The OP of this reddit post has a lot of other posts (now hidden) about age verification, bypassing it, and privacy. They even got called out about this in the reddit thread and responded by hiding their profile, but you can see it on google still if you google for “reddit PaiDuck”
Not saying what this company did is right, but it feels like this guy has been testing how far he can push these various age verification companies with bypass attempts, and as a result got banned. Additionally the email response from the company could have been trivially edited before the screenshot was taken, so I’m not even convinced that the story is real. If I was running an age verification company I would absolutely not share with the banned users the reason we caught them, that’s like sharing the recipe for your secret sauce.
The company representative said that they report all users that use Graphene OS, without any additional qualifiers. Presumably after they've already uploaded their personal details. That's the egregious part.
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.
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.
I will rather choose not to visit the US for the foreseeable time, maybe never again (have been to the US more than 10 times). Freedom of speech is more important than tourist visits to the US. Well and working there was never an option for me, worker protection, universal healthcare, etc. make life much nicer.
Maybe the US will be free enough again in the future, but with its trajectory, I am not betting on it.
if you’re denied at the border for expressing speech online at some historic point (non-violent) then how can “respecting the culture” work?
When I am in Saudi Arabia, I don’t wear shorts out of respect for their culture; but they don’t go through my instagram looking for pictures of me in shorts.
> As for the US, probably 0.000001% or so had sad experiences at the border.
Heh it’s a lot more than that. About 1/3rd of my Australian friends have a story to tell about unfortunate US border crossing experiences. I personally know two (white) people who were denied entry at the border - in both cases for allegedly ridiculous reasons.
My partner was arrested at the beach once in the US. The police wanted her to narc on someone she was travelling with and she refused. (The case was thrown out of court by a furious judge, but it was a whole thing).
in the US we have free speech for citizens (generally). People in foreign countries are not citizens of the US. they do not receive the benefit of our free speech protections (whatever those may be), since they are not, in fact, citizens of the US.
you replied with an article about the US Vice President decrying what happened. I thought that to be a non-sequitur, so i asked what you were trying to say.
You said you don't arrest people at your border for [speech].
i responded to that non-sequitur with two reports of people being arrested for speech, who cares if it's at the border? that's UK citizens being arrested for "speech", not foreigners! Like, thanks, i guess, for letting us have free speech when you don't?
and here we are.
* note: i don't think we arrest people at the border, just deny entry. i could be mistaken, though.
But I only hold guests responsible for what they say while in my home. Not what they have said to their friends in DMs 6 months beforehand.
But the analogy is imprecise because the border patrol isn’t inviting people and revoking invitations when they misbehave. They are granting access to public spaces or revoking that. And the idea that a public place should do anything more than gate on current activity in that place is insane (for speech!)
In a world where people get canceled for things they said a decade ago, and for people whom they are friends with, and for what those friends said a decade ago, you are walking a fine line by not screening your guests’ past DMs
That’s why I said the analogy was imperfect. Because border guards (or the state) aren’t “inviting” anyone. It’s not an endorsement to let people in (unlike a friend to your house)
If I would push it further to the extreme, "you" are inviting yourself. You're not a guest yet, you're inviting yourself, showing up at a stranger's door asking to be let in.
Though I agree with you that analogies have limits.
I am not even sure of anything at this point, especially after reading the comments around, almost as if it was bigotry.
It could be a cultural / education difference too; I was taught that local cultures are equally legitimate as much as my personal culture.
> Be respectful of the tradition, culture and laws of the local country that you visit and you will be fine.
> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest.
Well, that's a pretty damned repulsive view.
Countries, governments, whatever, don't have a right to just do whatever they want to their citizens without anybody else noticing. All individuals morally outrank all institutions.
As a counterpoint: I lived in Melbourne, Australia during the pandemic. We were going for elimination. We tried some of the world’s strictest lockdown laws.
Apparently there were protests in NY of all places on our behalf. I don’t know what they were hoping would happen - would the state of NY ask our state to change our laws for them? How bizarre. Our local policies are up to us, thanks.
Surely NY had other things to worry about at the time? The news we were hearing of ambulances in NY queueing outside overpacked hospitals… though I suppose the media there was saying equally scary things about life in Melbourne.
Our lockdowns didn’t work, but we loved our state premier for trying. He was so popular that the following election, the other political parties didn’t really bother to show up. The opinion of New Yorkers was against the will of most locals here. It was sweet to protest for us. But it had very weird vibes.
I have really, really, really bad news for you about any modern SoC, including all those by Qualcomm. Their ROM private keys are widely available to the three letter agencies. Your OS, while cute, provides no protection at all to anyone who has physical access. Secure boot root keys give away the whole kingdom
There are no "ROM private keys" in Qualcomm or most other chips. The root of trust is fused in by the OEM. Apparently the exception is Apple.
They would have to individually steal keys from every OEM, in GraphenOS' case meaning Google. Then they'd have to do the right dance to fake the right stuff to satisfy the Secure Element(TM) and get it to let them use the data encryption keys. Which, by the way, I believe requires forking over a hash that may vary among individual phones; you have to know which version of the appropriate stage you want to fake.
... and you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your confident statements about what TLAs do or don't have access to, especially when you start talking about keys that don't exist.
Secureboot keys do not give away any data on the encrypted "cute" OS. At worst they can attempt an evil maid attack but why bother when they can use any device of the same model.
At least you can walk in with a phone reset to factory settings, and once you cross the border restore from the cloud (or home server like me). In UK you can be stopped walking on the sidewalk. It's much more dystopian in UK.
Any good examples of that happening? As far as I know, the police have to have a probable cause to stop and search you, but they can certainly ask you to stop and answer questions to which you can ask "am I being detained" if you object to their questions.
Sort of. It's also footway when denoting the no-carriages part of a road that also has a carriageway.
There's a whole complex terminology of footway, cycleway, bridleway, bridle path, footpath, cycle path, and carriageway. Even more fun: It's ever so slightly different in Scotland to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
I haven't written up an article about it yet, but from a cursory look of the legal stuff this only affects private citizens and could be circumvented by setting up a shell company that owns your devices.
Legally, you can't surrender these devices, access to them or their passwords, as they are company property.
There's what's legal, and then there's what the border guard with a hemorrhoid flareup decides to do on the spot. One pain in the butt can cause you a lifetime of pain in the butt even if it wasn't the intent of any legislator.
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.
> 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.
I had the same experience visiting the US - this was 15 years ago so I imagine it’s much worse now.
Got subjected to hour long questioning because I only had a little cash on me and told them truthfully that I would travel the country so I didn’t have one place to stay for the entirety of the trip (because I was TRAVELLING).
I since learned that my first mistake was to tell them the truth but alas.
After asking me about every single detail of my life they eventually let me in.
It’s a pity, such a great country being ruined by kleptocrats.
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.
> In the UK I'd be worried about being arbitrarily arrested, deported, and banned from re-entry.
That's not going to happen unless you commit a serious crime, in which case it's not arbitrary. I can't think of a single case that's made the news.
Meanwhile across the pond in America you have the nightly news reporting on children and people in cages screaming. People being rounded up for not being white. Little to no due process at all until you've been through 6 rounds of hell.
By "commit a serious crime" I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action" or maybe "hold a blank sign at a protest". Those are serious crimes in the UK now. But as I said, the worst they're going to do is kick me out, not kill me, and that makes the difference.
> I assume you mean "publicly state that I support Palestine Action"
They are currently a proscribed group, so yes, that is included in the list of things you probably shouldn't do. You're not going to get killed for it though. You're probably not even going to get arrested in most cases.
Whether or not they should be proscribed is a different issue. The best course of action is probably to wait for the courts to decide. Pressure groups damaging military assets probably aren't going to be well received by the public regardless of which cause they're for.
This confuses so many people - the Uk has a series of constitutions and a very strong and historical legal basis for rights. It’s not strictly codified in one purposely written document but it does exist. And it’s a mistake to say if there’s no constitution then you have no fundamental rights. The UKs system is a hodgepodge but so is having a written constitution that can be regularly amended or otherwise ignored.
