Not saying what this company did is right, but it feels like this guy has been testing how far he can push these various age verification companies with bypass attempts, and as a result got banned. Additionally the email response from the company could have been trivially edited before the screenshot was taken, so I’m not even convinced that the story is real. If I was running an age verification company I would absolutely not share with the banned users the reason we caught them, that’s like sharing the recipe for your secret sauce.
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
I won't be visiting. Despite many flaws, the US has some damn good rights for its citizens compared to the rest of the world.
This is precisely the reason why I don't want to visit the US at the moment.
The USA immigration officers can ask me to forfeit my phone's password and look at all my photos, documents, messages, call logs etc, WITHOUT SUSPICION.
Some of that data can even stay on their servers for decades, and who knows if it ends up on a CIA/NSA server.
Of course, I can always refuse, but non-cooperation with CBP means immediate denial of entry and risks of lifelong headaches with future immigration checks.
I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.
I will rather choose not to visit the US for the foreseeable time, maybe never again (have been to the US more than 10 times). Freedom of speech is more important than tourist visits to the US. Well and working there was never an option for me, worker protection, universal healthcare, etc. make life much nicer.
Maybe the US will be free enough again in the future, but with its trajectory, I am not betting on it.
I'll probably just buy a decoy phone for the border.
It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
The same way if I travel to US, Russia, China, Germany, Iran or wherever, if the rules say "no porno" or "do not criticize the royal family" (e.g. UAE or Thailand), then I will respect the rules.
In the US these border rules exist because they want to check phones of people who might pose a danger to the country and its institutions. If you insult the US, the police, their government, you increase your odds to be checked because you might represent an actual danger, that's fair enough.
If you write Glory to Ukraine everywhere, and the Russia checks your phone, this is fair as well.
The other way around too, if you write on the internet everywhere Glory to Russia, do not be surprised if you get an additional check or rejection.
if you’re denied at the border for expressing speech online at some historic point (non-violent) then how can “respecting the culture” work?
When I am in Saudi Arabia, I don’t wear shorts out of respect for their culture; but they don’t go through my instagram looking for pictures of me in shorts.
In fairness, all western democracies have an enormous number of laws, so most citizens are already in violation of some tiny law or paragraph somewhere.
Is this right? No, not at all. But that should not lead us to stop living our lives in search of some utopia that will never exist under democracy.
But I only hold guests responsible for what they say while in my home. Not what they have said to their friends in DMs 6 months beforehand.
But the analogy is imprecise because the border patrol isn’t inviting people and revoking invitations when they misbehave. They are granting access to public spaces or revoking that. And the idea that a public place should do anything more than gate on current activity in that place is insane (for speech!)
> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
I will plead Poe's law here.
Some of ICE’s detainees may have different opinions on that point.
The UK may endow her citizens with fewer rights. But I have a lot more trust in British due process. British civil servants seem much less … capricious than Americans.
I was almost denied entry to Hawaii once because I told the CBP agent I didn’t have any cash on me. (My money is in a bank account, obviously). He went on a big rant about how expensive Hawaii is. I think he was worried I’d end up homeless. (Even though my visit to hang out with my then employer.) Over the years I’ve heard so many stories from other Australian friends about wild and unfortunate encounters with US police and officials.
By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised. If something happened while visiting the UK, I have much more confidence that everything would be resolved in a fair and reasonable manner.
Got subjected to hour long questioning because I only had a little cash on me and told them truthfully that I would travel the country so I didn’t have one place to stay for the entirety of the trip (because I was TRAVELLING).
I since learned that my first mistake was to tell them the truth but alas.
After asking me about every single detail of my life they eventually let me in.
It’s a pity, such a great country being ruined by kleptocrats.
Or freedom of protest... Er ehm, that was three years ago
Well at least no Double jeopardy... until 2003
Right to silence! Oh no not that one either
Shrugs and scratches head
Only it had no teeth and whatever Stalin or Brezhnev wanted, the KGB would do.
