Depends if they are using another CI provider or running Jenkins themselves.
But also, Circle CI would be a known cost change. Right now, the only thing you know is that GitHub wants to start charging money. You have no idea what new pricing model they come up with.
Self-hosting all of your CI is yet another tradeoff. The software comes for free (if you're using Free Software, that is), but you now have operational overhead. I'm not saying it's an unreasonable move, but it's also not a free swap
> He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of "hostile activity" simply because their technology "make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications.
Sounds like Let's Encrypt would also fall under that.
This has got to stop. If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites, not the streets they walk on. I walk on them too. And don't use CP as a catch-all argument to insert backdoors.
Their big problem here is that previously, it was hard to find people with the same opinion as you. If you couldn't find someone in the same village who wanted to start a rebellion, it probably wouldn't happen. Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war. That is still not a strong enough reason to call road construction a hostile activity.
I'm back in Sweden after 12 years abroad. Time to read up on which parties are sane and which aren't when it comes to technical infrastructure.
> Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people.
Don't play into their propaganda. Governments don't like it because they're protecting themselves and their power; making it harder for people to find each other and organize and rally is one of many ways governments do that. (There's a reason authoritarian governments regularly shut down cell networks.)
> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”
You don't even have to go that far, in Europe, to use a large social network (50M users), and the definition is very broad (WhatsApp is a social network, Telegram, Signal, TEMU, Aliexpress, etc), all users will have to provide their ID to that they are not a minor, otherwise the website can be blocked or fined.
This is to protect minors of course. Did you think about the children ?
Telegram, whether it's true or not, claims they are not a large platform (so if this is a lie, it may really pay off).
Curtains should also fall under the same category because they do make it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor suspect activities. Then of course you also have walls...
The argument is so fundamentally stupid that they should be embarrassed just putting it down in writing!
Both you and the poster above you may be misunderstanding the point that Jonathan Hall KC appears to be making. If you take a look at what he actually writes [1], then it is pretty clear that he is presenting these hypothetical cases as examples of obvious over-reach.
This is a warning from the independent reviewer that the law is too potentially broad, not an argument to retain these powers.
This cuts to one of the critical issues with governance globally in this era. For a really long time, we relied on social norms and mores to keep governments in check - and astonishingly it worked at least a little. Embarrassment was a good proxy for well constituted rules of representation.
What right-wing institutions have noticed all around the world is that you can just kind of ignore all that shit now. Centrists are flailing around begging for an explanation for "how this could happen" and folks on the left, marginalized for years in favor of free markets, are just kind of facepalming and saying we told you so.
You need to put it in writing somewhere that there's a limit on governmental authority and enforce the hell out of it. You need to do the same to clamp down on the power of special interests and corporations. More than anything, you need robust mechanisms that make government representatives vulnerable to the voting public. The people need to be the ones that they scramble to please and when we get mad that should be dangerous and difficult for those holding the reins of government. Their existence needs to depend on the mandate of the public.
It boggles my mind that you think this stuff is being pushed by the right. Expansion of government and surveillance is a hallmark of the left, and indeed this latest wave of surveillance is being pushed by progressive governments in Western Europe and Australia.
Governments of both flavours are ignoring the voting public, for various reasons, e.g. they are signatory to agreements that no longer work for the public but are difficult to break, the public is increasingly economically irrelevant compared to businesses, and, of course, the greedy self-interest of the politicians themselves.
I agree with you on the third paragraph, but it's also the reason that I believe the US will be okay compared to other Western democracies (an opinion I'm not sure you would share, judging by your post). The Constitution is already a thing, and is on its own a declaration that certain rights derive from a higher authority than government. The second amendment in particular is under siege (again, by the left), but does equalize things in a way that many of its opponents are reluctant to admit.
The constitution is being summarily ignored by the current administration. There is a right to trial in there that we've just totally blown past, and the deep integration between party insiders and media consolidation is a sideways assault on the first amendment.
The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Just out of curiosity - in what concrete way do you think the second amendment serves as an equalizer? Do you imagine that the government sees an armed populace as any kind of a threat?
Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
>The constitution is being summarily ignored by the current administration. There is a right to trial in there that we've just totally blown past, and the deep integration between party insiders and media consolidation is a sideways assault on the first amendment.
To what extent does the US have the right to maintain its borders? The idea that anyone should be able to enter the country illegally and be given the right to due process presupposes that the state has the resources to deal with the volume of people who decide to do that. And in most of the world, it would be uncontroversial to suggest that people entering a country illegally have -- effectively, if not necessarily legally -- zero recourse should the state decide to remove them.
