So wait - would this be something like... you trying to send a dickpic via WhateverMessenger, the content would be scanned first and you would be presented with a message along the lines of "This message cannot be sent as it violates our T&Cs"?
Don't buy into that framing either. Optional scanning - if a user wants to, they are free to download government spyware onto their phone/computer and do all the scanning they want, local or otherwise. No new laws needed.
I agree. If someone is happy for a government worker/algorithm to snoop through everything they send to anyone, feel free to opt in, just don't force us to participate.
If you use app A and that app is scanned for "malicious" content then I will message you on app B where there is no such scanning. If you don't want to use app B then I guess we can't be friends.
I mean at some point you need to make some choices.
But the beauty is that if anyone wants to talk through app A exclusively and their contacts are happy to respond on the same platform, then they can do that.
More likely it would just silently not be sent, and potentially a week later you get a visit from the cops. Censors hate drawing attention to their actions, that is why you never see a "this message censored on government request" as sender or recipient.
This is where someone conflates it with anti-spam and acts confused, because showing such a notice for every spam message would make a service unusable. As if spam is equivalent, as if users cannot be given the choice to opt in/out of however much anti-spam and other filtering that they want as recipients, and as if "This was censored" messages cannot be collapsed/shown per category, e.g. "Messages blocked: 12 spam, 4 unwanted sexual content, 5 misinformation/lacking context, 7 hate/harmful content". As a rule, when someone raises an objection that can be resolved with less than 60 seconds of thought, they are not being genuine.
But more importantly, it would make it illegal to provide any kind of messaging software without government approval, which is only given by letting government-designated censorship and surveillance services act as middle-men. And then the law can be more or less strictly applied, depending how much the government dislikes the general sentiment that is spread on your network, regardless of its legality, thus controlling discourse.
I am not speculating here - this is what the UK government has admitted they want:
First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. - https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...
What kind of training data do you suppose contains an answer to "how to build a submarine out of spaghetti on Mars" ? What do you think memorization means?
That is literally the reason for which I finally canceled Spotify a few years ago. At that point I was accumulating reasons to switch for the last few years but that was the last straw.
I am paying your most expensive subscription and if you would have had a more expensive / premium one I would have paid more explicitly for the service to not include ads anywhere, under any possible curcumstance. Aparently that was impossible.
Never looked back and I should have done the switch years before.
Legit question: if this disaster of a legislation passes, what are the alternatives to provide secure messaging / comms when you are inside the EU?
The only 2 options that I can think about are:
- The Dark Web: TOR, I2P (<--- not sure why I2P didn't gain more popularity) or potemntially other alternatives in the same space
- VPN outside the EU and access a secure messaging system via the VPN exit point. This would assume that the system would have E2EE / some kind of at least superficial privacy guarantees.
Am I missing any major category / tech combination?
The GP felt it is okay to disparage Arab News solely because they are funded by the Saudis, which evidently they don't like. By the same standards, the BBC is literally funded by another state, the UK. Both are state funded media, thus propaganda almost by definition. Remember, propaganda does not have to be false or unreliable. (Although, ironically, BBC right now is in trouble for deceptive portrayal of Trump.)
Hacker News guidelines[1] recommend posting the original source, not BBC over Arab News.
The newspaper has been described as "a mouthpiece for the Saudi regime" by Qatari-owned The New Arab,[24] and regarded as "reflecting official Saudi Arabian government position" by the Associated Press and Haaretz.[5]
This is much different than the BBC which attempts to maintain independence.
Sure, one can debate this ad nauseam. I would even concede that on average, BBC is perhaps more reliable than Arab News. However, if your standard is ArabNews not OK because Saudi government funds it, but BBC OK, you might just as well say it in plain English that you simply don't like the opinion of the Saudi government but on board with the UK's (which is a stance that by the way I mostly share, but refuse to preach on a neutral forum like Hacker News as policy.) I would not be surprised that for some stories, Arab News would be a better source than BBC.
This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible, while denying it to the UK every step of the way. The implication of what you're saying is that the structure of the government and the precise way in which it owns a state media outlet doesn't really matter, if there's any ownership then it's a propaganda mouthpiece regardless of all other circumstances.
