Outrageous. I would actually be protesting if this were to happen in my country, and you wouldn't hear the end of it. Protect-the-children my ass, this is an attack on the freedom of the common folk. Criminals will continue to use encryption even if its against the law; they were already commiting crimes, so what's one more in the list?
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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This bill seems to be all sort of bad (maybe with some good intentions), really hope it doesn't pass to not give other countries any ideas
Please don't fall in that trap. Authoritarian attacks on citizens have always been neatly wrapped in either anti-terrorism or protect-the-children propaganda since the dawn of politics. This is a very obvious and delibirate attempt to further remove freedom from the common folk.
It’s not really that hard to deploy a matrix server. So this bill is dumb as anyone who wants encrypted messages can easily have them.
I'm all for Matrix, but the things is, Matrix is primarily developed by people in the UK. They will be easily forced to implement backdoors.
That’s good to know🙏
Hopefully some trustworthy third party can audit the code if this ever becomes a thing.
I'm not sure auditing would be enough. We would literally need a development team outside of dictatoric countries like the UK, where such things can be forced.
UK is such a shithole.
Would VPN protect an individual against such actions?
VPN will encrypt your communications between your local PC/phone/device and the VPN server you connect to. After that, the data packet transits just as if you’re anywhere else. So if they can crack that encryption, your data is still open. They might not know where the packet came from, but if you are talking PII, that’s not really important. (Does it really matter what IP you had when you tell them your health history and name? Or full banking info?)
I really don't like that.
Even if it will get dismissed/amended so it doesn't ruin open and private internet, the direction it's all going really worries me. Every couple of months/years you will hear that the governments are trying again and again...Eventually they will succeed - enter "1984"
The governments don't even need to go that far, they just get the data directly from the corporations people just willingly divulge it to.
What about decentralised solutions like Matrix? I think they would have hard time accessing anything if it's stored on a private server. EDIT: Or is it on ISP level? So no matter how you access/communicate - it will all be scanned the point when data leaves your device and communicates with web.
Why would they get a VPN to exit from the UK tho lol