9 ms·
Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ChoGGi 4mo agoWe're #1!
- panny 4mo agoMass surveillance is bad, until I'm in charge of it. -- Parents demanding "age verification" laws
- sph 4mo agoIt's not parents demanding 'age verification' laws.
- gruez 4mo agoThat's not supported by the polling. >From everything you have seen and heard, do you support or oppose the recent rules requiring age verification to access websites that may contain pornographic material?* >80% support https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/52693-how-have-britons-reacted-to-age-verification https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/52693-how-have-britons-rea... >The Essential poll found majority support for a range reforms to improve online safety including: [...] enforcing age verifications for pornography and gambling sites (79%); enforcing age verification for social media (76%) https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/07/australia-esafety-law-changes-age-verification-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/may/...
- xyzzy_plugh 4mo agoSupport is not the same thing as demand.
- gruez 4mo agoThat just seems like a cheap way to wriggle out of any inconvenient poll numbers. Most people support access to abortion? Well how many people actually demand it? Most people support medicare for all? Well how many people actually demand it?
- xyzzy_plugh 4mo ago[dead]
- john_strinlai 4mo agoit really difficult to take this polling at face value. average people typically hear only one side of the argument: "age verification will stop kids from accessing harmful sites". they don't hear about all of the potential downsides, knock-on effects, chilling effects, etc. unless they are part of niche groups like HN. and even if they do, in passing, they often lack the technical knowledge to really understand the implications. i.e., they are consenting, but it isn't informed consent. i imagine there would be an interesting picture if these numbers were presented in buckets by occupation, or by results in tech competency test, etc. (similarly, as an example, my opinion in a poll about some complex medical procedure would not be very informed. i would be relying solely on what i hear on the news or read in a quick article, with no fundamentals to really assess and form an opinion of my own)
- amarant 4mo agoThis is a problem with current implementations of democracy. It's free elections, but it's not informed elections. The average voter has very little clue about what they are voting for. Arguably it's impossible to know in a representative democracy. Not that I know how to do it better, but it's definitely an issue, possibly one that could be solved somehow.
- fsflover 4mo agoProbably with better education.
- blharr 4mo agoRepresentative democracy was supposed to be the solution for this. i.e. "I dont know what the best way to do age verification should be, but it's probably important"... and then voting for the candidate that has shown ability, intelligence, and a good nature to look at the issue in your best interest and handle all the edge cases without screwing you over. What we've lost is the integrity of this system entirely. No candidate can truly be trusted to implement an age verification system without first getting a check from big tech
- antipurist 4mo agoAre you quoting the same polls that simply didn't offer respondents any way to say "I'm against all of it"? Dishonest polls do not demonstrate popular support. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/User:Louis/Manufacturing_support_for_age_verification https://consumerrights.wiki/w/User:Louis/Manufacturing_suppo...
- gruez 4mo ago>Are you quoting the same polls that simply didn't offer respondents any way to say "I'm against all of it"? https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/07-may-2024 https://essentialreport.com.au/reports/07-may-2024
- diordiderot 4mo agoThere was no option to select no! Only which age you wanted the ban to start
- gruez 4mo agoSee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674572
- PxldLtd 4mo agoThis feels a bit out of touch. These policies have a lot of public support here in the UK. All of our parent friends are lauding it despite my complaints.
- kodisha 4mo agoWhat story are they telling them self to justify this?
- mhitza 4mo agoBy ignoring key implementation details. That's what has been happening in Romania with this topic for the last year. Constant polling and reporting of opinion, and always phrased in terms of effect instead of how they aim to do so. Once properly informed "do you want to go through an ID check on all websites and apps that you use?" people wise up quickly to the issue. But state sponsored media is pretty adamant about moving this topic forward.
- ryan_n 4mo agoYou sure about that? The average person couldn't care less about privacy and would gladly hand over a significant amount of data to whatever company asks. The sentiment on hacker news isn't the norm.
- vlian2088 4mo ago>Parents demanding "age verification" laws I keep seeing this claim, but where is it coming from?
- beached_whale 4mo agoThis parent wants a form of that that doesn't require identity disclosure. Like zero trust assertions. Without that, the risks are too high.
- esikich 4mo agoJust talk to an average person rather than a tech nerd.