Which is not to excuse the errors, but to put it in context: it is a European country… albeit just like Turkey and Azerbaijan.
In the US I'd be worried about being murdered. By police. In cold blood.
That's not going to happen unless you commit a serious crime, in which case it's not arbitrary. I can't think of a single case that's made the news.
Meanwhile across the pond in America you have the nightly news reporting on children and people in cages screaming. People being rounded up for not being white. Little to no due process at all until you've been through 6 rounds of hell.
Simply don't chase, harass, attempt to run over, or assault LEOs doing their jobs
Hope that helps.
Why did people suddenly stop talking about body cams after mass adoption. Maybe it didn't show you what you thought it would.
Edit: ah, because the word is pavement in British English :).
There's a whole complex terminology of footway, cycleway, bridleway, bridle path, footpath, cycle path, and carriageway. Even more fun: It's ever so slightly different in Scotland to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Legally, you can't surrender these devices, access to them or their passwords, as they are company property.
Hard LOL. Doesn't apply at borders. Any country borders.
Europe is not one country so this can vary a lot depending on which country you are visiting.
I’ve never heard of someone being subjected to the kind of extensive electronic searches that are routine in the US.
This is why many companies have procedures for when employees visit certain countries, including the US. For instance that you are not allowed to bring your personal phone, your personal and work laptop or any medium that can hold sensitive or proprietary information.
Is this really the case? As far as I understand it, US citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. So they can sit you in a room and ask you questions all afternoon, but eventually they have to let you in.
The first minute my brain didn’t register because though Spanish is my mother tongue, I guess it was not ready for that. The police officer started to get irritated. Eventually my brain switched, I had a chat with him and he left.
I was totally freaked out the rest of the time, till the moment I boarded.
Only then I realized how frail our rights are when you are abroad.
I presume any journalist or competent protest organiser in the UK knows the details better than me, but they can't just stop you on the sidewalk (UK: pavement) and ask you to hand over your PIN on the spot.
I think the "put you in jail" thing is a misunderstanding of the general "police can detain someone suspected of a crime" principle, but then they still need to get a judge to approve them holding you longer than a few* days.
(*) The rules are slightly different for terrorism suspects.
Absolute Mickey Mouse country singing itself propaganda about building the future whilst having a healthcare system that lets people die regularly for being too poor. Not exactly freedom if you’re dead is it?
Then they come to London and realise it’s just a much cleaner, safer, nicer looking city than anywhere in the US and has more culture, food and diversity than all but a few American cities. But have to justify going back to a chicken coop country where they grind out the prime of their lives, get no maternity pay, and like 10 days of holiday.
I have lived in European countries all my life (except for ~6 months in Australia) and let's say I'm opinionated, I have never feared that the country I lived in or its authorities would arrest me or harm me otherwise. Of course, there are certain boundaries - you don't threaten someone, etc. But once you cross those lines, you are not interested in free speech anyway, only intimidating people or inciting hate.
Do immigrants have the same full rights as British citizens?
Would I be willing to re evaluate my visa every X years? Will I be willing to be uprooted if it's denied?
And how will childcare work when my elders are all here?
I think your post was correct as far as the state of the US, but your final paragraph is reductive. It's not always easy for someone to drop everything and uproot their life, even if it's possible
It was pretty funny because right next to Trump they had a man/woman in a Easter bunny suit.
It is not about christianity. Authoritarian and populist leaders will always coopt/corrupt whatever is convenient for them. Christianity, socialism, capitalism, whatever works to rally a substantial portion of the population.
I know plenty of people who immigrated from the UK and not one of them would ever go back.
The US spends more (16% Vs 10 GDP), but preventable mortality, life expectancy, people living with chronic conditions etc are all worse than other developed nations: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/05/26/a-comparative-ana... Plus the risk of being a victim of violence is higher in the US - you are 400% to 600% more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK, 700% more likely to be raped, 400% more likely to be robbed etc (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/internat...) so you're gonna need that hospital treatment more.
