I confess I don't follow X as thoroughly as some on here but my perception is we have moved from the era of freedom of speech to fairness of speech. There are still regrettably too many voices which don't get heard but more voices are being heard now than at any other time in the recent past.
Anyone with a device and a opinion can put it "out there" (where the truth is, I was once told). The problem is the plethora of voices isn't a million people all talking at once but a small number of people saying a lot repeatedly. I suspect @TSE and @rcs1000 could quickly tell us who the most frequent posters on here are in any 24 hour period.
If you say something often enough and loudly enough it does get traction and those opposed to anything will always shout louder than those supporting it so we have a relatively small number of voices who have come out swinging against the Government and especially in the past week (I suspect the same would have happened if this had all taken place on Cleverley's watch by the way).
As for the likes of Musk - it's his business and he has a right to an opinion. Like many of his ilk, he tends to see things in simplistic terms and offers simplistic solutions to complex societal problems but that's the thing - the easy answer gets the traction because people then ask "if it's so simple, why haven't we done it?". Trying to express the complexity of the counter-argument gets you nowhere when all some want to hear is an easy solution however impractical, illogical and probably illegal it might be.
But it’s over on the left bank and I want somewhere within 5 minutes walk. I’m by l’Opera
Go to my suggested restaurant - if you don't love it, it'll be dinner on me. (Wine excluded)
And actually @leon I think that perhaps you'd like 'Roger la Grenoille' - very good food, but hardly great, but seriously just an evening of great merit.
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
But what do you do about VPNs hosted in countries where a British government request for anything just goes in the bin?
The UK ISP informs the UK government who is using said VPNs and blocks the customer until they agree to not use the VPN.
So we are now blocking all VPNs, worldwide, who won't tell the British government where the traffic is going?
A Great British Firewall only allowing access to approved sites will be simpler, at that point.
No need, just make Twitter liable for content that it publishes and let the lawyers do the rest.
It's quite incredible that people are arguing that Musky Baby should be able to shove any old sh*t down our throats (and remember, he has full control over Twix), but the government should not be able to stop him.
That, dear friends, is the end of democracy and the start of tyranny.
Musk's comments on Twitter are unacceptable for someone with such power. He may well cause deaths in this country.
I confess I don't follow X as thoroughly as some on here but my perception is we have moved from the era of freedom of speech to fairness of speech. There are still regrettably too many voices which don't get heard but more voices are being heard now than at any other time in the recent past.
Anyone with a device and a opinion can put it "out there" (where the truth is, I was once told). The problem is the plethora of voices isn't a million people all talking at once but a small number of people saying a lot repeatedly. I suspect @TSE and @rcs1000 could quickly tell us who the most frequent posters on here are in any 24 hour period.
If you say something often enough and loudly enough it does get traction and those opposed to anything will always shout louder than those supporting it so we have a relatively small number of voices who have come out swinging against the Government and especially in the past week (I suspect the same would have happened if this had all taken place on Cleverley's watch by the way).
As for the likes of Musk - it's his business and he has a right to an opinion. Like many of his ilk, he tends to see things in simplistic terms and offers simplistic solutions to complex societal problems but that's the thing - the easy answer gets the traction because people then ask "if it's so simple, why haven't we done it?". Trying to express the complexity of the counter-argument gets you nowhere when all some want to hear is an easy solution however impractical, illogical and probably illegal it might be.
It becomes the voice of whoever has the largest and cleverest (least obvious) bot farm.
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
VPN's are merely a conduit and most don't give a shit where you are heading after, vpn chains are also easy vpn from here to a vpn abroad preferably one unlikely to cooperate and how is the uk plod likely to find out anything. Yes vpn's absolutely don't care what you are upto for the most part.
You need an ISP to get access to a VPN and ISPs most certainly do give a shit about the views of the police. The ISP will politely or not so politely tell you to stop using the VPN or stop using their internet service. You think Virgin Media are going to stand up for your rights to use a VPN? If so I’ve a bridge to sell you.
Well apart from everyone working from home is using a VPN how you going to tell the difference as you can't see where I am heading from the VPN. ISP's would be blocking about 42% of customers based on VPN usage in the UK. You are fighting a battle you can't win. Even China hasn't managed to block VPN usage
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
VPN's are merely a conduit and most don't give a shit where you are heading after, vpn chains are also easy vpn from here to a vpn abroad preferably one unlikely to cooperate and how is the uk plod likely to find out anything. Yes vpn's absolutely don't care what you are upto for the most part.
You need an ISP to get access to a VPN and ISPs most certainly do give a shit about the views of the police. The ISP will politely or not so politely tell you to stop using the VPN or stop using their internet service. You think Virgin Media are going to stand up for your rights to use a VPN? If so I’ve a bridge to sell you.
So the government is going to have to keep a list of the VPNs that report all traffic to the UK government the UK government specifies as bad. Including to sites that are legal in host VPNs country.
So a world wide list of VPNs you are allowed to connect to.
Why would the VPNs and foreign government cooperate? How could you deal with VPN *pretending* to cooperate?
The trail you are walking down is the one that the Chinese government went down. Which is why they built the Great Chinese Firewall, in the end.
This is before you get to the competency problem - how many times will the government block the VPN you use for work? I can easily see a Civil Service VPN ending up on the list, due to the usual fuck up.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
VPN's are merely a conduit and most don't give a shit where you are heading after, vpn chains are also easy vpn from here to a vpn abroad preferably one unlikely to cooperate and how is the uk plod likely to find out anything. Yes vpn's absolutely don't care what you are upto for the most part.
You need an ISP to get access to a VPN and ISPs most certainly do give a shit about the views of the police. The ISP will politely or not so politely tell you to stop using the VPN or stop using their internet service. You think Virgin Media are going to stand up for your rights to use a VPN? If so I’ve a bridge to sell you.
Well apart from everyone working from home is using a VPN how you going to tell the difference as you can't see where I am heading from the VPN. ISP's would be blocking about 42% of customers based on VPN usage in the UK. You are fighting a battle you can't win. Even China hasn't managed to block VPN usage
You think. And besides, why block?
It may be better for a state to allow people to think: "Oh, I'm safe with this...", as people thinking that are the ones you want to watch.
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
But what do you do about VPNs hosted in countries where a British government request for anything just goes in the bin?
The UK ISP informs the UK government who is using said VPNs and blocks the customer until they agree to not use the VPN.
So we are now blocking all VPNs, worldwide, who won't tell the British government where the traffic is going?
A Great British Firewall only allowing access to approved sites will be simpler, at that point.
No need, just make Twitter liable for content that it publishes and let the lawyers do the rest.
It's quite incredible that people are arguing that Musky Baby should be able to shove any old sh*t down our throats (and remember, he has full control over Twix), but the government should not be able to stop him.
That, dear friends, is the end of democracy and the start of tyranny.
