The dysfunction on the corporate side just gets swept under the rug, only in extreme cases does it get brought to the attention of the public.
Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring.
It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects.
Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.
Having watched these people when I do my own shopping, it made me realise, if i ever needed get someone to shop for me, it wouldn't be on a busy weekend.
Ukraine is "the whole of the west", interesting? Even the Russian propaganda can't magic up a serious intervention on Ukraine's behalf by western countries. Europeans have been scared to do anything significant, and Trump cut off any real support from the US.
Russia somehow fucked up the initial invasion involving driving a load of preprepared amour across an open border, and have been shredded by FPV drones ever since.
The barrier to entry for grifting has been lowered, and for existing grifters they can put together some intricate slop. Of course Google doesn't care, they get to show ads against AI slop the same as normal human generated slop.
A fun one was from some minor internet drama around a Battlefield 6 player who seemed to be cheating. A grifter channel pushing some "cheater detection" software started putting out intricate AI generated nonsense that went viral. Searching Karl Jobst CATGIRL will explain.
You are over thinking. This is to enforce age restrictions online which parents are overwhelmingly in favour of.
Make the friction high enough for evading age restrictions and it will stop most kids. Not all but most. Same as most shops stop under age kids buying alcohol and most cinemas enforce age ratings.
If you want to roll your own VPN go ahead.
As far as the "dystopian" state of the UK goes. Even if the UK was a "distopia" the internet won't save you, even though people of a certain age like to think they can stop an authoritarian government from their keyboard. Take the US as a recent example, the bastion of free speech, but US citizens are being murdered by a government organisation. Posting memes from your VPN won't help.
> As far as the "dystopian" state of the UK goes. Even if the UK was a "distopia" the internet won't save you, even though people of a certain age like to think they can stop an authoritarian government from their keyboard. Take the US as a recent example, the bastion of free speech, but US citizens are being murdered by a government organisation. Posting memes from your VPN won't help.
I understand what you mean but still, one has to realize that all the grievances happening in US (esp with Greenland) feels like something trying to distract from the Epstein files (Me and my cousin literally talked about this yesterday and these were almost his words not mine)
Epstein files pressure got dialed up to 11 because of internet, was it not.
If however the internet keyboard warriors weren't there or just the people who were aware from the internet (I mean I can't attest for you but I was reaware of epstein files from internet)
Also yeah, Take the example of Nepal whose almost authoritarian esque govt. was literally toppled by internet protestors to get an anti corrupt person in power.
Internet & anonymity still has power and to just give it up to a govt. would still have massive massive consequences man.
If this law passes, anonymity & privacy is fundamentally ended in UK.
> If you want to roll your own VPN go ahead.
If my VPN would have an IP be arranged via a VPS they will just come knocking to my VPS
Russians actually use a Russia VPS to connect to VPN but they are getting locked down. (Source: I saw some russian person in a forum doing exactly this)
if we are comparing UK to Russia on a reasonable amount, then that would speak mountains too and we can move our conversation from there.
Edit: perhaps I feel like I was also overthinking it a year back when I was worried about VPN's block (I have written it in Hackernews you can go read) and I figured that with something like UK, the tech wouldn't be enough to be uncensorable and we are still off to govt laws and I was worried about exactly this happening.
I didn't want to be right then and I don't want to be right now but I am just telling what I have a reasonable enough suspicion of something happening in future.
UK citizens already lost legislative war, now government has a valid enforcing reason for IP blocks, DPI, etc.
Just a recap how it happened in Russia:
1. First, year ~2015 legal framework was created under disguise of banning pirated media(specifically torrents.ru)(legislative push). State-wide DNS ban introduced. Very easy to circumvent via quering 8.8.8.8
2. Then, having legal basis, govt included extra stuff in banned list(casinos, terrorist orgs, etc)(executive push). IP bans introduced, applied very carefully.
3. Legal expanded allowing govt to ban specific media on very vague criterias(legislative push). IP blocks tried on some large websites. DPI hardware mandated to be installed by ISPs to filter by HTTPS SNI(executive push).
4. At ~2019 Roskomnadzor(RKN) created, special govt entity which enforces bans without court orders(legislative push).
5. ~2021 sites become banned if they are not filtering content by Russian laws by request of RKN(executive push). VPN services were obligated to also DPI-filter traffic(legislative push).
6. ~2023 Crackdown on VPN started(executive push). Popular commercial services were IP-banned, OpenVPN and IPSec connections selectively degraded by DPI.
7. ~2025 Heavy VPN filtering(vless, wireguard, etc) introduced(executive push). Performance of certain sites were degraded(youtube, twitter, etc).
Most users here are American, have you seen what is happening in America?
The funny (sad) thing is all the hot takes about the UK or Europe being a "police state" because porn is being blocked for kids, or persistent abuse on social media actually has repercussion (as it does in the real world already).
Meanwhile ICE are murdering US citizens in the streets. Turns out American "free speech" doesn't prevent an authoritarian regime taking hold.
To clarify, i do believe in free speech. But until you are bundled into a black car for holding up poster with a political statement (like in Russia or China), you have free speech. Attempting to stop abuse on social media is not the same. The closest we have to preventing free speech in the UK is the Israel/Gaza "issue".
Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for about a year in the UK for posting an inflammatory anti-immigration social media post which was deemed illegal under UK law, and is currently being threatened (https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2157938/lucy-connolly-pris... ) with being returned to jail for posting social media content attacking the current UK government.
This is hardly the only example of the UK, or other Anglophone democracies, criminalizing speech with actual prison time. I'm not happy with UK laws trying to block VPNs under the pretense of blocking porn for minors either.
Can’t even incite murder anymore without being put in prison; it’s political correctness gone mad!
There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech. The UK has actual problems with free speech (particularly the Online Safety Act), but this isn't one of them.
In whatsapp:
> She said that if Ofsted were to get involved, she would tell them it was not her and that she had been the victim of doxing
Bit more crime, there (she worked in a regulated industry around kids; lying to the regulator isn't allowed).
> She went on to say that if she got arrested she would “play the mental health card”.
PLEASE STOP SAYING YOU WILL DO CRIMES.
(I'm always amazed that so many criminals end up having these incriminating conversations on WhatsApp and similar; have they never read the news or watched any crime drama? In a vacuum she'd probably have got off!)
> There is no country in the world where inciting arson of housing counts as free speech.
Wrong. In the USA that speech would have been protected. It obviously does not meet the imminent lawless action standard and is not meaningfully incitement.
What she actually said was:
> “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f*** hotels full of the ba***s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it.”
This is clearly someone just angrily ranting. It's absurd nonsense to pretend otherwise. Imagine arresting everyone who said "punch Nazis" because that's "incitement." The UK is one of the worst speech control regimes in the world on any honest scale - even in most third-world dictatorships at least the state isn't strong or coordinated enough to go after most people for this stuff. Sorry, most of the world doesn’t punish angry hateful off the cuff comments with prison. You are an outlier.
"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f** hotels full of the ba**s for all I care … if that makes me racist so be it."
Which is an insane thing to imprison someone for a year for and to continue threatening them with prison for on account of their continued social media political criticism of their government.
Honestly I'm not sure if it would be legal for me to write this very comment quoting the original tweet if I was subject to UK law.
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