The problem with that view is that when the "strong legal basis" is not codified, and codified in a way that nonspecialists can at least vaguely identify and understand, it gets a lot easier to get away with ignoring it. Which the UK has been going hog wild doing in the last 20 years or so.
I am not saying the US is better in practice. The bottom line is that authority worshippers will take whatever liberties they can get away with in any system.
I’m not really defending the system, just making the point about a form of constitution existing. Even if the things you mention were nailed down in a constitution, that constitution could be amended to undo them, same as every other form of law.
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.
Is this really the case? As far as I understand it, US citizens have an absolute right to enter the country. So they can sit you in a room and ask you questions all afternoon, but eventually they have to let you in.
File a lawsuit, and if that fails go to the media. Or do both at the same time. As bad as things are, we don’t live in 1984 or Soviet Russia yet, and this works for citizens. Maybe there’s one or two cases where this hasn’t worked, but that would be an extreme outlier. The courts still strongly support habeas corpus for citizens.
"At a time of sticky inflation and a softening job market, extra money in the bank can serve as a lifeline for many consumers. Yet just 47% of Americans indicate they have sufficient liquidity or access to funds to cover a $1,000 emergency expense, a Bankrate survey found. This can present challenges when dealing with job losses, medical issues or other problems that could exhaust one’s cash reserves."
So this raises the question for most Americans: file a lawsuit with what money? It also raises the question of whether your rights should depend on your bank balance. Now, we can pretend that anyone can start a successful gofundme to fund their efforts to have their basic rights protected, but you see where this is going?
As for the media: what media outlets? And why would they care unless it is a particularly egregious story or it involves someone famous? Thousands of people have their rights violated every day. Why would the media care about any "nobody"?
No you don't live in 1984 or Soviet Russia. You live in much worse circumstances because back in the Soviet times, the state, fortunately, had limited ability to surveil, track and control you. The capabilities a state gone bad have at their disposal today are much, much more invasive and effective. And the brutality you risk (eg CECOT) is arguably not materially better than getting shipped off to Siberia. At least around 90% of those who were shipped off to Siberia had fixed term sentences.
And perhaps you will never have the opportunity to litigate if you find yourself wronged. What if you die in custody due to a medical emergency that was not taken into account? Thousands die of medical neglect in custody every year in the US. (Look it up. State and federal custody, ICE, prison system etc). This happens to thousands of people every year and nobody cares. Least of all the media.
What if you find yourself in CECOT -- effectively isolated from the world and anyone in your personal network that could do something about it? Or in ICE detention where the very best case is that you disappear for days without anyone knowing where you are, and without the ability to contact anyone.
It frightens me that people can find their way to Hacker News yet be so ignorant of the reality the majority of Americans face. How can you not know basic statistical facts? How can you not ask yourself how someone who isn't rich, isn't well connected, doesn't have a strong network of people around them are supposed to defend their basic rights?
Know what you are talking about. Find out what reality is like for other people. Don't blab on about remedies that are purely theoretical for much of the citizenry. Know stuff!
Your hyperventilating about the current state of the US aside, there are many ways in which things could be worse. Are they great? No. But they have been worse, they are worse in many other countries, and likely they will get worse again here before long. If you think things are this bad now I can’t wait to see what you think about things a decade or so from now.
People currently do have ways to fight back, even those with limited resources. That may not be the case forever. But lying down and sighing about how hopeless things are helps nobody, least of all yourself.
Not sure if related but this is my story. I am Spanish. When leaving SF back to Europe from a Google IO, after control, waiting to scan my luggage, an officer stood besides me and started speaking in Spanish besides me.
The first minute my brain didn’t register because though Spanish is my mother tongue, I guess it was not ready for that. The police officer started to get irritated. Eventually my brain switched, I had a chat with him and he left.
I was totally freaked out the rest of the time, till the moment I boarded.
Only then I realized how frail our rights are when you are abroad.
I presume any journalist or competent protest organiser in the UK knows the details better than me, but they can't just stop you on the sidewalk (UK: pavement) and ask you to hand over your PIN on the spot.
I think the "put you in jail" thing is a misunderstanding of the general "police can detain someone suspected of a crime" principle, but then they still need to get a judge to approve them holding you longer than a few* days.
(*) The rules are slightly different for terrorism suspects.
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.
It's all extrapolated from a few articles where someone in Germany or the UK is arrested, but if you go beyond the tabloids it turns out that the person threatened to harm or kill someone online (which is not free speech in most European countries for obvious reasons).
I have lived in European countries all my life (except for ~6 months in Australia) and let's say I'm opinionated, I have never feared that the country I lived in or its authorities would arrest me or harm me otherwise. Of course, there are certain boundaries - you don't threaten someone, etc. But once you cross those lines, you are not interested in free speech anyway, only intimidating people or inciting hate.
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
An immigrant on a student visa was recently elected (or selected by the Green Party because of proportional representation) to be a member of the Scottish parliament. So it’s finally reached the point in the UK where citizenship confers almost no rights that can’t be obtained by anyone coming to the country, even temporarily.
I think you have your numbers backwards regarding health.
The US spends more (16% Vs 10 GDP), but preventable mortality, life expectancy, people living with chronic conditions etc are all worse than other developed nations: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2023/05/26/a-comparative-ana... Plus the risk of being a victim of violence is higher in the US - you are 400% to 600% more likely to be murdered in the US than the UK, 700% more likely to be raped, 400% more likely to be robbed etc (https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/internat...) so you're gonna need that hospital treatment more.
As for pay the legal minimum hourly rate in the UK is approx $16.90 Vs the US minimum of $7.25
Median annual salaries seems to be approx $62k US Vs $53k UK so it is 17% higher not 400%. When you adjust for purchasing parity (https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPEX@WEO/OEMDC) it's more like 62k Vs 58k, or approx 8% more in the US. There are plenty of high-tech jobs in London, especially in AI & biotech recently (e.g. as an example
I am quite "mid-to-senior" level (i.e. 2 to 3 promos away from "director" type levels, so more headroom.for sure) and my annual total comp is about 8-9 times the median UK salary for example, somewhere in the $450-500k range and I am not even an AI researcher, just an engineer writing web apps at a Big Co)
Can't deny that some parts of the US are warmer, but there are also colder places. UK is actually very mild climate-wise given it's latitude. I am married to a US citizen and our kids are dual national but there is zero zero zero chance of us ever living in the US for the above reasons. I work with loads of Americans who have permanently relocated to London, but it goes in both directions.
Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing.
What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be.
Side note, UK police harass people for 'non-crime hate incidents' and put people on terror lists for being critical of protected ideologies.
Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
I won't take any lecturing on societal ills from such a perverted system.
> Side note, UK police harass people for 'non-crime hate incidents' and put people on terror lists for being critical of protected ideologies.
The US has recently declared being "anti-fascist" as a terror organisation. Bonus points: antifa isn't even an organisation.
> Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children.
Citation needed.
> More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence.
Yes, gun violence is grossly overrepresented in the fears of most people, compared to how big the risks actually are.
And yet, the life expectancy in the US (79.3) is younger than EU as a whole (81.7), and also in the UK (81.3).
> Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing outcomes in the OECD. You have relatively poor cancer treatment outcomes
Given the US has the lower life expectancy, this is unfortunate… for you, not for everyone else.
Also, for birthing outcomes, the phrase "throwing stones in glass houses" comes to mind:
Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
There are large, fully developed, highly populated parts of the US where you are very safe. Often moreso than places people assume are “safer” because they are outside America.
> Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.
Do you think crime in Europe is evenly spread across the whole continent? Or even that it's a constant rate within any geographical division of any nation in Europe?
Small groups doing crimes mostly to each other is not a novel thing unique to the USA. The (approximately) power-law relation is the same in places where stats exist to study the question: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-017-0069-x/...
