OI mate, you got a loicense for that operating system?
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
> Yep, police can simply ask anyone for their passwords and if you don't give it up they can put you in jail.
This is precisely the reason why I don't want to visit the US at the moment.
The USA immigration officers can ask me to forfeit my phone's password and look at all my photos, documents, messages, call logs etc, WITHOUT SUSPICION.
Some of that data can even stay on their servers for decades, and who knows if it ends up on a CIA/NSA server.
Of course, I can always refuse, but non-cooperation with CBP means immediate denial of entry and risks of lifelong headaches with future immigration checks.
Me too. I’m going to wait a few more years before I visit again.
I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.
Indeed, but the UK is in many ways words. At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld (give or take); in the UK you often don't even have such fundamental rights. The UK at present fits more to Russia than, e. g. European countries.
UK has (for now) the Human Rights Act and is a (for now) subject to the jurisdiction of (by being a founding member of) the European Court of Human Rights.
Which is not to excuse the errors, but to put it in context: it is a European country… albeit just like Turkey and Azerbaijan.
> At the least in the USA, often the constitution is upheld
Some of ICE’s detainees may have different opinions on that point.
The UK may endow her citizens with fewer rights. But I have a lot more trust in British due process. British civil servants seem much less … capricious than Americans.
I was almost denied entry to Hawaii once because I told the CBP agent I didn’t have any cash on me. (My money is in a bank account, obviously). He went on a big rant about how expensive Hawaii is. I think he was worried I’d end up homeless. (Even though my visit to hang out with my then employer.) Over the years I’ve heard so many stories from other Australian friends about wild and unfortunate encounters with US police and officials.
By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised. If something happened while visiting the UK, I have much more confidence that everything would be resolved in a fair and reasonable manner.
You are aware of the fact that you essentially have no rights at border crossings, right? Even if you are a US citizen entering the US.
This is why many companies have procedures for when employees visit certain countries, including the US. For instance that you are not allowed to bring your personal phone, your personal and work laptop or any medium that can hold sensitive or proprietary information.
Americans perception of themselves always baffles me. You have police brutality regularly, ICE raids shooting protestors and deporting people (inc those with the right to be there) to El Salvador, people who write critical articles of Israel denied visas, servicemen dying in the Middle East, your president openly stealing from your government via slush funds and his sons, and so little accountability that the only people facing consequences for Epstein are in Britain. Your news is owned by oligarchs who openly buy it to divide you and push their agenda not yours, your views barely matter as your politics is bought and paid for, your elections are rigged by gerrymandering so few incumbents ever lose. Then call yourself a democracy.
Absolute Mickey Mouse country singing itself propaganda about building the future whilst having a healthcare system that lets people die regularly for being too poor. Not exactly freedom if you’re dead is it?
Then they come to London and realise it’s just a much cleaner, safer, nicer looking city than anywhere in the US and has more culture, food and diversity than all but a few American cities. But have to justify going back to a chicken coop country where they grind out the prime of their lives, get no maternity pay, and like 10 days of holiday.
That's all true, and I had a great time in London and many eu countries.
Do immigrants have the same full rights as British citizens?
Would I be willing to re evaluate my visa every X years? Will I be willing to be uprooted if it's denied?
And how will childcare work when my elders are all here?
I think your post was correct as far as the state of the US, but your final paragraph is reductive. It's not always easy for someone to drop everything and uproot their life, even if it's possible
Hilarious comment. Every dumbass America bad trope is here. Our salaries are like four times higher so while you're yelling about healthcare our actual expenditure is lower as a percentage of our income. Our outcomes are better and while you're yelling about days off I can retire at like 45 and have three times your net worth. Plus I don't have to fly anywhere. I'm already in a warm destination.
I know plenty of people who immigrated from the UK and not one of them would ever go back.
Fun fact: Americans pay more tax money towards healthcare than countries with universal tax-funded healthcare. How much healthcare does that spending get them? Zero. After overpaying tax for healthcare they also have to buy healthcare separately.