>The idea that "they're coming for your guns" is something we can begin to discuss when the first step to curb our mass shooting problem is actually taken. For now, it's a little ridiculous to infer that there's any kind of 'siege' on the second amendment given that we have them all the damn time and they're not slowing down.
There is a sustained anti-gun lobby, and California has taken significant steps to restrict gun ownership. The US is too far gone for any one government to be able to swoop in and completely remove all guns, so the goal is long-term. Sway people's opinions, change the culture, and implement controls that skirt the edge of violating the second amendment, or set a precedent for limits on the second amendment. I don't live in the US, but even what I see as an outsider looking in makes it clear that this is happening.
Governments as an organization are perfectly capable of putting down an armed population, but individual members of a government certainly do see an armed population as a threat. I know for a fact that senior members of the (large, US) company that I work for take security very seriously. And though I don't support or condone shooting government officials and CEOs in any way, shape or form, I do believe that all peaceful negotiations, whether they be between employees and employer, or citizens and government, are purchased through a credible threat of violence. Otherwise, there are no negotiations, just suggestions. We're the lucky ones who got to live through a time when those fights have already been had, but there's nothing to say they won't need to happen again.
>I would ask folks in the EU whether they think they're leaning left at the moment. Reading their news it doesn't seem to be the case [0 1 2 3].
Incumbent governments in western Europe are mostly left wing, especially by US standards. The population is pushing right as a response to those governments refusing to address valid concerns of the voting public. This is why right wing "populist" parties are on the rise, but they aren't in power yet. The push for surveillance has been bipartisan at best, and more realistically driven by the political left under the guise of limiting hate speech.
>Leaving the left-right debate behind for just a second - I smell that there is something perhaps we may agree on. Representation is fundamentally broken. Even given our ideological differences, how do you feel about direct democracy? I think we'd benefit.
I agree that representation is fundamentally broken across much of the west, but I believe that the cause is ultimately a crisis of sovereignty.
As an example: it's no secret that there's a major backlash against migration in many western countries, but with the volume of people coming across, what do you do? You can't shoot them, and if you spend resources shipping them home, a non-trivial (and generally privileged and insulated) chunk of your population wants to save the world and will protest. And the business lobby is all over it because they like the idea of lower wages, so you've also got an army of neoliberal economists and lawyers telling you why you should just let all these people stay. Then you've got all the NGOs that your country is signatory to that want you to invest resources in helping illegal migrants, and in the case of Europe, the EU might try to directly tell your government it needs to do its fair share of taking those people anyway. And even if an individual member of government privately thinks there's an issue with an unpoliced border, the party number-crunchers are telling them that these people vote for the party, so letting them stay and giving them a path to voting actually helps the bottom line. And of course, you've also got a few investment properties...
The end result of all of this is that governments change, but the course stays the same, because in the absence of a government that is willing to risk never being in power again no one is willing to do anything. At worst, you get voted out, the next group does the same thing until people are angry again, and then you get voted back in.
Which of course brings us to Trump. A lot of what Trump is doing, at least to me, is reasserting US sovereignty. He's forcing US companies to heel through the H1B visa change and tarriffs, rattling treaties to get allies to absorb some of the expenditure of maintaining security, and enforcing the nation's border. These aren't historically radical concepts. If the US is going to be a country where the government has an opinion and can advocate for itself as an entity, this probably needs to happen, because no one wants to fight for a shared economic zone. And eventually, if a government can't enforce its borders and exercise its monopoly on violence, another entity will fill that void.
I guess this is a long way of saying that I have no issue with direct democracy, but I don't know that it's the answer, because I don't think it addresses the real problem. Maybe it circumvents some of these issues, but how does a direct democracy raise and maintain an army? Or pass a budget?
Are you under the impression that corporations and governments of capitalist countries are somehow independent? The ultimate goal of both of them is to have the greatest amount of power over the greatest number of people. They're an extension of one another more than they are independent entities.
You my friend must live in an alternate reality where political leadership isn't obviously enmeshed with corporations to a pathological degree - without a revolving door of people circling between them, without lobbying, without corruption, without special deals to the benefit of the biggest corporations, where private corporations aren't abused to bypass restrictions on government powers, and vice versa.
Lobbying is a tiny industry in the United States and corruption is basically a nonissue. With the exception of the current president I haven’t seen any evidence for widespread corruption in the United States - at most it’s a collection of isolated low impact and rare incidents.
> I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people.
they're not doing this to protect people, they're doing this to ensure there cannot be rebellion against unpopular policies. Organization is harder if all communications is monitored.
