No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
I’d say it is a very low quality article. There is very little detail about what the offending speech actually includes. For example:
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
I don't have time to dig up her post - but she was calling on people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers - she had around 10,000 followers, and her post was read 300,000 times: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yl7p4l11po
This is a deeply deranged opinion piece. The author ties himself into knots to conflate a tiny number of high profile instances involving social media posts with harassment and other negative behavior involving electronic communication.
I genuinely believe that in 2015 Apple had the balls to resist and today they don't.
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
This’ll go down well (/s) but if you accept that the State has the right to be able to surveil public communications infrastructure (which it has been doing since paper mail was invented, through: radio, telegraph, telex, telephone, fax, email, and mobile telephony) then it’s not surprising certain commoditised public data handling services might be required to provide government access on demand or be restricted from implementing features that can effectively deny that access.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.
If Bill left the UK temporarily would the ability to turn on ADP come back? Or is a device from the UK that’s not able to enroll somehow prevented forever? Not saying that this makes it OK, just curious
You can switch your Apple ID's region to another country, enable ADP then revert your account's region back to the United Kingdom. You've got to leave Family Sharing first and may also need to adjust/cancel subscriptions - I don't think it's totally straightforward.
What a crazy answer you've written. In the sense of: it's wild that the procedure is like that.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
I changed countries a few months ago. It took me about two months with all the roadblocks, while I already had government issued proofs from both countries about the change and new address.
I've not looked into it but I suspect this uses eligibilityd, the same thing that does the location based checks to see if EU users can use 3rd party app stores.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Yeah, good point. I wonder what would happen if someone without ADP in the UK changed over the region settings to the United States, switched ADP on, and then switched the region back to the UK. I wonder if anybody's tried this?
To an extent. My account is on a different country. Even using a VPN, I was still asked to verify my age to access certain websites. The only explanation I could think of is that iOS abused my consent to them using location data for that.
It's crazy SimpleX is fine being based there. I mean, everything is open, the clients have reproducible builds, but it seems like it may end up being a hassle.
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
I'm guessing they could, in theory, attack open source projects, but it would not be very effective as those could be infinitely forked. That's the reason why governments will actually support an encourage an oligopoly of proprietary platforms via regulations (e.g. mandatory automated scanning) which only companies can practically comply with.
There's no way to obtain root access on GrapheneOS without making your own builds (which won't be affected by many of the apps adding support for GrapheneOS, who likely would only whitelist the official signing keys) or keeping the bootloader unlocked in perpetuity (because AFAIK there is currently no way to recalculate verified boot hashes on top of a systemless root like Magisk -- not that I even know if that works on GOS in the first place). Some years back I was actually working on calculating AVB2 hashes from a live system rather than ONLY through the Android build process, until TWRP wiped my phone without consent or confirmation due to an OpenRecoveryScript that I absolutely did not put there and I basically stopped tinkering with Android root due to that. I have an iPhone nowadays.
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
> There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
The Apple-vs-FBI narrative is constructed fiction. Sure, they didn't make a custom firmware to dump the phone's contents, but that's irrelevant. Everything relevant to the investigation on that phone was in the non-E2EE iCloud Backup, which the FBI got from Apple long before, via normal search warrant means. Apple likely either got an FAA702 order (aka PRISM, aka the "backdoor" that Tim Apple says doesn't exist - it allows the USG to access anyone's iCloud data immediately, with no warrant (it's not an encryption backdoor, just an access backdoor)) or a standard search warrant and most probably turned over everything they had in iCloud instantly, just as they do constantly when receiving a search warrant or FAA702 order. (As I mentioned, the FAA702 order fulfillment is likely instantaneous/automated, which amounts to direct access to the storage servers.)
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
Heres a favourite of mine. Apple & Google were/still are syphoning off all mobile device push messages to US government. They flat out denied it for years until it got leaked from another source, as soon as it was out in the open they admitted and said they were doing it all along but weren't allowed to tell anybody due to government NDAs.
If it was irrelevant then why did the FBI make such a big deal about it? Are you saying the FBI did that just to make Apple look good? Why would they care about Apple's reputation?