Yea cause we throw more money at it. Our facilities are far superior. In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
I am an atheist and any country were a leader claims their country to be Christian is a no go for me. Is the separation of church and state a joke to Americans?
It was pretty funny because right next to Trump they had a man/woman in a Easter bunny suit.
Yet swatting, making police kick in the doors and shoot the dogs of someone who was victim of anonymous slander, isn't really a thing here in europe compared to the US.
The very politicized US courts that collude with and are completely in the pocket of whomever's running the country? More developed countries have a clear separation between the judiciary and the executive powers.
Even if you take the European Union alone and ignore all the other European countries, the EU only legislates over a subset of things for member countries.
I think it’s true that declining to hand over a password in a criminal investigation is itself a criminal act in the UK. That said, I don’t know how often this actually occurs.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
After having watched too many videos on Auditing Britain, I can not trust the UK cops. In some ways they are worse than US cops, except for shooting down people, where US cops still lead negatively here. Also, UK cops use many more words than US cops, without those words really meaning much at all. The amount of flabbergast-inflated text length is insane.
Non-crime hate incidents 1) never lead to people being charged, and 2) recording of them has been greatly reformed following a court ruling and new legislation
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
I also assume this incident was not in the UK as the details were shared on imgur which blocks the UK. The authorities also do not seem to have taken any action. Anyone can report anything they want.
Yep but they live with you for life on a DBS check, and you know that we brought up in a court of law if anything else happens to be against your favor
1. That is one reason why the rules were changed to reduce the level of recoding
2. It would only be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check, not basic or standard. This also applies to all other information the police have on you, not just NCHIs. This is just like the rules for disclosing something like a caution issued to someone in your household, an aquittal, allegations made against you, parking and speeding tickets etc.
"Non-crime information can be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check – which is limited to high-risk positions like teachers and carers – but only with the approval of a chief officer. The chief officer must have regard to statutory guidance issued by the Home Office and consider whether the applicant should be allowed to make representations before any information is disclosed."
When I was in high school I brought in a copy of The Hacker's Dictionary to show a friend. A teacher saw it.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under the their keyboard.
I started studying IT back in ‘99 and got a strict warning from the school my first year, because I had used the schools network to access the internet from my own laptop. I had “gained access” by plugging an ethernet cable into a random socket in the wall, and was doing some homework, when radom employee walked by. Since there wasn’t any rules (yet), that allowed nor disallowed it, I got of with only a warning ... from a school, that teaches IT :|
When I was in middle school I used to download keygens and cracks for programs from the school computer and take them with me home on a floppy disk because I didn’t have internet at home.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
I remember trying to argue with the IT folks at school because hackaday.com was blocked for "hacking"... damn, guess all those fun electronics projects people were doing is Super Evil And Only For Criminals.
It's so surprising that despute so many screams "China" in western media in the last 15 years, it happens in the west, but in China it's free to use any OS without any negative consequences. Why? What's going on?
Maybe because in 50 western countries nobody bothers you and the 1 exception, the UK did some weird stuff with online policing. The courts don’t sentence for that even in the UK, all you hear about are police actions.
They’re also declining hard because of brexit and maybe fear public unrest.
And in China for dissent you go to a reeducation camp. Or maybe the China incidents aren’t newsworthy, just expected.
Not true the part about China, but yes Western countries do like to pretend they have a lot more freedom than they do.
If you can't criticize or protest Xi in China, try criticize or protesting the laws in rest of the world. Especially the things they do in the name of privacy, I remember UK jailing folks for FB posts, that's stuff that happens in third world countries.
Not that UK ever had much of a leg to stand on, US does the same now very scary.
For trips to any of the countries first thing I check is my socials and delete stuff that might get checked on airports now. This was apparently not supposed to happen in the developed world.
My friends still tell me it's not that bad, but it's just scary reading stuff on HN like this once a month, every month for the last few years.
That response looks like it is generated from boilerplate, so the 'reported to the authorities' part is as likely true as when sudo says the same thing.
As the age verification and the dodgy businesses around them become more widespread, people will find the friction and risk of paying for "legitimate" access on par with pirating, and to boot, the later doesn't cost money.