But this is how gov't get to be kept in check - the risk of "rebellion". If this risk is removed, you get authoritarian states - see north korea.
I know its satisfying to think of the government as some singular nefarious entity, but the reality is far worse: There is no one in charge. It’s chaos all the way down.
There are a few people in charge, they just don’t advertise the fact. Similar how the ‘Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence’. These both appear correct to the vast majority of people because of the Pareto distribution of outcomes, the vast majority of people experience the incompetence / no-one in charge and don’t experience the relatively tiny number of events when the competent malevolent people in charge do make their decisions. Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
> Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence
I feel like this needs updating, sometimes it is greed, other times it also very much is malice, sometimes making those appear as incompetence or just "complex circumstances" is beneficial.
Like how you have a culture war in the US while the rich rob you blind. How you have the "us vs them" politics while checks and balances are dismantled (including accurate reporting on science), alongside social support programs. How around 2020 companies rose prices across the board while claiming supply chain issues, just for those prices to never really come down. Same with the global DRAM manufacturing and the effects across the board on RAM, GPUs and storage - the companies just don't give a shit about consumers, they are choosing this. Also how the housing market is completely unreasonable. Same with US trying to break up EU and increasingly siding with Russia.
Sometimes there's just malice or greed, even when it's not just a small group of shady people in a dark room, but rather entire social groups whose interests and ideologies just happen to align. A lot of people aren't even trying to serve the greater society in the slightest, the prevailing attitude increasingly seems to be "fuck you, I got mine". It doesn't seem entirely new, though, since the whole millennial generation largely got saddled with that economy by those who came before, what's going on is just a bit more open now. Also using US as a good example here, but obviously similar issues are on the rise in Europe as well and elsewhere.
No, that's what I was getting at. Thinking "they" are in charge is actually very widespread, with varying opinions on who "they" actually are—whether it's billionaires for you, the Rothschild's for others, or Reptilians for some.
How great it would be to have a select few evil masterminds, a clear enemy to roil against! That isn't reality, though. Would the super-secret council of puppet masters have allowed Trump to become president of the USA (again) and ruin the economy? You'll have an answer to that, obviously. It matters little. Reality is far more complex, shadow masters prefer stability over chaos, and the world is generally full of competing and opposing interests.
A few rich men might hold a lot of power in their hands, I give you that; but unless you limit "the world" to mean an arbitrary smaller region of earth, nobody is in charge of it all.
You're confusing control with total control. Nobody has total control, even the most powerful and rich entities. This doesn't mean, however, that a lot of the policies we see being enacted by governments have not been discussed and promoted by a small number of people in very high positions of economic and political power. You're trying to disprove this well known and easily attested fact with the straw man of total control.
> Consider if you were hosting the Jekyll Island meeting, how many people of what caliber would you invite to be there? And that’s just one of the meetings we know about. Another good one is the involvement of Bohemian Grove in selecting Ronald Regan to run for president. Their motto, "Weaving spiders come not here", like many institutions, describes the opposite of what actually happens there.
That's some pretty classic conspiracy theory stuff. No evidence of anything nefarious, just heavily implied.
I think the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is more apt.
I think what’s happening isn’t some evil plot to quell opposing voices, but more likely the UK government thinking they’re actually passing laws to reduce rioting and online abuse. And the censorship effects are a side effect of these laws.
Some might consider this opinion naive but take this counterpoint: laws require a majority to pass. So if these censorship laws were written to squash opposing voices, then we’d be dealing with a literal conspiracy involving hundreds of people. I don’t believe all politicians are only in it for themselves (though I do believe many are), so you’d expect at least 1 MP to speak out if such a conspiracy existed.
This. Governments are signatory to a huge number of agreements, and are members of various NGOs. Things start out as being representative of some will of the people, but over time it becomes a millstone around the government's neck if it the arrangement becomes politically difficult at home. And of course, those arrangements often morph to be to the benefit of those in charge.
What happens is that you get arrangements like the EU demanding migration quotas that the populations of various individual countries despise, or an automobile market that gets progressively more expensive as environmental legislation puts ever more pressure on manufacturers. And of course, if you're saving the world, who needs cars anyway? We should all be living Hong Kong style to save the environment, so we need more urban density.
> they're not doing this to protect people, they're doing this to ensure there cannot be rebellion against unpopular policies
Yup. There is a huge amount of resentment about handouts for pensioners, a lot of disagreement with any kind of new 'islamophobia law', anger about actual and perceived reneging on pre-election promises, still a lot of anti asylum-seeker sentiment, anger about grooming/rape gangs etc.