Musk's comments on Twitter are unacceptable for someone with such power. He may well caused deaths in this country.
The point is not that it is wrong to do something. The point is to find something that works before we do it.
Otherwise you end up with - “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” as an idiot tried to end security for online transactions.
It amazing how fast some people are desceding into pretty authoritian solutions, ban twitter, VPNs, have the government spy on everybody.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the organising of the things don't go near twitter, it will be much more likely via something like Telegram or Signal. Telegram is particularly tricky service to deal with, its everywhere and nowhere, its owner is a billionaire and doesn't care about money and located himself in the Middle East where the authorities are happy to have him.
My guess is it will end up with a lot of old school methods of bodies on the ground infiltrating the loose networks of people.
Here is one telling quote "Enhanced online privacy (39%): The largest percentage of British VPN users cite enhanced online privacy as their main reason for using a VPN. This reflects growing concern about online privacy and the desire to protect personal data from prying eyes, including ISPs, advertisers, and government surveillance"
But VPNs do not allow you to engage in criminality and since the government gets to decide what is illegal VPNs aren’t the protection from prying eyes you think it is.
VPN's are merely a conduit and most don't give a shit where you are heading after, vpn chains are also easy vpn from here to a vpn abroad preferably one unlikely to cooperate and how is the uk plod likely to find out anything. Yes vpn's absolutely don't care what you are upto for the most part.
You need an ISP to get access to a VPN and ISPs most certainly do give a shit about the views of the police. The ISP will politely or not so politely tell you to stop using the VPN or stop using their internet service. You think Virgin Media are going to stand up for your rights to use a VPN? If so I’ve a bridge to sell you.
Well apart from everyone working from home is using a VPN how you going to tell the difference as you can't see where I am heading from the VPN. ISP's would be blocking about 42% of customers based on VPN usage in the UK. You are fighting a battle you can't win. Even China hasn't managed to block VPN usage
You think. And besides, why block?
It may be better for a state to allow people to think: "Oh, I'm safe with this...", as people thinking that are the ones you want to watch.
It was a response to the bizarre idea that the government would simply say to all isp's block vpn usage. Besides sensible people look up which VPN to use eg
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
That's disingenuous to us poor white people. Most of us don't riot.
Most men don't rape women either, yet I am assured rape is the fault of all men.
What a silly post. You're better than that 'Tubbs.
I'm not. Its been a long day.
In general I think the danger is that too many are ignoring the left behind of the country, AGAIN. Nothing makes racism right, nor rioting, but its essential to ask why things happen. Too many of my colleagues at Uni could not understand the Brexit vote because 'everyone I know voted remain'. Well yes, you know upper middle class academics.
There are many UK populations. Most are decent, kind folk. Some are not. Some are bitter, twisted, racist thugs. But a lot of people do feel left behind and feel that the country has let in too many immigrants. Thats not my opinion, but if you don't understand that viewpoint (while disagreeing) you will never understand the reasons.
Completely o/T but as the site seems to have loads of Brompton fans has anyone seen one of these things before? Just spotted it now and looks fun. I will examine it some time.it seems to be in conjunction with the bus co so you can take them on the bus easily then hop off on stretches for cycling.
Completely o/T but as the site seems to have loads of Brompton fans has anyone seen one of these things before? Just spotted it now and looks fun. I will examine it some time.it seems to be in conjunction with the bus co so you can take them on the bus easily then hop off on stretches for cycling.
Yes, and have used them. It's for daily hire.
It's a very good idea.
I've noticed, in summer, that on trains to nice bits of the countryside, you often see one person in a couple with a hire Brompton (branding and colour) and one person on an owned one. I presume one is the commute bike and they got another one for a day out in the country.
It amazing how fast some people are desceding into pretty authoritian solutions, ban twitter, VPNs, have the government spy on everybody.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the organising of the things don't go near twitter, it will be much more likely via something like Telegram or Signal. Telegram is particularly tricky service to deal with, its everywhere and nowhere, its owner is a billionaire and doesn't care about money and located himself in the Middle East where the authorities are happy to have him.
A lot of it is surely Putin via Telegram which then bleeds into WhatsApp and X
It’s so easily done. Start a rumour of a far right stramash - it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Either the skinheads show up or the hard case Islamists or ideally both - and you’ve successfully brewed a nasty riot
His statement covers both. "Any violence against our police is completely unacceptable" seems pretty clear to me.
It doesn't cover both if it's made in response to one, and the response to the other is to release a ridiculous selfie whilst kneeling. He's just an utter turd.
It amazing how fast some people are desceding into pretty authoritian solutions, ban twitter, VPNs, have the government spy on everybody.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the organising of the things don't go near twitter, it will be much more likely via something like Telegram or Signal. Telegram is particularly tricky service to deal with, its everywhere and nowhere, its owner is a billionaire and doesn't care about money and located himself in the Middle East where the authorities are happy to have him.
A lot of it is surely Putin via Telegram which then bleeds into WhatsApp and X
It’s so easily done. Start a rumour of a far right stramash - it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Either the skinheads show up or the hard case Islamists or ideally both - and you’ve successfully brewed a nasty riot
One of the negatives of mainstream social media overly censoring during COVID is that actually pushed a load of people to go and explore the likes of Telegram.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
If you look at the background of racists and various kind of extremists, there is a high percentage of people who "feel abandoned by society". Yes, you get racists coming out of nice homes with loving parents, good education and social life. But it is much, much rarer.
Which is part of the Reason behind Prevent. To try and catch people before they go down such roads and send them to a better destination.
It amazing how fast some people are desceding into pretty authoritian solutions, ban twitter, VPNs, have the government spy on everybody.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the organising of the things don't go near twitter, it will be much more likely via something like Telegram or Signal. Telegram is particularly tricky service to deal with, its everywhere and nowhere, its owner is a billionaire and doesn't care about money and located himself in the Middle East where the authorities are happy to have him.
A lot of it is surely Putin via Telegram which then bleeds into WhatsApp and X
It’s so easily done. Start a rumour of a far right stramash - it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Either the skinheads show up or the hard case Islamists or ideally both - and you’ve successfully brewed a nasty riot
Presumably using Premiership bots instead of the Conference bots we get on a Saturday morning.
But it’s over on the left bank and I want somewhere within 5 minutes walk. I’m by l’Opera
Go to my suggested restaurant - if you don't love it, it'll be dinner on me. (Wine excluded)
And actually @leon I think that perhaps you'd like 'Roger la Grenoille' - very good food, but hardly great, but seriously just an evening of great merit.
Thankyou for the suggestions! But it will have to be next time. I’ve walked ten miles today and I just want to collapse into the nearest velvet gaff
Think I’ve found one right by the opera. 4 mins walk.i can manage that. Just about
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
His statement covers both. "Any violence against our police is completely unacceptable" seems pretty clear to me.
