Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail’s account recovery process.)

That could be it. What is certain is that these big corps really don’t want to pay human beings to sort out issues so if you get caught in the middle of some BS you may have no recourse out of it.

I honestly do not know what you are saying. Deep packet inspection through a firewall that does mitm interception demonstrably happens. It is not up for debate.

What isn’t made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone’s account gets flagged for “suspicious activity” or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.

I really do not know what you are saying. I have just told you that Fortigate Firewall can and does do deep packet inspection on https connections. It does so by man in the middle proxying. If one filter / proxy can do it then any other could too. There would be ways for kids to circumvent this, e.g via VPN but that is no different than with age verification.

I’m intimately aware about what it can and cannot do. And it can intercept and man in the middles any https traffic

Did you read the text? This guy was providing a package because the default one was broken and he’s fed up of dealing with complaints. And the solution to that is just flatpak the thing and tell users to use that regardless of dist.

The answer for this guy and other people stretched by supporting Linux is to say it’s flatpak or nothing. Stop trying to build for each dist because it’s not sustainable. If someone on a dist wants to maintain a package then let them take the heat if it is broken.

You obviously didn’t know how it works if I had to explain it was already possible. And I am not aware of any mobile device that prevents you installing a new root CA.

And it isn’t “madness”, it’s a completely workable way to offer filtering for people who want it for kids and have no filtering or censorship for anybody else. It is a vastly better option than onerously demanding adults provide their identity to random and potentially adult themed websites where they could be victims of identity theft or extortion

Deep packet inspection already happens on encrypted traffic (Fortigate Firewall) so it’s eminently possible for filtering software to do the same.

Actually it can be done and is being done. Software like Fortigate Firewall can do deep packet inspection on encrypted connections by replacing certs with their own and doing man in the middle inspection. It requires the browser has a root CA cert that trusts the certs issued by the proxy but that’s about it. Filtering software could onboard a new device where the root cert could be installed.

And if Fortigate can do it then any filtering software can too. e.g. a kid uses their filtered device to go to reddit.com, the filter software substitutes reddit’s cert for their own and proxies the connection. Then it looks at the paths to see if the kid is visiting an innocuous group or an 18+ group. So basic filtering rules could be:

1. If domain is entirely blocked, just block it.
2. If domain hosts mixed content, deep packet inspection & block if necessary
3. If domain is innocuous allow it through

This is eminently possible for an ISP to implement and do so in a way that it ONLY happens when a user opts into it on a registered device while leaving everything open if they did not opt into it.

And like I said this is an ISP problem to figure out. The government could have set the rules and walked away. And as a solution it would be far more simple that requiring every website to implement age verification.

That’s a problem is for ISPs and content providers to figure out. I don’t see why the government has to care other than laying out the ground rules - you must offer and implement a parental filter for people who want it for free as part of your service. If ISPs have to do deep packet inspection and proxy certs for protected devices / accounts then that’s what they’ll have to do.

As far as the government is concerned it’s not their problem. They’ve said what should happen and providing the choice without being assholes to people over 18 who are exercising their rights to use the internet as they see fit.

It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.

Sites are lazy and greedy. They throw dozens and dozens of 3rd party javascripts into their headers, that punish and annoy people for not using an ad blocker - they slow the site down, bloat the memory, consume energy, track the user and festoon the page with garbage. As soon as people hear that an ad blocker is a thing, then of course they leap at the chance of using one.

It would be straightforward for sites to insert ads into their content - make the ad urls, images and links indistinguishable from actual content. i.e. serve them up from the same domain, from non predictable paths and use html structure where ads and content are intermingled. Even if an adblocker wanted to block the ads, there are no patterns that work and every single site would require different rules. But that requires effort. I suppose we should be glad that sites don’t do it.

You’re getting it the wrong way around. People aren’t arrested for the phone they have. This is a complete nonsense by a clickbait article. They are arrested based on observation or intelligence of criminal activity. After the fact, when they are arrested they are found to have one of these phones flashed to use a privacy OS. Do you think such a phone convinces the cops they got the wrong person or not? The answer quite obviously is it convinces the cops this person is a criminal and is attempting to hide what they are up to.

It would be absurd to think cops are staring at people’s phones to initiate arrests because they are not.

This is not hard to understand.

Having a phone installed with an OS favoured by criminals doesn’t exculpate a person arrested for criminal activity, or make the cops think they’re innocent.

The cops quite obviously don’t think owning a Pixel makes somebody a drug dealer. But if they arrest or detain a suspect then owning a Pixel flashed with GrapheneOS isnt exactly a sign of innocence. Even if nothing could be extracted from the phone, I’m sure a judge and jury could be convinced what they were doing if they have such a device in their possession.

Also, regardless of the security the OS claims to have, most criminals are not the brightest and I bet some can be squeezed to hand over the key or the phone can be unlocked with a face id or fingerprint. It also motivates the cops to do what they’ve done in the past where they have compromised supposedly secure operating systems or apps and installed backdoors.

Fascists? Virtually the entire house of commons voted them a terrorist organisation, not just Labour. That was because they attacked UK military aircraft on a UK military base and concocted an excuse for doing it. That got them branded terrorists.

This does not in any way stop people rallying for Palestine or the appalling inhuman injustices they’re suffering. I’m sure there are marches happening all the time, not to mention charities to donate to, social media feeds to amplify atrocities. Just don’t attack UK bases or support those who do and you’ll be fine.

As for Corbyn, he wasn’t “stabbed in the back”. He lost two general elections in a row and he resigned. If he was still there for the last election he’d be sitting in opposition in charge of an even smaller party surrounded by a clique. He was not some saviour for Labour, he was the bane of it.