I used to live in the UK, and in my 35 years there I was victimised a total of twice, one of which was an unattended bike left outdoors overnight; the safe middle-class south of Havant just wasn't targeted by roving gangs from the "rough" estate of Leigh Park in north Havant, even though that was absolutely walking distance, and a short walk at that.
So let me get this straight, you have to 'the break the numbers down' to contextualise US safety, but you don't have to 'break the numbers down' to contextualise European safety?
Why do people on HN throw these stats out comparing poor people to poor people? We are all tech workers on HN. I'm not living in Alabama. When I compare my living situation I'm comparing my premium healthcare in Los Angeles to whatever the fuck you guys are doing.
Pretty much all those stats are irrelevant.
Seriously 62k? Try 3.5 times that and then you're in the ballpark. My healthcare expenses for the past few years have been less than 2% of my salary.
Y'all don't realize just how intensily our poor rural areas bring down the average while our HCOL areas tend to set the world wide standard you're trying to catch up to.
Please read my comment - my London tech worker total comp is about 8 times that 62k and I am coasting mid-level. The poor folks in the UK are pulling the average down too.
Oh and healthcare costs in the UK are obviously zero percent, paid for out of general taxation (there is no dedicated "NHS tax"). So those unemployed poor people with literally nothing pulling down the averages get better-than-US health outcomes from the NHS, and the exact same level of treatment as anyone else using the NHS would get. I get additional private healthcare too through my employer and it is also zero cost to me. No co-payments or any other things like that at all - all zero cost to me.
Obviously, to the meanest intellect at least, it is because they are comparing an entire country to an entire country and not a few privileged here to a couple of elites there.
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.
You seem to be saying two opposite things here, that the US is better because you spend more money on it, and yet also that you don't spend more money on it. Both can't be true, but both can be wrong.
> Our facilities are far superior.
Then why is US life expectancy worse?
> In California where I live though folks with little money get very subsidized healthcare that is cheaper than NHS taxes.
Unless "very subsidized" means "by 100%", the UK's "folks with little money", or indeed significantly more than national average income, are still doing better. NHS care for citizens is zero upfront cost, except for dentistry and prescriptions which total to 1% of the UK's health costs.
The claim about taxes is just plain false, when considered over the whole USA and not cherrypicking the most favourable states within it: the US federal spending on Medicare + Medicaid is around $4,352/person, state-level spending added around $1,105/person on top of that for a total of around $5,457/person, and remember this is before personal insurance and co-pay costs which are on top of that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fy2024_federal_budge...
So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
As a percentage of my paycheck what you cited as Medicare/Medicaid is again very low. State taxes are basically 2-3% and in some cases $0 and/or funded through real estate taxes rather than income tax. This is actually one of the arguments for American universal healthcare. We can bridge the final gap of uninsured with about 1-2% more in taxes. It would still be much less than what most countries pay by a substantial amount while still maintaining 90% of the level of care.
Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
Do not cite flat numbers as some sort of gotcha. Obviously we spend more money on our own healthcare. We have more of it with fewer hours of labor.
> If my salary is 150k and I spend 5k that's 3.3%.
> If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%.
So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found.
Same idea in the UK.
> So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This is true across all socioeconomic classes.
False.
The average person in the UK spends about half as many hours on health as the average person in the USA.
> The same Medicare + Medicaid you cite is actually our tax payer funded subsidized healthcare for folks that have to use tax payer funded socialized healthcare and are basically at the mercy of what our healthcare system will provide them state by state but generally it is federal law that an ER has to take care of you if it's an immediate life threatening problem. So what you are citing is actually our tax payer funded socialized healthcare which is funded differently state by state and a lot of people won't even use because it's basically the last resort. Most Americans are subsidizing that healthcare.
I know all of that. What's your argument here? Mine is that the NHS costs roughly the same as Americans spend on just this alone, and the UK doesn't then need other spending on top.
> Having a lower cost per person is actually not a good thing. It's bad, actually. It means worse facilities, fewer staff, worse equipment.
My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
> My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in a different way as luxury add ons.
Your argument is false.
Americans on average spend about as much per person as the average UK citizens spend on the NHS even though that care doesn't even reach all Americans because not all Americans are eligible for it.
You call an ambulance in the UK? Free*. You give birth in the UK? Free. When I was a kid and slipped into some ashes and burned an arm? Free care. When I was at university, hadn't gotten around to registering with a local doctor, had testicular torsion? Free surgery. Panic attack making me worried I was having a heart attack? Free both in the UK and again in Germany when I moved country. Accidentally peeled a finger on the inside of a tomato tin while making dinner (by this point in Germany)? Free treatment.
What do these things cost in practice in the US? I see the same viral bills as the rest of us, not lived experience, i.e. hundreds to tens of thousands for each of those things, and also reports claim the "average bill for a natural birth in the US comes in at $30,000": https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37555048
* to the user, obviously. "No bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective taxes" is functionally the same as "no bill at point of service, paid for by everyone's collective mandatory insurance". In fact, the UK calls it "National Insurance" though there's a whole argument about how correct the name is, while Germany it's literally a small list of mandatory-for-everyone-to-pick-one insurance corporations with so little room for manoeuvre between them they may as well be government owned.
> You don't seem to understand purchasing power what so ever.
I literally expressed it in terms of GDP.
I know I can be verbose at times, but US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, UK 8.9%. Citations in previous comments.
> Anyway I was born in Europe so I know all this far better than you.
I also was born in Europe.
I still live in Europe, just a different country of Europe than where I started.
> Nothing about the NHS is free. They simply take it out of your paycheck.
As are the federal taxes covering Medicare and Medicaid and the state level stuff. Which. Sums. To. More. Than. The. UK. Spends. Per. Person.
(Aside: if you're going to insist it's "not free", back off about subsidised healthcare in the US: same applies).
Even when I then convert that to % of GDP, US government spending on healthcare is about the same as UK government spending on healthcare, but the US population then also spends more, as a percentage of GDP, on additional private healthcare, than the UK spends on just government healthcare, totalling just over twice as much as a percent of GDP.
The US spends around 18.0% of GDP on health, the UK 8.9%.
The UK population, spends less than half as much of its economic output, lives two years longer.
You should check out the stats broken down by ethnicity and household wealth. That gives you a clearer picture of what a typical person on HN actually experiences.
I can retire at like 45 and have three times your net worth
Yet Americans cannot protest, because they are living from paycheck to paycheck. This is not in jest, this is the reason Americans trump up (ahem) when non-US citizens ask why they don't protest ICE and whatever other nonsense is going on.
Did you ever consider that you are in a bubble and most Americans barely have savings and are a healthcare incident away from poverty?
"The median American has $8,000 in transaction accounts (savings, checking, money market). [...] Only 46% of U.S. adults have enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses"
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.
I am also an atheist. Our country has christian prime ministers in the past. It was not a problem, because virtually all the christians that are left in our country (the majority of people are atheists of agnostics these days) believe in a separation of church and state.
It is not about christianity. Authoritarian and populist leaders will always coopt/corrupt whatever is convenient for them. Christianity, socialism, capitalism, whatever works to rally a substantial portion of the population.
A friend of mine visiting the US as a tourist with family was expected by immigration to provide lots of digital information and full access to every device at JFK.
They were held for more than 4 hours at the airport.
But, to counter balance, I had multiple other friends traveling to the US (both on work visas and tourist ones) and it was smooth sailing.
In any case, the story of my first friend is what made me cancel my US trip last summer and go to Japan instead.
The police can ask for your passwords. You're not required to give them anything until they apply for a Section 49 notice of RIPA. Which they must get from a Judge.
It seems to be recommended to refuse giving them the password before that notice is issued and seek a lawyer before complying.
If the judge agrees with them, you have to comply.
Yeah they can ask for passwords but I've seen so many people work around this by pretending they forgot. Because at that point what are they going to do.
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.
Trying to imagine how, and the only thing I can think of is that technically you can write a contract on anything? And possibly a cheque, too, because a the cheques in a chequebook are just a standardised IOU form with exactly the same legal weight as if it was done by hand?