Remember, people use these services largely for convince more than qualms with paying for multinationals. So once they create friction, off we go to the bays again in large masses.
Actually, that makes me think, what will happen, if suddenly there is a flood of reports, too many for them to deal with? Let's say all GrapheneOS users installed that app to get reported and then some more bots/fakes are set up to do that too.
While most people who use an unbackdoored OS aren't frauds, presumably it's correct at a slightly higher rate than assuming someone is a fraud because they use the internet.
Someone in the comments of that post linked to a long FAQ section for GrapheneOS about how apps can identify it and so forth [1]. I don't understand why it doesn't just attempt to spoof that's it's stock Android/Google everywhere it possibly can?
The goal is to normalize the usage of alternative OS. The moment you find workarounds and not question, you accept their position and eventually you'll run out of workarounds.
'you can still do X through Y, they are not removing it' is a popular and often the top reply on posts related to companies tightening their walled gardens. It gives an immediate solution to the problem but it doesn't address the core issue. I wish that wasn't the case.
They are focused on making their users more private and secure, not trying to trick 0.01% of apps that give them problems.
It's a cat and mouse game that would require significant investment and could make things look more suspicious, better to focus on adoption so it becomes harder for companies to make stupid decisions like this. I've seen a banking apps that have expressly added support for GrapheneOS with their hardware attestation after customers mentioned it.
Even dedicated anti-detect browsers are constantly blocked and need patches. It's not something I would want GrapheneOS to focus on.
Because that would be pointless. If you have use-after-free exploit mitigations active, apps can test for its presence by simply trying to use after free. The only way to make the mitigation unnoticeable would be disabling it.
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
It depends on what you're trying to do with it, right? If I have my browser spoof it's useragent to say it's firefox when it's chrome, is that fraud? At what point are we saying something is fraud and at what point are we just trying to avoid needless fingerprinting in apps/operating systems/whatever else?
If you're using any type of adblock in your browser, you're essentially spoofing countless systems just to have those ads not show up. But if I'm having my operating system tell an app that I'm not OS XYZ that's fraud?
AIUI if they decide members of a category receive some tangible benefit, so you fake being in that category and get the benefit, it's technically criminal fraud.
>The Spanish privacy regulator (hereinafter: AEPD) recently imposed a fine of €950,000 on age verification service YOTI
>For the unlawful processing of biometric personal data in violation of Article 9 of the GDPR, YOTI was fined €500,000. In addition, a fine of €200,000 was imposed for obtaining invalid consent in violation of Article 7 of the GDPR. Finally, the company was fined €250,000 for exceeding retention periods in violation of Article 5 of the GDPR
This actually is how authorities work. If you do anything unusual at all, you are flagged as suspicious. You will find yourself being denied services without explanation. There is no appeal process.
Not where I live. If it's happening where you live then it's a sign you need to start protesting/organizing/get involved in politics/using whatever skills you have to improve matters before they get worse.
This happened in the UK, specifically, and from what we've all seen it's definitely sliding in a bad direction over the past decade. But it's also not in any way so far gone that you can't take action. If you're sitting here on HN complaining and yet doing nothing else, you're a part of the problem. Stop being complacent, take action before it's too late. You won't get thrown in jail for getting involved in politics there (yes, you'll find some specific examples of that happening but if you look deeper they'll all unravel and show there was a deeper reason that's being misrepresented, usually by tabloids/social media).
This isn't how the UK works. There is a vast ecosystem of pre-crime authorities and the police are able to investigate things which aren't crimes and add "non-crime" incidents to your criminal record. It may not surprise you to learn that almost all of the cases in which this is used are "social" crimes. In cases of actual crime, custodial sentences are sometimes not applied at all...again, usually for reasons of social order.
Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.
But get your car stolen in the UK and the police won't do a thing. Even if you know where it is via a tracker. Nothing. Outright refuse to take any action.
All sharing sites are not blocked, postimg and Reddit image hosting and Flickr and many more are not blocked.
The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.
