https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/26/23922397/uk-online-safety-bill-law-passed-royal-assent-moderation-regulation
A bill years in the making.
No, there's no such thing as breaking encryption, they're trying to outlaw, or require back doors for strong encryption. Outside of a quantum computing miracle expansion, there's no breaking strong encryption.
require back doors for strong encryption
That's what the headline implies. Encryption is useless if a third party can decrypt it.
His point, which seems pedantic, but isn’t, is to illustrate the specific attack vector.
Breaking encryption would mean that the cryptographic process is something that an attacker can directly exploit. This is as close to impossible as it gets in that line of work.
While you can compromise the effectiveness of encryption by subverting it using other attack vectors like man in the middle or phishing or the good old fashioned physical device access, these don’t break the algorithm used in a way that it makes it vulnerable to decrypting other data.
None of those mean an algorithm used like say the ole Two fish encryption is “broken”.
Blowfish Triple DES Twofish RC4 Etc. All are fine and not currently broken. All however cannot protect your data if some other attack vector companies you or your site’s security.
Why are Ofcom and UK Parliament still using https:// ? They should set an example, and stop using illegal end to end encryption!
Basically nothing being done "for the children" is ever actually "for the children." It's just an emotional life hack to do whatever you want and call anybody who calls you on it a pedo.
I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir here but oh well.
Any sane country should make a "for the children" or other bs justifications in law or policy proposals immediately punishable.
Facebook, Google et al. literally just said "fuck it" and stopped serving news content to Canadian and Australian users when they tried legislating around it. I'm curious if UK users won't just get geoblocked out of many major services lol
This is their stated intention, but there are a bunch of idiots, and even they know it won't work.
So this will probably end up getting quietly walked back to avoid yet another embarrassing scandal of governmental uselessness, and you'll never hear about it again. They are currently getting absolutely rinsed in the enquiry, so hopefully they're feeling a little bit humble at the moment.
Except it doesn't, because it can't. The government even admitted that enforcing (that bit of) their new law is impossible.
Neat, how does this interact with the other Five Eyes nations? For example, can US traffic be intentionally tunneled through the UK and then be legally decrypted with no additional permission or oversight required? Would the UK attempt to compulsorily force decryption of a US company's routed traffic -- like some kind of extradition treaty for data? Will other Five Eyes nations simply act on their behalf and exert the force needed?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Specific harms the bill aims to address include underage access to online pornography, “anonymous trolls,” scam ads, the nonconsensual sharing of intimate deepfakes, and the spread of child sexual abuse material and terrorism-related content.
The first covers how platforms will have to respond to illegal content like terrorism and child sexual abuse material, and a consultation with proposals on how to handle these duties is due to be published on November 9th.
Ofcom says it expects to publish a list of “categorised services,” which are large or high-risk platforms that will be subject to obligations like producing transparency reports, by the end of next year.
Social media companies will be held to account for the appalling scale of child sexual abuse occurring on their platforms and our children will be safer,” said UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the bill’s strict obligations for protecting children from inappropriate content could create issues for a service like Wikipedia, which chooses to collect minimal data on its users, including their ages.
In a statement, Ofcom’s chief executive Melanie Dawes pushed back against the idea that the act will make the telecoms regulator a censor.
The original article contains 659 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!