And Labour are worried about Reform making big gains again in local elections next year.
This is about the astonishing lack of ability in the political class in the UK. The security services are honestly wagging the dog and they think they can force some kind of key escrow eventually, but instead they’ll just destroy software development in the UK and possibly financial services.
It’s the same with the multi billion ID cards and digital ID which is almost impossible for a government as incompetent as this one to implement.
And whatever is foisted on the public will be so insecure you’ll have to deal with your identity constantly being stolen, and it being your problem to fix it.
> That would be against everything european governments stand for.
I really struggle to understand why the hell this is always only applied to european governments? The idea to take 1984 as a book of requirements seems to extend *far* beyond europe.
yes, and here is a fun fact, most of the push for mass surveillance comes from the European Council, the thing is that literally are "just" the locally elected leaders...
not some vague far away "the EU (personalized)" thing
which also mean you can locally enact pressure on them
furthermore the EU supreme court(s) might have more often hindered mass surveillance laws in member states then the council pushing for them...
and if we speak as of "now", not just the UK, but also the US and probably many other states have far more mass surveillance then the EU has "in general".
so year the whole "EU is at fault of everything" sentiment makes little sense. I guess in some cases it's an excuse for people having given up on politics. But given how often EU decisions are severely presented out of context I guess some degree of anti-EU propaganda is in there, too.
> mass surveillance comes from the European Council, the thing is that literally are "just" the locally elected leaders...
Factually incorrect.
The European Parliament is elected. The Council is appointed, so there is no direct democratic incentive for the council to act on and no direct electorate to please.
On top of that the actually elected European Parliament can only approve (or turn down) directives authored by the Council. They have no authority to draft policies on their own.
To make matters even worse the European Council, which drafts the policies, has no public minutes to inspect. Which obviously makes it ripe for corruption. Which evidently there is a lot of!
Looking at the complete picture, the EU looks like a construct designed intentionally to superficially appear democratic while in reality being the opposite. The more you look at how it actually works, the worse it looks. Sadly.
In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).
While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.
There's societal memory of monarchies and kings that held a lot of power that still impacts things to this day, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes consciously.
The NSA is an American body, and Trump is the subject of a personality cult far in excess of any European monarch. Authoritarianism is a personality trait independent of political structures.
it was the EU which had stopped many similar unhinged attempts from the UK when the UK was still a member
similar it had been the EU which had shut down various other surveillance nonsense of the EU
you are basically pretending the EU is a person with one uniform opinion and goals
but it's like the opposite of it, like in a lot of way
it's a union of states, each having a vastly different goals and culture and non of them having a "single uniform opinion" either but (in most cases) a more complex political field then the US (on a federal level)
Furthermore the most influential organ of the EU when it comes to making changes is literally a composition of the elected leaders of the member states. So for most big controversial decisions the driving and directing force isn't "the EU" but but the various elected leaders of the member states. For EU citizens blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders is common, but pretty counter productive, as it's basically pretending you have no power to change things.
Furthermore in the EU you have an additional parliament which (in general) needs to ratify laws and two high courts which can (and in context of mass surveillance repeatedly have) shut down misguided "laws", including in many cases local attempts at mass surveillance laws.
So while some parts of the EU have consistently pushed for mass surveillance in recent years other parts also have consistently moved against it.
In general while the EU needs a lot more transparency and some more democratic processes in some aspects a lot (not all) of the "stories told to make the EU look dump/bad" have a lot of important context stripped from that (like e.g. that a lot of the current push for surveillance comes from the locally elected leaders not the EU parliament or some other abstract "the EU" thing, it's your own countries leader/lead party(1) which does or at least tolerates that shit).
> blaming "the EU" instead of blaming your own elected leaders
The elected leaders like to blame the EU (or for those without an EU - any external body or even the mythical deep state) for everything adverse. The reality is these "failures" they blame on someone else are generally in alignment with their own policies goals and objectives.
Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
For people too lazy to click, the second post was:
> I think it’s time for the British to gang together, hit the streets and start the slaughter.
> Violence and murder is the only way now. Start off burning every migrant hotel then head off to MPs’ houses and Parliament, we need to take over by FORCE.
I'm not sure what the punishment for such a clear but ineffective incitement to violence should be, but it shouldn't be nothing.
The US has a three part test[1] for what constitutes incitement:
- intent
- imminence
- likelihood
If the UK had speech protections like the US (which I wish they would) then it would fail the imminence and probably the likelihood tests (you rightly note that it is ineffective).