I'm pretty sure it was in protest of a law saying they'd have to check everyone's ID. The BBC, being incredibly biased, obviously won't report this correctly.
That's in countries that have a constitution, a Bill of Rights that can't be revoked by a simple vote of the legislature, separation of powers and the rule of law. None of which applies to the UK.
3 of those factors are nothing more than bits of paper. Everything hinges on separation of powers, and the one you omitted: a thoroughly established sense of democracy. If either of those fails, any report to the authorities is a threat.
There is a whole set of things that can be done to you before you are proven guilty (detained, arrested, refused service, denied boarding, visit from the police, interrogated, etc..)
This is totally unacceptable. But going to the hassle of running GrapheneOS and then using it to try and submit facial scans to combine your identity with your PSN account just seems so pointless.
> But going to the hassle of running GrapheneOS and then using it to try and submit facial scans to combine your identity with your PSN account just seems so pointless.
reply
Totally disagree. Everyone has a different threat model. Some people may solely be interested in the exploit protections and not care about their privacy. Some people might just like that it's completely open source or that there's no AI or it's bloat free.
I really dislike this maximalist, "ruin privacy" stance because it discourages people from making a small improvement if they can't be perfect. Changing to GrapheneOS is an insanely large privacy benefit compared to almost any other change and people might see this sort of sentiment and think there's no point if they use one privacy invasive app.
It's really scary how society is being 'nudged' into using 'authorised devices' to participate in society (which we have to pay for, lol).
I wonder if some ideology which believes in tech freedom will become the communism of the next age, and prompt a new wave of 'democracy' purity crusades.
A friend of mine told me that Yoti is used as an age verification system in so many porn websites. That’s such an issue, this information should never be owned by private companies.
Or you could just choose not to use pornography. Then you don't have to verify your age to these websites.
I get that some people have a behavioural addiction to this harmful content but perhaps the age verification is an opportunity to step back and reconsider.
Greetings stranger! Your comment has been shadowbanned. In order to prove you are a legal adult, please email a selfie, holding your username on a piece of paper, and your government ID to [email protected]. Alternatively, you may use this opportunity to step back and reconsider whether you still wish to remain addicted to Hacker News.
I usually just use the Book of Mormon and that typically helps me get it done well-enough. But when that doesn't work, I allow myself some different material. The New Haven Code of 1656 is my reserve favorite and I have a laminated copy of the Comstock Act of 1873 on-hand for unusually-tricky edge cases.
> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom
Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States?
When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
Oh, I missed that "let us now, assembled noble lords, end this abominable institution through which we have become filthy rich. And my lords, what say ye regarding pushing drugs to the wretches of Asia?"
Totally agree, the British Empire has a lot of blood on its hand,
but compared to its forebears and contemporaries it did abolish slavery, a tradition that has roots as old as humanity itself.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
It's pretty baffling tbh.
Anyone: criticises the British empire.
Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
> My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
The others he listed didn't stop voluntarily - their empires collapsed, lol. The UK made the choice to stop, at massive cost, because their values changed.
That is, they actual made actual progress, and thus are hated by many calling themselves progressives.
The UK is historically a very bad example, especially as a colonizer. It has basically invented concentration camps before the Nazis, in Africa, and if we get to the opium war, the picture does not get much better either. Almost everywhere they went they engaged in hideous despicable crimes. If they have done most for the cause of freedom, then they have also done a much higher amount for non-freedom and slavery.
The bodycam literally shows a police officer responding to a man who's been stabbed with "I don't think you have mate", just because his killer said the man was racist.
I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing.
From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.
Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.
The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts. And putting this together with the Nowak case leads to an almost contradictory position. Whatever the issues with police handling of pro-Palestinian protestors, they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups). For example, here is a poster who' all over this thread complaining about two-tier policing, but who supports the ban on PA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504
The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
There's a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind where your brain is gradually replaced, neuron by neuron, with artificial units that replicate the exact input and output mappings of the original neurons. The question, of course, is whether this change is accompanied by any change in your subjective conscious experience.
I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed.
A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok.
Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
You haven't even begun to understand people who disagree with you.
If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad. Saying that being appalled by police brutality towards a white person is "racism" misunderstands what people are saying complextely.
You are arguing with phantoms in your head.
The problem that people have is that whilst America was ripping itself apart with riots, British politicians were enthusiastically supporting this. Starmer made a statement saying he stood with the rioters. The same thing happened in the UK, there was a brief riot, and Starmer has taken the complete opposite position...and today, actually complained about people in other countries "stoking up division" (this is something that is getting said every few days).
The UK has policing policies and laws which favour some groups in society, this event was the outcome of that. When this happened in the US, the same politicians were outraged, appalled, disgusted. When this happened in the UK, no issues with policing at all. The problem that people have is that this is obviously contradictatory...again, if you start from the basis that people should be treated equally (which many people in the UK do not).
You will need to explain this in more detail so people without racial prejudice can understand why someone's race impacts their ability to do a certain job.
If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country.
Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact.
In the case of Henry Novak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing.
The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse.
The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong.
Being non-white does not mean they are able to do their job better. That is a racist belief.
The police in this case were white. But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently. It is nothing to do with diversity. Unless you are a racist, diversity is not an end in itself. No-one is making self-important statements about changing society. They just want the police to do their job correctly. If someone is stabbed, they shouldn't arrest them because their policy dictates that non-whites are rarely suspects in crimes.
The peak of luxury beliefs is to believe that people performing vital jobs that may involve life or death should perform that job in a way to achieve abstract social goals in order to make individuals feel better about "society".
>But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently.
There is no actual evidence of this. Some people apparently think they can read the minds of the officers on the scene. And, being serious for just a moment, even the most outré of the police policy documents that have been dug up following this event (allowing the dubious assumption that any serving police officer has ever read them) do not require the police to deny medical attention to white people who claim to have been stabbed.
The Nowak case is certainly a horrendous instance of police incompetence, but you have to marvel at the shamelessness of the people who are jumping to exploit it for nefarious political ends.
People often critisize the USA - rightfully so, now as the orange king and his cronies rule over it - but the UK is in some ways worse. One of the best things that happened in the last years was BREXIT; that way the craziness from the UK can no longer taint other Europeans. And that's actually a good thing. Age sniffing is done for appeasement to corporate overlords; people should not buy into the propaganda that this is "to protect the kids". It is so obvious at this point in time - the amount of money spent by lobbyists must be insane, and the UK is the easiest to fall victim here, even before the USA. Evil companies such as Yoti need to be disbanded at once - either by the state, or by the people if the state has already been bribed into obedient submission to private, particular interests.
If anything, from an age-verification perspective those using GrapheneOS are probably more likely to be adults, mentally mature, or otherwise smarter than the average sheeple.
The only surprising thing about this story is that the user didn't get a visit by the police to be charged with a "non-crime cybersecurity incident". The UK has become such a shithole.
I won't be visiting. Despite many flaws, the US has some damn good rights for its citizens compared to the rest of the world.
This is precisely the reason why I don't want to visit the US at the moment.
The USA immigration officers can ask me to forfeit my phone's password and look at all my photos, documents, messages, call logs etc, WITHOUT SUSPICION.
Some of that data can even stay on their servers for decades, and who knows if it ends up on a CIA/NSA server.
Of course, I can always refuse, but non-cooperation with CBP means immediate denial of entry and risks of lifelong headaches with future immigration checks.
I‘m also careful with what I say online. US CBP tracks what people post online, and has been known to deny entry to people for being critical critical of the current president. I don’t want to risk losing out on future opportunities in the land of the free.
Which is not to excuse the errors, but to put it in context: it is a European country… albeit just like Turkey and Azerbaijan.
Some of ICE’s detainees may have different opinions on that point.
The UK may endow her citizens with fewer rights. But I have a lot more trust in British due process. British civil servants seem much less … capricious than Americans.