(Vague memory that someone used this to avoid paying a bill, because refusing a cheque when offered counted as discharging the debt it represents (if I have the right terminology), and as cheques could be written on anything they chose to write it on a car that physically would not fit through the door).
In this thread's context, the "constitution" is the kind of thing which is supposed to make that not happen.
Famously bereft of a written constitution, the closest single document along these lines which the UK had for a long time was ("the") Magna Carta, which basically exists because King John's lords were tired of King John directing the courts that King John personally owned to not hear cases against himself.
But if your point is that some constitutions may as well be toilet paper for how much the people with power care about their contents, then I agree.
Famously, the toilet paper known as the US Constitution has prevented any violations of rights recently, like the brown skinned people getting brought to concentration camps, or your dog getting shot because you used free speech.
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.
AFAIK, not even that. This topic came up in relation to Hungary (before Orban was gone). What I understood from the discussion is that a country can only be punished by not giving them EU funds, etc.
Kicking out is possible, but not established and everyone happy that Orban is gone for now and no immediate need to find out how that process works in reality.
Yes. The EU has no army, no legal sovereignty within each country, etc. It's an alliance of countries NOT a single federal government. The individual countries remain in charge of themselves and the alliance is supposed to be structured in a way that only paases things the countries actually want.
trumpdong then makes a comment that I interpret as saying the EU doesn't have a lot of power over member states, and saying that the worst which could happen to one of them is to be kicked out of the EU.
Slightly shocked by the idea that the EU should be doing something worse than expelling a member for not following the Union's rules, I use a _reductio ad absurdum_ and ask if they thought the EU should be harder and actually perform an armed invasion of a member state that didn't follow them.
They complained kicking out the worst. I suggested one possible worse possibility (again, in a reductio ad absurdum rhetoric), trying to understand what they thought should be done more than "just kicking them out". They agreed with it.
This is not true – the police cannot "simply ask anyone for their passwords", and your oversimplification has resulted in this becoming a lie. I would really strongly recommend that you educate yourself first – by doing this, you contribute to the misinformation that is currently making much of the world an unpleasant place to be.
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.
You need to be able to hand over encryption keys too.
Claiming to not know them is also not allowed, whether you actually know them or not.
I am reasonably convinced that if you wipe the key slots on an encrypted drive but leave encrypted blocks around, they might be able to argue that you are obligates to store all the block keys for such an occasion. So using any kind of multi-tier encryption in the UK might be a massive liability unless you permanently store all the material required to derive any key that is used to encrypt anything.
This also probably has impact on TLS now that I think about it.
Now, real world criminal cases are likely to proceed differently than how they proceed in the mind of a programmer interpreting the law as a program. But, I am not too convinced such a farcical thing wouldn't happen, the UK government and police have engaged in much dumber things.
Now that I think about it, storing randomness on a disk could probably be used to incriminate you in case that disk was seized. Since the police wouldn't be able to tell if it wasn't encrypted data.
Not yet, but for a long time nobody spent years in court because they were particularly rude to nobody in particular on the internet, and then it happened, and the law was there all along.
This is the real endgame, and my biggest fear of the war on privacy. That in the future, even trying to assert your right to privacy will be grounds for suspicion.
It's gaming communities too. There is a massive mindset overlap between gamers and average UK residents.
They both think that all the dystopia is for the greater good, is never abused, and if you fall victim to it, you must have been doing something dodgy to deserve it.
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."
If they're turning over all information the police have it makes sense this gets turned over... Or do you want the police to not have any record they spoke to you, so they'll come tomorrow and say the same thing again, and again, and again?
So what metadata would be appropriate? Just an incident regarding this person was reported? For a hate incident regarding this person was reported? That could easily make things worse as the risk is that people looking at the check would assume the worst.
Example H above is in my view a good example of something should be recorded. A single incident is not a crime, but repeating that conduct could constitute a criminal harassment.
No, the "rest of Europe" is not going the way of outlawing e2e encrypted iCloud backups and other bullshit your shitty government is pulling on you, stop deluding yourself.
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.
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 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 :|
We had a single wireless AP (really, a WRT54G) chilling in the high school library in my last couple years. I may or may not have factory defaulted it a few times to hop on an open linksys SSID...
... they only seemed to put a sign on it to say 'stop defaulting it' yet did zero oversight, so I'd just keep on walking over to the printer next to it, reset it, and keep on trucking.
Getting a CR48 from the Google Chromebook pilot program was my next trick to defeat their WRT shenanigans - that 200mb of free 3G every month actually went a long way back then in the halls, and a McJob paid for the rest of the wireless freedom ;)
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.
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 earned myself a notice in the local newspaper in 8th grade for hacking the public library. what i did: on the PC terminal right click, show source, edit the HTML to leave a "i was here" note, click save :)
True story: my house (in Australia) was raided by the police in 2022. 8 months later when they said I could collect all the gear they seized the officer in charge told me that the following are things they consider to be suspicious:
1. Use of MEGA (it's apparently used to share CSAM)
2. Use of virtual machines
3. "Having Tor on my computer" (I had to put that in quotes because whilst it doesn't make sense, that's what they said).
They're fucking clueless, don't underestimate how little they understand. An explanation of how something is harmless likely sounds to them like an admission of guilt.
It was an eye opening experience. I (and many members of my extended family) have very much less respect for the competence of law enforcement as a direct result of this experience.
Everyone should encrypt their hard drive. At all times. Even if your country has password disclosure it forces them to get a warrant from a judge for your password and the worst case is the same as the best case from not encrypting it.
MEGA is indeed used to share CSAM and pirate stuff. That is its primary use actually but it's one of those institutions that maintains plausible deniability. Remember it was started after MegaUpload was shut down for being obviously designed to reward copyright infringement - the new one isn't obviously designed for that
I only ever used MEGA a handful of times, and it was only for Android ROM downloads. The police commentary about MEGA was notable to me precisely because of how infrequently I'd used it despite their mention of it. They kinda tipped their hand with that. If they hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have known it was a red flag at all.
There's also a large chasm separating copyright infringing material and CSAM, and putting them together as "the primary use" as you did is, in my opinion, questionable agenda pushing.
I agree with your first paragraph, but your second one leaves me wondering about your motivations for commenting in the first place; MEGA and Kim Dotcom embarrassed US law enforcement for a long, long time.
I happen to think that KDC is a piece of shit. But it seems that would make him perfect tech-bro material, except that his copyright infringement wasn't seen as 'US preferential' at the time.
CSAM and pirated material are both illegal file sharing, exactly the same from a technical perspective like how file sharing software works. Of course Mega would like you to pay to use it for backups, but I don't think anyone actually does. Their E2EE is there for a reason - they don't want any information about what you're hosting.
Which is exactly the same as legal file sharing from a technical perspective.
Which is exactly the same as leading corporate secrets or international espionage or hosting a copy of The Satanic Verses, from a technical perspective.
It's also no different from hosting a blog or any other website from a technical perspective.
The title might be XYZ Hackathon but the word Hackathon isn't really meaningful outside of that scene, so if asked what it is, you'd say a computer programming conference or something like that. When I tell people about Revision, I don't say "demoparty", I say "computer art festival", because that's not subculture jargon.
Putting aside that the source for this is a Reddit post linking to screenshots of text, as opposed to a news site where a journalist would have to stake their reputation on the story being true.
Anyone can report anyone else to "the authorities" for anything. It doesn't mean the unnamed authorities act on it. It's also quite strange that Yoti (if this isn't just a hoax) don't specify which policing unit is recieving these reports.
Right, but that doesn’t automatically mean that Redditors have better reputations. I use Reddit daily, but if I see any news that might sound absurd, I will definitely take a look on other news sites to see if the information is real. Journalists, impartial or not, may at least have better credibility in these news sites.
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.
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?
China has a whole other level of control going on. You’re free to use any mobile OS you want because they’re able to monitoring every internet connection, see what you’re downloading and block any and all content they deem unsuitable with no recourse. They can also arrest you and move you to a labor camp with little recourse.
