I am surprised to see the positive takes on this sort of thing on HN considering that we all know that is just the first step of many steps that the current governments worldwide are rolling out.
Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?
You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.
The slippery slope is real.
We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.
Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?
And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
However good this news is, it means nothing if the average household is not seeing any price decrease in their bill.
It's well and good to say that eventually sometime in the future prices will be lower but in the meantime it doesn't help that the prices continue to rise.
While a bill reduction is definitely useful and important for the people of the UK, energy independence is also important for the nation.
Exposure to international fossil fuel markets has been a problem for many nations in recent years, as turmoil upsets supply. And greater energy independence also means handing less money over to countries and governments with conflicting defence goals.
> energy independence is also important for the nation.
None of this matters to people who can't afford to heat their homes in the winter.
The price reduction was a Labour campaign promise and on that front it has failed dramatically.
This is why people lose trusts in politicians and what has fueled the rise of the far right across Europe, when politicians make promises that they know they won't be able to keep.
Price and energy independence are both important. Renewables are an important way to both (1) drive long-term cost down and (2) reduce reliance on foreign states.
I wouldn't say Labour have failed here. In fact, efforts like this are steps towards lowering prices. Let's see what the long-term trend is. Prices aren't going to plummet overnight.
I understand but I am telling you that this argument is basically useless when people see their bill at the end of each month.
> I wouldn't say Labour have failed here. In fact, efforts like this are steps towards lowering prices.
I don't mind splitting hairs when necessary but you are clearly not arguing in good faith. Labour pledge repeatedly that it would lower the prices by hundreds of pounds each year for good and this has not happened and Labour is running out of time.
If the promise could not be delivered on, why make it? That is just giving ammunition to the other parties who will use it against them not to mention make them look like liars.
The BBC just like any other news organization is not neutral. It sometimes leans left and it sometimes lean right. The problem is that this "leaning" is never disclosed.
If a newspaper is comfortably right-wing/left-wing and so on, I don't care about their biases because at least you know that if you read it, you are going to get a "version" of a story that fits the overall narrative of the outlet.
When it comes down to publicly funded news outlet though, their neutrality is disputable and on top of that you end up paying through your taxes for "news" that have either been downplayed or exaggerated depending on who is reporting on it.
So as a tax payer, what is there to gain from being manipulated (at best) or lied to (at worst) by an organization who is supposed to be neutral but who isn't?
I wish it wasn't the case but there has been too many stories in the past in the mainstream media that turned out to be either misrepresented or made up and there was rarely any retraction/apologies on the subject.
And just in case you think that only right wingers have problem with the BBC (for example), the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
I also have personal experience that they're far from infallible, a friend lied to them about our farcical "Potato powered" computer† and for a while their news story about this was actually available as if it was real news not a joke.
But they're clearly trying and "not good enough" doesn't seem like an adequate justification for giving up and saying we'll just go without democracy then. If this is the best we have then this will have to do.
† The worst part is that this is kinda, sorta at the edge of plausible, which is why I thought from the outset that it's not a good joke. We didn't build such a thing, but maybe someone could have or even has.
> the accusations of biases come from the left and from the right
> of the political spectrum so this is a problem for everyone.
It's impossible for any media outlet to be considered truly neutral. Reporting that doesn't align with your own (biased) partisan viewpoint is, to you, biased.
It's often said that when both sides accuse a media outlet of being biased towards the other side, they're probably being pretty objective. It shows they're reporting accurately rather than pandering to one side over the other.
By contrast, nobody is accusing the Daily Mail of left-wing bias, nor The Guardian of being right-wing.
Public funding is not the solution. Too many conflicts of interests. Who is going to bite the hand that feeds them?
Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
You may say that things won't go that way but since there is no way to check then we need to rely on trust and the trust in the mainstream media for good or bad reasons has plummeted in last decade.
And don't take this comment as an endorsement of paid news media, they have the same exact problems.
Currently the most succesful method of assaulting the "marketplace of ideas" is by overwhelming channels with content. Most of our guard rails and fears were around government over reach, not through the attrition of attention and via the production of overhwelming amounts of content.
As a result, more competition (more speech) has been defanged as a solution.
Producing Local news is never going to be more interesting and attention grabbing, and thus revenue generating, than pure dopamine stimulation.
To keep local news alive, it needs money.
A public news option may seem sub ideal, but the option is on the table because the other avenues have been destroyed. Hell - even news itself is losing. The NYT is now dependent on video game revenue to keep itself afloat.
The common ground of the eralier information ecosystem was a result of chance. New factors are at play, and if we want it to survive, then we need to address the revenue issue, some how.
> Want to get a higher budget next year? You better run some stories on the great work that the current government is doing or else...
This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration. It is possible to do, though given the current state of US politics it doesn’t seem remotely likely.
> This is why you fund public media sensibly, outside the control of any given administration.
