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.
If she has, her biggest complaint will no doubt be "And it was halal!!"
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
You're obsessed with Starmer taking the knee. Would you like him to perform a Nazi salute to show his empathy with the neo-Nazis currently roaming our streets?
"‘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.
Constable Savage waves hello...
Disgusting statement.
That is Chief Constable Savage OBE, MBE, DipSHit to the likes of you. And I'll have you know that his entire command has done and passed their anti-racism, click through, online tests. As the abstract Perspex award in his personal award cabinet (taxpayer funded) attests.
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.
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.
Its the something must be done, same as when we have floods politicians must be seen in the wellies.
In reality there is only so much even Starmer can do. If 1000s decide to come out onto the streets every night wanting to riot, you can't really stop them. You have to hope the police do a good job, which is out of his individual control.
Here is Katherine Leavitt, Trump's Press Secretary, on the news:
From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda.
Right.
It's dangerous to allow convicted felons to take part in politics.
That's why everyone wants Trump, a man with 34 criminal and innumerable civil convictions, tossed from the race...
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
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.
But equally a school will control the hardware running in the school - the whole point that you can't access porn or similar on a school computer.
That resulted in children at the Twin's old school spending a lot of time playing the games on the Daily Mail website (most gaming sites were banned but as the Daily Mail was a newspaper access was allowed).
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....
Letby, you mean? Yes there are unfathomable cases like that.
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.
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
You're obsessed with Starmer taking the knee. Would you like him to perform a Nazi salute to show his empathy with the neo-Nazis currently roaming our streets?
Why does your comment make me want to shout "Mein Führer, I can walk!" ?
Quite amusing catching up with some of the comments here today. I expect this will rile people, oh well.
Musk tweeting “two tier kier” is no different to any tabloid front page saying something mischievous about a sitting PM. Many here just don’t like it because it’s about a politician they like, and dare I say, because only the truth can sting so bitterly.
As for hate speech and defamation on social media, there are long standing laws governing both. If not already in place, you could trivially legislate to compel social media companies (sorry this includes you TSE and RCS) to comply with police investigations of such. Elon Musk and his backers, as well Nick Clegg’s lot, would comply with this law. I suspect Telegram and the like, where there is discourse of an altogether different nature, would not.
But in any event, I fail to see why a software company is the appropriate body to determine guilt in cases of defamation or incitement to violence, and should be expected to act as society’s censors. Did we learn nothing from the Twitter files?
Without Musk’s maximalist approach to freedom of speech on X, I would personally be completely unaware that current events carry more nuance than our glorious PM or state broadcaster appear willing to admit. And as much as the government would love the genie back in the bottle, the days of them tightly controlling information are gone. They are going to have to work much harder than burying problems and hoping they go away. Good.
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
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
Quite amusing catching up with some of the comments here today. I expect this will rile people, oh well.
Musk tweeting “two tier kier” is no different to any tabloid front page saying something mischievous about a sitting PM. Many here just don’t like it because it’s about a politician they like, and dare I say, because only the truth can sting so bitterly.
As for hate speech and defamation on social media, there are long standing laws governing both. If not already in place, you could trivially legislate to compel social media companies (sorry this includes you TSE and RCS) to comply with police investigations of such. Elon Musk and his backers, as well Nick Clegg’s lot, would comply with this law. I suspect Telegram and the like, where there is discourse of an altogether different nature, would not.
But in any event, I fail to see why a software company is the appropriate body to determine guilt in cases of defamation or incitement to violence, and should be expected to act as society’s censors. Did we learn nothing from the Twitter files?
Without Musk’s maximalist approach to freedom of speech on X, I would personally be completely unaware that current events carry more nuance than our glorious PM or state broadcaster appear willing to admit. And as much as the government would love the genie back in the bottle, the days of them tightly controlling information are gone. They are going to have to work much harder than burying problems and hoping they go away. Good.
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).
I'm not going to argue with a knob who selectively quotes from the answer to a Parliamentary question without posting the bit, specifically paragraphs 48 and 49, which completely discredits the point he is making. Your mates burning down libraries don't do much reading either it seems.
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
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....
Letby, you mean? Yes there are unfathomable cases like that.
No, this was a little girl, not even in her teens, who was discovered to have absolutely no empathy. Trying to remember the details of the case. Among other things she tried to murder her baby brother for next to no reason, IIRC
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
"‘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.
Exactly, very similar vibes and we’re seeing the whole sweet innocent thing again this time too, featuring old ladies on Facebook saying “do I look far right?”
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
There is having used a VPN sometime in the past, perhaps through work, and those who use them routinely at home.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
This is the medals table from the Microsoft Start webpage:
Can anyone explain how the sorting works? It clearly isn't on Golds, or China would be first... but it clearly isn't on total medal count, or the UK would be ahead of Australia.
