This bullshit comes up every five years or so and has done since the naughties. It goes like this.
Government states they need a backdoor to encryption to stop terrorism/pedophilia.
Privacy and tech groups say it's a bad idea, children's charities and anti-terrorist groups say it's a good idea.
Someone in the Civil Service informs a top politician that if there is a backdoor, hackers will find a way in and that could mean leaks of things the government doesn't want the public to see like their affair with their intern or how they are doing to abolish devolution.
They use an event to cover it up again.
Next government, return to step one.
This has happened under Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, Boris, Truss wasn't around long enough (lol), and now Sunak.
It's funny because Boris Johnson is currently using an encrypted phone to stop giving evidence to the Covid Enquiry (namely his WhatsApp messages, yes, the UK government uses fuckin' WhatsApp.
We keep telling them it won't work, that it will only put the data of law abiding citizens at risk, but they don't listen and they keep playing the same game over and over.
The NSPCC is running articles saying that we should only have End to End encryption if we can somehow guarentee children's safety, which sounds like they're advocating for backdoors.
Because matrix is absolutely not there yet like lemmy and mastodon are.
I‘m an admin and a coder for roughly 20 yrs, yet it took me hours to understand matrix and elements. There is just not enough knowledge out there atm and the apps dont do a well enough job themselves imho.
I think the implication is that they don't use anything from any of those companies. I see icons for Bitwarden, Nextcloud, and Lemmy. So they're probably a big selfhoster.
From memory the UK gov is trying to (or has?) pass anti-encription laws targeting the big tech giants GAFAM (google, apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft). I am in Australia so not up to date with this.
Its hard to tell from the icon pack they are using but I think this might be a screenshot from a degoogle phone?
For example I don't see any Facebook or Microsoft specific apps. But I do see a nextcloud app which is an open source self hostable replacement suite for Google's cloud apps.
Basically the law change won't affect them as they are not using any GAFAM apps/software.
I think its targeting all encryption, but these are self hosted end to end encrypted typically, all upon grapheneOS, so would be all but impossible to crack
It's pretty hard to make open source developers all over the world comply with unreasonable demands of nation-states. Ditto locking down the national Internet to block people from accessing them. Even in North Korea it's hard, not impossible.
Man I wish I could uninstall it. It's just plain spyware, at least from my point of view, but everyone uses it. I wanna be part of society too you know.
I might bite the bullet, and buy a Pixel tablet, to flash it with GrapheneOS. Lineage OS tablet support is pretty spotty lately. I use a Samsung SM-T720 that is doing well, but will die eventually.
Sheesh! I mean, I did get a token around 100k when I signed up, but they definitely need a better way of screening if it takes an average user more than a year to get through the screening :/
I've been waiting for almost a month now, and I've seen a few people complaining how they're in waiting list since multiple months (recent ones, i.e. after they announced lesser waiting time)
When you visit the UK? That's how I interpret the OP.
They could possibly keep the device to study it and create tools by the time the next guy with the same software comes along. Or simply confiscate and pressure you to give access. A lot of people simply crack.