I think the Online Safety Act recently passed in the UK does technically make proper encryption illegal. Chat platforms are supposed to comply when UK law enforcement asks for logs, and it says something about them needing to be “readable”.
This probably mainly just means they should be able to use the backdoors in major platforms. It would be very difficult for them to go after every obscure xmpp provider or whatever, and so far they haven’t.
The law says lots of other dumb and quite dystopian stuff like policies every “social media platform” has to follow, which seem to really misunderstand how the internet works. The UK would need to block itself off from most of the internet for any of this to work. One of the main chat platforms I use is just a computer in some German tech enthusiast’s house (I think).
Thankfully, Labour got into power in the recent election instead of Conservatives. Their candidate was often called a “Tory with a red tie” since he didn’t believe in as serious left-wing policies as other, failed Labour candidates like Jeremy Corbyn. The point though is that hopefully they won’t be dropping many more laws like the “Online Safety” (“Ahhh, protect the children because any website can have porn D:”) Act.
Ofcom is supposedly in the stages of putting the law into practice though. I hope nothing extreme happens to the UK, but it all sounds pretty horrible to me.
I think the Online Safety Act recently passed in the UK does technically make proper encryption illegal. Chat platforms are supposed to comply when UK law enforcement asks for logs, and it says something about them needing to be “readable”.
This probably mainly just means they should be able to use the backdoors in major platforms. It would be very difficult for them to go after every obscure xmpp provider or whatever, and so far they haven’t.
The law says lots of other dumb and quite dystopian stuff like policies every “social media platform” has to follow, which seem to really misunderstand how the internet works. The UK would need to block itself off from most of the internet for any of this to work. One of the main chat platforms I use is just a computer in some German tech enthusiast’s house (I think).
Thankfully, Labour got into power in the recent election instead of Conservatives. Their candidate was often called a “Tory with a red tie” since he didn’t believe in as serious left-wing policies as other, failed Labour candidates like Jeremy Corbyn. The point though is that hopefully they won’t be dropping many more laws like the “Online Safety” (“Ahhh, protect the children because any website can have porn D:”) Act.
Ofcom is supposedly in the stages of putting the law into practice though. I hope nothing extreme happens to the UK, but it all sounds pretty horrible to me.
Yea, I wonder what they would do against my self hosted matrix server behind VPN and reverse proxy 🤔