Just for a bit of fun, I assigned 3 points for a Gold, 2 for Silver, and 1 for a bronze, and got this table:
G S B Total points United States 63 60 28 151 China 66 38 14 118 France 39 32 19 90 Great Britain 36 26 18 80 Australia 42 24 8 74 South Korea 33 16 7 56 Japan 30 12 11 53 Italy 27 20 6 53 Germany 24 10 4 38 Netherlands 21 10 6 37
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
There is having used a VPN sometime in the past, perhaps through work, and those who use them routinely at home.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
Sighs do your own calculation even if you only go down as far as the every 6 to 12 months column which implies use in the last year you still get to 35% , plus as I said some of the prefer not to say will be in that figure....the 42% is not egregiously unlikely. You are splitting hairs over a few percent at best.
My point still stands these people will have a vpn on their pc, give them more reason they have to use it they will. VPN usage is on very much an upward curve
Quite amusing catching up with some of the comments here today. I expect this will rile people, oh well.
Musk tweeting “two tier kier” is no different to any tabloid front page saying something mischievous about a sitting PM. Many here just don’t like it because it’s about a politician they like, and dare I say, because only the truth can sting so bitterly.
As for hate speech and defamation on social media, there are long standing laws governing both. If not already in place, you could trivially legislate to compel social media companies (sorry this includes you TSE and RCS) to comply with police investigations of such. Elon Musk and his backers, as well Nick Clegg’s lot, would comply with this law. I suspect Telegram and the like, where there is discourse of an altogether different nature, would not.
But in any event, I fail to see why a software company is the appropriate body to determine guilt in cases of defamation or incitement to violence, and should be expected to act as society’s censors. Did we learn nothing from the Twitter files?
Without Musk’s maximalist approach to freedom of speech on X, I would personally be completely unaware that current events carry more nuance than our glorious PM or state broadcaster appear willing to admit. And as much as the government would love the genie back in the bottle, the days of them tightly controlling information are gone. They are going to have to work much harder than burying problems and hoping they go away. Good.
The Twitter files were Musk b/s
Were they? Really? Zucks has admitted to complying with state censorship requests during covid. And we know Google were at it.
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.
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).
I'm not going to argue with a knob who selectively quotes from the answer to a Parliamentary question without posting the bit, specifically paragraphs 48 and 49, which completely discredits the point he is making. Your mates burning down libraries don't do much reading either it seems.
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
I quoted the bits which proved there was no "exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid". That exception specifically came in on 4 July 2020, which was after the BLM protests: the legal position was exactly as per the contemporaneous article I posted. You could have done ten seconds of googling and found that out: you chose not to, so suck it up and take your L.
The thing is, Musk has just name-callled Starmer, but predicted civil war, which he seems to be willing on, in a Trumpian frenzy.
He seems to consider it natural that the polarisation of the U.S. should or will be in the U.K., which means that the U.K. government would be well within its rights to block him and his site.
The thing is, Musk has just name-callled Starmer, but predicted civil war, which he seems to be willing on, in a Trumpian frenzy.
He seems to consider it natural that the polarisation of the U.S. should or will be in the U.K., which means that the U.K. government would be well within its rights to block him and his site.
But, as we’ve discussed, it is really really hard to do either of these things, for multiple reasons
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.
My admonishment was for your "rape" comment.
I am well aware of the "left behind". They have been left behind for generations by the Labour party in Northern, Midlands, Scottish and Welsh s***holes. Hence they voted, SNP, Leave and "lent"their vote to Johnson in 2019, who also left them behind. They lent their vote to Farage in 2024 and probably 2029. He will let them down too.
When the politicians let them down the politicians look for scapegoats. The EU, foreigners, scroungers, illegal immigrants. Scoundrel like Farage buy the easy win, so we are where we are.
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
You're obsessed with Starmer taking the knee. Would you like him to perform a Nazi salute to show his empathy with the neo-Nazis currently roaming our streets?
Just watching video on Russian interference in US investment markets. How did they get their "in",.as they were all using VPNs and top tier op sec....until one of them logged into their iTunes account (registered in own real name) while connected to VPN.
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.
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.
It just gives a voice to the tosspots who stirred the pot like Farage.
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.
And yet most people don't use them. I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most. And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
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.
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).
I'm not going to argue with a knob who selectively quotes from the answer to a Parliamentary question without posting the bit, specifically paragraphs 48 and 49, which completely discredits the point he is making. Your mates burning down libraries don't do much reading either it seems.
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
I quoted the bits which proved there was no "exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid". That exception specifically came in on 4 July 2020, which was after the BLM protests: the legal position was exactly as per the contemporaneous article I posted. You could have done ten seconds of googling and found that out: you chose not to, so suck it up and take your L.
Unless you are a lawyer yourself, best not to argue law with a lawyer, even a piniped one.
This is the medals table from the Microsoft Start webpage:
Can anyone explain how the sorting works? It clearly isn't on Golds, or China would be first... but it clearly isn't on total medal count, or the UK would be ahead of Australia.