It doesn't cover both if it's made in response to one, and the response to the other is to release a ridiculous selfie whilst kneeling. He's just an utter turd.
He later denounced the NRA and supported gun-control measures, such as an assault weapons ban. During his first campaign for governor in 2018, the NRA completely downgraded his rating. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
Not that I think they would be, but someone might make the argument that there are institutional or societal biases that make it the case in practice even though not official. Indirect or even unintentional discrimination and what not.
I don't believe that would be the case in that scenario, but I can see it being argued.
Well I caught a TV Vox Pops with somebody sympathetic to this racist violence and she was saying that white people in Britain are starting to feel how the Native Americans would have felt when they were brutalised and dispossessed. Seemed perfectly sincere. Not sure how you can deal with that sort of brain chemistry.
These riots are awful, Starmer has got to find a way to make them stop. Family members are too scared to go out, cancelling plans.
The Prime minister to hold emergency COBRA meeting tonight.
Refuses to recall parliament, will look weak and lead by the Tories when he inevitably does. Hemmed himself into a corner where he can't criticise counter protestors directly even if they're stabbing people on his doorstep. But he's going to have to, and that also looks weak.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
People are criticising Elon Musk. But as far as I can see it Twitter has changed the narrative about these events because it is where the images of the counter violence were posted, there was no coverage of that in the 'MSM'; it was completely suppressed. Now the acceptable narrative amongst politicians has changed to a condemnation of 'all violence'. Twitter has essentially blown apart the preferred 'left liberal' explanation of events.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
That's essentially this Farage "two tier policing" bollocks.
"Poor white people", my arse! Violent bastards, some of whom are taking their children with them.
Poor any other colour people if they are violent bastards also need banging up.
If there is a two tier policing it would look more like this: If I was a teenager on Lewisham High Street and was stopped by the police, I would most likely not be white.
Well yes, I agree with your third para. But SKS didn't seem anything like so angry about the BLM riots.
Clearly he sympathised with their grievance, to the extent of 'taking the knee'. I'm not sure quite was BLM was protesting in the UK at the time...
Given the cultural cringe that sees adoption of US talking points irrespective of their relevance to the UK, and in fact distracts from tackling problems we have in that arena by meshing the two together, I'm not surprised you're unsure.
Its a bit like the endless protests we have seen over Gaza on UK streets. I'm not quite sure what action they wanted to happen. I could understand the Jarrow marches. I could see what the Countryside alliance wanted. I understood what the women at Greenham Common wanted. I didn't see what the Gaza protesters wanted us to actually do.
I don't have an issue with people have a strong stance on foreign policy matters, I have some myself. But I still believe that issue receives, even before the last 10 months, way more focus than makes sense.
He later denounced the NRA and supported gun-control measures, such as an assault weapons ban. During his first campaign for governor in 2018, the NRA completely downgraded his rating. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
The NRA went loopy, quite a bit before Trump. But in a very MAGA kind of way.
These riots are awful, Starmer has got to find a way to make them stop. Family members are too scared to go out, cancelling plans.
The Prime minister to hold emergency COBRA meeting tonight.
Refuses to recall parliament, will look weak and lead by the Tories when he inevitably does. Hemmed himself into a corner where he can't criticise counter protestors directly even if they're stabbing people on his doorstep. But he's going to have to, and that also looks weak.
For there to be “counter protesters” there have to be protests. These are not protests. These are riots. They’ve more in common with 2011 than 2020. Means of organisation especially. In 2020 the wimps in BLM socially distanced themselves at many of the protests.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
It's believed that the bans etc on ISIS and related websites has had next to no effect.
Tragically, @DavidL (among others) can probably confirm that images of utter horror are widespread.
I'm interested to hear more.
I was previously involved with tracking some of this stuff, basically from a freedom of speech angle and out of concern with New Labour's authoritarian tendencies.
Low stakes conspiracy theory: Elon Musk is trying to provoke Starmer into nationalising Twitter as the only way to get back the $40 billion he paid for it.
Except that falls down on *how* he nationalises it.
Mind you, Starmer could just rock up and say "$40 billion, cash"
I’m afraid I see BBC Verify as a load of self-aggrandising, self-satisfied nonsense.
Concentrate on reporting the facts and let people make up their own minds. You don’t need a separate unit to bestow its seal of approval on what constitutes “truth.”
The point of BBC Verify is to respond to misinformation online. Material appears online. People are uncertain whether it’s true or not. BBC Verify investigates. It’s not bestowing a seal of approval on what constitutes “truth”. It is responding to a very specific, real, modern problem.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
The problem for those who want to control information flow, is that end-to-end encryption is rapidly becoming the defect standard for all comms.
So you can't go - "oh look at the bad man using a VPN".
Instead it is "2 billion people use WhatsApp. And we have no clue what they are saying."
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
There is a clear link between the Brexit vote, the Reform vote in 2024 and these riots. Yes the riots are being inflated by bad actors on socials, but those being whipped up are the same ones who thought Brexit would fix their ills (it didn't), that Reform would fix their ills (it won't) and that immigration and immigrants are part of the problem (possibly a small part is true - if you move a million more people into a country, housing becomes scarcer and services harder to access). But rioting won't fix that.*
*Except it might fix YOUR housing for a while, at His Majesties Pleasure...
There's usually a socioeconomic context to public disorder and this is no exception. But I'm talking about the people leading and avidly participating in racially targeted violence. Attacks on Mosques, Asylum Seekers etc. These people have no legitimate cause or context for their actions. It awards them an unmerited gravitas to suggest otherwise.
Walz has two great advantages as a politician: He is not a lawyer -- and he is a winning football coach. (Most Americans dislike lawyers -- and love winning coaches, especially football coaches.) "After returning, Walz took a job teaching and coaching in Alliance, Nebraska, where he met his wife, Gwen Whipple, a fellow teacher.[11] He and Gwen married in 1994, and moved two years later to Mankato in Minnesota, his wife's home state,[11] where he worked as a geography teacher and coach at Mankato West High School.[10] He coached the football team to its first state championship in 1999." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Walz
And, then there is this: "Walz was ranked the 7th-most bipartisan House member during the 114th Congress (and the most bipartisan member from Minnesota) in the Bipartisan Index created by The Lugar Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy, which ranks members of Congress by measuring how often their bills attract co-sponsors from the opposite party and how often they co-sponsor bills by members of the opposite party."
Good comment. Neither part of the "liberal elitist" tag is going to stick.
Early signs are that the Trump campaign is already flailing around, trying to find an effective attack.
I quite like the "first non-lawyer on a Democratic ticket since Jimmy Carter" line.
Average blood pressure in the posh bit of Sheffield increases a little.
These riots are awful, Starmer has got to find a way to make them stop. Family members are too scared to go out, cancelling plans.