As for pay the legal minimum hourly rate in the UK is approx $16.90 Vs the US minimum of $7.25
Median annual salaries seems to be approx $62k US Vs $53k UK so it is 17% higher not 400%. When you adjust for purchasing parity (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/OEMDC) it's more like 62k Vs 58k, or approx 8% more in the US. There are plenty of high-tech jobs in London, especially in AI & biotech recently (e.g. as an example I am quite "mid-to-senior" level (i.e. 2 to 3 promos away from "director" type levels, so more headroom.for sure) and my annual total comp is about 8-9 times the median UK salary for example, somewhere in the $450-500k range and I am not even an AI researcher, just an engineer writing web apps at a Big Co)
Can't deny that some parts of the US are warmer, but there are also colder places. UK is actually very mild climate-wise given it's latitude. I am married to a US citizen and our kids are dual national but there is zero zero zero chance of us ever living in the US for the above reasons. I work with loads of Americans who have permanently relocated to London, but it goes in both directions.
You really gotta look at how those numbers break down.
Who's killing who and where. Be in the right places and you're much safer than anywhere in Europe
Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing.
What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be.
Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
I won't take any lecturing on societal ills from such a perverted system.
No, I’m saying almost the opposite.
Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
There are large, fully developed, highly populated parts of the US where you are very safe. Often moreso than places people assume are “safer” because they are outside America.
Pretty much all those stats are irrelevant.
Seriously 62k? Try 3.5 times that and then you're in the ballpark. My healthcare expenses for the past few years have been less than 2% of my salary.
Y'all don't realize just how intensily our poor rural areas bring down the average while our HCOL areas tend to set the world wide standard you're trying to catch up to.
Oh and healthcare costs in the UK are obviously zero percent, paid for out of general taxation (there is no dedicated "NHS tax"). So those unemployed poor people with literally nothing pulling down the averages get better-than-US health outcomes from the NHS, and the exact same level of treatment as anyone else using the NHS would get. I get additional private healthcare too through my employer and it is also zero cost to me. No co-payments or any other things like that at all - all zero cost to me.
> Our facilities are far superior.
Then why is US life expectancy worse?
> In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
Unless "very subsidized" means "by 100%", the UK's "folks with little money", or indeed significantly more than national average income, are still doing better. NHS care for citizens is zero upfront cost, except for dentistry and prescriptions which total to 1% of the UK's health costs.
The claim about taxes is just plain false, when considered over the whole USA and not cherrypicking the most favourable states within it: the US federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid is around $4,352/person, state-level spending added around $1,105/person on top of that for a total of around $5,457/person, and remember this is before personal insurance and co-pay costs which are on top of that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2024_federal_budge...
In comparison, the NHS spent around £3,482/person, at current exchange rates $4,643.66/person: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn00...
If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
As a percentage of my paycheck what you cited as Medicare/Medicaid is again very low. State taxes are basically 2-3% and in some cases $0 and/or funded through real estate taxes rather than income tax. This is actually one of the arguments for American universal healthcare. We can bridge the final gap of uninsured with about 1-2% more in taxes. It would still be much less than what most countries pay by a substantial amount while still maintaining 90% of the level of care.
Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
Do not cite flat numbers as some sort of gotcha. Obviously we spend more money on our own healthcare. We have more of it with fewer hours of labor.
> If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found.
Same idea in the UK.
> So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
False.
The average person in the UK spends about half as many hours on health as the average person in the USA.
What you're comparing now isn't just the government taxation supported stuff, so you also have to include the insurance and out-of-pocket costs, which then brings the USA to a nationwide average of $15,474/person, i.e. 18% of GDP, compared to the UK's (in USD terms) $5493/capita or 8.9% GDP: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo... vs https://healthsystemsfacts.org/uk-consumer-costs/
> The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
I know all of that. What's your argument here? Mine is that the NHS costs roughly the same as Americans spend on just this alone, and the UK doesn't then need other spending on top.
> Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
False:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=line&...
It seems that you only care about how well you and your bubble are off and not others. As the young kids say it - sad.
Disregarding wealth inequality is the most trope-ey American thing you could possibly do.
Yet Americans cannot protest, because they are living from paycheck to paycheck. This is not in jest, this is the reason Americans trump up (ahem) when non-US citizens ask why they don't protest ICE and whatever other nonsense is going on.
Did you ever consider that you are in a bubble and most Americans barely have savings and are a healthcare incident away from poverty?
"The median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market). [...] Only 46% of U.S. adults have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses"
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/savings-account-ave...
Seems like not everyone can retire at 45 eh?
The absolute gall of saying this, on this point in in particular, with all that has happened over the past 1.5 years in the US... Gobsmacked
The police can ask for your passwords. You're not required to give them anything until they apply for a Section 49 notice of RIPA. Which they must get from a Judge.
It seems to be recommended to refuse giving them the password before that notice is issued and seek a lawyer before complying.
If the judge agrees with them, you have to comply.
(Vague memory that someone used this to avoid paying a bill, because refusing a cheque when offered counted as discharging the debt it represents (if I have the right terminology), and as cheques could be written on anything they chose to write it on a car that physically would not fit through the door).
Even if you take the European Union alone and ignore all the other European countries, the EU only legislates over a subset of things for member countries.
AFAIK, not even that. This topic came up in relation to Hungary (before Orban was gone). What I understood from the discussion is that a country can only be punished by not giving them EU funds, etc.
As opposed to what? Armed invasion?
Unless you turn up to a protest against the ICEtapo, with a holstered gun. Then you can be murdered and called a domestic terrorist.
As a brown visitor to the US.... Well I won't be one. They can ask for access to my entire digital life without the slightest suspicion of any crimes.
They were held for more than 4 hours at the airport.
But, to counter balance, I had multiple other friends traveling to the US (both on work visas and tourist ones) and it was smooth sailing.
In any case, the story of my first friend is what made me cancel my US trip last summer and go to Japan instead.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
I actually think it might be worse.
You need to be able to hand over encryption keys too.
Claiming to not know them is also not allowed, whether you actually know them or not.
I am reasonably convinced that if you wipe the key slots on an encrypted drive but leave encrypted blocks around, they might be able to argue that you are obligates to store all the block keys for such an occasion. So using any kind of multi-tier encryption in the UK might be a massive liability unless you permanently store all the material required to derive any key that is used to encrypt anything.
This also probably has impact on TLS now that I think about it.
Now, real world criminal cases are likely to proceed differently than how they proceed in the mind of a programmer interpreting the law as a program. But, I am not too convinced such a farcical thing wouldn't happen, the UK government and police have engaged in much dumber things.
Now that I think about it, storing randomness on a disk could probably be used to incriminate you in case that disk was seized. Since the police wouldn't be able to tell if it wasn't encrypted data.
They both think that all the dystopia is for the greater good, is never abused, and if you fall victim to it, you must have been doing something dodgy to deserve it.
Don't give them ideas!
After having watched too many videos on Auditing Britain, I can not trust the UK cops. In some ways they are worse than US cops, except for shooting down people, where US cops still lead negatively here. Also, UK cops use many more words than US cops, without those words really meaning much at all. The amount of flabbergast-inflated text length is insane.
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
I also assume this incident was not in the UK as the details were shared on imgur which blocks the UK. The authorities also do not seem to have taken any action. Anyone can report anything they want.
2. It would only be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check, not basic or standard. This also applies to all other information the police have on you, not just NCHIs. This is just like the rules for disclosing something like a caution issued to someone in your household, an aquittal, allegations made against you, parking and speeding tickets etc.
"Non-crime information can be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check – which is limited to high-risk positions like teachers and carers – but only with the approval of a chief officer. The chief officer must have regard to statutory guidance issued by the Home Office and consider whether the applicant should be allowed to make representations before any information is disclosed."
https://www.college.police.uk/article/protecting-freedom-exp...