This is definitely not a crime in the US per the US Supreme Court. Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
> Several additional conditions not in evidence are required for speech of this type to fall outside of First Amendment protections.
Perhaps your point would be clearer if you indicated what specific conditions you believe are missing. Maybe the tweeter had no followers? Idk, I can only vaguely guess at what you're referring to.
It didn't happen in the US though, so that's neither here nor there. America's political system is not some benchmark that the rest of the world needs to judge themselves against.
> Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’
That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.
As you seem to be unaware of where the 12,183 arrests figure comes from, and suggest that you haven't seen compelling evidence for this figure, you should know that it's from The Times(0). They found that this led to 1,119 sentencings.
In your linked post [1] you suggest that this figure is completely wrong. To demonstrate this, you linked to a FOI request for the Metropolitan Police which shows that the actual figures for 2023 are 124 for Section 127 of the Communications Act and 1,585 for Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act. This is, ironically, completely wrong. These figures are only applicable for the Metropolitan Police in the Greater London area, if you want figures for the UK you need to file FOI requests for all 45 territorial police forces in the UK. This is what The Times did, and 37 of them responded.
The Standard(1) attempts to address the claim of whether the UK arrests more people for social media posts by looking at figures from other countries, fails to point out a country with more arrests for social media posts, and concludes that open and liberal societies will have more arrests for social media posts because we are more free to do so. Go figure.
You also suggest that racial harassment, domestic abuse, stalking, and grooming are covered under the law, which is somewhat true, The Times quoted a spokesperson from Leicestershire police which stated that the laws cover any communications and may deal with cases of domestic abuse, and this is often the only example given to explain the figures. However it should be noted that the Communications Act(2) only covers electronic communications that are 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' (or posts a message known to be false for the purposes of causing 'annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety', prior to 2024), and the Malicious Communications Act(3) while covering letters, EC, articles, etc, only applies if the communication is 'indecent or grossly offensive' (or a threat, prior to 2024).
For some of those issues it can be easy to point to communications that are 'grossly offensive' or threatening/menacing, however there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse. An order of magnitude more people are arrested for hate crimes under these and similar laws than they are for malicious communications. The Protection from Harassment Act which covers harassment and stalking, the Serious Crime Act covers controlling and coercive behaviour, the Criminal Justice and Courts Act for revenge porn, and the Sexual Offences Act which covers an incredible amount of offences (it's a large act), including everything related to grooming.
The CPS largely discourage using communications offences (unsourced, but (4) is a good starting point), possibly because of the mens rea requirements for 'grossly offensive' or causing distress or anxiety, possibly because the sentencing limit for either communications act limited at 6 months or 12 months for malicious communications (also 6 months for offences prior to 2022), possibly because it has to weigh whether the sentencing is within the public interest with regards to the chilling effect it can have on speech, especially when concerns about Article 10 of the ECHR are brought up, but it has recommended using these acts as a fallback. Prior to 2015 revenge porn wasn't a specific offence but could still be considered under the communications acts for instance.
All of this to say, if the communications acts are being used as a fallback for the issues you mention, it can't be seen as anything other than a failure that the more specific legislation fails to address issues of or prosecuting issues of 'grossly offensive' or 'threatening' communications appropriately, which seems unlikely, but if it is the case, why then is the sentencing rate so pitiful? 10%? For 'racial harassment' and domestic abuse? In a country that records around 130k hate crimes and 230k cases of domestic abuse (of which 35% are related to malicious communications, do the maths) yearly? When the bar is as low as racial slurs or 'threats'?
For a number of high profile cases you could perhaps make the case that the arrest was justified, but these cases are high profile for a reason, they're testing the limits of what can be considered 'grossly offensive' that aren't covered by other more applicable laws. But even then, there are high profile cases simply because the police had absolutely no business arresting anybody(5). For it to be the case that these laws, specific to 'grossly offensive' and 'threatening' behaviour, are being used to address these issues it needs to be demonstrated, and I don't think that has been the case, and the issue of wasted police time needs to be addressed when 90% of arrests didn't need to be made. The last point is especially relevant at a time where petty crime has all but decriminalised over the past decade and when police chiefs are suggesting citizens are the ones that need to do something about shop lifters(6).
In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts, regardless of whether you agree with the intent or not, and it should be obvious that the police are interested in policing social media given the absurd number of Non-Crime Hate Incidents being recorded, also around 13,000(7) a year, and I can't see things getting better with the introduction of the OSA. Blaming these issues on a 'right-wing narrative' seems naive at best and missing the forest for the trees at worst. Labour having absolutely abysmal polling issues should suggest that this isn't a partisan issue in the slightest.