If you go out and encounter a protest, you could end up being arrested and then jailed for 'violent disorder'. This is not too far fetched as a scenario.
Low stakes conspiracy theory: Elon Musk is trying to provoke Starmer into nationalising Twitter as the only way to get back the $40 billion he paid for it.
Except that falls down on *how* he nationalises it.
Mind you, Starmer could just rock up and say "$40 billion, cash"
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
The second article is incorrect. During the first lockdown there was an exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid. That exemption was removed for the second, November 2020, lockdown. The protests in 2020 were generally lawful and, in many cases, actually socially distanced (which was absurd) and clearly radically different to the rioting at the moment which is more akin to 2011.
I’m afraid I see BBC Verify as a load of self-aggrandising, self-satisfied nonsense.
Concentrate on reporting the facts and let people make up their own minds. You don’t need a separate unit to bestow its seal of approval on what constitutes “truth.”
The point of BBC Verify is to respond to misinformation online. Material appears online. People are uncertain whether it’s true or not. BBC Verify investigates. It’s not bestowing a seal of approval on what constitutes “truth”. It is responding to a very specific, real, modern problem.
And we should consider the BBC trustworthy enough to verify for what reason?
Only 44% of britons consider the bbc trustworthy or very trustworthy.....slightly less than the number of people who thought scottish independence was a good idea
Musk using Twitter to tilt the scales of democracy is a pretty clear show of how economic power translates into political power, sooner or later. The more we allow wealth inequality to grow and grow, the more we will move from democracy to oligarchy.
Social media networks need to know that, if they don't fulfil neutrality in their moderation, they should be seen as a publisher. Which means they are liable for what is printed on them. Hold Twitter liable for what people write on it.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
If you are on the internet at all these days, you can't miss adverts for VPN services. I think basically every YouTuber takes a sponsorship from one. I don't think they are an weird niche thing only super nerds use. Plus WFH, all decent companies use them.
All the major ones are trivial to use, its one click.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
Not that I think they would be, but someone might make the argument that there are institutional or societal biases that make it the case in practice even though not official. Indirect or even unintentional discrimination and what not.
I don't believe that would be the case in that scenario, but I can see it being argued.
Well I caught a TV Vox Pops with somebody sympathetic to this racist violence and she was saying that white people in Britain are starting to feel how the Native Americans would have felt when they were brutalised and dispossessed. Seemed perfectly sincere. Not sure how you can deal with that sort of brain chemistry.
Unless she has had her land and property confiscated and her animals massacred. I presume she hasn’t.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
It would indeed cause huge pain to Musk.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
I’m afraid I see BBC Verify as a load of self-aggrandising, self-satisfied nonsense.
Concentrate on reporting the facts and let people make up their own minds. You don’t need a separate unit to bestow its seal of approval on what constitutes “truth.”
The point of BBC Verify is to respond to misinformation online. Material appears online. People are uncertain whether it’s true or not. BBC Verify investigates. It’s not bestowing a seal of approval on what constitutes “truth”. It is responding to a very specific, real, modern problem.
Is there an ITV or Sky Verify for when the BBC are the posters of misinformation?
Back in the day when I was playing with podcasting (meaning 2004-5) there was an early audioblog called Minnesota Stories, which communicated that it was kind of ordinary - the biggest two cities being the size of Nottingham and Derby roughly.
To choose an English county to compare, I'd go for Staffs or Salop.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
42% of the uk already use a vpn...they only have to help one person each who doesn't know how for vpn use to rocket. You think all the social media using people in the uk are going to go oh I can use it or ask a friend that they know that is still posting. The ban it people seem to have little idea of how common vpn use is
Musk using Twitter to tilt the scales of democracy is a pretty clear show of how economic power translates into political power, sooner or later. The more we allow wealth inequality to grow and grow, the more we will move from democracy to oligarchy.
Social media networks need to know that, if they don't fulfil neutrality in their moderation, they should be seen as a publisher. Which means they are liable for what is printed on them. Hold Twitter liable for what people write on it.
He's not though. He's just saying stuff because that's what x does.
I confess I don't follow X as thoroughly as some on here but my perception is we have moved from the era of freedom of speech to fairness of speech. There are still regrettably too many voices which don't get heard but more voices are being heard now than at any other time in the recent past.
Anyone with a device and a opinion can put it "out there" (where the truth is, I was once told). The problem is the plethora of voices isn't a million people all talking at once but a small number of people saying a lot repeatedly. I suspect @TSE and @rcs1000 could quickly tell us who the most frequent posters on here are in any 24 hour period.
If you say something often enough and loudly enough it does get traction and those opposed to anything will always shout louder than those supporting it so we have a relatively small number of voices who have come out swinging against the Government and especially in the past week (I suspect the same would have happened if this had all taken place on Cleverley's watch by the way).
As for the likes of Musk - it's his business and he has a right to an opinion. Like many of his ilk, he tends to see things in simplistic terms and offers simplistic solutions to complex societal problems but that's the thing - the easy answer gets the traction because people then ask "if it's so simple, why haven't we done it?". Trying to express the complexity of the counter-argument gets you nowhere when all some want to hear is an easy solution however impractical, illogical and probably illegal it might be.
There's a gray area between commentary that most find objectionable ("The protestors are right") and incitement ("Go to the hotel in Rotherham at 7pm and burn it down. There are asylum seekers staying there."). And because they deliberately don't express themselves in a straightforward way the likes of Robinson, Farage and Musk are able to exploit that gray area.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
It would indeed cause huge pain to Musk.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
I once blocked social media on my home LAN. To say there were protests....
Previously, I mentioned a relative who, when he sets up a building site, sets up a WiFi network for work use. And blocks social media. Quite a few people here seemed to think he was breaching their human rights or something.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
They are. The character of every human being is influenced by a mix of nature and nurture, experience and circumstance, and it's mainly the last three. None of these racist thugs were pre-programmed to become this way. Same goes for all heroes and all villains and everyone in between.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
There is a clear link between the Brexit vote, the Reform vote in 2024 and these riots. Yes the riots are being inflated by bad actors on socials, but those being whipped up are the same ones who thought Brexit would fix their ills (it didn't), that Reform would fix their ills (it won't) and that immigration and immigrants are part of the problem (possibly a small part is true - if you move a million more people into a country, housing becomes scarcer and services harder to access). But rioting won't fix that.*
*Except it might fix YOUR housing for a while, at His Majesties Pleasure...
There's usually a socioeconomic context to public disorder and this is no exception. But I'm talking about the people leading and avidly participating in racially targeted violence. Attacks on Mosques, Asylum Seekers etc. These people have no legitimate cause or context for their actions. It awards them an unmerited gravitas to suggest otherwise.
Yes. I find it utterly astonishing that folk can equate seeking to burn down hotels, knowing that there are residents and staff in them, with any other form of protest that I've witnessed over the last 50 years.