But as far I can see, authoritarian states tend to have a direct path from their governments' sacred opinion to the eyes and ears of the people, there are levers of direct influence within their media industries that let them directly dictate what the journalists will pretend to report on. One can debate back and forth about how the BBC may suffer from the biases of its British writers, implicit pressure from their government, individual cases of bias and even attempts at government overreach, but despite all of it, none of these infractions would rival even 1/10th of what countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia do with their media. Despite all of their countless issues, the UK still values independence far more than what the Saudis could even dream of. Moreover, the BBC is implicitly checked by having neighboring media outlets with no government ownership, while the countries I listed exercise degrees of total control over the entire industry.
The BBC may in individual instances be biased towards the current sitting government or pro-British views or whatever, but it is not a blind mouthpiece like these other countries. It's not simply a difference in preferring one ruthless government narrative over another.
> This equation is extremely reductionist in ways that end up giving the Saudi government's stance as much merit as possible
What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
I don't understand why the way the government body is elected (or not) is material in any shape or form here. If you are British, sure, perhaps you get a say. I am not and I don't really care what the majority of UK (or rather whoever counts the votes) thinks. As far as I am concerned, it's just another foreign entity who has their interests that are at times unaligned with me. Heck, the bigger and more perceived to be legitimate, they have more power, to the degree they had the audacity and effectiveness to interfere with my country's elections. I don't think ArabNews has such capacity.
FWIW, BBC runs a World Service targeting people abroad in their languages. Is that just out of goodness of their hearts? Gimmie a break. A state funded media is always propaganda by charter, sometimes with an ancillary news division. Propaganda does not equate to lies all the time. The best form or propaganda, and the most effective, would in fact not obviously lie most of the times, but be biased when it matters. UK is hardly alone in this. US also has similar apparatus under VOA or NPR or PBS.
P.S. I think we are getting out of the core topic. I am not debating reliability of the media per se. What I objected to is the advocacy to always link to someone's preferred media, as opposed to preferred story (either due to the quality of that particular story, website, or original sourcing).
> What I posit is absolutely symmetric, so you are just making this up.
What I said was followed by three paragraphs of me discussing why exactly I posited what I did.
> I don't understand why the way the government body is elected
Who talked about elections? I certainly never brought elections up. What I did bring up, though, is that the Saudi Arabian government dictates directly what is allowed to be a media outlet and who is allowed to be a journalist. They have ways of influencing national discourse that the UK just never had. It's not about how they're ruled (though it is also a side factor), it's that they're a far more overbearing and authoritarian state. This is what the "structure of the government" referred to - now that I read it back, I realize it could've been confused for something else.
Running international services of course has a national interest for the government (in addition to a business interest for the company). I never said that the BBC's existence wasn't good for the UK or that it was completely unbiased and independent, in fact I made sure to not paint them as unequivocally good anywhere - merely far better than what they do in Saudi Arabia. Ultimately I never was arguing about the start of the conversation (choosing preferred media vs. preferred story), but the framing of different national media outlets as completely equivalent things, just with different flavors of which party line they follow.
You don’t see a difference between a major news outlet from a democratic country which has freedom of speech and an outlet from a religious monarchy which has no notion of free speech or even human rights?
That's usually not the bar though, many who refuse saudi media due to saudi ownership would be completely okay with al jazeera regardless of qatari ownership, even though both countries have very dubious intentions and government system
Saudi Arabia is one of the world leaders by number of death sentences. They have no qualms with putting you to death or giving you life imprisonment for all sorts of things, including "wrong-speech" in the form of leaving the state religion, or opposing the government. The UK isn't some shining beacon of freedom by Western standards, but it's not even in the same universe as Saudi Arabia.
There was a recent scandal with respect to a misleading quote from a news story about President Trump and the General Director and Head of News resigned.
Yes, it would have been better if they had not spliced the clips so closely together, but that does show a commitment to taking its role seriously.
"Misleading" is a stretch. It's not even controversial imo, because his actual intent was provably the same as what the BBC represented with this stitching. It's a non-issue for all practical purposes and only a problem on paper. The fact the BBC is holding themselves to a higher standard and integrity on this is actually a very good thing here (which you allude to as well).
Correct - the vast majority of people vastly underestimate the complexity of the human brain and the emergent properties that develop from this inherent complexity.
Yes, uv is probably the best thing to happen to the Py ecosystem in the last decade. That is mainly because the rest of the ecosystem is somewhere between garbage fire and mediocre at best.
uv in itself is a great tool, I have no complaints about it whatsoever! But we have to remember just how bad the rest of things are and never forget that everything's still in a pretty bad state even after more than 3 ** DECADES ** of constant evolution.
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