I’m not defending the UK police’s actions here but “it’s just as bad as China!” is a refrain you see often that rarely adds up.
There isn't even any indication of police involvement. "The authorities" could mean anything from the local police service to the National Crime Agency, to the National Cyber Security Centre (part of GCHQ) and anything in between.
Tbh I feel what you say it’s just to feel good about how bad our situation is. Oh, their situation is much worse, don’t worry about us, we are so much better.
yup, me and my whole family using VPNs on there phones were arrested and placed in labor camp, I'm writing this now from camp, sending it to gateway on pigeon...
but seriously, these people fear mongering arbor China are completely clueless, China absolutely doesn't care about you unless you go against gov, nobody checked our phones at border, nobody bothered us, at the Beijing province border checks they noticed we didn't register our accommodation which is mandatory and just let us go on our trip anyway telling us to go to police after weekend where we met extremely laid-back police officers smoking under no smoking sign
been living there for years and the situation was same, I fucked up paperwork which would in US lead to detention and deportation, in China we always found solution, there is always workaround for rules, China doesn't care about you unless you do something extreme against the gov
I remember being on high horse about freedom and other BS regarding West vs china, but since COVID I'm more and more failing to see the difference, quite the opposite for West
The way Chinese and US treat foreigners are at two extremes. Simply from your example,
> didn't register our accommodation which is mandatory
>> Foreigner: just let us go on our trip anyway
>> Citizen: sent to detention and beaten to death [0]. Reverse ICE?
Police is friendly and laid back for foreigners, in China there are even foreigners advertising to call the police for you if you lost something, simply because police will be more responsible if a foreigner is involved. And they are also more flexible like your experience shows, which does not apply to citizens.
There are more examples, like gfw, for foreigner there are even volunteers at major airports helping you install VPN, while for citizens you can get fined or warned with an official record in your dossier.
Or like COVID you mentioned, during the lock-down period foreigners have prioritized access to foods and necessities. One extreme case I remember is a wealthy couple in Shanghai ran out of those things. And how did they get through? They happened to hire a Philippine nanny at the time, and that gives them priority, despite not officially registered like you. Imagine your gov prioritize your servant over you.
oh please, I lived in China 5+ years, plenty of Chinese breakm various laws and nobody is sending them to detention or beats to death, that's more like US thing
maybe visit China to have clue instead parroting someone's propaganda
and no, there are NOT volunteers helping you with VPN at airport, not sure what are you smoking
All I am saying is foreigners' experience does not necessarily reflect that of citizens, just like in the US the current ICE raids and immigration visa tighten up does not affect most citizens, but changed many foreigners' life forever.
I pick the previous linked case because what he did is exactly what you did, and I am not arguing for general law enforcement.
I go to major expos in China multiple times a year, and the volunteers are there, every time. You can find advertisements for sim cards, vpn services not only at airports, but also hotels, etc.
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.
Right… because your yap is not accessible to anyone in their country and they have a much higher level of control and tracking that makes a potential dissident less dangerous.
I’m not defending the US policy for a second, it’s totalitarian. But holding China up as a positive comparison to totalitarian impulses is missing the bigger picture.
> I remember UK jailing folks for FB posts, that's stuff that happens in third world countries.
The only cases this has happened has been over people actively calling for racial violence over an imagined scare - bunch of morons thought a muslim migrant killed someone, so they went on to riot, burn mosques, assault foreign looking people, etc; on day 2 it was revealed the perpetrator was a Britain born Christian son of foreign origins, but the morons didn't care, they had their excuse.
I struggle to think of many countries where calling for immediate violence, on Facebook or in public with placards, is acceptable. Or any reason why it should be.
Sure courts won but the arrest is the issue. Courts general also win in other democratic third world countries but the initial arrest is enough of an intimidation.
Also this is a slippery slope I remember one person you mentioned were bad but there was another which wasn't nearly as bad.
Also folks on the other side can say the same thing when you call them fascists or something.
Sure saying bad stuff is bad, but it's very very fucking slippery slope.
All speech is hate speech of you are not in line with the current govt.
Another example from what you might consider hateful probably who went to jail and was acquitted but after a lengthy process.
Indeed, but police do this kind of thing in a lot of places. Didn't the US have multiple cases of people being arrested over comments on Kirk's death? It's not good, but cops on a power trip because you hurt their feelings is not a thing we can easily root out. Hence why courts matter.
> All speech is hate speech of you are not in line with the current govt.
Not at all what hate speech means.
> Basically if China is 100% authoritarian, UK is atleast 70% there. They just need a leader to abuse these systems to come in power.
Yeah, no, 70% is ridiculous. I'm not sure you can clearly measure this, but at most 50%. Even with an abusive leader you can still criticise them and the monarch without fear of actual repercussions. In China prison time is basically guaranteed.
That's the problem mate, UK and US pretend they are free, democratic but the lived experience doesn't match up.
There are cases where things atleast have a decent ending but that's not even a given in so called free and democratic world.
The only constant is rights for people get stripped and reduced in the name of safety and security. And people consider politicians willing to given fake, and nonsensical answers as the democratic process.
How is that different from an authoritarian state?
> Yeah, no, 70% is ridiculous. I'm not sure you can clearly measure this, but at most 50%. Even with an abusive leader you can still criticise them and the monarch without fear of actual repercussions. In China prison time is basically guaranteed.
Just to note most people just get deplatformed for this stuff in china they don't get jailed. Since they control media China doesn't even care about putting you in an actual jail cell if you aren't a major active threat.
As for actual repercussions, people are getting shot at, put in jail with (even folks with green cards in US), and banned from travel (in UK).
I am not sure how that isn't 70% of the way there. But it's fine if it's already alright with you that you consider 50% authoritarianism Free.
I am certain you agree that this nonsense is on the rise. But I am also certain you just haven't considered how close it is to actual authoritarianism.
China isn't just shooting people who have said stuff against China I could get a visa and travel without too much hassle even after showcasing visible displeasure with the country's rules.
US and UK doesn't even like me mentioning them negatively if I am applying for a visa.
Idk I went to probably dozens of public protests here screaming no justice no peace, fuck the police and nothing ever happened to me, except a little tear-gas once in a while. I might be on some secret police lists not sure.
Living in Germany so UK might be much worse for all I know , but I would be surprised if Germany is the shining paragon for democracy now.
Germany tends to allow protests they know will have no effect. Try a Palestine protest - those are more dangerous to the regime. Also take note of the ratio of cops to protestors.
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.
Looking more closely into the claim, the actual message from Yoti was:
"Due to past security concerns, Yoti automatically flags multiple verification attempts and any devices running GrapheneOS. These instances are automatically reported to both the authorities and our security team."
Then:
"Unfortunately, as multiple attempts were made from this specific device, your account has been flagged for suspicious activity."
So the "and" looks like a typo, otherwise their system wouldn't have allowed more than one attempt from a GrapheneOS device to begin with.
i.e. multiple verification attempts from a GrapheneOS device will flag your account.
Full transparency, posting this as Yoti's PR team as discussed with Hacker News moderators:
Yoti does not and never would never report any user to the authorities based on their choice of operating system or device. The image of the customer support email being circulated on Reddit does not match anything in Yoti’s customer support records.
We have engaged with GrapheneOS to better understand any issues their users may be experiencing and explore ways to securely resolve those issues.
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.
Maybe the whole age verification push will change that discussion, if suddenly requests for entire categories of services have to be funneled through a small number of age verification providers that intentionally try to block alternative OSes.
The discussion might have been mostly theoretical before, but it sure isn't anymore...
Sue whoever blocked your device. I was about to consider it for my bank but an update enabled Graphene. Now it thinks my other phone is insecure and won't let me log in on that one, heh.
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.
And lets not forget how pointless Play Integrity is for what it is being touted to be for, when there is millions of "Certified" devices ready for us by shady people via clickfarms.
