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Comment by massifgreat | Hacker News Reader

These UK laws might boost Tor usage.. let's hope something good will come from the full censorship political tyranny in Europe.

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If enough people switch to Tor, then Tor will get banned. Technical solutions don’t fix bad policies.

If you're in a struggle against a hostile regime, you don't refuse to use the weapons available to you because they're not what will bring you final victory. You use whatever you can.

Don’t refuse of course, but any workaround will be unsustainable, and you will eventually run out of measures unless the issue gets addressed politically.

Tor is pretty hard to block. I think that some sort of mixnet is pretty much the solution to all ISP/Government spying and censorship on the web as they make the law de-facto unenforcable

It's not, really. All governments have to do is to block all IP addresses in exitnodes.txt, and suddenly it's only a handful of people who can bootstrap Tor using custom exit nodes remain.

I doubt it. I think these laws were made to herd users towards big tech's established platforms that are 'policed' by community guidelines deemed 'appropriate' and where the content is never more than a takedown request away.

Welcome to the new internet.

(and it's funny how everyone's yelling 'fascist' at whatever happens in the US instead)

Right, it is called Regulatory Capture, because big actors have the means to comply.

Trust me, while the big social media sites love this, it wasn't their lobbying that made this happen.

The UK government has a long history of meddling in media coverage to achieve certain aims. Up until Covid, legacy media still had control over the narrative and the internet was still considered 'fringe,' so governments could still pull the tried-and-true levers at 1-3 of the big media institutions to shape opinion.

Post-covid, everyone became internet nerds and legacy media in english-speaking countries fully lost control of the narrative.

This regulation is intended to re-centralize online media and bring back those narrative control levers by creating an extremely broad surface area of attack on any individual 'creator' who steps out of line.

they were alarmed they lost what used to be tight control of media narratives around e.g. the gaza genocide and are working overtime to concentrate control so it doesn't happen again

let it be known the UK used its carve out territory in Cyprus to process bomb shipments to the IDF in furtherance of a genocide

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/15/uk-bases-in-cyprus-...

Leave this "vile" "unsafe" forum and go talk on ... er ... Twitter.

Two countries can be fascist at the same time.

And it's not like the UK and the US aren't known for exchanging the worst of the worst with each other all the time.

The UK is not in Europe, which would otherwise impose human rights legal constraints on UK government legislation.

The UK is in Europe, it didn't suddenly break off and float away, it's just not part of the EU, there's a bunch of European countries that aren't in the EU

The UK is in Europe. What other continent would it be in?

It isn't in the EU, but it is a member of the Council of Europe, which is why it is still a party to European Declaration of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights still hears appeals from the UK.

No international agreement can ever or has ever been capable of imposing legal constraints on the British Parliament because it is absolutely sovereign.

You know perfectly well that the UK is in Europe. Not necessary part of the EU, but Europe as a continent, yes.

The UK is a signatory to the european convention on human rights (hell it wrote it), despite what Farage and the the Mail convinced you of in 2016 this was unrelated to the EU

Y'all know perfectly well this refers to the UK leaving the EU.

I have it on good authority that the majority of Tor nodes are compromised.

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