That is a very nice solution but it doesnt work in practice. If the budgets are decided by the government then there is always the possibility that neutrality on some subjects may be missing or that some amount of pressure will be applied in order to get some stories buried or on the contrary exacerbated.
Since there is no way to know which is which then how can you trust it? Personally I don't.
It's as if many of you have never really understood the concept behind separation of powers. There is a very clear reason why the branches of government are constructed in partial opposition to each other, and the validity of that reason is readily demonstrated every day. Who cares if one branch of the government doesn't want to fund a particular story or slant: another branch should be happy to write that check to provide a counterbalance.
While you have a point, you are looking at this the wrong way.
20 years ago if you had told someone you needed to get a face scan or upload your ID to view certain websites or that you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
Yet as we are seeing currently this is what is happening slowly but surely.
Yes, the UK government is not gunning down protesters in the street but can you say with certainty that the screws are not being tightened and that the so called western values of freedom of speech are not being eroded systematically year after year under the pretense of safety?
It seems to me that every western government is looking at what China and Russia are doing and instead of staying true to their values, they are actually trying to figure out how to roll out the same exact measures in the west.
Will we see Gulags in the west make a comeback? Most likely not but in terms of freedom of speech and online privacy rights, we are seeing clearly a rollback and if we do nothing to stop it, we will end up like China with governments looking at everything we say and write on our phone and computer and that is unacceptable especially when these measures are cowardly disguised as 'safety" measures.
> 20 years ago if you had told someone … you might get your messages and emails scanned in case you send something that the government deems suspicious to someone else, people would have laughed at you.
20 years ago we already knew the US government was watching everything.
I agree. If someone is happy for a government worker/algorithm to snoop through everything they send to anyone, feel free to opt in, just don't force us to participate.
If you use app A and that app is scanned for "malicious" content then I will message you on app B where there is no such scanning. If you don't want to use app B then I guess we can't be friends.
I mean at some point you need to make some choices.
But the beauty is that if anyone wants to talk through app A exclusively and their contacts are happy to respond on the same platform, then they can do that.
parents should have government issued tools for safeguarding their children's devices.
it's insane that we have so many standards and guidance for how to keep children safe.
but when it comes to the internet, it's either a wild west with no restrictions, or huge government overreach that negatively impacts the adult community.
Simple, you can choose to only use platforms that use the most stringent scanning technologies for you and your family.
You give the UK government (or the equivalent that applies to you) the right to continuously scan everything from pictures to emails to messages and then obviously you give them the right to prosecute you and come after you when one of their AI algorithms mistakenly detects child porn on your device or in your messages just like this guy: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
For the rest of us, we should be free to opt out from being surveilled by machines 24/7.
Personally, I think this is the answer too - rather than mandating it across all platforms, they could have created a service which provides scanning so that there was an additional app people could choose to install (and would, presumably, present as an accessibility addon so it could access content in other apps).
That's not without its own issues though - creating external deps is more or less what they did the first time they tried to mandate age verification.
Although their plans fell through, they created an industry who'd expected a captive market and started lobbying heavily. Eventually, it worked and we've ended up with mandatory age verification.
I don't understand the downvotes that you are getting.
There is a clear intent to muzzle the population that is going on in Europe with this new legislation and then with Chat control. Those who can't see that need to remove the blinders they have on.
First, it's the nudes and then it's something else. Once there is a capability to filter what can be shared between two adults in private message, then can anyone say that any government is not going to come back for more and ask more and more things to be removed or censored?
> The UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT)
It should be called the Ministry of Truth at this point.
> Unwanted
How do you know if a nude is unwanted? The premise itself makes no sense. The only way this could potentially work is if you had the whole context of the relationship somehow embedded in the messages and then if you deciphered the intent behind the messages. Even then what about sarcasm or double entendre?
>How do you know if a nude is unwanted? The premise itself makes no sense
If the app has sufficient permissions to infer user demographics a sufficiently jaded person should be able to come up with a set of rules that get you a 99% solution pretty easily.
In the future, phones will refuse to take pictures of dicks unless men register their height and income levels so that useful and relevant information can be added to the image metadata.
Once we agree to that, then next time, you'll need to upload your ID to do something else and by the way you don't mind proving that you are not a psychopath and/or a sexual predator if you want to keep using WhatsApp/Telegram and other services?
You also don't mind if we scan your private messages now, do you? We just want to make sure that you are are not some sort of extremist/activist or someone who might cause trouble.
The slippery slope is real.
We look down at China, Russia and Iran for silencing the voices of the protesters and dissidents but we are slowly building the infrastructure that will enable future governments to do just that in the future.
Once everything is locked down and tied to your real ID, then it will be extremely easy to suppress view points or things that any government left or right doesnt want to see spread in the wild. What then?
And those who say, well, we should just wait and see what happens in Australia because if it doesn't work out then we can always turn it off or something, my question to you is when have you seen a government go back on something like this?
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