If you go to chatcontrol.eu you will find more info about chat control and how to fight against it.

FWIW, Denmark has had this digital infrastructure in the last 10 years and it’s been the foundation of a huge transformation in terms of how people interact with the government services.

It’s also extremely privacy preserving and while Denmark is actually moving forward with an age proving infrastructure like Britain, it’s designed with zero knowledge proofs so literally no-one knows where you have proved your age.

I don’t have a problem with the infrastructure. I have a problem with how Britain designs and uses the infrastructure.

A digital ID, by itself, isn't much of an issue and can be very convenient for the user as well. Even better, it can be setup in a more privacy conserving way. For instance, when you have to provide your ID today, you often have to give companies a copy of your ID, which isn't really favorable to the owner of that ID. With digital ID, it's easier to give/revoke access to your ID or mask certain information the other party doesn't need to know. Most ID scans are mainly done to verify the person has a legitimate ID anyways and presented it, making this digital can be an improvement.

Where it does get black mirror-ey is when you have to use that digital identity to basically log in to the internet and all your internet activity is logged to your ID. The shit the government can pull with such information is mindbogglingly bad.

relevant maybe

I've been running i2p for years. It works well and if there was demand it would be fairly trivial to make Lemmy compatible.

So what did you change about your behavior after writing this message?

Something similar when using an operating system from Google and Apple, known for their attachment to privacy and noble behavior?

In any case, you can't have a mesh with ends reachable at all times or even addressed. Delay-tolerant applications are sort of better. With nodes synchronizing when in contact. Except for, say, threaded discussions to make sense, this would almost require some sort of dependency management, to synchronize objects by priority.

But honestly all of today's computing seems authoritarian and imperial. Which leads to the way it shapes the world. Richard Stallman is known for being worried about this (not many other people), but GNU + Hurd is honestly still in the same paradigm.

I wonder if it's possible to devise something like BTRON, except with program objects being similar to Java assemblies, but at the same time more like Common Lisp. For the commonly used software to be generally easily hackable\changeable. BTRON in its concept is nicer than Unix, it's a consistent idea for modernity of computing, one can say. It seems even nicer than Plan 9. Unfortunately I don't know Japanese to play with it.

Something that could be used on weak and cheap enough hardware to have some separate niche of personal\PDA computing based on it. Like Briar, but.

Things like CJDNS and Yggdrasil surely look nice, but those just change one layer. For a real totalitarian world they won't help. It's not even a matter of technology, it's a matter of links' capability when you can't use the Internet because, ahem, you'll be detected and police will come knocking.

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network https://yggdrasil-openwrt.github.io/openwrt-config-basic.html

the brits really need to learn from the french how to protest

Where were all the protests to this: https://techinformed.com/france-enforces-age-verification-law-adult-sites/ ?

This is what you get at the moment when you access pornhub from a French IP:

We used to know, even in the face of state atrocities: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragette_bombing_and_arson_campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984%E2%80%931985_United_Kingdom_miners%2527_strike

Sadly, Thatcher broke the miners and we’ve never been right since.

There has been a petition. And it has received the aforementioned "lol no" response. The thing is though after the French set the capital on fire the age of retirement still went up, nothing changed.

Anyway, all we have to do is use a VPN to get around it and wait for the inevitable data leak, then the whole thing will collapse under the weight of its own stupidity.

With regards to this most people are just ignoring the law. VPN use has gone through the roof.

They also get arrested for peaceful protests and stay silent: https://www.npr.org/2025/08/11/nx-s1-5498378/uk-police-say-more-than-500-people-arrested-in-pro-palestinian-events-over-weekend

The reason is that we all live in capitalist dictatorships masquerading as "democracy", and are rapidly approaching a time when climate change, wealth inequality, and automation will see widespread revolt of the proles, so the ruling class is tightening its grip, and going all in on fascism.

I doubt enough people care

England isn't the problem, it's London that's the problem.

London needs to become its own independent city state and then they can do what the hell they want with it and then we'll be governed by someone from Leeds or Manchester or someplace like that, by someone who actually has a grip

EU isn't much better.

We don’t want this dystopian nightmare either, and just like Brexit we weren’t told what it was before it was too late. Hopefully you will welcome us back when all the liars are voted out and ignored.