Just for a bit of fun, I assigned 3 points for a Gold, 2 for Silver, and 1 for a bronze, and got this table:
G S B Total points United States 63 60 28 151 China 66 38 14 118 France 39 32 19 90 Great Britain 36 26 18 80 Australia 42 24 8 74 South Korea 33 16 7 56 Japan 30 12 11 53 Italy 27 20 6 53 Germany 24 10 4 38 Netherlands 21 10 6 37
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.
My admonishment was for your "rape" comment.
I am well aware of the "left behind". They have been left behind for generations by the Labour party in Northern, Midlands, Scottish and Welsh s***holes. Hence they voted, SNP, Leave and "lent"their vote to Johnson in 2019, who also left them behind. They lent their vote to Farage in 2024 and probably 2029. He will let them down too.
When the politicians let them down the politicians look for scapegoats. The EU, foreigners, scroungers, illegal immigrants. Scoundrel like Farage buy the easy win, so we are where we are.
You say they are let down - but what exactly do they want and is it achievable?
The problem is that a lot of people want the impossible and don't understand that that is not achievable...
The thing is, Musk has just name-callled Starmer, but predicted civil war, which he seems to be willing on, in a Trumpian frenzy.
He seems to consider it natural that the polarisation of the U.S. should or will be in the U.K., which means that the U.K. government would be well within its rights to block him and his site.
Doesn't Musk come into the "Highly Intelligent Really Stupid" category?
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
There is having used a VPN sometime in the past, perhaps through work, and those who use them routinely at home.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
Sighs do your own calculation even if you only go down as far as the every 6 to 12 months column which implies use in the last year you still get to 35% , plus as I said some of the prefer not to say will be in that figure....the 42% is not egregiously unlikely. You are splitting hairs over a few percent at best.
My point still stands these people will have a vpn on their pc, give them more reason they have to use it they will. VPN usage is on very much an upward curve
'THE RISKS OF VPNS: HOW LAW ENFORCEMENT CAN TRACE YOUR IP ADDRESS'
The thing is, Musk has just name-callled Starmer, but predicted civil war, which he seems to be willing on, in a Trumpian frenzy.
He seems to consider it natural that the polarisation of the U.S. should or will be in the U.K., which means that the U.K. government would be well within its rights to block him and his site.
That seems disproportionate. He's an arse who is not as all knowing as he thinks he is and gets off on important people engaging with him. He does have enormous influence and I'm not sure how that should be responded to, but he wants to stoke a fire so lowering to his level may not be wise.
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.
And yet most people don't use them. I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most. And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
If they have to be talked through such a simple process I would dispute they are tech savvy, it really isn't anymore difficult than installing any program on your pc or mobile
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
easyJet have just cancelled my flight to Gatwick tomorrow. That's 3 cancellations and 1 4 hour delay in my last 4 trips...
That tells me an awful lot about the demand for flights to Aberdeen from London.
It was like the weekly entertainment at Schiphol as you knew there was 9 flights but only 8 planes available - the flight with the least passengers across both legs was the one going to be cancelled - twas usually the one to Inverness but once in a while you were not so lucky.
Pupils opted to get their grades by text message or email, but those opening an email from the Scottish Qualification Authority (SQA) were disappointed to see a blank space where the exam results should be.
The chief executive of the SQA apologised to pupils for a “technical issue” causing a delay to some results sent by email. It's estimated that around 7,000 pupils were affected.
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.
And yet most people don't use them. I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most. And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
If they have to be talked through such a simple process I would dispute they are tech savvy, it really isn't anymore difficult than installing any program on your pc or mobile
The former apparently is something more people struggle with now than the old days (by which I mean the early 2000s) as in general they have no need to do it.
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
There is having used a VPN sometime in the past, perhaps through work, and those who use them routinely at home.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
Sighs do your own calculation even if you only go down as far as the every 6 to 12 months column which implies use in the last year you still get to 35% , plus as I said some of the prefer not to say will be in that figure....the 42% is not egregiously unlikely. You are splitting hairs over a few percent at best.
My point still stands these people will have a vpn on their pc, give them more reason they have to use it they will. VPN usage is on very much an upward curve
'THE RISKS OF VPNS: HOW LAW ENFORCEMENT CAN TRACE YOUR IP ADDRESS'
Which is why if you are actually upto no good (note I don't class accessing twitter if jackbooted governments ban it) then you use vpn chains or the tor network. When it comes to the internet the authorities have cap pistols and the bad guys have tanks. Only real idiots get caught
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
You're obsessed with Starmer taking the knee. Would you like him to perform a Nazi salute to show his empathy with the neo-Nazis currently roaming our streets?
Starmer taking the knee was fucking disgusting.
He should never have become PM.
No it wasn't. It showed solidarity with black Americans being blown away on traffic stops by gun-toting State Troopers.