It's attempted mass murder, and for all the wrongdoing witnessed on other 'protests' I've never seen anything as wicked.
The second article is incorrect. During the first lockdown there was an exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid. That exemption was removed for the second, November 2020, lockdown. The protests in 2020 were generally lawful and, in many cases, actually socially distanced (which was absurd) and clearly radically different to the rioting at the moment which is more akin to 2011.
The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 imposed the first national lockdown, beginning on 26 March 2020. These Regulations prohibited any person leaving their home “without reasonable excuse” and provided a non-exhaustive list of reasonable excuses. This list stated that a “reasonable excuse includes” various reasons such as obtaining basic necessities, taking exercise and seeking medical assistance. The Regulations did not specify engaging in protest as a reasonable excuse for leaving the home...
At the same time, the first lockdown regulations also imposed restrictions on gatherings: no person was permitted to participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people. This restriction took a slightly different approach. It did not specify that gatherings were only prohibited where there was no “reasonable excuse”. Instead, it provided a general prohibition on gatherings coupled with an exhaustive list of lawful exceptions. These exceptions did not include protest...
From 1 June 2020 the restrictions were eased, with the prohibition on leaving the home replaced with a prohibition on staying overnight at any place other than home and the prohibition on outdoor gatherings limited to those involving more than 6 people.24 For the first time, “gathering” was defined—as “when two or more people are present together in the same place in order to engage in any form of social interaction with each other, or to undertake any other activity with each other.”25 There remained no exemption for engaging in public protest. It was under these restrictions that the BLM protests and the protests to protect statues and memorials took place...
From 4 July 2020 a further easing of restrictions took place, with people permitted to leave their homes and stay overnight elsewhere. Restrictions on outdoor gatherings remained, although up to 30 people were now able to attend gatherings outside as opposed to six. Significantly, for the purposes of protest, there was an exception in relation to outdoor gatherings of more than 30 people taking place in public spaces as long as (a) the gathering had been organised by “a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution, a public body, or a political body”; (b) the person organising had carried out a health and safety risk assessment; and (c) the person organising had taken all reasonable measures to limit the risk of transmission of the coronavirus (taking into account both the risk assessment and government guidance).
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
Irrecoverable encryption is not new. In the olden days a telephone conversation was encrypted, unless recorded, by the simple fact that the conversation was in the past and could not be recovered, even if the fact of the call could be. Similarly setting fire to pieces of paper ('please burn this letter').
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
There is a clear link between the Brexit vote, the Reform vote in 2024 and these riots. Yes the riots are being inflated by bad actors on socials, but those being whipped up are the same ones who thought Brexit would fix their ills (it didn't), that Reform would fix their ills (it won't) and that immigration and immigrants are part of the problem (possibly a small part is true - if you move a million more people into a country, housing becomes scarcer and services harder to access). But rioting won't fix that.*
*Except it might fix YOUR housing for a while, at His Majesties Pleasure...
There's usually a socioeconomic context to public disorder and this is no exception. But I'm talking about the people leading and avidly participating in racially targeted violence. Attacks on Mosques, Asylum Seekers etc. These people have no legitimate cause or context for their actions. It awards them an unmerited gravitas to suggest otherwise.
Yes. I find it utterly astonishing that folk can equate seeking to burn down hotels, knowing that there are residents and staff in them, with any other form of protest that I've witnessed over the last 50 years.
It's attempted mass murder, and for all the wrongdoing witnessed on other 'protests' I've never seen anything as wicked.
This.
The crime of arson against a potentially inhabited building is extreme reckless endangerment. At the very, very least.
If they knew there were people in the building, that would be, in my view, attempted murder.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
Irrecoverable encryption is not new. In the olden days a telephone conversation was encrypted, unless recorded, by the simple fact that the conversation was in the past and could not be recovered, even if the fact of the call could be. Similarly setting fire to pieces of paper ('please burn this letter').
No but now the authorities know those conversations are still sitting there they want to access them and are having a tantrum that the hoi polloi can talk to each other without them being able to listen these archived conversations
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
They are. The character of every human being is influenced by a mix of nature and nurture, experience and circumstance, and it's mainly the last three. None of these racist thugs were pre-programmed to become this way. Same goes for all heroes and all villains and everyone in between.
There is a counter example - that little girl, who despite a loving upbringing, turned out to be a literal sociopath of the most horrifying kind. So who knows....
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
"‘Civil unrest is not terrorism’: Telegraph readers react to riots Following a week of violence, readers weigh in on labelling the demonstrations as terrorism and ‘two-tier’ policing"
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
Irrecoverable encryption is not new. In the olden days a telephone conversation was encrypted, unless recorded, by the simple fact that the conversation was in the past and could not be recovered, even if the fact of the call could be. Similarly setting fire to pieces of paper ('please burn this letter').
Heh. When we were first going out, the conversations between Mrs J and myself were routinely listened to, if she was in her home country. We used to sex-talk, as it would embarrass the young conscripts who were having to listen in to the conversation.
As an aside, my parents were also amused by the fact Christmas cards from my parents-in-law always arrived in an envelope from the Royal Mail saying something like: "This letter was opened by a third party."
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
They are. The character of every human being is influenced by a mix of nature and nurture, experience and circumstance, and it's mainly the last three. None of these racist thugs were pre-programmed to become this way. Same goes for all heroes and all villains and everyone in between.
There is a counter example - that little girl, who despite a loving upbringing, turned out to be a literal sociopath of the most horrifying kind. So who knows....
That's rare though. And you cannot be fully sure of what happened in her upbringing...
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
"‘Civil unrest is not terrorism’: Telegraph readers react to riots Following a week of violence, readers weigh in on labelling the demonstrations as terrorism and ‘two-tier’ policing"
The Telegraph and the Mail have, unusually, taken different sides on this one.
As for "two tier policing", what they mean is they fear one-tier policing. There's an assumption that whites, and the middle class, should be given the benefit of the doubt by the police because "they are one of us", and shock when that doesn't seem to be the case. What EDL types really want is the sort of two-tier policing that they remember from the good old days.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
Who probably also happen to be poor, white people.
Most of them are far richer than most people in this world.
What the fuck is that supposed to add? By UK standards the rioters are almost certainly 'poor and white'. The kind of folk who feel that the governments of all hues have abandoned them in favour of migrants, who see themselves at the bottom of every queue (council housing etc). Doesn't mean they are right, or that by comparison with someone from the Global South they are wealthy, if they think their life is shit.
I doubt the motive for someone meting out racist violence is that he feels abandoned by the government.
People are complex. Yes they might be racist but why are they racist? Is there a racist gene? Has he been indoctrinated all his life? Has he brooded over perceived issues?
They are. The character of every human being is influenced by a mix of nature and nurture, experience and circumstance, and it's mainly the last three. None of these racist thugs were pre-programmed to become this way. Same goes for all heroes and all villains and everyone in between.