It is illegal to request a higher level of check than the guidance allows for a particular role.
By reduced I mean a stricter code of practice that requires a good reason for doing it.: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/non-crime-hate-in...
Example H above is in my view a good example of something should be recorded. A single incident is not a crime, but repeating that conduct could constitute a criminal harassment.
Anyone can report anyone else to "the authorities" for anything. It doesn't mean the unnamed authorities act on it. It's also quite strange that Yoti (if this isn't just a hoax) don't specify which policing unit is recieving these reports.
Have you seen the reputations of most "journalists" these days? Several UK newspapers frequently repost stories from forums like reddit and mumsnet.
And I'll remind you that the alternative in this case is just believing the random redditor's version of events.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under their keyboard.
... they only seemed to put a sign on it to say 'stop defaulting it' yet did zero oversight, so I'd just keep on walking over to the printer next to it, reset it, and keep on trucking.
Getting a CR48 from the Google Chromebook pilot program was my next trick to defeat their WRT shenanigans - that 200mb of free 3G every month actually went a long way back then in the halls, and a McJob paid for the rest of the wireless freedom ;)
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
1. Use of MEGA (it's apparently used to share CSAM)
2. Use of virtual machines
3. "Having Tor on my computer" (I had to put that in quotes because whilst it doesn't make sense, that's what they said).
They're fucking clueless, don't underestimate how little they understand. An explanation of how something is harmless likely sounds to them like an admission of guilt.
It was an eye opening experience. I (and many members of my extended family) have very much less respect for the competence of law enforcement as a direct result of this experience.
"Due to past security concerns, Yoti automatically flags multiple verification attempts and any devices running GrapheneOS. These instances are automatically reported to both the authorities and our security team."
Then:
"Unfortunately, as multiple attempts were made from this specific device, your account has been flagged for suspicious activity."
So the "and" looks like a typo, otherwise their system wouldn't have allowed more than one attempt from a GrapheneOS device to begin with.
i.e. multiple verification attempts from a GrapheneOS device will flag your account.
Congratulations Graphene for being acknowledged as the OS of the next generation. An old version of Android or OsX would just be a confused boomer.
I’m not defending the UK police’s actions here but “it’s just as bad as China!” is a refrain you see often that rarely adds up.
We should be criticizing our governments. But for the things they’re actually doing. Not what we imagine them to be doing.
If you can't criticize or protest Xi in China, try criticize or protesting the laws in rest of the world. Especially the things they do in the name of privacy, I remember UK jailing folks for FB posts, that's stuff that happens in third world countries.
Not that UK ever had much of a leg to stand on, US does the same now very scary.
For trips to any of the countries first thing I check is my socials and delete stuff that might get checked on airports now. This was apparently not supposed to happen in the developed world.
My friends still tell me it's not that bad, but it's just scary reading stuff on HN like this once a month, every month for the last few years.
I’m not defending the US policy for a second, it’s totalitarian. But holding China up as a positive comparison to totalitarian impulses is missing the bigger picture.
Living in Germany so UK might be much worse for all I know , but I would be surprised if Germany is the shining paragon for democracy now.
The only cases this has happened has been over people actively calling for racial violence over an imagined scare - bunch of morons thought a muslim migrant killed someone, so they went on to riot, burn mosques, assault foreign looking people, etc; on day 2 it was revealed the perpetrator was a Britain born Christian son of foreign origins, but the morons didn't care, they had their excuse.
I struggle to think of many countries where calling for immediate violence, on Facebook or in public with placards, is acceptable. Or any reason why it should be.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyenzdz66wo
Sure courts won but the arrest is the issue. Courts general also win in other democratic third world countries but the initial arrest is enough of an intimidation.
Also this is a slippery slope I remember one person you mentioned were bad but there was another which wasn't nearly as bad.
Also folks on the other side can say the same thing when you call them fascists or something.