If he'd taken the knee AND shot up a mall in Fort Lauderdale you would have a point.
We are aware of a potential protest being organised in Nottingham on Wednesday evening.
The location has no links to the business advertised on the internet.
Officers have visited the address and it is home to an elderly person with vulnerabilities.
We don’t know who is “organising” what, TBH
Is this just going to go on and on?? I kinda expected it to end by now. This is about day 7??
Starmer can't even bring it under control, despite his Bunker Rants.
That's how shit he is.
He accused musk (fairly, to my mind) of stoking tension what that mad “civil war” tweet, but then he says “we will have a standing army ready to crack down”
A standing army? How is that different to predicting civil war? Worse, he’s the prime minister, so it’s much more important and visible
I can see why pollsters say voters are not impressed
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
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.
Not bullshit because look at the figure for never use its 35.39% . Give them an incentive and never heard of this 16.63% add them together and include the prefer not to say of 7.91% you get a total that equates to people who use vpns in the uk of 40.07%. We can assume some of the not prefer to say includes some who do use a vpn.
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
Nah, it was bullshit. See the caveats you had to place to get your 'figure'.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
Which part of my suggestion that 42% of uk people used a vpn in the uk. Totting up all the figures on the used part comes to 40%. The 60% not using vpn's probably account for the people on your password list
There is having used a VPN sometime in the past, perhaps through work, and those who use them routinely at home.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
Sighs do your own calculation even if you only go down as far as the every 6 to 12 months column which implies use in the last year you still get to 35% , plus as I said some of the prefer not to say will be in that figure....the 42% is not egregiously unlikely. You are splitting hairs over a few percent at best.
My point still stands these people will have a vpn on their pc, give them more reason they have to use it they will. VPN usage is on very much an upward curve
'THE RISKS OF VPNS: HOW LAW ENFORCEMENT CAN TRACE YOUR IP ADDRESS'
Most good VPN services now offer RAM only / no log and IP mixing. So the main criticism is nonsense and has been tested in court.
I can believe for international terrorism there are zero days into things like OpenVPN protocol, but otherwise they rely on individuals slipping up and social enginneering.
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
Yet you still claim to have voted for Starmer last month, and not, say, for RefUK...
Quite amusing catching up with some of the comments here today. I expect this will rile people, oh well.
Musk tweeting “two tier kier” is no different to any tabloid front page saying something mischievous about a sitting PM. Many here just don’t like it because it’s about a politician they like, and dare I say, because only the truth can sting so bitterly.
As for hate speech and defamation on social media, there are long standing laws governing both. If not already in place, you could trivially legislate to compel social media companies (sorry this includes you TSE and RCS) to comply with police investigations of such. Elon Musk and his backers, as well Nick Clegg’s lot, would comply with this law. I suspect Telegram and the like, where there is discourse of an altogether different nature, would not.
But in any event, I fail to see why a software company is the appropriate body to determine guilt in cases of defamation or incitement to violence, and should be expected to act as society’s censors. Did we learn nothing from the Twitter files?
Without Musk’s maximalist approach to freedom of speech on X, I would personally be completely unaware that current events carry more nuance than our glorious PM or state broadcaster appear willing to admit. And as much as the government would love the genie back in the bottle, the days of them tightly controlling information are gone. They are going to have to work much harder than burying problems and hoping they go away. Good.
The Twitter files were Musk b/s
Were they? Really? Zucks has admitted to complying with state censorship requests during covid. And we know Google were at it.
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.
Birmingham to Istanbul? That's a hell of a ride.
Here's a fifty-something lady who did London to Sweden on a Brompton, bikepacking.
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.
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).
I'm not going to argue with a knob who selectively quotes from the answer to a Parliamentary question without posting the bit, specifically paragraphs 48 and 49, which completely discredits the point he is making. Your mates burning down libraries don't do much reading either it seems.
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
I quoted the bits which proved there was no "exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid". That exception specifically came in on 4 July 2020, which was after the BLM protests: the legal position was exactly as per the contemporaneous article I posted. You could have done ten seconds of googling and found that out: you chose not to, so suck it up and take your L.
Unless you are a lawyer yourself, best not to argue law with a lawyer, even a piniped one.
Did you notice that this lawyer tried to prove "there was an exception that permitted demonstrations to take place" by quoting and bolding a section that said "throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings"? Because he apparently didn'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.
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.
And yet most people don't use them. I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most. And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
If they have to be talked through such a simple process I would dispute they are tech savvy, it really isn't anymore difficult than installing any program on your pc or mobile
The former apparently is something more people struggle with now than the old days (by which I mean the early 2000s) as in general they have no need to do it.
My son is distressingly non technical despite having passed all his ICT exams, showing him how to actually copy files was a revelation to him for example. However having said that getting a vpn set up these days is not much harder than buying a game from steam
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
Yet you still claim to have voted for Starmer last month, and not, say, for RefUK...