I was almost denied entry to Hawaii once because I told the CBP agent I didn’t have any cash on me. (My money is in a bank account, obviously). He went on a big rant about how expensive Hawaii is. I think he was worried I’d end up homeless. (Even though my visit to hang out with my then employer.) Over the years I’ve heard so many stories from other Australian friends about wild and unfortunate encounters with US police and officials.
By comparison, the British government seems far more civilised. If something happened while visiting the UK, I have much more confidence that everything would be resolved in a fair and reasonable manner.
This is why many companies have procedures for when employees visit certain countries, including the US. For instance that you are not allowed to bring your personal phone, your personal and work laptop or any medium that can hold sensitive or proprietary information.
Absolute Mickey Mouse country singing itself propaganda about building the future whilst having a healthcare system that lets people die regularly for being too poor. Not exactly freedom if you’re dead is it?
Then they come to London and realise it’s just a much cleaner, safer, nicer looking city than anywhere in the US and has more culture, food and diversity than all but a few American cities. But have to justify going back to a chicken coop country where they grind out the prime of their lives, get no maternity pay, and like 10 days of holiday.
Do immigrants have the same full rights as British citizens?
Would I be willing to re evaluate my visa every X years? Will I be willing to be uprooted if it's denied?
And how will childcare work when my elders are all here?
I think your post was correct as far as the state of the US, but your final paragraph is reductive. It's not always easy for someone to drop everything and uproot their life, even if it's possible
I know plenty of people who immigrated from the UK and not one of them would ever go back.
It was pretty funny because right next to Trump they had a man/woman in a Easter bunny suit.
Unless you turn up to a protest against the ICEtapo, with a holstered gun. Then you can be murdered and called a domestic terrorist.
As a brown visitor to the US.... Well I won't be one. They can ask for access to my entire digital life without the slightest suspicion of any crimes.
Even if you take the European Union alone and ignore all the other European countries, the EU only legislates over a subset of things for member countries.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
Don't give them ideas!
After having watched too many videos on Auditing Britain, I can not trust the UK cops. In some ways they are worse than US cops, except for shooting down people, where US cops still lead negatively here. Also, UK cops use many more words than US cops, without those words really meaning much at all. The amount of flabbergast-inflated text length is insane.
I agree there are a lot of problems (e.g. the online safety Act) but it look as though both the rest of Europe and the rest of the west is going the same way.
I also assume this incident was not in the UK as the details were shared on imgur which blocks the UK. The authorities also do not seem to have taken any action. Anyone can report anything they want.
2. It would only be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check, not basic or standard. This also applies to all other information the police have on you, not just NCHIs. This is just like the rules for disclosing something like a caution issued to someone in your household, an aquittal, allegations made against you, parking and speeding tickets etc.
"Non-crime information can be disclosed on an enhanced DBS check – which is limited to high-risk positions like teachers and carers – but only with the approval of a chief officer. The chief officer must have regard to statutory guidance issued by the Home Office and consider whether the applicant should be allowed to make representations before any information is disclosed."
https://www.college.police.uk/article/protecting-freedom-exp...
It is illegal to request a higher level of check than the guidance allows for a particular role.
A few weeks later there was a hacking incident! The shared spreadsheet of every pupil's grades that every teacher had full access to was modified, boosting the grades of some students (including me) and lowering the grades of others (including people I didn't get on with). I was immediately sent home during the investigation. Nothing came of it in the end.
Years later my friend revealed the advanced technique of finding his music teacher's password (bassoon) on a post-it note under the their keyboard.
One of the websites I downloaded keygens and cracks from was called TheBugs.WS. Another pupil saw that I was downloading keygens and stuff and tried to rat me out to one of the teachers saying like “hey look at his screen, he can’t use the computer for that”.
The teacher had a brief glance at my monitor and read the title of the page TheBugs.WS and just said “nothing wrong about learning about insects” and then just walked away lololol. To this day I still don’t know if the teacher genuinely though the page was about insects just from the title, or if she just didn’t care as long as the briefest of glances at my screen didn’t show anything that seemed really out of place.
Either which way, my situation was kind of the exact opposite of yours. And the inconspicuous name of the site was enough that I didn’t get in trouble even though I could have if a teacher looked closely.