You're right about the figures, that's my mistake, thanks for teaching me.
I'm not convinced by the rest of your argument. For example:
> there are other more applicable laws to choose from such as the Public Order Act, the Crime and Disorder Act, and the Domestic Abuse Act which largely covers hate crimes and domestic abuse
Isn't it possible that people get arrested on multiple charges - both for malicious communications and for harrassment, say?
> In the greater context of the conversation, it should be obvious that police are arresting people for social media posts
Yes, but what's not obvious (or even likely) is that 12000 people are being arrested for "online comments" [0], or that the UK leads the world in such arrests. Sentences have been handed out for various other activities, such as sending photographs or abusive private emails. That's the bit that makes it a right-wing narrative: taking a statistic and giving it a misleading interpretation that happens to support your cause. Has Tommy Robinson said anything in defense/support of Joey Barton? I'm guessing not, because the victims were neither Muslim nor immigrants.
No one is getting 20 years for tweet content in the UK like they are in Saudi Arabia. No grandmother is being arrested for holding up a blank sign like in Russia. I can go on just with the reported stuff from memory for an hour wrt Iran, North Korea and China. I don't even know how many books it would take to read to learn of all the examples worse that aren't.
Look I think there are problems with the UK's policy here, but this comment is either disingenuous or naive.
The decline of the US government is the faster than "Europe", because it's been declining rapidly in a few months. The US government currently has a monthly quota for ICE arrests. ICE agents racially profile people and ignore non-white people telling them they are US citizens because they assume they are lying. Non-white US citizens need to have papers on them that prove their status (US citizen), or else might be disappeared. The US government now bans immigrants from a list of dark skin countries but fast-tracks White South Africans for immigration. It politically persecutes their political opponents and ignores the rule of law. It is preparing for war with Venezuela, which would conveniently tie up US resources as Russia positions itself for entering Europe.
The UK is rapidly declining as a close second, but calling it "European" (especially when UK citizens see themselves as non-European) is just a lazy generalization.
> I don't understand why you got heavily downvoted.
Because his post contributes nothing to the discussion.
> Yes, there are governments that are worse than European, but the decline of European government is the fastest.
What makes it the fastest?
> You may be surprised that the UK is the world leader in the number of people arrested because of internet posts. And that Germany, which is still way behind the UK, has more people arrested for the same reason than Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and a few others combined.
Don't know about you but I'd rather be arrested for posting something in EU then be disappeared in any of the countries that you mentioned.
> And many people still believe that those countries are beacons of democracy while the others are backward dictatorships.
That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech. Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed.
Read my comment again. The fact that the UK and Germany are in some aspects still better than the ones I mentioned doesn't make them beacons of democracy. It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
>> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
> This doesn't mean anything in isolation.
It's pretty good proxy for freedom of speech, one of the features without which democracy is not possible.
>> Here's the citation from the EU parliament itself [1], since I doubt you'd believe non-government sources.
> Do we know each other?
Probably not, but I can smell a state believer when I see him.
> No, but there aren't many that are much better so when you take all of that in to account, yes UK an Germany are beacons of democracy.
If they are, it's a pretty low baseline. They are but a shadow of what they once were.
>> It's sad that those countries declined so fast that we are now comparing them.
> I already asked this but by what metric are they declining faste?
The article I posted has a link [1]. There you can see the number of people arrested went up from 5502 in 2017 to 12183 in 2023. It's a pretty sharp decline in freedom of speech.
The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.
The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.
The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.
> American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue
The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.
American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.
You completely missed the point of what I wrote and ignored the majority, just so you could claim that Nazi speech is actually a left-wing issue — which is not a claim I think many people outside of the USA would agree with.
I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.
> The UK arrests 12k people per year for social media posts, using vague laws to undermine free speech.
A spokesperson for Leicestershire police clarified that offences under section 127 and section 1 can include any form of communication and may also be “serious domestic abuse-related crimes”. [1]
It seems misleading to count arrests related to domestic abuse as "anti-free speech".
It seems very politically convenient to be able to hide that one number behind the other. To obfuscate something highly controversial by making it artificially conflated with something everyone would agree on with.
This is what governments do when they want to avoid public scrutiny. This is not the win you are looking for.
It would indeed be better to have the separate counts. It's also wrong to attribute to only one case what is a actually a larger category, unless there is actual evidence that it's the overwhelming majority anyways. Both can be true at the same time.