- vlian2088 4mo agoI don't think asking the average person whether they would consent to constantly have their face scanned to access the Internet would yield the result you believe it would, no matter the excuse. "parents" are not do-I-look-like-I-know-what-a-jay-peg-is boomers you and others who make this claim believe them to be. the people who are having children now grew up with iPhones. to them, the Internet is not that newfangled thang they heard about on CNN/Fox. so, show me the data. not a poll with vague ass questions like "are you concerned about your children's safety on the Internet?". I want to see the percentage of people who answer yes to an unambiguous question like "do you consent to submit your ID and/or scan your face to access any random website ~~to fight terrorisds~~ ~~to protect our democracy~~ to protect your children?"
- esikich 4mo ago"Won't somebody think of the children" is as old as time and works. That's why it's used so often. If it were ineffective at convincing people to give up their rights, it wouldn't be a thing.
- vlian2088 4mo agoand what I'm saying is that I'm not seeing the data to back up that claim. California, for example, has all those propositions they vote on, about various things they're allowed to decide. the recent age verification bullshit, however, doesn't seem to have been put up to a vote.
- noosphr 4mo agoYes, I really want pedophiles to know just how old my kids are.
- basket_horse 4mo agolol as if they don’t have a birth certificate already
- dismalaf 4mo agoIt's not shown on the internet. Age verification laws essentially broadcast it.
- jmclnx 4mo agoIt is from a VPN Company, so YMMV. But I do agree there is surveillance happening, but the amount of data is way too much to fully examine. Makes one wonder if this is one of the reasons the US Gov. (and others) are so into AI.
- beached_whale 4mo agomullvad has been one of the good ones.
- qwertox 4mo agoIt's just a matter of time until police will ask their digital avatar of you if you're becoming a problem, how your week and month and year has been, what you're up to next week.
- john_strinlai 4mo ago>It is from a VPN Company, so YMMV. mullvad has one of the best, if not the best, track records when it comes to vpns over its nearly 2 decades of being in business. it feels wrong to lump them under the same "a VPN Company" label with the likes of Hola VPN or whatever, despite it being technically true.
- tamimio 4mo agoYou don’t need to wonder, it’s a fact that the interest and investment in AI is primarily driven by the ability to mass surveillance and other mass XYZ. In Canada, they straight up tell you that the AI will be used to profile you, from every transaction you do all the way to analyzing your sentiment > AI could analyze public sentiment on social media and other platforms to gauge public opinion. https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-government/digital-government-innovations/responsible-use-ai/consultations-ai-strategy-federal-public-service-what-we-heard.html https://www.canada.ca/en/government/system/digital-governmen... Brace yourself!
- goalieca 4mo agoVPNs are great and all but many that are well advertised here in North America are a huge source of attacks, abuse, etc. so it’s pretty desirable just to block them. They sometimes have agreements with residential ISPs to get around the bans.
- dataviz1000 4mo agoThe largest provider of residential ISP, BrightData, has installed them on smart TVs made by Samsung and LG, millions of them, unknown to the people who purchase and use the TVs.
- qwertox 4mo ago[dead]
- vivzkestrel 4mo ago- does anyone have actual proof that surveillance does not effectively curb terrorism or something along those lines? - i keep seeing the same arguments everywhere "ThEy WaNt To CoNtRoL Us" etc - how do you propose catching terrorists then?
- sevenzero 4mo agoHow much of this is actually to "catch" terrorists? Its mostly for surveillance, intimidation, suppression. Usually it's the state that defines who a terrorist is, and usually terrorists are ALL people opposing the current regime.
- DrScientist 4mo agoCase in point - in the UK you can currently be put into prison for a long stretch under terrorism charges for holding up a sign with just 4 words.
- deaux 4mo agoLast I checked River->Sea is 6 words. Unless it's a phrase about a different subject, but I can't imagine since the UK only tends to arrest sign holders as part of protecting Bibi's interests.
- DrScientist 4mo agoYou don't get prison for that. It starts "I support" and ends action. It's just the most recent and egregious misuse of anti-terrorism laws - doing the sort of thing that they claimed it never would be used for when they were brought in. Secret courts, evidence the defence isn't allowed to see nevermind challenge, judges trying to restrict what the defence can say, long prison terms for simply holding up a sign. The treatment of Julian Assange was a warning of what was to come. These are worrying trends.
