alphazard 3 hours ago

This is a little wild to think about. It would make infosec impossible in the UK.

Imagine the IT departments of every mutltinational corporation desperately trying to sort out permissions to keep important information off of machines deployed in the UK. New authorization groups for everyone in the UK, lots of meetings with lawyers to sort out what they can have access to. Everyone in the UK becomes a second class psuedo-trustworthy employee overnight.

Were I in charge of IT, when that bombshell came across my desk, I think I would give every UK employee a chromebook, and migrate all workloads to the cloud. No data could be saved locally. No thumb drives. Depending on the availability of good cloud tools, the productivity hit might be so large that layoffs would be warranted.

  • subscribed 3 hours ago

    Oh, they'll just introduce mandatory digital ID, and the vpn registration.

    Companies will be permitted to use vpns as long as their AUP forbid employees from using their own for personal reasons.

    Or so.

    Plenty of the ways authoritarian can go.

    • nly 35 minutes ago

      Good luck to them.

      VPN companies like Mullvad currently accept anonymous accounts with payment via crypto.

      You can also just lie about your country of origin when signing up to a VPN account even with a 'compliant' provider that blocks UK IPs.

  • hamdingers 3 hours ago

    That would be the proposal from IT, and the response from the C-suite will be "that's unfortunate, lay them all off."

KaiserPro 2 hours ago

Urgh, the courts already have the power to compel you to provide private keys.

It was for anti-terror, but now its being used on pricks like Yaxely-lenon, who Imagine will make much hay from it.

Hamuko 4 hours ago

What private keys? Any private keys?

  • noir_lord 3 hours ago

    No one has seriously discussed banning VPN's - one minister mentioned they where looking it and no one said anything about private keys either as far as I know.

    If I'm wrong someone can drop me a link since I live in the UK.

    • rob_c 3 hours ago

      it's been mulled over and keeps getting brought up again and again, the Overton window has shifted from "go away and come back when you're serious to", "christ how would we comply with that?" https://nordvpn.com/blog/tech-world-angry-with-theresa-mays-...

      If you live here how can you not spot how every govt since they kicked out brown has been pushing for this?

      • noir_lord 2 hours ago

        I'm aware and it's precisely because it's not a new thing been seeing it for years, I specifically was asking for a citation for this government.

        I don't rule out they are daft enough to consider it, I just think they aren't quite that stupid.

        OSA was a "something must be done, this is something, it must be done" thing - they can appease the mumsnet types for a bit with it and would generally prefer it quietly went back to sleep for a bit.

        Not least because it's gonna hurt them electorally because while the people who are slightly in favour of it where slightly in favour of it a lot of the people who aren't really aren't seeing it as either unworkable, stupid or unworkable and stupid.