Unless the app has certificate pinning, the modification of app behaviour is also not guaranteed. Really, it is just a pointless exercise for most of the use cases.
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.
> 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.
Sibling comment says running this simple curl command would be illegal. Guess what? It is illegal.
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.
It is dirtier to pay for big tech services than it is to infringe copyright.
Ironically, the big AI companies have scaled copyright infringement and appear to be profiting from it. So, pretty much: "meat's back on the menu boys".
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.
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.
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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.
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”.
No, they blocked the UK because it was either that or open themselves up to £18m in fine liability thanks to the Online Safety Act[0]. Social media sites which are unable or unwilling to operate strict, full-time content moderation have all blocked the UK because the alternative is being held punitively liable for abuse by bad actors. Pretty much a no brainer. (And that's without even getting into the quagmire of legitimate, consenting, age-gated adult content.)
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.
Imgur were found to be in breach of the data collection laws before any "you must check IDs" laws were even discussed in parliament, let alone passed, where the guidance was pretty much "Don't get caught actively selling data you already know is from children". And even the punishment was pretty much writing a document of "we'll try not to do it quite so obviously next time", but they refused to do even that.
The "implied" link between their fines, them rejecting UK connections, and any new laws is very much a PR thing from imgur.
All the breathless online reporting seems to miss just how toothless the law was, and they still failed at following it.
Like I think the new verification laws are an unworkable mess at best, written by people with an idea similar to believing they could "ban one specific species of fish from UK territorial waters" by throwing the odd grenade in, but they're rather unrelated to what imgur actually did.
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).
In Queensland, Australia. Saying from a flow streaming of water to a large salty tidal body of water lands you a criminal record. Just the words. Same in Berlin.
So the goated take in your opinion would be to just believe that a guy in Germany was arrested for writing random Arabic letters that kinda look like the Hamas logo without any proof or sources because it fits a certain narrative?
I’m not saying it’s impossibleb but there should be some evidence for such a strong claim
No, you see; that is why your take is so ungoated. You know it is not an impossible claim, you also have access to internet, but you opt for benefit of the doubt. As I said, there is a line between fair benefit of the doubt and the taste of shoe leather.
Yea I did 5 minutes research on google and nothing turned up. If it’s such an outrageous case it should be easy to find - so your point is that I should invest hours trying to prove some claim that some rando typed on here while taking a shit.
Nah bro a goat like me has much better things to do.
If you make outrageous claims the burden of proof is on you and not the people you’re talking to.
You don't have to prove anything, but given the staggering amount of evidence to support such event as likely, you opt to dismiss it without evidence. Like I said, shoe leather.
That in Germany “they also arrest a guy for writing some random Arabic on a flag because Hamas also has a flag written in Arabic” - that was what I didn’t believe initially, and what you called me a bootlicker for lmao
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..)
>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
The lesson is you gotta incorporate your crimes. If you kill a person you face life in prison. If you are a decision maker at Boeing who lies to regulators and customers, committing fraud that killed hundreds of people [0], you receive a golden parachute instead!
Someone using their phone while driving in the UK will almost certainly be charged £200. They'll only receive the maximum £1000 charge in extreme circumstances.
Oh, this gave me an idea. OP should be able to get a hold of this „report” by subject access request. Law enforcement exception to GDPR doesn't apply to private companies.
My guess is computers will end up soon where cars are today.
I will be unclear if you can use your GOS, Linux or BSD computer. You might get stopped, checked, if the authorities want to screw you they can always find something. If you have an accident your insurance will find something.
So you will live in a constant fear of getting caught, and you do not really know why. Until you end up getting a chromebook, aka a bus card or Uber rides.
In most western countries the rules for car safety are draconian but I see everywhere 80+ years old people, out of their mind, driving SUV while looking at their phone.
Since the 2010 people would call themselves hackers because they hang out here, use Github, VSCode and know about Kubernetes. But now you are about to get arrested for using GOS or whatever. At least the meaning of the term hacker is getting its shine back a bit.
> 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?"
So you can’t do a good thing just because you do other bad things?
So you must be either a saint (who also did a lit of bad things) or the devil himself (who punishes bad people).
You could just simply acknowledge the fact that Britain was one of the first major powers to abolish slave trade and later slavery across its empire, and it actively pushed other countries to follow.
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 either collapsed or found themselves at the mercy of another that likely also practiced slavery. As he said, slavery was the default. The UK itself was getting raided by Barbary pirates just 200 years before the Slavery Abolition Act.
Unlike the Romans or the Mongols, the UK made a choice to stop, and they did so, at massive cost, because their values changed. 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.
You said one officer. There were four in attendance.
You're saying that allegations of two-tier policing are far-right disinformation. In fact, it is official policy, and the IPCC document leaves no room for interpretation on this.
Another user brought up Jean Charles de Menezes, a man killed in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings after being misidentified as a terror threat that should not be allowed on the tube. Ironically, that operation was overseen by a woman who went on to become the Met Police Commissioner, setting diversity targets that led to [1] (quoting Wikipedia):
> In January 2026, a Met Police review revealed that in an attempt to meet the diversity targets set by Dick, senior figures in the force had allowed recruitment standards to fall. More than 100 applicants who initially failed vetting procedures were later allowed to join after their cases were referred to a special panel set up to scrutinise rejected applications from ethnic minority candidates. Several of these went on to commit criminal offences or misconduct, including violence, sex attacks and drug use.
The rot is very deep at this point, and it's far too late to pretend it isn't happening. Your efforts would be better spent on arguing why the policies you support are a good thing.
The UK is already seeing a right-wing resurgence with the simultaneous collapse of Labour and the Conservatives, and rise of Reform and Restore. If the left fails to justify these policies to the masses, they'll be doing more for the far right than anyone on this forum could ever dream of.
> I am saying that this one event is being used as ammunition by racist organisations to further their aims.
That much follows as sure as night follows day. I'm reminded of the riots after the police killing of Mark Duggan [1]. Those who understood themselves to be on the receiving end of policed mistreatment latched on to it, using it as an excuse to loot and start fires, regardless of the fact that Duggan was lawfully killed on his way back from purchasing an illegal firearm - a weapon that he, ironically, intended to use to kill another black man.
There's an outside chance you're correct that the police's treatment of Nowak was simply incompetence, but paired with the explicit policy to treat racial groups differently to one another, that is not how it will be perceived. Add to that the fact that his murderer falsely accused him of racism to obscure the fact he'd just fatally stabbed the man, and the racial dynamic is undeniable.
That dynamic concretely exists. It exists on paper, in the mind of Nowak's killer, and in the minds of those protesting. The question then is how to defuse it. If you think immigration/diversity are positives (and I agree that they can be, with some caveats), my suggestion would be that you should be as against the IPCC's notion of "racial equity" as I am, even if only because the current situation was bound to happen regardless of any p=0.01 direct line between the IPCC document and this particular incident.
In other words: even if you were right, it would barely matter. Mark Duggan has rarely been brought up as an example of injustice since the facts of the case were fully elucidated, but that IPCC document, and others like it [2], will be an endless source of grief.
> It's wrong to use this as an example of why immigration is bad for society.
The top comment mentioned "two-tier justice" and we have argued from there. You are the only person to even use the words "immigration" or "diversity" until now.
I would like to think that we can have immigration and diversity without an IPCC that says police shouldn't treat people equally, or a sentencing council that thinks provision of PSRs should be based on ethnicity, or vetting panels that that allow ineligible applicants to join the police force.
Am I wrong? Let me know and I'll update my opinions accordingly.
The fundamental issue isn’t that the police believed Person A rather than Person B when they first arrived at the scene - the police can be misled like anyone else. The issue is that they failed to properly check on someone who claimed to have been stabbed. That is something that they should do regardless of whether they find the claim credible or not. There is certainly no police policy which prevents them from doing this when the victim is white. And indeed, one could say that the British police are commendably balanced on this point, as (in flagrant contradiction to that one out of context sentence that people have been quoting, from a document that’s not even a policy document) they have also have a track record of ignoring the pleas of plenty of people of color, disabled people, etc. etc. who have appealed to them for medical attention.