There is a counter example - that little girl, who despite a loving upbringing, turned out to be a literal sociopath of the most horrifying kind. So who knows....
That's rare though. And you cannot be fully sure of what happened in her upbringing...
Yes to both. Though the case was studied in some depth.
Go on holiday, Keir – you can never satisfy demands for empty gestures (& resist recall of parliament too)
===
He wont go on holiday me thinks.
Can't claim on the travel insurance for that. Hope he hasn't spent £10k.
They can just recall parliament online. Set up a teams call and put Jackie Weaver in charge so she can press the mute button if Farage goes on too long.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
It would indeed cause huge pain to Musk.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
I once blocked social media on my home LAN. To say there were protests....
Previously, I mentioned a relative who, when he sets up a building site, sets up a WiFi network for work use. And blocks social media. Quite a few people here seemed to think he was breaching their human rights or something.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that an offense under some law? I was a teacher in a school where they investigated jamming mobile signals onsite to stop kids using them. They were told NO in no uncertain terms.
"‘Civil unrest is not terrorism’: Telegraph readers react to riots Following a week of violence, readers weigh in on labelling the demonstrations as terrorism and ‘two-tier’ policing"
The Telegraph and the Mail have, unusually, taken different sides on this one.
As for "two tier policing", what they mean is they fear one-tier policing. There's an assumption that whites, and the middle class, should be given the benefit of the doubt by the police because "they are one of us", and shock when that doesn't seem to be the case. What EDL types really want is the sort of two-tier policing that they remember from the good old days.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
It would indeed cause huge pain to Musk.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
I once blocked social media on my home LAN. To say there were protests....
Previously, I mentioned a relative who, when he sets up a building site, sets up a WiFi network for work use. And blocks social media. Quite a few people here seemed to think he was breaching their human rights or something.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that an offense under some law? I was a teacher in a school where they investigated jamming mobile signals onsite to stop kids using them. They were told NO in no uncertain terms.
Nope - if it was your school would have a fully open internet connection and I would bet my house that your school filters what a pupil can view...
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
PGP died mostly because it was hard to use, Zimmerman made bad choices about commercialisation and it is now obsolete.
End to end encryption is being implemented, by default, in just about every chat system I am aware of. Many of them don't have a way to turn it off.
"‘Civil unrest is not terrorism’: Telegraph readers react to riots Following a week of violence, readers weigh in on labelling the demonstrations as terrorism and ‘two-tier’ policing"
There's an assumption that whites, and the middle class, should be given the benefit of the doubt by the police because "they are one of us", and shock when that doesn't seem to be the case.
They should find common ground with Just Stop Oil and the luvvies who objected to their people going to jail in that case.
A lot of 'look at this sweet middle class person, do they look like a criminal?' vibes.
Yes but the next general election is four or five years away. Things that ought to matter, often don't.
Indeed
However isn’t it a political truism that perceptions are crucially formed in the first 100 days of office? And after that they become hard to shift
Starmer has been given a seriously tough test on his second month of office. I don’t envy him. However he came in with baggage that is entirely his own fault - taking the knee AFTER the BLM riots
The British public believe he is making a hash of this major crisis. Pompous but ineffective, hypocritical and bloviating?
He may find this perception hangs around
That said there are exceptions to the rule. Thatcher was massively unpopular at first but became more popular over time
Yes, for me the problem isn't so much the pomposity - hard to disapprove of rioters without sounding pompous - or the ineffectuality - a common failing in the face of rioting - but that he seemed so equivocal about rioting until it was poor white people doing it.
These aren't poor white people. They're violent racists.
These things, sadly, are not mutually exclusive
Sure. But the poorness and whiteness isn't what's causing the problem. It's the racially aggravated violence. You'll see this when cases get to court. Nobody is going to be charged with being poor and white.
There is a clear link between the Brexit vote, the Reform vote in 2024 and these riots. Yes the riots are being inflated by bad actors on socials, but those being whipped up are the same ones who thought Brexit would fix their ills (it didn't), that Reform would fix their ills (it won't) and that immigration and immigrants are part of the problem (possibly a small part is true - if you move a million more people into a country, housing becomes scarcer and services harder to access). But rioting won't fix that.*
*Except it might fix YOUR housing for a while, at His Majesties Pleasure...
There's usually a socioeconomic context to public disorder and this is no exception. But I'm talking about the people leading and avidly participating in racially targeted violence. Attacks on Mosques, Asylum Seekers etc. These people have no legitimate cause or context for their actions. It awards them an unmerited gravitas to suggest otherwise.
Yes. I find it utterly astonishing that folk can equate seeking to burn down hotels, knowing that there are residents and staff in them, with any other form of protest that I've witnessed over the last 50 years.
It's attempted mass murder, and for all the wrongdoing witnessed on other 'protests' I've never seen anything as wicked.
I was at the BLM riots in Trafalgar Sq in 2020 and I saw multiple beatings of white people which, if the coppers hadn’t leapt in and saved the victim, would have likely turned into murder
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
Completely o/T but as the site seems to have loads of Brompton fans has anyone seen one of these things before? Just spotted it now and looks fun. I will examine it some time.it seems to be in conjunction with the bus co so you can take them on the bus easily then hop off on stretches for cycling.
Actually, yes.
It's Brompton Bike Hire which has been a thing for quite a long time. Checking, it launched in 2011.
I took one on holiday from the locker outside Birmingham Station to Istanbul in I think 2018.
They are very cheap - I think now about £5 per day, and it is a good way to find out if a Brompton works for you since they discount a month or so of hire fees off the price of a new Brompton.
The network is quite varied - for example not in Derby or Chesterfield but several lockers in Newark, which is tiny and in the back of beyond. It May because Newark is an easy rail commute to London which may be one market, and is flat as a pancake.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
PGP died mostly because it was hard to use, Zimmerman made bad choices about commercialisation and it is now obsolete.
End to end encryption is being implemented, by default, in just about every chat system I am aware of. Many of them don't have a way to turn it off.
All this stuff has been open sourced as well. Hence why people can easily spin up a twitter-esque clone like Parlour or Truth Social really easily and quickly or messaging apps.
On the Q from the previous thread, the infra to block twitter would be exactly the same as the infra used to block anything else, such as child abuse images.
It's been in place for 15-20 years. There was a day in ~2008 iirc where they blocked Wikipedia by mistake.
It won't be 100% - nothing ever is, but it will be 98%+, surmountable by some internet tricks and established routes used by privacy activists.
Yeah.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
It would indeed cause huge pain to Musk.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
I once blocked social media on my home LAN. To say there were protests....
Previously, I mentioned a relative who, when he sets up a building site, sets up a WiFi network for work use. And blocks social media. Quite a few people here seemed to think he was breaching their human rights or something.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that an offense under some law? I was a teacher in a school where they investigated jamming mobile signals onsite to stop kids using them. They were told NO in no uncertain terms.