I'm not trying to win anything, and I do support privacy. I just think any argument, especially those citing specific numbers, should be based on an accurate description of reality.
>"That is because Germany and UK are beacons of democracy when compared to the countries that you listed."
Give them a little time. They'll catch up. Comparatively to what the UK used to be it is sliding down, more and more. One should be more concerned about what is happening in their country rather than consoling themselves that there are worce places.
The UK is not part of the EU, and its security services are barely affiliated with it. That all ended with Brexit.
It's absolutely hopeless at protecting citizens from foreign threats.
95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Compare with various authoritarian dictatorships where if the police turn up at your door you're unlikely to survive.
And - unlike the US - no one is hauling random British brown people off the streets and sending them to prison camps.
The UK does have a far-right party desperate to end judicial oversight and remove legal protections from torture, etc, by ending support for the ECHR.
There's currently a huge online campaign, funded in part with foreign money and supported by most of the British press (foreign billionaire owned...), to make their far-right dictatorship seem like a political inevitability.
It isn't. But they're trying really really hard to pretend otherwise.
Putin is also really, really pissed at the EU for taking Russian money and using it for defence and reparations.
But - you know - if you start a war because you're a grandiose psychopath, that's what happens.
> 95% of the arrests aren't actually arrests. The police send you a polite letter, you write a polite response, and at least 90% of the time the case is dropped.
Bahaha, as if that's any better.
Guess cops showing up to your door for being mean to someone online is just an inevitability when there is no "second amendment" equivalent in said country.
Sad state of affairs, if they weren't british I'd almost feel bad.
> If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites,
I don't think their real intention is to stop criminals, it's just the smoke screen similar to ChatControl and other similar legislations prohibiting privacy elsewhere.
Governments always focus on the tools and not the people. Troubleshooting and resolving the root cause requires work. They do not get paid to work or care meaning they could sit on their hands and still get paid.
> they could sit on their hands and still get paid
Could? I know of government employees who literally cannot do their job, yet somehow they've been employed for over twenty years. When I say they can't do their job, I mean they have to ask coworkers how to do something that is and always has been a job requirement, and they have to "ask for help" every time. People are actually enabling massive amounts of waste and inefficiency.
Then there are those who don't even have work to do, and will take offense if you ask them to justify their continued employment. As though they are owed a position in the organization tomorrow just because they have a position in the company today.
Indeed. I work with governments all over the United States from federal, to states to counties, and even to larger cities. This is a consistent pattern I see as well. We have senior IT people who don't even know basics about firewall configuration. In one place, I waited 2 weeks for the IT person to figure out how to even get into the firewall configuration. Then they proceeded to completely screw it up in obvious ways, and then once we got the firewall completely configured, we could not get the app to work. It took another 2 weeks, and burned 40 hours of engineer time on our side, before somebody on their end realized that they had modified the wrong firewall!
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience. In another jurisdiction it took two months and we finally got to the point where even providing specific coaching telling them that it wasn't working because they opened the TCP port numbers we said instead of UDP, even though UDP was heavily emphasized. The stonewalling and constant battling ended up delaying our launch to the point where the decision makers decided to just can it instead of fight with their own IT organization.
Now that said, I have worked with some truly incredible and brilliant people on the government side. There definitely are some fantastic people that work for the government. Unfortunately they seem to be in a minority.
I wish I could say that was an unusual experience.
It sure is not. I'm not going to list all the examples I know as embarrassing some departments does not end well but I have to share this one. I tried to email someone at the California DMV a couple decades ago. My email bounced and I got a strange routing error. I assumed the problem was on my end. The first thing I did was dig their MX records and what did I get? 2 MX records with RFC1918 address space (10.0/8). I managed to get through to a real person on the phone and that went nowhere. They eventually fixed it some months later but they probably enjoyed the email silence.
Another one involved a 3 letter agency that should know better and could not figure out how to install an intermediate certificate on their website. They expected me to instead install their certificate on all of our servers and got mad & huffy puffy when I refused. I am not naming them but after a couple years they figured it out.
I don't believe there is an easy fix though. The government will prioritize retention because it promotes institutional stability while at the same time offering low pay (and not just low pay but often a complete lack of flexibility regarding pay) because the electorate demands it.
Which means that the truly good people are basically quirky people with strong work ethic/believe in the mission that happened to join the organization for some reason.
You seem to think this is somehow specific to government. It is not. And, no, the market does not eventually destroy the organizations where it happens.
> If you want to stop criminals, then focus on their illegal activites,
And what do you do when the criminals can successfully prevent focus? Whether by encryption or by locked doors keeping cops out or by letting it be known that grasses get concrete shoes?