- deaux 4mo ago
- egorfine 4mo agoreddit started asking KYC yesterday. You (and me) can bitch all you want, but reddit has well prepared for us whining and being sad will change nothing. Mark my words: KYC will be required on HN in about two years. Not because dang will want it, but because that's the direction the world is going to.
- simonask 4mo agoIt's weird because... I'm not the customer on either Reddit or HN. I'm the product.
- egorfine 4mo agoYou can become a customer on reddit by purchasing subscription. I did. I like reddit. Doesn't matter. They want your passport.
- bsenftner 4mo agosure, I'll just right on your service, with the ability to see and sell everything I do...
- Cider9986 4mo agoVPNs shift trust from your ISP to the VPN provider. I trust Mullvad 100x more than my ISP, so it's a good decision to use Mullvad and it benefits my privacy. It's not like your ISP or Mullvad can see content of sites, either they can just see the DNS requests. What ISP sees without a VPN: news.YCombinator.com, apple.com, Wikipedia.com What ISP sees with a VPN: Mullvad server What VPN sees when you use it: news.YCombinator.com, apple.com, Wikipedia.com
- z3t4 4mo agoYou also need to trust the root certificates that they don't give key access to the VPN or ISP
- Cider9986 4mo agohttps://certificate.transparency.dev/ https://certificate.transparency.dev/
- raverbashing 4mo agoNote that depending on how you're using your VPN you need to explicitly set it for DNS queries to be made over the VPN
- speak_plainly 4mo agoGovernments are casting a wide a net but it all seems aimed at a foreign influence and espionage Cold War going on. The thought of using this for crime in most countries is tertiary and the real reasons for implementing these systems are so embarrassing to their respective governments that they will rarely mention what's actually going. In Canada there has been two recently large omissions, one is the Chinese government influencing Canadian elections and the other was Indian spies killing Indian immigrants on Canadian soil. Maybe this will all result in mission creep, but the upside will be getting to pay for things with your face.
- cyanydeez 4mo agoAmerica, however, is definitely trying to tear down the wall between domestric and foreign surveillance.
- swordlucky666 4mo ago[flagged]
- sys_64738 4mo agoBritain will win for sure.
- forshaper 4mo agoI've very sympathetic to this message, but "not even the Pentagon’s employees can expect to have their privacy respected" doesn't make sense. When you sign up, you sign up to hand everything over, including your private life.
- GL26 4mo agoSpoiler alert : Singapore won the race years ago. Cameras everywhere, and mostly : the singaporian civilian population is educated to surveil peers so that they don't commit incivilities. Here is an article about it : https://gcctvms.com/smart-city-surveillance-singapore-camera-system-deterrent/ https://gcctvms.com/smart-city-surveillance-singapore-camera...
- Cider9986 4mo agoI need a list of countries not to visit. So far I have UK, China, Singapore. But maybe I should accept less rights when traveling.
- highfrequency 4mo agoWhy UK?
- ranger_danger 4mo agoAll the ones that force you to give up passwords would be on many peoples' list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law?lang=en https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law?lang=en Ireland... I'm disappointed.
- Cider9986 4mo agoSuch stupid laws. What's next, you want me to say I did the crime if a judge orders it! It's such a shame that there's no solution for deniability on SSDs because of wear leveling. There's been no court cases about plausible deniability with VeraCrypt, so we don't have any real insight into how it would play out.
- 0x_rs 4mo agoThe internet, as it was before the one-way ratchet started to close, feels more and more like a lightning in a bottle that nobody in power wants repeating ever again. Everything in the past couple years has been going towards the centralization into a small number of services, walled wastelands that require you forfeit any kind of anonymity to even browse, tightly coupled to the countries they operate in, and especially for tech corpos, practically an extension of surveillance agencies through PRISMesque programs. Soon enough (and already the case, if you're one of the unlucky ones) you won't even be able to browse it without explicitly allowing Google to track you on every single website you try to access through your Google-approved, constantly monitored handheld device, linked directly to your identity. Commercial VPNs are not a solution, they're merely kicking the can down the road, and shrinking the number of people that will complain once they will, finally, come for them too, first by requiring strict accountability to providers and age verification, then outright banning any that do not comply.