Since Epstein is no more, the governments became crazy about going after people's private data, perhaps hoping to find some spice. Like some politicians lost their source.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
Stories like this quickly put to rest the idea that everyone who gets arrested must actually deserve it. The bar for posting content that violates the law is very low.
Pretty sure she called for the murder, by arson, of asylum seekers although the article missed that bit out.
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
> The wife of a conservative politician was sentenced to 31 months in prison for what police said was an unacceptable post.
What did she say? The article does not elucidate.
Inciting violence for example is not legal. I believe spaces around abortion clinics are also to be free from demonstrations. US free speech absolutists seem to vehemently disagree until you say something unkind about Charlie Kirk or ICE.
The low point might be quoting Elon Musk. This is true in any context, but in particular here. The scandal is real, but none of it is about people being arrested for non-politically-correct speech.
There’s plenty of otherwise real stuff to poke the UK about.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2910vrrygo
I am judging by a simple fact, that "please confirm your age" screen is now mandatory during the iPhone setup in all countries, and in some it's behind a KYC. I have a strong opinion that this is insane. And once they let the foot in the door - there is no closing it.
That angry’s up the blood of libertarians, but ultimately from the point of view of the State it has to be able to do its job of detecting and prosecuting serious crime, and it will redraw privacy lines whenever that is substantially impeded by new technology.
It's almost as wild as when during the pandemic "lockdown", planes had to take off, burn tonnes of fuel and land empty some minutes later at the same airport, because there's some fucking law about landing spots and how they'd be lost if that bullshit wasn't done.
From what I remember it uses a combination of things like your current GPS location, your SIM cards reported country and more to determine what country you're really in to restrict certain features.
So it's not as simple as swapping your location in settings, or even traveling to somewhere in the EU, theres a certain sticky-ness to what your device thinks is your current country.
Edit: bit more info on eligibilityd here https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Eligibility#eligibilityd
Has the UK started attacking any open source E2EE projects yet?
Apple's control over iOS is the main reason I prefer GrapheneOS so much over it. You get amazing privacy and security without sacrificing control. GrapheneOS has said they won't introduce age verification and a backdoor they obviously won't implement.
Getting really tired of the UK govs incompetence/maliciousness around digital law making
It relays my main concern which is that while current governments may use this in moderation and under judicial oversight, future ones may not. And we should build tools for the future not just for now.
There’s a general regression towards fascist and right wing ideologies in the last few years and I don’t want to be up against a wall one day because someone did something with ignorant best intent.
The “fascist” part (authoritarian/totalitarian tendencies) came long before the resurgence of the right, but most people seem to approve of those methods as long as they target those they dislike, so I won’t be shedding any tears for them when it’s their turn at last.
The whole "Apple won't do what the USG wants" story is farce, engineered specifically to protect Apple's brand image. Following the Snowden drop when we all learned that the USG has unfettered realtime access to everything in iCloud without a warrant via FAA702, Apple had a major fucking crisis on its hands, along with a lot of other companies. (If you think the CIA can't read any object in S3, you simply don't understand how the world works. Note also that AWS has built a custom, one-off, airgapped AWS region ON PREM for the CIA. https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ )
Those CEOs all went to DC and sat down with Obama and talked it out. The official cover story was something like "Obama wants help with healthcare.gov".
> The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-ceo-meeting-with-obama-... (includes photo)
It is very likely that this media plan was discussed and agreed upon in those meetings. Otherwise, nobody sane in any government in Europe would ever buy an iPhone (or let their citizens do same), given that the USG can read all their photos and messages and emails and contacts in iCloud instantly and without a warrant.
(China of course requires Apple run the iCloud servers for Chinese users in China via a joint venture with a CCP-operated company, which preserves the same realtime full access to all iCloud/iMessage data in China for the CCP as PRISM does for the USG.)
Don't believe the marketing hype.
Further reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
The Snowden releases support very plainly the direct realtime access of the US intelligence community to tech company servers without search warrants (just FISA orders).
It is the single most used data source by the US intelligence community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Apple began providing such data in October 2012.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PRISM_Collection_Det...
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/new-slides-reveal-gr...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/governments...
These aren't conspiracy theories, these types of secret agreements happen all the time.
EDIT: it seems the original poster I was replying to has deleted their post, and so this may not make as much sense in the thread now.