Nope - if it was your school would have a fully open internet connection and I would bet my house that your school filters what a pupil can view...
No jamming required - if you are running the WiFi. Ban an IP or IP range. Trivial.
A VPN gets round this by - you go to the VPN, then from their "exit point" (which might be on another continent) to wherever you really want to go.
Jamming is only if you want to block someone using a mobile phone connection to the internet, which you don't control.
Go on holiday, Keir – you can never satisfy demands for empty gestures (& resist recall of parliament too)
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He wont go on holiday me thinks.
Can't claim on the travel insurance for that. Hope he hasn't spent £10k.
They can just recall parliament online. Set up a teams call and put Jackie Weaver in charge so she can press the mute button if Farage goes on too long.
Recalling parliament is such a token gesture it should be avoided. It's a joke suggestion most of the time along with calling for enquiries every 5 minutes which was in vogue 5-10 years ago.
What people need to also get a grip on themselves and remember is social media like every other technology is a two edged sword. It can be used for good and bad. Everyone is concentrating on the bad stuff. Rarely see people comment on the good stuff like safe space support groups for LGBTQ teens, eating disorders, community groups which admitted can be at times bad but mostly aren't.
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
The other problem is chat systems like WhatsApp & Signal.
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
All western countries are wanting to ban end to end encryption. Basically the powers to be don't like the fact that people can talk without them being able to eavesdrop. I would be interested in seeing a study of how much end to end encrypted stuff is actually used for illegal purposes. My suspicion is its probably a lot lower than 0.5% and most its about what aunt gladys said to our Reen at your wedding , cat pics and other memes
I don't know. PGP has pretty much died a death, because people using it are either doing nefarious things or paranoid (*) . The number of paranoid people willing to jump through the extra hoops (even downloading a VPN client...) are low. Therefore leaving the criminal or criminal paranoids (**)
(*) Sorry, PGP folks! (**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
PGP died a death because it was hard to use when compared to current end to end encryption, it is also fairly old technique wise compared to more modern algorithms. People didn't abandon pgp because they no longer wanted encryption they abandoned it because they had more convenient ways to achieve it.
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
Comments
I confess I don't follow X as thoroughly as some on here but my perception is we have moved from the era of freedom of speech to fairness of speech. There are still regrettably too many voices which don't get heard but more voices are being heard now than at any other time in the recent past.
Anyone with a device and a opinion can put it "out there" (where the truth is, I was once told). The problem is the plethora of voices isn't a million people all talking at once but a small number of people saying a lot repeatedly. I suspect @TSE and @rcs1000 could quickly tell us who the most frequent posters on here are in any 24 hour period.
If you say something often enough and loudly enough it does get traction and those opposed to anything will always shout louder than those supporting it so we have a relatively small number of voices who have come out swinging against the Government and especially in the past week (I suspect the same would have happened if this had all taken place on Cleverley's watch by the way).
As for the likes of Musk - it's his business and he has a right to an opinion. Like many of his ilk, he tends to see things in simplistic terms and offers simplistic solutions to complex societal problems but that's the thing - the easy answer gets the traction because people then ask "if it's so simple, why haven't we done it?". Trying to express the complexity of the counter-argument gets you nowhere when all some want to hear is an easy solution however impractical, illogical and probably illegal it might be.
That, dear friends, is the end of democracy and the start of tyranny.
Musk's comments on Twitter are unacceptable for someone with such power. He may well cause deaths in this country.
So a world wide list of VPNs you are allowed to connect to.
Why would the VPNs and foreign government cooperate? How could you deal with VPN *pretending* to cooperate?
The trail you are walking down is the one that the Chinese government went down. Which is why they built the Great Chinese Firewall, in the end.
This is before you get to the competency problem - how many times will the government block the VPN you use for work? I can easily see a Civil Service VPN ending up on the list, due to the usual fuck up.
It may be better for a state to allow people to think: "Oh, I'm safe with this...", as people thinking that are the ones you want to watch.
Otherwise you end up with - “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia,” as an idiot tried to end security for online transactions.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the organising of the things don't go near twitter, it will be much more likely via something like Telegram or Signal. Telegram is particularly tricky service to deal with, its everywhere and nowhere, its owner is a billionaire and doesn't care about money and located himself in the Middle East where the authorities are happy to have him.
My guess is it will end up with a lot of old school methods of bodies on the ground infiltrating the loose networks of people.
https://uk.cybernews.com/lp/best-vpn-uk/?campaignId=21181941100&adgroupId=163821424991&adId=705945122786&targetId=kwd-30555441&device=c&gunique=CjwKCAjwk8e1BhALEiwAc8MHiB1xwckKFs57w23aXsbU_LBTEIRyApAOhwA6DCGNVw5Twr4jB7kGmxoC8p4QAvD_BwE&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwk8e1BhALEiwAc8MHiB1xwckKFs57w23aXsbU_LBTEIRyApAOhwA6DCGNVw5Twr4jB7kGmxoC8p4QAvD_BwE
In general I think the danger is that too many are ignoring the left behind of the country, AGAIN. Nothing makes racism right, nor rioting, but its essential to ask why things happen. Too many of my colleagues at Uni could not understand the Brexit vote because 'everyone I know voted remain'. Well yes, you know upper middle class academics.
There are many UK populations. Most are decent, kind folk. Some are not. Some are bitter, twisted, racist thugs. But a lot of people do feel left behind and feel that the country has let in too many immigrants. Thats not my opinion, but if you don't understand that viewpoint (while disagreeing) you will never understand the reasons.
Chilcotin River Flows Freely After Historic Slide | Aerial footage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUFQh8lSFI
It's a very good idea.
I've noticed, in summer, that on trains to nice bits of the countryside, you often see one person in a couple with a hire Brompton (branding and colour) and one person on an owned one. I presume one is the commute bike and they got another one for a day out in the country.
It’s so easily done. Start a rumour of a far right stramash - it then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Either the skinheads show up or the hard case Islamists or ideally both - and you’ve successfully brewed a nasty riot
Which is part of the Reason behind Prevent. To try and catch people before they go down such roads and send them to a better destination.
Think I’ve found one right by the opera. 4 mins walk.i can manage that. Just about
Now I have no particular duck in this hun as the only thing I do online that is like social media is here. I don't do Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok etc...I am commenting merely from a point of view that these attempts are going to fail. The Forbes report I linked pointed out that 42% of people already in the UK use a vpn in one form or the other.
VPN's are too useful for businesses so can't be banned. Even China haven't been able to stamp hard enough to crush them
He later denounced the NRA and supported gun-control measures, such as an assault weapons ban. During his first campaign for governor in 2018, the NRA completely downgraded his rating. “I had an A rating from the NRA. Now I get straight F’s. And I sleep just fine.”