Sure saying bad stuff is bad, but it's very very fucking slippery slope.
All speech is hate speech of you are not in line with the current govt.
Another example from what you might consider hateful probably who went to jail and was acquitted but after a lengthy process.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgv785n23eo
I am not saying UK is the next China but, it's rather fascinating people in UK to claim they have so much more freedom and privacy.
Basically if China is 100% authoritarian, UK is atleast 70% there. They just need a leader to abuse these systems to come in power.
Indeed, but police do this kind of thing in a lot of places. Didn't the US have multiple cases of people being arrested over comments on Kirk's death? It's not good, but cops on a power trip because you hurt their feelings is not a thing we can easily root out. Hence why courts matter.
> All speech is hate speech of you are not in line with the current govt.
Not at all what hate speech means.
> Basically if China is 100% authoritarian, UK is atleast 70% there. They just need a leader to abuse these systems to come in power.
Yeah, no, 70% is ridiculous. I'm not sure you can clearly measure this, but at most 50%. Even with an abusive leader you can still criticise them and the monarch without fear of actual repercussions. In China prison time is basically guaranteed.
Not exactly what you asked but here’s something tangentially related
They’re also declining hard because of brexit and maybe fear public unrest.
And in China for dissent you go to a reeducation camp. Or maybe the China incidents aren’t newsworthy, just expected.
that may be true, but in the US, you get shot?
The situation is worse than it has been in the past but it’s not at China equivalence levels.
That line of propaganda pushed by the US government worked well for the better part of a century, not any more.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=Apps%20can%20detect%20tha...
'you can still do X through Y, they are not removing it' is a popular and often the top reply on posts related to companies tightening their walled gardens. It gives an immediate solution to the problem but it doesn't address the core issue. I wish that wasn't the case.
The discussion might have been mostly theoretical before, but it sure isn't anymore...
It's a cat and mouse game that would require significant investment and could make things look more suspicious, better to focus on adoption so it becomes harder for companies to make stupid decisions like this. I've seen a banking apps that have expressly added support for GrapheneOS with their hardware attestation after customers mentioned it.
Even dedicated anti-detect browsers are constantly blocked and need patches. It's not something I would want GrapheneOS to focus on.
0: https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview
From https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...:
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
If you're using any type of adblock in your browser, you're essentially spoofing countless systems just to have those ads not show up. But if I'm having my operating system tell an app that I'm not OS XYZ that's fraud?
Sibling comment says running this simple curl command would be illegal. Guess what? It is illegal.
Bank is highly regulated service and vital so there's strong incentive and ramp up here
It's resistance against mass surveillance and a State that's grown cancerous. It's any citizen's duty, really.
Ironically, the big AI companies have scaled copyright infringement and appear to be profiting from it. So, pretty much: "meat's back on the menu boys".
Piracy is justified action in response to intrusive, mass, and overreaching surveillance by the unholy matrimony of State and Corporate.
Remember, people use these services largely for convince more than qualms with paying for multinationals. So once they create friction, off we go to the bays again in large masses.
Maybe I’m too niche or not niche enough to run into issues. I also never download software from any site like this so maybe that’s it.
They need to prove people guilty, not flag all “suspicious activity” then let people prove they are innocent.
This happened in the UK, specifically, and from what we've all seen it's definitely sliding in a bad direction over the past decade. But it's also not in any way so far gone that you can't take action. If you're sitting here on HN complaining and yet doing nothing else, you're a part of the problem. Stop being complacent, take action before it's too late. You won't get thrown in jail for getting involved in politics there (yes, you'll find some specific examples of that happening but if you look deeper they'll all unravel and show there was a deeper reason that's being misrepresented, usually by tabloids/social media).
It shouldn't be about what they call you, it should be about your actions. Neonazis must be allowed to peacefully protest.
Hamas and its symbols are illegal however.
Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.
(n.b. quotation marks used correctly)
RIP Henry
The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.
The "implied" link between their fines, them rejecting UK connections, and any new laws is very much a PR thing from imgur.