That line of propaganda pushed by the US government worked well for the better part of a century, not any more.
They’re also declining hard because of brexit and maybe fear public unrest.
And in China for dissent you go to a reeducation camp. Or maybe the China incidents aren’t newsworthy, just expected.
If you can't criticize or protest Xi in China, try criticize or protesting the laws in rest of the world. Especially the things they do in the name of privacy, I remember UK jailing folks for FB posts, that's stuff that happens in third world countries.
Not that UK ever had much of a leg to stand on, US does the same now very scary.
For trips to any of the countries first thing I check is my socials and delete stuff that might get checked on airports now. This was apparently not supposed to happen in the developed world.
My friends still tell me it's not that bad, but it's just scary reading stuff on HN like this once a month, every month for the last few years.
Not exactly what you asked but here’s something tangentially related
* https://postimg.cc/3kVXKzhk
It's resistance against mass surveillance and a cancerous State. It's any citizen's duty, really.
Remember, people use these services largely for convince more than qualms with paying for multinationals. So once they create friction, off we go to the bays again in large masses.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/faq#:~:text=Apps%20can%20detect%20tha...
'you can still do X through Y, they are not removing it' is a popular and often the top reply on posts related to companies tightening their walled gardens. It gives an immediate solution to the problem but it doesn't address the core issue. I wish that wasn't the case.
It's a cat and mouse game that would require significant investment and could make things look more suspicious, better to focus on adoption so it becomes harder for companies to make stupid decisions like this. I've seen a banking apps that have expressly added support for GrapheneOS with their hardware attestation after customers mentioned it.
Even dedicated anti-detect browsers are constantly blocked and need patches. It's not something I would want GrapheneOS to focus on.
0: https://developer.android.com/google/play/integrity/overview
From https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...:
> GrapheneOS not only upholds the app security model but substantially reinforces it, so it cannot be justified with reasoning based on security, anti-fraud, etc.
If you're using any type of adblock in your browser, you're essentially spoofing countless systems just to have those ads not show up. But if I'm having my operating system tell an app that I'm not OS XYZ that's fraud?
>The Spanish privacy regulator (hereinafter: AEPD) recently imposed a fine of €950,000 on age verification service YOTI
>For the unlawful processing of biometric personal data in violation of Article 9 of the GDPR, YOTI was fined €500,000. In addition, a fine of €200,000 was imposed for obtaining invalid consent in violation of Article 7 of the GDPR. Finally, the company was fined €250,000 for exceeding retention periods in violation of Article 5 of the GDPR
They need to prove people guilty, not flag all “suspicious activity” then let people prove they are innocent.
This happened in the UK, specifically, and from what we've all seen it's definitely sliding in a bad direction over the past decade. But it's also not in any way so far gone that you can't take action. If you're sitting here on HN complaining and yet doing nothing else, you're a part of the problem. Stop being complacent, take action before it's too late. You won't get thrown in jail for getting involved in politics there (yes, you'll find some specific examples of that happening but if you look deeper they'll all unravel and show there was a deeper reason that's being misrepresented, usually by tabloids/social media).
It shouldn't be about what they call you, it should be about your actions. Neonazis must be allowed to peacefully protest.
Ironically, I also can't read most of the screenshots because all sharing sites are blocked in the UK because of the threat image sharing represents to the social order.
The uk didn’t block sharing sites because of a threat to the social order, sharing sites blocked uk viewers because they don’t want to comply with uk laws like “don’t gather children’s personal data”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo
i love commenting on this stuff to get an insight into the mindset of people who support this...strident ignorance.
Totally disagree. Everyone has a different threat model. Some people may solely be interested in the exploit protections and not care about their privacy. Some people might just like that it's completely open source or that there's no AI or it's bloat free.
I really dislike this maximalist, "ruin privacy" stance because it discourages people from making a small improvement if they can't be perfect. Changing to GrapheneOS is an insanely large privacy benefit compared to almost any other change and people might see this sort of sentiment and think there's no point if they use one privacy invasive app.