The **** ******* ****** should ***** and ***** his ***** to *****.
Starmer should serve his revenge cold. I have a suspicion he might be quite good at that.
On the VPN thing. As with any terrorist organisation, a VPN might hide your tracks to some extent but it isn't a defence against a criminal charge if that's what you've done
Keeley is the real deal. Not just the best 800m runner in the world but a really personable and relatable person (for a super hero). There are always a lot of stars in an Olympic year but for me she is nailed on SPOTY.
We are aware of a potential protest being organised in Nottingham on Wednesday evening.
The location has no links to the business advertised on the internet.
Officers have visited the address and it is home to an elderly person with vulnerabilities.
We don’t know who is “organising” what, TBH
Is this just going to go on and on?? I kinda expected it to end by now. This is about day 7??
Starmer can't even bring it under control, despite his Bunker Rants.
That's how shit he is.
He accused musk (fairly, to my mind) of stoking tension what that mad “civil war” tweet, but then he says “we will have a standing army ready to crack down”
A standing army? How is that different to predicting civil war? Worse, he’s the prime minister, so it’s much more important and visible
I can see why pollsters say voters are not impressed
You are aware that the UK, like nearly all countries, has a standing army?
Plus the modern police force would have been seen by the libertarian slaveowners of the American Revolution as a standing army.
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.
SKS is a typical North London left-liberal with zero imagination whatsoever.
However, he is personally ambitious so he learned to take advice before the election and cosplay a Blairite to win.
The **** ******* ****** should ***** and ***** his ***** to *****.
Starmer should serve his revenge cold. I have a suspicion he might be quite good at that.
On the VPN thing. As with any terrorist organisation, a VPN might hide your tracks to some extent but it isn't a defence against a criminal charge if that's what you've done
The reason for what amounts to panic, in some governments, about end-to-end encryption, is that it provides total security. Which can't be broken by court order.
The **** ******* ****** should ***** and ***** his ***** to *****.
Starmer should serve his revenge cold. I have a suspicion he might be quite good at that.
On the VPN thing. As with any terrorist organisation, a VPN might hide your tracks to some extent but it isn't a defence against a criminal charge if that's what you've done
Its not a defence against a criminal charge if you get stupid and get caught, much like shoplifting, burglary, cartheft, mugging etc
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
Yet you still claim to have voted for Starmer last month, and not, say, for RefUK...
Do you know I don't altogether believe you.
Doesn't quite scan, does it.
So, what, now you don’t believe me? That I voted for this twat Starmer? What would I gain from lying to you about my vote?! What do I care what you think of my vote? You seriously over estimate your salience in my mind
We are aware of a potential protest being organised in Nottingham on Wednesday evening.
The location has no links to the business advertised on the internet.
Officers have visited the address and it is home to an elderly person with vulnerabilities.
We don’t know who is “organising” what, TBH
Is this just going to go on and on?? I kinda expected it to end by now. This is about day 7??
Starmer can't even bring it under control, despite his Bunker Rants.
That's how shit he is.
He accused musk (fairly, to my mind) of stoking tension what that mad “civil war” tweet, but then he says “we will have a standing army ready to crack down”
A standing army? How is that different to predicting civil war? Worse, he’s the prime minister, so it’s much more important and visible
I can see why pollsters say voters are not impressed
Starmer probably believes his own propaganda that this is all the work of "racists" and they need to be crushed and defeated, and that'll be the end of the matter.
Quite aside from that not being the case he doesn't have the balls to do it in any event, thus earning the contempt of both sides.
Remind you of something? He's a reverse-Conservative. Just the left-wing version.
Keeley is the real deal. Not just the best 800m runner in the world but a really personable and relatable person (for a super hero). There are always a lot of stars in an Olympic year but for me she is nailed on SPOTY.
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.
And yet most people don't use them. I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most. And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
If they have to be talked through such a simple process I would dispute they are tech savvy, it really isn't anymore difficult than installing any program on your pc or mobile
The former apparently is something more people struggle with now than the old days (by which I mean the early 2000s) as in general they have no need to do it.
My son is distressingly non technical despite having passed all his ICT exams, showing him how to actually copy files was a revelation to him for example. However having said that getting a vpn set up these days is not much harder than buying a game from steam
My daughter (eldest) is totally non-technical. When I blocked social media, she tried installing a VPN. From a Tik Tok she found. Blocked against installing (I have admin) she found a thing that claimed to be a VPN via Javascript from a website.
Fortunately the anti-virus plus no install privileges on her account dealt with that....
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
That’s what I saw. I was there
Two days later, Starmer took the knee
Yet you still claim to have voted for Starmer last month, and not, say, for RefUK...
Do you know I don't altogether believe you.
Doesn't quite scan, does it.