- tim333 4mo agoOn the other hand, while there is more monitored walled garden stuff, there is more stuff in general. I seem to be seeing more varied and often anonymous views than in the early internet when there was less good content up there.
- TestINGNG 4mo agoThe interesting question is whether non-Western countries will develop their own internet governance models that are neither US-dominated nor China-firewall style. The .ng ccTLD (Nigeria) is a real, functional namespace that offers an alternative to .com. The internet was supposed to be distributed. Maybe the future is genuinely distributed governance, not a single blocs approach.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoIf you're not fabricating your own silicon, you are OWNED.
- Cider9986 4mo agoLock in, that's not true. https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Backdoor&since=&until=&min_faves= https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/search?f=tweets&q=Backdoor&si...
- othomp 4mo agolong video, but... https://youtu.be/jmTwlEh8L7g https://youtu.be/jmTwlEh8L7g the presenter now works at intel.
- MomsAVoxell 4mo agoWhat point are you trying to make? Its not obvious from the link.
- tamimio 4mo agoThat’s why I said it before, only delusionals think we live in democracy, there’s no democracy, no freedom, no transparency, none of the values you hear daily are actually in use, it’s just a facade to trick people and maybe to make them relax their measures to maintain their own privacy compared to non democratic ones. In fact, it’s better to be straightforward and be oppressive where people might fed up and revolt at some point rather than those sneaky tactics, coupled by making people lives very expensive to live where “privacy” becomes an auxiliary commodity, plus giving the public some distraction like concerts and other carrots after all that whipping. It’s very accurate to assume that ALL US based tech companies are part of mass surveillance, no matter what promises you hear, companies can be forced to cooperate without the public knowledge. Same with European ones, as the article stated, they are not that far, so don’t assume much even when you see the cliche “based in Switzerland!! Trust us give us your money”. The only safe way is to host your own, maintain your own, encrypt at rest and while transferring on your own, trust no one and nothing, and it’s a good start.
- lenerdenator 4mo agoThe country that really refined mass surveillance in the digital age, China, has seen tons of investment from people who want to see big returns and for the workers to be kept in line (by force if necessary) and many countries want that sort of "prosperity" for themselves, which means sucking up to the investor class, which includes people like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison. If you do business with totalitarian states, there's a good chance you become one.
- josefritzishere 4mo agoThis is very unwelcome.
- ranger_danger 4mo agoWhy did so many countries all start trying to do this at once?
- tim333 4mo agoResearch came out suggesting social media was harming kids, along the lines of https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic-ebook/dp/B0CGWS3JQ6 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childho... then politicians thought what to do - put restrictions on kids using social media.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago"There are two types of mass surveillance. Commercial, which you can read about here. And mass surveillance carried out by states and rulers." It may be ambiguous to refer to internet surveillance by so-called "tech" company intermediaries as "commercial" surveillance because the intermediaries monitor all internet use, not only commercial use. In other words, surveillance of non-commercial activity. There is no way for the public to verify how the data collected is used, hence restriction on data usage, cf. restriction on data collection, becomes pointless HN commenters seeking to defend so-called "tech" companies in the past have made nonsensical analogies to, for example, banks that have traditionally tracked credit or debit purchases But these issuers did not monitor card holders' non-commercial activity They had profitable business operations outside of surveillance The so-called "tech" companies generally don't. Whatever non-surveillance operations they conduct are subsidised by surveillance. Perhaps this is what is meant by "commercial" surveillance. Surveillance to generate profit Generally no one pays anymore for what these companies mainly produce: software It is a sad state of affairs when software, e.g., web-based software, is given away for free as bait to lure in surveillance targets But that's the entire Silicon Valley "business model" in a nutshell. They wish they had something better Enter the new "AI"
- VortexLain 4mo agoIt seems like in 5 years using stolen ID scans as a basic privacy and anonymity tool will be as common as using VPNs today. What a wonderful world.
- MetroWind 4mo agoFor many years I've been saying to people that the world will all copy China because it's just too good to resist. Reactions from people were usually along the lines of "we have laws", "believe the system", "we are a democracy", etc. lmao