesh networking using direct comms (typically ad-hoc wifi modes and other radio protocols to avoid the liability/detectability of cabling), sneakernet, IP over Avian Carriers - those are all cumbersome and rather slow typically, but still orders of magnitude better than trying to pass stuff over ISPs using steganography
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    With network enabled SoC's costing $1 and associated charge controller, battery and solar cell coming in around $5 I could definitely see a future where people roll out their own clandestine internets in order to route around the centralized and regulated internet. The simplest form of this is a single access point set up as a piratebox allowing people within range to connect and download/upload files. It could be scaled to a large mesh network covering an entire city.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Peer to peer needs a business model. E2EE social media involves storing tons of large binary blobs (images and video) for people, and they need to cover that cost somehow. Since it's already been established that social media is supposed to be free, a lot of people aren't going to want you to charge for it, no matter what advantages you have over other market participants.

gravitate 4y ago

It could mean choosing a life of crime if the regulations are too draconian. Now that your legit business enterprise can’t succeed because of Stasi tactics by the UK government, you are forced to go underground and build something to sidestep the measures.

DocTomoe 4y ago
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." (A certain Cardinal Richelieu). The truth is that we already are all violating laws, every day we live, mostly without being aware of them. That is exactly why there are so many of them. The only thing more draconian laws do is make people decide actively that they commit them.

mfincham 4y ago

"We will just use technology to bypass this bad law" is a very convenient position for a technology-focused group to take. It feels weirdly privileged to just say "ah we will abdicate ourselves from the problem by using ever more complicated technology" rather than working to improve the legislation to benefit everyone.

maskil 4y ago
Sometimes technology is the way out. Sometimes the only way to fix the system is to create an alternative that circumvents it. Tools matter.
sircastor 4y ago
I don't think this sounds weirdly privileged at all. The trouble is people will solve problems typically through the path of least resistance. It's much easier to find legal loopholes than it is to try and comply. And contrary to the rhetoric, it's expensive and uncertain to simply buy law-making through lobbying. Consider how hard it is in the United States to lay new fiber (and this is an imperfect metaphor). The ideal solution would be to get legislative branches to solve the telcos oligopoly problem. That has not and is not working. So what's happening? Wireless internet over LTE, and 5G being deployed everywhere. Route around.
- astrange 4y ago
  Deploying 5G doesn't involve laying new fiber?
etherael 4y ago
If you were taken hostage and had access to a teleportation device that would extricate you from the situation, but was extremely difficult to use such that the vast majority of people would be unable to do so, would you be ethically obligated to risk your life making it more easy to use so more people could get out, or negotiate with the hostage takers, rather than just making use of the escape avenue you have clearly available to you? Why is obeying idiotic unenforceable laws any different to this when it comes to technology, aside from the obvious of the stakes being much lower? Although the way the world is going, that may not be a given in the future. I'd argue it may even be worse when it comes to cases of governments who are nominally democracies making idiotic laws for their populaces, because at least theoretically, those populaces could have voted in such a way that said idiotic laws would never come to be, and thus their misery, the stupid laws that they're subject to, etc, are somewhat self inflicted, and for those that do dissent it makes even more sense to feel zero obligation to the greater populace given that. I personally don't really buy this because in my experience, what people want in a democracy has very little with what they end up getting, and the same people that will scream blue murder about the right to self rule when it comes to a national group, will scream just as loud when it comes to an individual in the exact opposite direction.

joshspankit 4y ago

I certainly hope something results in a renaissance of truly private social spaces. Yes there were risks, but zero oversight is how we built the internet byte by byte. Anyone know if that “two computers talking directly to each other” patent has expired yet? Hard for companies to make those apps while patent-encumbered

aahortwwy 4y ago

"Well, the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian Prime Minister. This is their attitude. They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that. They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt. The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control. TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.

etherael 4y ago
While you're absolutely right that this is their attitude, what they will do, etc. The laws of mathematics steadfastly remain consistent despite your latlon and it doesn't matter what random idiot politician thinks about it. This too will remain constant.
- aahortwwy 4y ago
  That doesn't really matter. The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/ No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too. It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.
  - etherael 4y ago
    Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.

mathieubordere 4y ago

Which appstore is going to allow apps that implement these protocols? They will just be forbidden. Back to square 1.

pSYoniK 4y ago

Fully agree with your point on the grey market aspect of things. I'm also curios about the actual implementations that they hope to see not to mention how they would hope to regulate "internal" chats and other internal communications channels which are, as far as I know, not in the scope of this bill. I had some thoughts on some of the many issues this type of thinking result in - https://psyonik.tech/posts/thoughts-on-the-uk-online-safety-bill/ https://psyonik.tech/posts/thoughts-on-the-uk-online-safety-... TL;DR for the article: 1. Any technical solution will be imperfect and can potentially lead to hundreds if not thousands of cases being raised 2. Difficulties in clearing your name in the case of false flags (not to mention how this would actually be implemented) 3. No clear guidance on how such a system would work 4. A death to encryption services since any system that would entail some for of media transfer would be in scope 5. A grey/dark market place for custom software that will still allow encrypted communications run on VPSes/servers that might restrict UK access but could be accessible through VPNs that exit outside of the UK and thus wouldn't fall under the legislation (I think, feel free to correct me on any of these points ofc). 6. A host of other issues from overworked law enforcement trying to deal with the flood to the migration of individuals involved in any illegal activities far far deeper and thus more difficult to detect. This is a clear as day example of what happens when people with no understanding of these topics (and many others, I'm sure economy, education and law enforcement is managed by people with no real world experience in said fields...) are allowed to legislate.