I don't have any problem believing it. @Leon loves winners, whether they are despots, crooks like Trump or psychopaths like Putin. In contrast he despise losers and Sunak was a loser. He finds losing a moral flaw, evidence of weakness. Starmer was obviously going to be the winner. Who cares what he actually stands for?
We are aware of a potential protest being organised in Nottingham on Wednesday evening.
The location has no links to the business advertised on the internet.
Officers have visited the address and it is home to an elderly person with vulnerabilities.
We don’t know who is “organising” what, TBH
Is this just going to go on and on?? I kinda expected it to end by now. This is about day 7??
Starmer can't even bring it under control, despite his Bunker Rants.
That's how shit he is.
He accused musk (fairly, to my mind) of stoking tension what that mad “civil war” tweet, but then he says “we will have a standing army ready to crack down”
A standing army? How is that different to predicting civil war? Worse, he’s the prime minister, so it’s much more important and visible
I can see why pollsters say voters are not impressed
You are aware that the UK, like nearly all countries, has a standing army?
Plus the modern police force would have been seen by the libertarian slaveowners of the American Revolution as a standing army.
Where did this "standing police force" or whatever it is phrase come from?
I'm aware of the two-tier policing talking point that was pulled out of someone's (Lee Anderson's, perhaps?) butt, but I haven't sourced the other one.
The **** ******* ****** should ***** and ***** his ***** to *****.
Starmer should serve his revenge cold. I have a suspicion he might be quite good at that.
On the VPN thing. As with any terrorist organisation, a VPN might hide your tracks to some extent but it isn't a defence against a criminal charge if that's what you've done
The reason for what amounts to panic, in some governments, about end-to-end encryption, is that it provides total security. Which can't be broken by court order.
The panic is more about in my view and this is opinion not fact
Before the internet information was a 1 to many broadcast. You had a few companies publishing information for people to read, governments could apply pressure on the few to not publish inconvenient facts
After the internet information was a many to many broadcast. There are too many publishing inconvenient facts for governments to pressure
Along with the after internet era however you also got the ability to publish many to many falsehoods which is a downside
Before the internet era however governments had the ability to push convenient falsehoods which was a downside
For all the downsides I prefer the after internet era
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.
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).
I'm not going to argue with a knob who selectively quotes from the answer to a Parliamentary question without posting the bit, specifically paragraphs 48 and 49, which completely discredits the point he is making. Your mates burning down libraries don't do much reading either it seems.
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
I quoted the bits which proved there was no "exception that permitted demonstrations to take place with additional measures designed to mitigate the spread of Covid". That exception specifically came in on 4 July 2020, which was after the BLM protests: the legal position was exactly as per the contemporaneous article I posted. You could have done ten seconds of googling and found that out: you chose not to, so suck it up and take your L.
"Suck it up" Sure. Oh for fuck sake you pathetic snowflake. You're wrong, suck it up like a good little boy. I didn't have to Google it. I spent six months of 2020 advising people as to the ever changing law on assembly Which I'm guessing you didn't. You didn't even read the article you cited originally which read in part -
Barrister Audrey Cherryl Mogan explains the European Convention on Human Rights (in British law as the Human Rights Act) says that public bodies must respect both the right to assemble and to express one's views.
But these two rights are not absolute. The government or another public body can interfere with them if it has a proper legal reason to do so.
"So it becomes a balancing exercise," she says. "If what's being done is to enforce the health regulations, then you can argue that [stopping a protest] would be reasonable and proportionate."
From 1 June 2020 lockdown 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. 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.” There remained no explicit exemption for engaging in public protest but was under these restrictions (together with 'reasonable excuse') that the BLM protests and the protests to protect statues and memorials took place
But, on 5 November 2020, when the second national lockdown began, under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020. As in the first lockdown, these regulations imposed a prohibition on leaving home without ‘reasonable excuse’ and, again, provided a list of exceptions, which did not include protest. The difference with the first lockdown was that regulations DID appear to permit a gathering, including (unlike the first one) expressly for the purposes of protest involving more than 30 people to be held, but did not permit anyone to participate in it or arguably to leave home to attend it. This was probably an error in the drafting of the legislation, but it meant that the 28 November protests were broken up. That is what I was referring to
So, shove your 'L' where the sun doesn't shine and read shit before posting.
Comments
https://x.com/faithrubpol/status/1820808036229013769?s=61&t=LYVEHh2mqFy1oUJAdCfe-Q
Would you like him to perform a Nazi salute to show his empathy with the neo-Nazis currently roaming our streets?
That is Chief Constable Savage OBE, MBE, DipSHit to the likes of you. And I'll have you know that his entire command has done and passed their anti-racism, click through, online tests. As the abstract Perspex award in his personal award cabinet (taxpayer funded) attests.
In reality there is only so much even Starmer can do. If 1000s decide to come out onto the streets every night wanting to riot, you can't really stop them. You have to hope the police do a good job, which is out of his individual control.