You and I and everyone on this site knows why encryption is important. We all know that the internet fundamentally can't work without it; not only but also online banking and online shopping. We here know it keeps all of society safe from hackers and blackmailers. It's common knowledge amongst us that it keeps critical infrastructure secure.
I think there's a genuine disconnect in the halls of government from all that: They're used to a world with humans that are flawed and who make mistakes, but those mistakes are at a personal scale. To err is human, to really foul up, as the saying goes, requires a computer, and I don't think popular culture has internalised what that means, despite the existence of all the websites with near-instant content lookup — look at how hacking is seen in pop culture, how it's akin to lock picking rather than programming: the perception is of one person's skill against a puzzle box, the reality is automation where once the puzzle is solved, the lock picked, every safe in the world opens in the blink of an eye.
Laws and press opinions about the need for government backdoors treat it like allowing police to break into houses: "got a warrant, then it's fine"; they don't realise it's more like "fake uniforms, ID badges, and warrants are available on most streets".
That doesn't make the problem category this is supposed to solve go away. There's a few reasons why I'd like to maximally liberalise the laws, one of them is so that criminal prosecution can be more tightly focussed on what matters. Other reasons include "people should be aware of all the laws that affect them, and it's not OK when the system is so complicated you have to be a lawyer to even get that far".
> Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square
The "fun" part of this is that the person writing the message on these apps might not even be a local person involved, but some person far away in another country just trying to stir up some shit.
> Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people.
Yes. Previously this capability was reserved for the CIA.
So you still believe that system which gives people less freedom with every new regulation would solve anything by contributing to it? Shouldn't we abandon the idea of giving our repsonsibility and power to uknown electorate?
I agree with your point and this is just a minor thing but it annoys me whenever it comes up:
Telegram is a terrible example. It is one of the few messengers that do not support end-to-end enrypted group chats. It is also heavily moderated. Your group will not be closed immediately but before anyone could pick up their pitchfork and certainly before it reaches a critical mass.
> Today, someone can post a Telegram group message and make thousands of people rally to a town square. I see the dangers, and I see why governments think they are doing this to protect the people. No one wants civil war.
The solution for government is simple: stop being scumbags whose only purpose is making people's lives more and more miserable by optimizing for total control and corporate profits.
I wonder if architects should be prosecuted first making non-transparent building structures making the observation of people very very hard for those puny security and intelligence agencies! Architects, you bastards! You aid and abet criminals!
Don't get me started on locksmiths, oh the horror!
"Can"? Sure. "Does"? Now that's debatable. Still waiting for the latest scandal to wrap up. Any day now. Surely it was the last. Surely the limp response hasn't led to more. _Surely_ arresting people for talking about it on social media hasn't led to more of it going on.
Readonly and rootless are my two requirements for Docker containers. Most images can't run readonly because they try to create a user in some startup script. Since I want my UIDs unique to isolate mounted directories, this is meaningless. I end up having to wrap or copy Dockerfiles to make them behave reasonably.
Having such a nice layered buildsystem with mountpoints, I'm amazed Docker made readonly an afterthought.
Yeah agreed. I use docker-compose. But it doesn't help if the Docker images try to update /etc/passwd, or force a hardcoded UID, or run some install.sh at runtime instead of buildtime.
Hmm... News about massive RAM price hikes. Then GitHub decides to charge for per-minute. Do they keep a lot of stuff in RAM while a workflow is running?
I read somewhere that the sentiment in Europe after WW2 was that Soviet had a bigger impact than the US. But narrative has shifted over time. I'd guess Churchill saw the US as a last resort, not the goto fixer. Happy to be corrected by someone who knows history, thouogh.
It seems the US wasn't in the war until two years after it started, and was drawn in due to Pearl Harbor. Even the protection of Atlantic trade was handled by the UK and Canada until 1941: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_the_United...
Given the eloquently natural words in this post, I conclude you must be this thread's prompt engineer! Well done, my fellow Netizen. Reading your words was like smelling a rosebud in spring, just after the heavy snow fell.
Now, please, divulge your secret--your verbal nectar, if you wish--so that I too can flower in your tounge!
Yeah, and the last five years has not been drilling, but installing. The last year has been testing and tweaking (accordingt to the ORF article.)
Seems like a great project outcome. Mostly within budget, no political chaos due to delays (AFAICT) and allowing several months for testing before announcing it open.
- Zoom out after drag start and back in when hovering over items.
- Drag to a staging area/clipboard.
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