I wonder if some ideology which believes in tech freedom will become the communism of the next age, and prompt a new wave of 'democracy' purity crusades.
I get that some people have a behavioural addiction to this harmful content but perhaps the age verification is an opportunity to step back and reconsider.
I usually just use the Book of Mormon and that typically helps me get it done well-enough. But when that doesn't work, I allow myself some different material. The New Haven Code of 1656 is my reserve favorite and I have a laminated copy of the Comstock Act of 1873 on-hand for unusually-tricky edge cases.
Not that I'm arguing the UK isn't accelerating further into an authoritarian nightmare.
[0] Kinda related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_Insights_Team
- Two-tier justice system
- This
How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.
Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States?
When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
That should be a few decades before the civil war in the USA about the same issue.
The US was actually pretty much the last Western civilization to abolish slavery from what I recall from history class.
> having led the way in abolishing slavery
As they like to say in England, bullocks!
But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today.
The words Slav and slave have the same root.
There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves.
The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to.
It's pretty baffling tbh.
Anyone: criticises the British empire.
Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
The others he listed didn't stop voluntarily - their empires collapsed, lol. The UK made the choice to stop, at massive cost, because their values changed.
That is, they actual made actual progress, and thus are hated by many calling themselves progressives.
Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding
Not the first mistake police made.
Do you think the same people who protest now, also protested when the person who died was non-white?
The behaviour of one officer does not mean that we should no longer live in a diverse society.
This is one incident. The officer is question made a terrible call.
The fact that people like you are using this as ammunition to further frankly racist aims, is an egregious afront to everyone living in the UK.
In could say Jean Charles de Menezes
And know?
From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance.
Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background.
[0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-...
[1] https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak
The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed.
A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok.
Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
Being against anti-black racism doesn’t mean pro-white racism.
Have you looked up what all those claiming racism against white people said when the victim of a mistake of an police officer was non-white?
If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad. Saying that being appalled by police brutality towards a white person is "racism" misunderstands what people are saying complextely.
You are arguing with phantoms in your head.
The problem that people have is that whilst America was ripping itself apart with riots, British politicians were enthusiastically supporting this. Starmer made a statement saying he stood with the rioters. The same thing happened in the UK, there was a brief riot, and Starmer has taken the complete opposite position...and today, actually complained about people in other countries "stoking up division" (this is something that is getting said every few days).
The UK has policing policies and laws which favour some groups in society, this event was the outcome of that. When this happened in the US, the same politicians were outraged, appalled, disgusted. When this happened in the UK, no issues with policing at all. The problem that people have is that this is obviously contradictatory...again, if you start from the basis that people should be treated equally (which many people in the UK do not).
If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country.
Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact.
In the case of Henry Novak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing.
The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse.
The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong.
I will not stand for it.
You have misunderstood my point entirely.
Being non-white does not mean they are able to do their job better. That is a racist belief.
The police in this case were white. But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently. It is nothing to do with diversity. Unless you are a racist, diversity is not an end in itself. No-one is making self-important statements about changing society. They just want the police to do their job correctly. If someone is stabbed, they shouldn't arrest them because their policy dictates that non-whites are rarely suspects in crimes.
The peak of luxury beliefs is to believe that people performing vital jobs that may involve life or death should perform that job in a way to achieve abstract social goals in order to make individuals feel better about "society".
You are incorrect.
There was no policy in place that made the officer behave in this way.
The police officer made a huge mistake. It's as simple as that.
Racist groups are using this ammunition to suggest we need to undo the progress that was put in place to create a fairer more equitable society.
You are furthering their aims.
There is no actual evidence of this. Some people apparently think they can read the minds of the officers on the scene. And, being serious for just a moment, even the most outré of the police policy documents that have been dug up following this event (allowing the dubious assumption that any serving police officer has ever read them) do not require the police to deny medical attention to white people who claim to have been stabbed.
The Nowak case is certainly a horrendous instance of police incompetence, but you have to marvel at the shamelessness of the people who are jumping to exploit it for nefarious political ends.
Trying not to get my account banned...
The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.