Here is Katherine Leavitt, Trump's Press Secretary, on the news:
From proposing his own carbon-free agenda, to suggesting stricter emission standards for gas-powered cars, and embracing policies to allow convicted felons to vote, Walz is obsessed with spreading California’s dangerously liberal agenda.
Right.
It's dangerous to allow convicted felons to take part in politics.
That's why everyone wants Trump, a man with 34 criminal and innumerable civil convictions, tossed from the race...
My claim wasn't that 42% use it daily. Now give them an incentive to use it more such as their favourite social media goes black without using a vpn then expect those figures for regularity to rapidly change. Your link proved my point exactly vpn usage is not alien to around 42% of the country just currently a lot don't need to use it all the time
That resulted in children at the Twin's old school spending a lot of time playing the games on the Daily Mail website (most gaming sites were banned but as the Daily Mail was a newspaper access was allowed).
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1820804792240734655
The **** ******* ****** should ***** and ***** his ***** to *****.
...you must try a twosome
or a threesome...
...and you'll find your conscience
bothers you much less. "
A gruesome twosome.
Kemper did two in one day.
Bundy at Chi Omega did three.
Boston Strangler, Hillside Strangler...
Does the order mean anything?
https://x.com/PStyle0ne1/status/1820840312153035255
I don't know if this is true, but even if it is false, it is hilarious.
I hope Putin, Musky Baby and Trump all see their dreams dissolve in the next few months.
plus see my reply to mr Jessop. The statista thing you and he posted back up the study I posted
Musk tweeting “two tier kier” is no different to any tabloid front page saying something mischievous about a sitting PM. Many here just don’t like it because it’s about a politician they like, and dare I say, because only the truth can sting so bitterly.
As for hate speech and defamation on social media, there are long standing laws governing both. If not already in place, you could trivially legislate to compel social media companies (sorry this includes you TSE and RCS) to comply with police investigations of such. Elon Musk and his backers, as well Nick Clegg’s lot, would comply with this law. I suspect Telegram and the like, where there is discourse of an altogether different nature, would not.
But in any event, I fail to see why a software company is the appropriate body to determine guilt in cases of defamation or incitement to violence, and should be expected to act as society’s censors. Did we learn nothing from the Twitter files?
Without Musk’s maximalist approach to freedom of speech on X, I would personally be completely unaware that current events carry more nuance than our glorious PM or state broadcaster appear willing to admit. And as much as the government would love the genie back in the bottle, the days of them tightly controlling information are gone. They are going to have to work much harder than burying problems and hoping they go away. Good.
Also, you ignore my point about stoopid passwords. Figures that are often gained not from surveys, but from hacked passwords lists. The idea that people use a VPN, yet use stoopid passwords, is odd.
As more supporting data:
https://nordpass.com/most-common-passwords-list/?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_term&utm_content=100094349&utm_campaign=off490&utm_source=aff34741&aff_free
I feel like a God doing a triathlon in double the time a professional would. Well, a God of myself...
Harriet Harman defects to the Tories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AL93KiCfTc
48.Yet through each period of national lockdown the law has not prohibited leaving the home if there is a “reasonable excuse” for doing so. Given that the regulations imposing lockdown have not (and could not) remove the underlying right to protest under Articles 10 and 11 ECHR, guaranteed by the HRA, it seems that going on a protest, if conducted in a manner that minimises the risk of spreading covid-19, could have been and could remain a lawful reason to leave the home during lockdown.
49.Furthermore, while throughout the national lockdowns the regulations have been clear that protest does not fall within the lawful exceptions to the prohibition on gatherings, they have been equally clear that breaching that prohibition will only be an offence if it is done without a ‘reasonable excuse’. If protest could potentially be a reasonable excuse in respect of the prohibition on leaving home, then protest could also potentially be a reasonable excuse for gathering together—meaning that participating in that gathering would not be an offence.
"The Russians raised a flag at the Novgorod special school No. 38 in Niu York."
https://x.com/DefMon3/status/1820864417346601303
"password"
I also block "Friend" and "Mellon" on any password system I set up.
(Incidentally, I was amused a couple of years ago when a used was promoting VPNs. *Never* choose a VPN from a random recommendation...)
"correcthorsebatterystaple"
You'd think that, having read carefully explained idea of a good password....
My point still stands these people will have a vpn on their pc, give them more reason they have to use it they will. VPN usage is on very much an upward curve
Think I still prefer The Verve - Urban Hymns, though.
That was quite the double take
He seems to consider it natural that the polarisation of the U.S. should or will be in the U.K., which means that the U.K. government would be well within its rights to block him and his site.
I am well aware of the "left behind". They have been left behind for generations by the Labour party in Northern, Midlands, Scottish and Welsh s***holes. Hence they voted, SNP, Leave and "lent"their vote to Johnson in 2019, who also left them behind. They lent their vote to Farage in 2024 and probably 2029. He will let them down too.
