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Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

...on serious topics that don't fit anywhere else at present.
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Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#141 Post by Alan H » May 18th, 2017, 1:02 pm

Latest post of the previous page:

Interesting... unless you'd logged in or provided contact details, it can only have been a coincidence...

But it is difficult to see whether you're on the best tariff.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

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Dave B
Posts: 17809
Joined: May 17th, 2010, 9:15 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#142 Post by Dave B » May 18th, 2017, 3:10 pm

Alan H wrote:Interesting... unless you'd logged in or provided contact details, it can only have been a coincidence...

But it is difficult to see whether you're on the best tariff.
I got the bill online, via a password, from n-Power so they knew who I was and it must have set a flag when I clicked the link to take a look at my options.

There is a lower short term, 3 years, tariff that would save me about £100 over that period. What then? Big hike?

Changing companies without having the details in exactly the same format for each can be a real pain with no guarrantee of a saving.
"Look forward; yesterday was a lesson, if you did not learn from it you wasted it."
Me, 2015

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Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#143 Post by Alan H » June 28th, 2017, 2:11 pm

The Dark Art of Encryption
The current crisis of encryption is in part due to a lack of intelligence. The governments of the UK and Australia are talking about bans, regulations, requirements and other legal structures to address the perceived problem of “going dark”.

The problem, inside the nutshells that are the May and Turnbull governments, is that encryption allows [evil-doer name fill in the blank here] to communicate where the legal authorities cannot monitor them. Thus, due to the lack of intelligence, the May and Turnbull governments propose to find some way to regulate encryption.

When I mention lack of “intelligence” I am not making reference to the collection of information of military or political value. I am using intelligence in the traditional form of the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. To those who have been placed, elected or seized power, understanding the technology is less important than trying to wrestle with its consequences.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#144 Post by Alan H » July 17th, 2017, 11:58 pm

The idiocy continues: Privacy campaigners criticise UK plan for age checks on porn websites
“Age verification risks failure as it attempts to fix a social problem with technology. In their recent manifestos, all three main political parties called for compulsory sex and relationship education in schools. Sex education would genuinely protect young people, as it would give them information and context.”
Jerry Barnett, author of the book Porn Panic! and a free speech campaigner, said: “This law is the culmination of years of lobbying by a wide variety of state and private interests, and will fundamentally change the internet in the UK and possibly globally. For the first time, the government has the power to block websites, en masse, without court orders. This is a first in a democracy.

“Although this appears to be just about protecting children from porn, it isn’t. It will block any site that doesn’t comply with strict UK content rules. Any nude image at all risks being categorised as porn, and the entire site being blocked. Current filtering systems class up to 4m websites as sexual. It’s likely this regime will block the vast majority of these. And doubtless, the censorship regime will then be extended to other crimes against decency.
Also, it mostly will be entirely ineffective.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

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Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#145 Post by Alan H » August 1st, 2017, 11:06 am

The burning stupidity of this Tory moron... UK home secretary Amber Rudd says 'real people' don't need end-to-end encryption
Amber Rudd has called on messaging apps like WhatsApp to ditch end-to-end encryption, arguing that it aids terrorists.

Writing in The Telegraph on Tuesday, the Conservative minister said that "real people" don't need the feature and that tech companies should do more to help the authorities deal with security threats.

But activists have reacted with concern to her remarks, blasting them as "dangerous and misleading."

Strong end-to-end encryption involves encoding messages or data so it cannot be read by anyone other than the intended recipient — including the company whose tech encrypts it, or law enforcement with a warrant.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#146 Post by Alan H » August 2nd, 2017, 1:51 am

Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#147 Post by Alan H » August 2nd, 2017, 8:47 pm

A detailed analysis of Amber Rudd's latest incompetence: Decrypting Amber Rudd
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#148 Post by Alan H » October 3rd, 2017, 5:23 pm

'I don't need to understand how encryption works,' admits UK Home Secretary
Fortunately, some sanity was restored at the event by one of the other speakers on the panel - Michael Beckerman of the Internet Association, representing the views of Google, Microsoft and other tech giants:

"Since it is just math and it has been invented it can't uninvented... So even if every internet company that we represent said 'ok we are turning off encryption' you are just weakening the security for everybody in this room but that math, that technology still exists for others to use on other platforms."

Encryption is a good thing.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#149 Post by Alan H » February 13th, 2018, 10:07 pm

UK Government announces tool to detect and block extremist videos
As BBC News reports, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd has announced a tool that is said to be able to detect and block extremist online content, such as Islamic State propaganda videos.

London-based ASI Data Science has received £600,000 of taxpayer's money to develop the software, which was trained with thousands of hours worth of video content posted by IS.

ASI Data Science says that its software can detect 94% of IS videos.

Of course, you can't just focus on what percentage of extremist videos are detected. That number is meaningless without also weighing up how many videos are mistakenly identified as extremist.

Let me put it this way. It's easy to write a detection routine that picks up all past, present, and future extremist videos - 100%! The only problem is that it would also detect everything that wasn't an extremist video too.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#150 Post by Alan H » February 14th, 2018, 9:35 am

Isis could easily dodge the UK's AI-powered propaganda blockade
An artificial intelligence system developed to automatically detect and block Islamic State propaganda on any online platform could be bypassed by a change in the group’s media strategy, one expert has warned.

The tool, announced by the Home Office today, can reportedly detect 94 per cent of official Isis propaganda with 99.995 per cent accuracy. But, as the tool only focusses on videos produced by Isis’ central and provincial media organisations, it would likely be possible for the group to dodge it.

“Presumably all it would take it to put us back to square one would be if the Islamic State changes the format that it uses, changes logos and is more careful about what soundtrack it uses,” says Charlie Winter a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation.

The branding of Islamic State videos, he continues, is monolithic: it uses the same structures, the same soundtracks, the same icons and the same logos. While this makes it possible for an algorithm to detect and block videos that match this signature, it also raises questions about how effective such a system can be against changes to Islamic State propaganda.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

User avatar
Alan H
Posts: 24067
Joined: July 3rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

Re: Big Brother is definitely watching and listening...

#151 Post by Alan H » September 13th, 2018, 3:11 pm

UK mass surveillance programme violates human rights, European court rules
The UK government’s mass surveillance programme violated human rights and had “no real safeguards”, the European Court of Human Rights (EHCR) has said in a landmark ruling.

The Strasbourg court said British intelligence agencies’ interception regime violated the right to a private and family life, since there was “insufficient oversight” over which communications were chosen for examination.

Not enough protection was given to journalistic sources by the government’s mass information collection programme, violating the right to freedom of expression, it also said.

But the court ruled that sharing the information with foreign governments did not violate either the right to a private and family life, or to free speech.
Alan Henness

There are three fundamental questions for anyone advocating Brexit:

1. What, precisely, are the significant and tangible benefits of leaving the EU?
2. What damage to the UK and its citizens is an acceptable price to pay for those benefits?
3. Which ruling of the ECJ is most persuasive of the need to leave its jurisdiction?

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