The advent of default, end-to-end encryption, means that the people running the service have no way to access the conversations. Serve a warrant, and all they can do is give your encrypted data.
So you'd end up like Turnbull in Australia, trying to outlaw maths. Because he was demanding a back door into all encryption. Any such backdoor has been proven, mathematically, to break the security system fundamentally. So goodbye doing anything online, securely.
I was previously involved with tracking some of this stuff, basically from a freedom of speech angle and out of concern with New Labour's authoritarian tendencies.
So you can't go - "oh look at the bad man using a VPN".
Instead it is "2 billion people use WhatsApp. And we have no clue what they are saying."
Average blood pressure in the posh bit of Sheffield increases a little.
Regardless of the rights or wrongs, it'd be effective enough.
Yes, people who knew about VPNs could download one, install it, and use it to bypass the ban, but a huge chunk of people wouldn't do that.
Which kills a massive chunk of their userbase in the UK and the attractiveness of advertising (especially as companies primarily operating in the UK wouldn't advertise on it anyway).
It'd cause huge pain to Musk, if that's the point.
Only 44% of britons consider the bbc trustworthy or very trustworthy.....slightly less than the number of people who thought scottish independence was a good idea
Social media networks need to know that, if they don't fulfil neutrality in their moderation, they should be seen as a publisher. Which means they are liable for what is printed on them. Hold Twitter liable for what people write on it.
All the major ones are trivial to use, its one click.
And the new American president will go bananas over restrictions against a US corporation. Game, set and match.
Back in the day when I was playing with podcasting (meaning 2004-5) there was an early audioblog called Minnesota Stories, which communicated that it was kind of ordinary - the biggest two cities being the size of Nottingham and Derby roughly.
To choose an English county to compare, I'd go for Staffs or Salop.
@JohnRentoul
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39m
Go on holiday, Keir – you can never satisfy demands for empty gestures (& resist recall of parliament too)
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He wont go on holiday me thinks.
Previously, I mentioned a relative who, when he sets up a building site, sets up a WiFi network for work use. And blocks social media. Quite a few people here seemed to think he was breaching their human rights or something.
It's attempted mass murder, and for all the wrongdoing witnessed on other 'protests' I've never seen anything as wicked.
The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 imposed the first national lockdown, beginning on 26 March 2020. These Regulations prohibited any person leaving their home “without reasonable excuse” and provided a non-exhaustive list of reasonable excuses. This list stated that a “reasonable excuse includes” various reasons such as obtaining basic necessities, taking exercise and seeking medical assistance. The Regulations did not specify engaging in protest as a reasonable excuse for leaving the home...
At the same time, the first lockdown regulations also imposed restrictions on gatherings: no person was permitted to participate in a gathering in a public place of more than two people. This restriction took a slightly different approach. It did not specify that gatherings were only prohibited where there was no “reasonable excuse”. Instead, it provided a general prohibition on gatherings coupled with an exhaustive list of lawful exceptions. These exceptions did not include protest...
From 1 June 2020 the restrictions were eased, with the prohibition on leaving the home replaced with a prohibition on staying overnight at any place other than home and the prohibition on outdoor gatherings limited to those involving more than 6 people.24 For the first time, “gathering” was defined—as “when two or more people are present together in the same place in order to engage in any form of social interaction with each other, or to undertake any other activity with each other.”25 There remained no exemption for engaging in public protest. It was under these restrictions that the BLM protests and the protests to protect statues and memorials took place...
From 4 July 2020 a further easing of restrictions took place, with people permitted to leave their homes and stay overnight elsewhere. Restrictions on outdoor gatherings remained, although up to 30 people were now able to attend gatherings outside as opposed to six. Significantly, for the purposes of protest, there was an exception in relation to outdoor gatherings of more than 30 people taking place in public spaces as long as (a) the gathering had been organised by “a business, a charitable, benevolent or philanthropic institution, a public body, or a political body”; (b) the person organising had carried out a health and safety risk assessment; and (c) the person organising had taken all reasonable measures to limit the risk of transmission of the coronavirus (taking into account both the risk assessment and government guidance).
The crime of arson against a potentially inhabited building is extreme reckless endangerment. At the very, very least.
If they knew there were people in the building, that would be, in my view, attempted murder.
I think he’s too savvy for that.
Remember the number of people who use passwords like 'password' or '12345'.
https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/password-statistics/
People are not security-conscious.
(*) Sorry, PGP folks!
(**) Being criminal and paranoid is perhaps a wise position.
Following a week of violence, readers weigh in on labelling the demonstrations as terrorism and ‘two-tier’ policing"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/06/protests-britain-immigration-policing-reader-react/
As an aside, my parents were also amused by the fact Christmas cards from my parents-in-law always arrived in an envelope from the Royal Mail saying something like: "This letter was opened by a third party."
Prasannanesque!
The 42% of the uk who now use a vpn belies your assertion people won't bother even 5 years ago that number would be about half
As for "two tier policing", what they mean is they fear one-tier policing. There's an assumption that whites, and the middle class, should be given the benefit of the doubt by the police because "they are one of us", and shock when that doesn't seem to be the case. What EDL types really want is the sort of two-tier policing that they remember from the good old days.
See the following:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1383616/uk-frequency-vpn-usage/
Also consider the figures for stoopid passwords that are not gained from a survey.
Also: daily use of a VPN might include work, not personal.
Mobile signals are a different matter - any jammer would impact people outside the school so is subject to the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/36/section/68
End to end encryption is being implemented, by default, in just about every chat system I am aware of. Many of them don't have a way to turn it off.
A lot of 'look at this sweet middle class person, do they look like a criminal?' vibes.
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1383616/uk-frequency-vpn-usage/#:~:text=Virtual private network usage frequency in United Kingdom (UK) 2023&text=A February 2023 survey in,private network (VPN) daily.
I ask partly because I don't know anybody who uses a VPN.
It's Brompton Bike Hire which has been a thing for quite a long time. Checking, it launched in 2011.
I took one on holiday from the locker outside Birmingham Station to Istanbul in I think 2018.
They are very cheap - I think now about £5 per day, and it is a good way to find out if a Brompton works for you since they discount a month or so of hire fees off the price of a new Brompton.
The network is quite varied - for example not in Derby or Chesterfield but several lockers in Newark, which is tiny and in the back of beyond. It May because Newark is an easy rail commute to London which may be one market, and is flat as a pancake.
A VPN gets round this by - you go to the VPN, then from their "exit point" (which might be on another continent) to wherever you really want to go.
Jamming is only if you want to block someone using a mobile phone connection to the internet, which you don't control.
"
What have you achieved in the past three years?
Bronze at 13, bronze at 16.
"
Incidentally, I heard on the radio earlier that the skateboarding has the youngest competitor at 11, and one of the oldest at 51...