When the politicians let them down the politicians look for scapegoats. The EU, foreigners, scroungers, illegal immigrants. Scoundrel like Farage buy the easy win, so we are where we are.
Nottinghamshire Police
@nottspolice
We are aware of a potential protest being organised in Nottingham on Wednesday evening.
The location has no links to the business advertised on the internet.
Officers have visited the address and it is home to an elderly person with vulnerabilities.
He should never have become PM.
I've been active on a Disney forum where you can only book certain things in advance at Disney over VPN (as if you're not in the US, they're blocked). Most on that forum are fairly tech-savvy, yet time and again, people have to be talked carefully through using a VPN.
Most don't and wouldn't bother. Twitter isn't that important to most.
And then others wouldn't use Twitter because so many others wouldn't be bothering. As with all social media platforms, many use it solely because many use it. That critical mass issue.
Mastodon isn't that complicated. Bluesky certainly isn't. Yet complicated enough and with the critical mass issues that preclude them from taking off.
The problem is that a lot of people want the impossible and don't understand that that is not achievable...
We don’t know who is “organising” what, TBH
Is this just going to go on and on?? I kinda expected it to end by now. This is about day 7??
https://thetruthaboutforensicscience.com/the-risks-of-vpns-how-law-enforcement-can-trace-your-ip-address/
Vote Green/Jezza/Whatever Gorgeous called his old bollocks.
It was like the weekly entertainment at Schiphol as you knew there was 9 flights but only 8 planes available - the flight with the least passengers across both legs was the one going to be cancelled - twas usually the one to Inverness but once in a while you were not so lucky.
That's how shit he is.
The chief executive of the SQA apologised to pupils for a “technical issue” causing a delay to some results sent by email. It's estimated that around 7,000 pupils were affected.
If he'd taken the knee AND shot up a mall in Fort Lauderdale you would have a point.
A standing army? How is that different to predicting civil war? Worse, he’s the prime minister, so it’s much more important and visible
I can see why pollsters say voters are not impressed
I can believe for international terrorism there are zero days into things like OpenVPN protocol, but otherwise they rely on individuals slipping up and social enginneering.
Do you know I don't altogether believe you.
Here's a fifty-something lady who did London to Sweden on a Brompton, bikepacking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLnkDxo9Mk
On the VPN thing. As with any terrorist organisation, a VPN might hide your tracks to some extent but it isn't a defence against a criminal charge if that's what you've done
Plus the modern police force would have been seen by the libertarian slaveowners of the American Revolution as a standing army.
However, he is personally ambitious so he learned to take advice before the election and cosplay a Blairite to win.
There really is nothing more to him than that.
Becoming FM seems to have come as a surprise to her.
Quite aside from that not being the case he doesn't have the balls to do it in any event, thus earning the contempt of both sides.
Remind you of something? He's a reverse-Conservative. Just the left-wing version.
Gorgeous.
I don't think lefty's should be so certain if a ten year Labour rule anymore.
Fortunately the anti-virus plus no install privileges on her account dealt with that....
I'm aware of the two-tier policing talking point that was pulled out of someone's (Lee Anderson's, perhaps?) butt, but I haven't sourced the other one.
Did the PM actually say that?
Before the internet information was a 1 to many broadcast. You had a few companies publishing information for people to read, governments could apply pressure on the few to not publish inconvenient facts
After the internet information was a many to many broadcast. There are too many publishing inconvenient facts for governments to pressure
Along with the after internet era however you also got the ability to publish many to many falsehoods which is a downside
Before the internet era however governments had the ability to push convenient falsehoods which was a downside
For all the downsides I prefer the after internet era
Barrister Audrey Cherryl Mogan explains the European Convention on Human Rights (in British law as the Human Rights Act) says that public bodies must respect both the right to assemble and to express one's views.
But these two rights are not absolute. The government or another public body can interfere with them if it has a proper legal reason to do so.
"So it becomes a balancing exercise," she says. "If what's being done is to enforce the health regulations, then you can argue that [stopping a protest] would be reasonable and proportionate."
From 1 June 2020 lockdown 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. 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.” There remained no explicit exemption
for engaging in public protest but was under these restrictions (together with 'reasonable excuse') that the BLM protests and the protests to protect statues and memorials took place
But, on 5 November 2020, when the second national lockdown began, under the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020. As in the first lockdown, these regulations imposed a prohibition on leaving home without ‘reasonable excuse’ and, again, provided a list of exceptions, which did not include protest. The difference with the first lockdown was that regulations DID appear to permit a gathering, including (unlike the first one) expressly for the purposes of protest involving more than 30 people to be held, but did not permit anyone to participate in it or arguably to leave home to attend it. This was probably an error in the drafting of the legislation, but it meant that the 28 November protests were broken up. That is what I was referring to
So, shove your 'L' where the sun doesn't shine and read shit before posting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKsSTAMKohQ
"How to stop the riots.
Nigel Farage"