All the breathless online reporting seems to miss just how toothless the law was, and they still failed at following it.
Like I think the new verification laws are an unworkable mess at best, written by people with an idea similar to believing they could "ban one specific species of fish from UK territorial waters" by throwing the odd grenade in, but they're rather unrelated to what imgur actually did.
i love commenting on this stuff to get an insight into the mindset of people who support this...strident ignorance.
I get that some people have a behavioural addiction to this harmful content but perhaps the age verification is an opportunity to step back and reconsider.
I usually just use the Book of Mormon and that typically helps me get it done well-enough. But when that doesn't work, I allow myself some different material. The New Haven Code of 1656 is my reserve favorite and I have a laminated copy of the Comstock Act of 1873 on-hand for unusually-tricky edge cases.
>The Spanish privacy regulator (hereinafter: AEPD) recently imposed a fine of €950,000 on age verification service YOTI
>For the unlawful processing of biometric personal data in violation of Article 9 of the GDPR, YOTI was fined €500,000. In addition, a fine of €200,000 was imposed for obtaining invalid consent in violation of Article 7 of the GDPR. Finally, the company was fined €250,000 for exceeding retention periods in violation of Article 5 of the GDPR
I wonder if some ideology which believes in tech freedom will become the communism of the next age, and prompt a new wave of 'democracy' purity crusades.
Totally disagree. Everyone has a different threat model. Some people may solely be interested in the exploit protections and not care about their privacy. Some people might just like that it's completely open source or that there's no AI or it's bloat free.
I really dislike this maximalist, "ruin privacy" stance because it discourages people from making a small improvement if they can't be perfect. Changing to GrapheneOS is an insanely large privacy benefit compared to almost any other change and people might see this sort of sentiment and think there's no point if they use one privacy invasive app.
If you don't use it for things like this you don't really see any disadvantage. Occasionally I get cloudflare or vercel blocked when trying to read a blog but that's all.
So they're at a very strange intersection of using graphene but wanting to do exactly the kind of that is difficult on graphene. And just to be able to chat on PSN.
You're right though, different threat model.
But I’m also under no illusion that Google has better analytics sources.
Using GOS itself is not a crime, unless you use it to commit crimes.
- Two-tier justice system
- This
How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.
Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States?
When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
That should be a few decades before the civil war in the USA about the same issue.
The US was actually pretty much the last Western civilization to abolish slavery from what I recall from history class.
> having led the way in abolishing slavery
As they like to say in England, bullocks!
So you must be either a saint (who also did a lit of bad things) or the devil himself (who punishes bad people).
You could just simply acknowledge the fact that Britain was one of the first major powers to abolish slave trade and later slavery across its empire, and it actively pushed other countries to follow.
But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today.
The words Slav and slave have the same root.
There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves.
The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
It's pretty baffling tbh.
Anyone: criticises the British empire.
Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
The others he listed didn't stop voluntarily - their empires either collapsed or found themselves at the mercy of another that likely also practiced slavery. As he said, slavery was the default. The UK itself was getting raided by Barbary pirates just 200 years before the Slavery Abolition Act.
Unlike the Romans or the Mongols, the UK made a choice to stop, and they did so, at massive cost, because their values changed. They actual made actual progress, and thus are hated by many calling themselves progressives.
Y'know.... i dunno man, i'm not so sure its the 'stopping' that makes them hated by those calling themselves progressives?
Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding
Trying not to get my account banned...
The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.
In could say Jean Charles de Menezes
And know?
> In January 2026, a Met Police review revealed that in an attempt to meet the diversity targets set by Dick, senior figures in the force had allowed recruitment standards to fall. More than 100 applicants who initially failed vetting procedures were later allowed to join after their cases were referred to a special panel set up to scrutinise rejected applications from ethnic minority candidates. Several of these went on to commit criminal offences or misconduct, including violence, sex attacks and drug use.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/08/met-hired-child-...
From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.
Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.
[0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...
