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Thought for the day: Online Safety and Age Verification
The Online Safety Act has made the United Kingdom the least-safe place to develop and build software to connect people, online.
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US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy explains that maybe age verification is not about child protection
[…] Child protection is a goal we share, but anyone who wants to force you to identify yourself to the government as a precondition for querying or speaking on the internet has other goals in mind.
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UK Govt to demand AgeVerification of “ALL regulated user-to-user” services, and VPNs for anyone under 18; well that would end online anonymity in the UK…
…or else it’ll just teach the teens to download TorBrowser and other circumvention tools. See page 54 & 55 of the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/64773/documents/7791
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I have a TCP/UDP port number, a patent*, a USENET** moderatorship, an RFC, and an Erdos Number of 2 twice over; it’s probably time for me to write that book
[*] just the one, before I learnt that patents are really evil [**] RIP
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Businesses may be caught by government proposals to restrict VPN use | Computer Weekly
The government’s announcement to limit the use of VPNs by under 16s is part of a wider proposal to restrict the use of social media by school-age children unveiled by the UK prime minister on Monday. However, it is unclear how the proposals will affect businesses, including small companies, that rely on VPNs to secure
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OFCOM update: so apparently the embargoed press-release email was circulated to one (more?) of their general discussion maillists, which I feel symbolic of their approach towards security
Highlights are as follows:
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HEADSUP: Ofcom *tonight* to announce demand for apps, websites to deploy “hash matching” (i.e. client-side scanning, fuzzy matching) of uploaded images “to protect children”
privacy impact: logfiles of fuzzy-matching hash databases become long-term surveillance pipeline to retrospectively track whistleblower leak images, Snowden 2.0, etc; plus enabling censorship of arbitrary content. WATCH THIS SPACE; ETA 2230H LONDON.
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Thought for the day: if there is a UK under-16 social media ban, the party which most appeals to 16-year-olds “out of the starting gate” will win the next election
There will be a voter demographic who will suddenly have to make a first time choice re: who to vote for, having also immersed themselves for the first time in social media over the previous 11 months. The party that dominates TikTok will win their votes. Currently, that’s ReformUK. The status quo can’t continue, and
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UK Government Press Release: “the same people who demanded & shaped the online safety act now want to do it all over again”
Andy Burrows, Molly Rose, formerly NSPCC, wants it bigger, harder, stronger: “…the Prime Minister must now go further. Sir Keir Starmer should commit to a new Online Safety Act that strengthens regulation and that makes clear that product safety and children’s wellbeing is the cost of doing business in the UK.” https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-no-platform-gets-a-free-pass-government-takes-action-to-keep-children-safe-online
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UK Government: “children deserve social isolation and pervasive surveillance to prepare them for their future lives”
“We are determined to give children the childhood they deserve and to prepare them for the future at time of rapid technological change.” https://www.gov.uk/government/news/pm-no-platform-gets-a-free-pass-government-takes-action-to-keep-children-safe-online
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UK Government: “platforms must retain activity data pertinent to dead children, unless it’s not pertinent to their death” | …but how will they know beforehand?
Like “legal but harmful” will we have a classification of data that is “potentially suicide-adjacent?” “We will also strengthen protections for families facing the most devastating circumstances, by ensuring that vital data following a child’s death is preserved before it can be deleted, except in cases where online activity is clearly not relevant to the
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