No number of profane adjectives are going to accurately describe my frustration with the monumental idiocy of these western nation states.
What do you want, UK?
These people ought to be preparing for something a lot larger. This year has been an absolute barrage of attacks on free speech, privacy, and security.
UK: We want china, we now authoritarian
That about sums up the UK lately, it seems lately they went from democratic to now more authoritarian
Yes but I feel like there’s a reason for this. Why now and why a coordinated attack? There’s something bigger we don’t know about. Are these countries preparing for war?
As for why, Pretty much control is at every answer of this is all I can really say.
Another is just clueless boomer politicians
Yes, yes - all obvious and true reasons. But I am questioning the timing and the coordination of it. Governments have a lot of bureaucracy and many things progress slowly unless they want to do something fast and as they want it.
There’s something more here, I’m almost sure of it.
@kalium
>Child sex offenders would be required to keep such blockers enabled
Yes, let's forbid sex offenders from seeking a legal outlet. This could never go wrong! 🤦♂️
f the UK gets its way, operating systems like iOS and Android would “prevent any nudity being displayed on screen unless the user has verified they are an adult through methods such as biometric checks or official ID.
Pretty stupid, considering someone underage could be looking for something like “how to check for testicular cancer” and then blocking legitimate medical images/videos showing what to look for.
I’m also pretty sure these governments are thinking on the lines of: hmm, good enough system for what we want to get done and we accept the collateral damage of and for the public that would inevitably stem from a clearly improper system.
The governments are here to only protect themselves and to ensure their goals. Public safety be damned, it would seem here.
Yes, yes - all obvious and true reasons. But I am questioning the timing and the coordination of it. Governments have a lot of bureaucracy and many things progress slowly unless they want to do something fast and as they want it.
It’s not like any of this is new. They’ve been trying to do crap like this for a long time. It’s maybe becoming more of an issue now though because of various governments sliding more and more authoritarian (and generally conservative, which is often tied into anti-porn stuff and similar things).
Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a war or whatever at some point. There’s already the whole Ukraine thing ratcheting up tensions, and of course China and Taiwan are an ever present source of tension that Japan has recently decided to poke with a stick. The US has been throwing away soft power left and right with how mercurial and ridiculous the Trump admin has been and more generally the constant flip-flopping between Democrat and Republican policies. EU is now building up more military and US support for stuff like NATO is less of a given (will depend on Trump’s most recent phone call I suppose). Basically, everything has become increasingly unstable.
This isn’t even mentioning billionaires (of which some have specifically stated they don’t believe in democratic government) funneling perverse amounts of money into what are effectively dystopian spying apparatuses actively being tested on immigrants, supposed criminals/terrorists, and Palestine.
Yes, almost like they’re not actually out to solve the problem but just want to appear “tough on sex crime” while using it as a justification for mass surveillance
. But I am questioning the timing and the coordination of it. Governments have a lot of bureaucracy and many things progress slowly unless they want to do something fast and as they want it.
There is no planning on global scale behind it. It is more like the bandwagon effect, where one starts something (Australia age verification for example) and the others are going after the same.
narrows eyes
I’m not so sure.. but I can’t prove it one way or the other.
In politics, never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice.
Yeah, I said the same here. Seems truer by the day.
Law enforcement and other governmental agencies from different countries regularly meet and cooperate with other countries’ law enforcement to suggest what laws they can suggest in order to increase their effectiveness. US, UK, and Germany are pretty influential in this regard. And international organizations facilitate the spread of powerful countries’ doctrines (good and bad) to others. There’s nothing secretive about this, its just globalism at work. The EU in particular can spread such policy like wildfire by its very design.
For example, the UN Convention against Cybercrime “encourages” countries to set up internet surveillance systems and share its data with other nations for anything they consider a crime. Its planning on a global scale for mass surveillance, but not necessarily a hidden conspiracy.
“Ministers want the likes of Apple and Google to incorporate nudity-detection algorithms into their device operating systems to prevent users taking photos or sharing images of genitalia unless they are verified as adults.”
To give an honest assessment on how well this would work at its intended goal to crack down on sexting:
1.For preventing online-only sexting from “Category 1” (regressive) offenders;
This will indeed deter a decent number young adults from sexting. I remember growing up in an era where my school classmates bragged about their 20-something year old “boyfriends” on MySpace/kik/whatever. And the “boyfriends” would typically turn out to live hundreds of miles away, in their mothers’ basement, and only talk about video games 
, and maybe a few weeks after getting attention, the girl would get bored. To be honest, I’ve been there when I was a teen (and no, i am not “traumatized” by it);
These are what we call “opportunistic”, “regressive” offenders. The kind of people who do this aren’t generally very tech savvy or intelligent, but at the same time aren’t particularly harmful either. These sad individuals make up the supermajority of those prosecuted for sexting. Criminology papers will typically note that such offenders very rarely do anything in real life, typically have no criminal record, and only do so due to depression, loneliness in their own lives. I think you get the kind of picture of the kind of person I’m painting here; so I will refer to this kind of offender as “Category 1”;
Due to their overall lack of knowledge, intentionality, or drive, I honestly think that nudity-blocking systems on common operating systems will deter and detect a large amount of people like this. However, the existing dragnet surveillance in place on common platforms already gets most of such people caught nowadays in the first place.
2.For preventing online-only sexting from “Category 2” offenders;
There are people who actually intentionally manipulate and even threaten teens for nudes, in order to secretly distribute them on the darkweb, or just for masochistic pleasure. They make up a very small minority of child pornography cases (but probably are the majority represented in media). These are people who intentionally hurt teens, and either don’t care or enjoy it. Groups like 764 are an example of the less tech savvy ones.
Unfortunately, I don’t see these laws deterring these kind of guys. For starters, they would just recommend moving to a non-backdoored OS or other line of communication after building rapport. Its not difficult to get even a 14 year old to install Tails on a computer with a webcam.
3. For preventing prohibited sexual relations in-person (Category 3):
Competent people who want to have sex with young adults or children (in person) just refuse to use phones for doing so in the first place, and just have relationships with people they know in person through friends, family, work or community organizations.
My concern is that given a restrictive digital ecosystem, many 1st category of people (careless teen sexters) who would otherwise be caught, will realize that sexting is to risky or simply difficult, and either move to the 3rd category (competent, offline) or even worse, the 2nd category (intentionally malicious, tech savvy).
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This has been said 1,000,000 times before, but the most effective solution against child sex abuse is good parenting & awareness, friendships, and maintaining a positive social and romantic environment for teenagers.
The UK’s “Home Office is expected to encourage companies to introduce such controls as part of its strategy to tackle violence against women and girls” when it announces the initiative in the coming days, the FT said.
No, digital surveillance will not effectively tackle violence against women and girls. The UK does have the highest rape rate in Europe (by far), but backdooring phones isn’t the solution to that issue 
Law enforcement and other governmental agencies from different countries regularly meet and cooperate with other countries’ law enforcement to suggest what laws they can suggest in order to increase their effectiveness. US, UK, and Germany are pretty influential in this regard. And international organizations facilitate the spread of powerful countries’ doctrines (good and bad) to others. There’s nothing secretive about this, its just globalism at work. The EU in particular can spread such policy like wildfire by its very design.
That’s correct and I never said otherwise.
The only thing I deny is a big plan behind it or global planning.
Nearly all agencies from countries meet together and talk like the IKT, EU conferences or the UNC Convention against Cybercrime, they talk with each other but to not plan on a global scale.