The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
Which is exactly what I said, courts generally do the right thing. The people were still arrested, and the dissent was still crushed, though. Israel is a strategic partner so all protests are equal, but some are more equal than others.
>they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups)
While far-right popularized the term, the awareness is now, at least among the people I know, full-spectrum. The tiers are independent according to the issue at hand and the priorities of the powers and lobbies involved. Simply some camps were unaware until it was their turn, and become confused when they overlap.
>The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
Personally, I think that statement has a pass in many places, but not in the UK. The "policy projection of values" (to give it some name), with the growth of identity politics mixed in to make it worse, attempted to make everyone feel equally protected, but instead succeeded in convincing almost every demographic in the UK that the system is rigged against them.
We are not racist -> certain crimes by given little publicity or ignored depending on the background of who committed them. Two tier.
Israel is a strategic partner -> pro-palestinian/anti-zionist groups labeled as terrorists. Two tier.
Hate has no place here -> police dispatched for nasty online comments, but dragging their feet for actual physical crime. The fact that "Non-Crime Hate Incidents" is an actual term is just baffling. Two tier.
Net Zero -> right wingers complain about blockades of ecologists going unpunished. Two tier. Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 passed, ecologist arrested (and sentenced!) for protesting against not doing enough for Net Zero. Pendulum swing, still two tier.
Directing mind and will -> individuals are fully accountable by their actions, for corporations one need(ed) to prove "directing mind and will" of the executives. Two tier. See the British Post Office Horizon scandal for extra depression, or how individuals are prosecuted for dumping, yet Thames Water can dump inordinate amounts of sewage but that's just "regulatory failure". While recent acts (Crime and Policing, Failure to Prevent Fraud) are in the right direction, criminal penalties for corporations remain financial, and swallowed into operating costs. Still solid two tier.
Russia is a criminal state -> Londongrad unbothered, alive, moisturized, flourishing. Two tier.
Protect the NHS -> partygate for some, fines for others. Two tier. Don't get me into the defunding of it.
Peace above everything -> the state actors that committed crimes (often acts of terrorism) with impunity in Ireland during The Troubles, were later prosecuted, while IRA members were secretly given out-of-jail cards. Just compare John Downey vs Dennis Hutchings. Since the topic has cooled down and the Hutchings' case fueled the fire, they passed the Legacy and Reconciliation Act to, 25 years later (!) finally providing immunity to British criminals. This is particularly damning because those following orders had been prosecuted, but no single commander, general, intelligence officer, minister actually giving or overseeing those orders had been, at any point. Two tier.
The UK is in a permanent state of "fake it till you make it" of the idea of the perfect state, and in doing so it routinely over/undershoots the mark, in an endless Samsara of overcorrections, because it is all still fake. The state sets the target, but it does nothing to get there. Ultimately the consistent application of the law is second to state, corporate and geopolitical interests, meaning the two tiers will be there no matter how correct the laws are.
I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed.
A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok.
Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
I will be unclear if you can use your GOS, Linux or BSD computer. You might get stopped, checked, if the authorities want to screw you they can always find something. If you have an accident your insurance will find something.
So you will live in a constant fear of getting caught, and you do not really know why. Until you end up getting a chromebook, aka a bus card or Uber rides.
In most western countries the rules for car safety are draconian but I see everywhere 80+ years old people, out of their mind, driving SUV while looking at their phone.
Since the 2010 people would call themselves hackers because they hang out here, use Github, VSCode and know about Kubernetes. But now you are about to get arrested for using GOS or whatever. At least the meaning of the term hacker is getting its shine back a bit.
That with which the authorities disagree is more than likely the morally, ethically, societally correct direction.
I'm a proud GrapheneOS user.
In the immortal words of Marvin: "I'm mine".
Fuck y'all.
Not that I'm arguing the UK isn't accelerating further into an authoritarian nightmare.
[0] Kinda related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
Fun fact: big European bad guy also carbon copied his strategies from the USA.