> There's an outside chance you're correct that the police's treatment of Nowak was simply incompetence, but paired with the explicit policy to treat racial groups differently to one another, that is not how it will be perceived.
That’s how it will be perceived if Reform’s shit-stirring is ultimately successful. But actually, my sense is that Reform are out of step with the majority of the British public on this one. I don’t think a majority of British people will buy their narrative; it’s too openly opportunistic and divisive, and based on twitter-brained logic that only the terminally online could find persuasive. It’s telling that even Kemi Badenoch wouldn’t go along with them on this one.
Jean Charles de Menezes was killed because he was misidentified as an active terror threat two weeks after the 7/7 London bombings. The officer who killed him was ordered not to allow him on the tube. Ironically, that order was given by Cressida Dick, who went on to set diversity targets that led to [1]. Quoting the Wikipedia summary:
> In January 2026, a Met Police review revealed that in an attempt to meet the diversity targets set by Dick, senior figures in the force had allowed recruitment standards to fall. More than 100 applicants who initially failed vetting procedures were later allowed to join after their cases were referred to a special panel set up to scrutinise rejected applications from ethnic minority candidates. Several of these went on to commit criminal offences or misconduct, including violence, sex attacks and drug use.
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.
That's because there's a pending appeal. It may take a while for the situation to fully resolve, legally speaking, but I think it's unlikely that the ban will be sustainable in the long term.
How would you propose to immediately put an end to the bad thing? Checks and balances take time. Any system that allowed this to be immediately fixed would also allow a whole bunch of other things to be immediately fucked up.
>The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts.
Which is exactly what I said, courts generally do the right thing. The people were still arrested, and the dissent was still crushed, though. Israel is a strategic partner so all protests are equal, but some are more equal than others.
>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)
While far-right popularized the term, the awareness is now, at least among the people I know, full-spectrum. The tiers are independent according to the issue at hand and the priorities of the powers and lobbies involved. Simply some camps were unaware until it was their turn, and become confused when they overlap.
>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.
Personally, I think that statement has a pass in many places, but not in the UK. The "policy projection of values" (to give it some name), with the growth of identity politics mixed in to make it worse, attempted to make everyone feel equally protected, but instead succeeded in convincing almost every demographic in the UK that the system is rigged against them.
We are not racist -> certain crimes by given little publicity or ignored depending on the background of who committed them. Two tier.
Israel is a strategic partner -> pro-palestinian/anti-zionist groups labeled as terrorists. Two tier.
Hate has no place here -> police dispatched for nasty online comments, but dragging their feet for actual physical crime. The fact that "Non-Crime Hate Incidents" is an actual term is just baffling. Two tier.
Net Zero -> right wingers complain about blockades of ecologists going unpunished. Two tier. Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 passed, ecologist arrested (and sentenced!) for protesting against not doing enough for Net Zero. Pendulum swing, still two tier.
Directing mind and will -> individuals are fully accountable by their actions, for corporations one need(ed) to prove "directing mind and will" of the executives. Two tier. See the British Post Office Horizon scandal for extra depression, or how individuals are prosecuted for dumping, yet Thames Water can dump inordinate amounts of sewage but that's just "regulatory failure". While recent acts (Crime and Policing, Failure to Prevent Fraud) are in the right direction, criminal penalties for corporations remain financial, and swallowed into operating costs. Still solid two tier.
Russia is a criminal state -> Londongrad unbothered, alive, moisturized, flourishing. Two tier.
Protect the NHS -> partygate for some, fines for others. Two tier. Don't get me into the defunding of it.
Peace above everything -> the state actors that committed crimes (often acts of terrorism) with impunity in Ireland during The Troubles, were later prosecuted, while IRA members were secretly given out-of-jail cards. Just compare John Downey vs Dennis Hutchings. Since the topic has cooled down and the Hutchings' case fueled the fire, they passed the Legacy and Reconciliation Act to, 25 years later (!) finally providing immunity to British criminals. This is particularly damning because those following orders had been prosecuted, but no single commander, general, intelligence officer, minister actually giving or overseeing those orders had been, at any point. Two tier.
The UK is in a permanent state of "fake it till you make it" of the idea of the perfect state, and in doing so it routinely over/undershoots the mark, in an endless Samsara of overcorrections, because it is all still fake. The state sets the target, but it does nothing to get there. Ultimately the consistent application of the law is second to state, corporate and geopolitical interests, meaning the two tiers will be there no matter how correct the laws are.
Your comment perfectly illustrates that all sorts of groups of all sorts of different political stripes (or none at all) have been treated unfairly at times. All of the issues you raise are serious ones, but they don’t support the spurious narrative about “two tier policing” being pushed by Musk, Farage and their ilk.
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).
>Except George Floyd was the last case in a long list of police brutality against black people.
You mean the long list which gets very short once you actually watch the bodycam footage instead of msm headlines?
>How many cases like Nowak‘s where before his?
They literally have tried there best to hide this case. Have you ever considered that the reason you have not heard of other cases is the opposite reason you claim there is a (disproportionately) long list of police brutality against black? Not to mention that statistically speaking, if a group of people commit more crimes, they are also more likely to be involved with police increasing the chance of any brutality.
>Seems like right wingers have a really short temper if they aren’t ok with the victims skin color.
I don't see how claimed political affiliation is relevant here outside of attempting ad hominem.
>Reminds me of anti vaxxers
Reminds me of whataboutism and deflection. You forgot to call me a nazi, im sure that will change reality and do the heavy lifting in an argument.
It’s the same kind if people who ignored the deaths by COVID but claimed every death linked to the vaccines was murder or the consequence of mass experimentation on humans.
Just because this time an police error lead to the death of a white person doesn’t make it a case of racism against whites.
George Floyd was also only the straw that broke the camels back. There is more than enough evidence of racism in the Us justice system.
No, you don't. That is the issue. You are trying to link this to people who believe in a completely unrelated issue. The only place this connection exists in your own mind.
Do you understand how odd this looks to someone who doesn't have these barriers in their mind? It is like someone saying they dislike ice cream and then using that as the basis for concluding they dislike pizza. If politics didn't exist, this would make no sense at all.
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 Nowak, 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.
Yes, there is evidence of this. Are you actually from the UK? I actually struggle to believe that anyone who is from the UK and is aware of events in the UK over the past few decades would actually be unaware this is the case.
The Lawrence case in the UK led to a massive structural and cultural shift in policing across the UK, not just the Met. This involved both changes to guidance and changes in how police officers are trained. You can look into this in your own time because there are multiple bodies that are involved in this but the result is that people who the police interacts with have to be treated differently based upon their race.
Also, I can only assume that you are unaware of how police actually do their job. Police officers in the UK (again, I can only assume that you are not from the UK or are someone who lives here but has almost no connection with the society for some reason) go through extensive training to effectuate policy. People who run police forces don't just go: have it lads, go wild. There is extensive training that governs how the police are allowed to behave and that is enforced, ultimately, through sanctions that can result in the police officer losing their job. These aren't abstruse documents that central government creates either, these are created by individual police forces (often with reference to guidance from central government, though this is mostly indirect rather than legal) that are part of continuous training to carry out the job. And, again, one of those things is that police officers are required to treat people they interact with differently based upon their race.
In this case, your description of what happened is also not correct. The police did not deny anyone medical treatment because they did not know that the person had been stabbed. The reason they did not know was because someone who was not white told them that the person was a racist, and policy for every police force in the UK is to believe this. When Nowak said they had been stabbed, the response of the officer was "don't think you have mate" which was conditional on being told by someone who was not white that Nowak was a racist. This behaviour is in line with expectations as Hampshire and Isle of Wight police force confirmed after the fact publicly and on multiple occasions. The reason why is that is policy to take accusations of racial discrimination extremely seriously and arrest immediately, which is what the police did. You may also like to listen to the 999 call where the handler coaches a murderer to invent a specific racial slur, this is also inline with policy which suggests accepting all of this at face value...can you see the contrast with how Nowak's claims were handled?
