Guess China was just ahead of the curve.
Just read some story about a Digital ID being proposed called the Britcard which everyone has to carry all the time sounds very Black Mirror and concerning.
FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.
It’s also extremely privacy preserving and while Denmark is actually moving forward with an age proving infrastructure like Britain, it’s designed with zero knowledge proofs so literally no-one knows where you have proved your age.
I don’t have a problem with the infrastructure. I have a problem with how Britain designs and uses the infrastructure.
A digital ID, by itself, isn’t much of an issue and can be very convenient for the user as well. Even better, it can be setup in a more privacy conserving way. For instance, when you have to provide your ID today, you often have to give companies a copy of your ID, which isn’t really favorable to the owner of that ID. With digital ID, it’s easier to give/revoke access to your ID or mask certain information the other party doesn’t need to know. Most ID scans are mainly done to verify the person has a legitimate ID anyways and presented it, making this digital can be an improvement.
Where it does get black mirror-ey is when you have to use that digital identity to basically log in to the internet and all your internet activity is logged to your ID. The shit the government can pull with such information is mindbogglingly bad.
We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .
We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .
Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?
In any case, you can’t have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.
But honestly all of today’s computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.
I wonder if it’s possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it’s a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don’t know Japanese to play with it.
Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.
Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won’t help. It’s not even a matter of technology, it’s a matter of links’ capability when you can’t use the Internet because, ahem, you’ll be detected and police will come knocking.
Perhaps a meshtastic delivered list of tor bridges or a wireless p2p internet . Digital dead drops
Well, in my head “like Briar” is the best thing possible for architecture. Except Briar only synchronizes joined groups.
Perhaps even with some kind of, yes, a digital dead drop, that would synchronize (purging stuff old or not in demand) everything announced by devices passing nearby. Over some low-range radio, like BT.
Asynchronous communication. Because having a real-time connection with any mesh is hard.
the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest. it’s been nearly a month and i haven’t heard of even a measly car being set on fire, just one petition that got a reply akin to “lol, nah”. the french would’ve set a car on fire for less is all i’m saying
We used to know, even in the face of state atrocities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984–1985_United_Kingdom_miners%2527_strike
Sadly, Thatcher broke the miners and we’ve never been right since.
There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned “lol no” response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.
Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.
It’s cute you think VPNs will survive this.
This is all theatre. They know they have no legitimate reason to ban VPNs. Their justification for all of this is protect the children if they start banning VPNs they’re going to start getting asked some incredibly awkward questions about how that’s going to work.
and that this thing will collapse
With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.
yeah and their government is planning on restricting VPN use because of that, they’re not going to stop being dickheads, brits need to get their voices heard sooner rather than later
They’ve said nothing of the sort.
One backbench MP said something about it.
Ah ok. That makes sense where it came from then.
i will admit, i do not remember where i got that info from, i thought it was part of the reply to the petition that was making rounds a week or so ago but i’m not sure now
I think there was a lot of speculation and jokes about that’s what would happen next from people on here and other places.
They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend
Southport was a tinderbox, but the current trends if you’re actually from the UK shows that there’s a bonfire incoming.
You only have to watch a couple of YouTube live streams…wait. Tomorrow I wait for age gating to see if Google is that…nefarious in stopping me watching YTP vids without a passport.
Ima gonna giggle
I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.
The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.
If a government says they’re doing something “for the children” or “to fight terrorism”, it’s neither of those things - it’s for control. Those are just the got-to reasons they use to push them through because they can push the narrative that anyone against it supports terrorism/child abuse.
The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as “democracy”, and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.
It’s really simple.
The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.
There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They’re often the targets for these campaigns because they’re easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they’re indoctrinated.
I don’t think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we’re not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They’re, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as “not caring about The Children” or “supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators”.
I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
It’s really inconsequential why they want this. Their success means endgame.
The actions have consequences, and whether I’m breaking a window with a hammer to check how fragile it is or to go outside, it will have both those consequences.
We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.
You can have “disinformation and extremism” campaigns with only presenting truth or things posted by real people. Just like with political representation. Representatives are a subset of citizenry. The visible posts are a subset of all things posted. Except you can pick any subset you want, if you, say, classify posts by emotion and people by political alignment and what not.
One can have so much more believable bots today, that they won’t be distinguishable from people, but those are beneficial as pressure, making the situation clear for normies, - with transparent identities of people, signing and globally addressing posts, you wouldn’t fear bots and you wouldn’t need a digital ID to access a website. And additionally you would have a way to double check the “color” of recommendations you get.
Thus the solutions they are picking are stabilizing the “disinformation and extremism” environment. With today’s bots it will soon be utterly visibly useless to communicate over social media without what I’ve described. Which means, superficially paradoxically but really not, an end to such campaigns’ efficiency.
So the claim of this helping fight such campaigns I have disproved.
I understand the situation, but they’re trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.
There’s no “situation”. “Situations” develop much faster. Such a “situation” didn’t transpire in the early 00s Internet, despite plenty of people in it and no identities and regulation.
What “situation” would really look like, I have described - herds of LLM bots infesting social media, which would be beneficial for propaganda of a small amount of interested powerful parties, but will just make social media sour when everyone uses such. Which is fine, there is a technical solution, they just don’t like it. They want the “situation” they describe, but in their favor. It’s very convenient, a weapon evil useless jerks didn’t have for a long time.
OK, I’m in Russia and don’t affect anything. You protest, I’ll cheer.
Bullshit. Our leaders want more power over the masses, they want to become autocrats, that’s it. Fuck them.
So they’re trying to censor any influence from adversarial nations to keep people from voting on politicians that would undermine the countries integrity?
The problem of social manipulation via bots isn’t limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.
We’re also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.
Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.
It’s causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.
Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it’s largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.
This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.
Now, in addition to the platform’s manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.
It’s a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.
I just don’t like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).
So we must censor everything to protect us from misinformation which allows the censors to determine what is available and what is lot.
Sounds an awful lot like China.
Geez Brits. One shit decision after another. Just like your western children.
US: Father, why did you vote for Brexit?
UK: Son, who are you to talk? You voted for Trump twice. Now shut up before your mother chimes in…
France: No wonder I took the house in the divorce and left you with your father.
US: Well at least I didn’t abandon my affair baby Haiti.
France:…
UK: Did you really have to go there son?
offtopic: The house being Normandy? Then Brits still keep a piece of the fence, as a symbol. Channel Islands meaning.
So we must censor everything to protect us from misinformation which allows the censors to determine what is available and what is lot.
Yeah, I think this is a terrible way to address the problem and very likely a way for elites to re-assert their control over information sources using this emergency.
It’s certainly not about ‘protecting children’ in the way that they’re presenting it.
Scotland might finally leave the UK because of this. It has been close before, but this must do it by now.
England isn’t the problem, it’s London that’s the problem.
London needs to become its own independent city state and then they can do what the hell they want with it and then we’ll be governed by someone from Leeds or Manchester or someplace like that, by someone who actually has a grip
Didnt say England was the problem. The UK is, whereever it’s run from.
and stay out of the EU, england
EU isn’t much better.
We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late. Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.
It seems that this time the EU plans to follow the UK in these atrocious policies against the Human Right to privacy, unfortunately. What a hell of a can of worms your country has opened.