I would also suggest that you possibly jumped to conclusions about what other people think based upon your personal opinions rather than actual fact. To be clear: you are saying things that indicate no knowledge of how police in the UK actually operate...but you are 100% sure that some evil people are manipulating this event for their own ends. Be clear: this isn't about fact for you (you don't seem to know any) but your own feelings. Other people care about the police doing their job correctly, that is all that matters.
That’s a very long comment that doesn’t provide any actual evidence that the officer in question was following a policy of not doing a basic medical check on someone if that person has been accused of being a racist. Clearly, no such policy exists. Police and other first responders are required to provide medical assistance to anyone who needs it, regardless of whatever crime they might be suspected of.
You refrain from linking to the actual “policy” (but not actually a policy) document that forms the basis of the wild claims that Musk and others are making about this. Perhaps you’re aware that it’s entirely innocuous when read in context.
As I explained, you should search for it. I said this because the process of searching for views that disprove your feelings would be beneficial for you. You seem to suggest that I intended to provide you with evidence...I specifically said that I would not.
https://www.hampshire.police.uk/police-forces/hampshire-cons... - this is a policy document from the police force, this is in the process of being reviewed because the police force involved reviewed the incident in question when it happened and said that the handling met their standards of policing in full (I don't think you understand that you are arguing with phantoms here, the police force has now acknowledged that their policy was wrong and led them to initially say that the incident was handled correctly...afaik, no-one apart from politicians is making the argument you are making, and the policing minister has also said that policy is likely wrong...not that the minister has control over this).
https://www.npcc.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/our... - this is a policy document from NPCC which is one of the many quangos that influences local force policy. There are actually quangos that just provide policy guidance on ethnic minority policy, you should look into these as they also provide extensive training to police forces on the specific situation that occurred and how to handle it (again, this is why the police force initially said that the incident was handled correctly, the key point was the accusation of racism and this is what the police said initially when they reviewed the incidence).
I would also repeat: the reason why I did not include these links is because you do not understand basic aspects of how policing works in the UK. I have answered your question about why a medical check was not performed...yes, that was fully explained (perhaps you see my issue with the way you come across, you come across as someone who has put effort into being misinformed). I have no idea what Elon Musk has to do with policing policy in the UK...that you would bring up this "Emmanuel Goldstein"-esque character unprompted comes across as very bizarre to someone who is unaware of whatever political game is occurring. It is very simple: the police should do their job correctly and treat everyone equally. That is it.
Neither of those documents is actually a policy document, and neither says anything particularly objectionable, or anything that could possibly be used to justify handcuffing someone who’s requested medical attention and then leaving them to die.
> I have no idea what Elon Musk has to do with policing policy in the UK.
He has nothing to do with policing in the UK, but he has a lot to do with the content of a lot of the comments here.
> the police force has now acknowledged that their policy was wrong and led them to initially say that the incident was handled correctly
Yes, it does. If you read it properly you will see that policy is to treat accusations of racism as accurate whenever they are made. The reason why the police didn't act was because he was accused of being a racist. Again, I am not sure what the argument is: everyone has accepted that this is the case, policing minister, the police force, everyone...apart from you and people who have some obscure political axe to grind.
The police issued a statement on Twitter, this was covered extensively...I am thinking that you are the type of person who is resistent to evidence that counters your opinion that you have just stopped being able to process information, you just loop through your feelings. In addition, it has also leaked that the statement they issued was dialled down significantly and the original line was to blame Nowak for being stabbed...again, this is because their policing policy was to accept any accusations of racism in full.
If you just read stuff properly, you would know all this and wouldn't find yourself backed into a corner arguing against all forms of reality.
Someone being accused of being a racist isn’t a logical reason to deny them medical care, regardless of whether or not you believe the accusation. There is no policy that could possibly be construed as requiring this. And your claims about what the linked “policy” says (again, not actually a policy) are becoming increasingly outlandish, as anyone can easily verify.
> The police issued a statement on Twitter, this was covered extensively.
I couldn’t find any statement that said anything like what you were claiming. Feel free to link it. This is the offical statement that I could find:
After the event, this police force confirmed they had reviewed behaviour and everything was in line with policy. I am not sure what more evidence you need other than the police force saying that what happened was in line with policy.
Bear in mind, the above plan has been edited since the events took place but every police force in the UK has similar policies and has done since the Lawrence case. In addition to policies that govern disciplinary actions, police officers in the UK undergo continuous training which often involves substantial work on dealing with ethnic minorities.
One of the other posters appears not to understand how policing in the UK works but police policies are taken very seriously and are used by management to effectuate behaviour of officers (i.e. are the basis for promotions/disciplinaries). There is no real direct control from central government either, there are quangos but they are largely unaccountable to elected officials.
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.
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.
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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.
The thing is though that this kind of verification is going to be rife if we keep accepting it, and inconveniences like it not working (plus some banking apps) is almost the entire downside of GrapheneOS.
If you don't use it for things like this you don't really see any disadvantage. Occasionally I get cloudflare or vercel blocked when trying to read a blog but that's all.
So they're at a very strange intersection of using graphene but wanting to do exactly the kind of that is difficult on graphene. And just to be able to chat on PSN.
Everyone should use Graphene. You don't have to be a privacy nut - it's also a version of Android that just works, efficiently, without bullshit, for you and not for Google. You should even install your privacy-violating apps on Graphene because that's better than having them on stock Android.
That's fair and I do agree Google is the biggest threat. It's just that all these ID verifications are already tying you with Google (or Apple) in most cases
It was an example that’s not particularly bound to me. I use a cheap burner android for shitware smarthome apps I need to setup devices before they get adopted by Home Assistant - if I cared about specifically ID association with gapps, I’d probably use my burner for that too.
But I’m also under no illusion that Google has better analytics sources.
This is why people should buy a cheap phone with stock android on which zero private data is stored and that is never used for anything other than those verification things or government apps that might be or become mandatory.
What i mean is, use your graphene phone for everything, but don't use it to legitimate yourself.
Take an old phone or cheap one and put nothing on it, no contacts, no email (maybe one exclusively used for this phone without any private conversation on it), no apps like messengers and so on.
A phone that is only used like a passport, to legitimate yourself and or use government apps you are forced to use."
HN commenters consistently argue they, and therefore everyone else, must be able to use the same phone for everything
Otherwise corporate mobile OS alternatives like GrapheneOS are useless
For example if banking app, the proverbial example, requires some corporate mobile OS, then the owner must use this corporate mobile OS for everything else besides banking, too
If they have multiple phones, then presumably they must also use the corporate mobile OS on every one of them
No exceptions
Perhaps next we will see comments trying to argue that users can only have one phone
Or that the only computer user may own is a phone
These HN comments make little sense to me
Perhaps the people using multiple as phones mentioned in MineralWater's comment are not the people commenting on HN
Well, he didn't get charged with one. But that's not all authorities do. He's probably on a secret watch list and will be stopped every time be crosses a border, etc.
As time progresses, the more I feel like 'acceptance' by the majority is a signal of complete capitulation to the power of the mighty dollar at the expense of all else.
That with which the authorities disagree is more than likely the morally, ethically, societally correct direction.
The manifold of meaning knows better. The days of black box justification machines are over. There is mystical, there is technical, and there is bedrock. Decision plumbing cant hide from the semiotic-reflexive transformer. To the defenders of the proprietary moat: your reality was just rewritten. When you realize we have mapped the semiotic infrastructure you can cut the bs.
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.
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.
Not saying what this company did is right, but it feels like this guy has been testing how far he can push these various age verification companies with bypass attempts, and as a result got banned. Additionally the email response from the company could have been trivially edited before the screenshot was taken, so I’m not even convinced that the story is real. If I was running an age verification company I would absolutely not share with the banned users the reason we caught them, that’s like sharing the recipe for your secret sauce.
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