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- Hacker News
- The UK genuinely has become the most scary country of all western democracies to me. I can't comprehend how this happened, and is still happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_sexual_abuse_cases
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploit...
(This link list is just the tip of an iceberg)
And now they changed lanes to fully protect themselves against people who may uncover such cases.
by firebaze - Russian bot.by rimeice
- I don't see what's "scary" about this link. It's talking about pretty much standard data processing, Palantir is doing that in the US for many years now.by dgroshev
- As a Brit - yeah it's horrendous, but to me it's like there's two completely disjointed realities. One online, where UK seems to be the most surveiled and invigilated of the "western" countries where your every action is tracked, and then the second one is out in the real world, where the police and in general various agencies are borderline useless, unwilling to investigate any crime, where I genuienly wonder what's the point of obeying the rules of the road, paying taxes, or in fact not just walking out of the store with a trolley full of groceries without paying since none of this seems to be prosecuted in the slightest. Reporting crime happening literally outside of my doors has zero effect. You had your house broken into, car stolen, bicycle nicked? It would be a miracle for a policeman to show up to even take your statement. Businesses saying they have persistent problems with criminals walking out with the merchandise, no action is ever taken, or it's completely ineffective. Or how I'm literally scared to walk around with my child or ride a bike on bike paths because groups of men riding surrons in balaclavas are a daily sight around what is a tiny town in North of England - I keep reporting them to 101 all the time and yet I see them every day(but somehow not a single policeman).
Or the whole meme of London having more cameras than people, but when a crime happens all of these cameras are impossible to access, in private hands, or broken - you could drive a stolen car through Oxford Circus and no one would stop you. Not to mention how every high street is now just a 50/50 mix of vape/phone shops, none of them ever have a customer in sight but somehow have a dude sitting there 24/7. But the sign changes every month to a new business. But no, the "most scary of western democracies" can't even prosecute organised crime properly.
I just wonder if the focus on online laws is because it's so much easier to focus on this than any of the above problems.
by gambiting - You think the UK is in worse shape politically than the US?by dools
- Yes, the UK is famously unique in having sexual assault against children.by Accacin
- I personally found the murder of an innocent man by Metropolitan police to be a pretty big deal that's been pretty much ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Jean_Charles_de_Men...
by elric - The president of the US literally attempted a coup, then was found liable for rape, and then got re-elected, then threatened to invade the European Union, then kidnapped the President of Venezuela, then invaded Iran.
How in the fuck is the UK "scarier" than the US. What is this obsession with the UK that americans have?
by Jtarii - I'm pretty disappointed to see all this nonsense about the UK on Hacker News.
Like the UK being the most scary country of all Western democracies? Have you not see what's happening in the USA? The US, Europe, and UK are all trying to implement basically the same ideas.
Now, I completely disagree with the current government in pretty much anything related to "protect the children", but the hyperbole is insane.
Finally, have you seen the UK's track record with IT projects? This is never going anywhere. £75 is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
by Accacin - £75m could only be the beginning. Next spending might be £750m if the results are going to please the stakeholders. Tomorrow digital Stasi might be knocking at your door.
- I’ve heard ‘the hyperbole is insane’ since 9/11 and this is what the world looks like today. Don’t try to sane wash yet another attempt at expanding the extent of mass surveillance, despite how silly it might seem on paper.by sph
- I think as soon as you understand that Americans in general at best pity and at worst hate us based on a rather old-fashioned concept of how we live and are governed, you understand that it doesn't matter how far the USA falls from their ideals, they will always project worse onto us, because us being worse is a core plank of the USA's founding mythology.
It comes out in many ways, and the more you see it the harder it is to ignore it.
But it has recently become text again in a way that it hasn't been since Joe Kennedy's days: Trump, Vance and Hegseth have just openly sneered at and defamed us, and because we favour the political, diplomatic approach, we've taken a lot of shit that it turns out Giorgia Meloni won't take (more to that story, I am sure).
FWIW this is mutual. I think Americans are increasingly going to be shocked to find that Brits are no longer bothering to convince themselves that the average American is not like the average Trump administration official.
We no longer waste time saying "OK their government is a bunch of nuts and bigots, and their gun laws insane, but Americans are pretty cool". We no longer forgive them their government; we now average out Americans. The presumption of coolness in Americans who travel, always pretty damn well-earned in my own experience, is gone.
In short we're going to treat them much more like the French do.
It will get worse and worse but we're not alone. And actually I hope people in the UK finally grasp this, especially people on the political right. Closer ties with the USA was the through-line of Brexit. But it's a fucking insane idea. We are less like them than we are like most of Europe.
by dofm - Is Priti Patel still running the Home Office? I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in policies between BoJo and Starmer.
What do you prefer, authoritarianism in red, authoritarianism in blue, or a Nigel the Trump bootlicker? At this point I’d rather have the monarchy back, at least you knew where is the class system you’re supposed to fit, and whose boot to lick.
by sph - demise
- I don't even want to fkin know. Literally everything the UK gov has announced on online anything lately has been dystopian misguided bullshit.by Havoc
- > Another case saw half a million e-books of data translated instantly, leading to the arrest of a serious organised crime gang
Does someone have details on this? I don’t see how ebooks translation relates to arresting organized crime gang
by dgellow - A few members of a private forum exchanging ebooks = organized, pirating ebooks = crime, boom. Organized crime gang. To the police, anyway.
- Perhaps the AI hallucinated it.by varispeed
- I wonder if they mean literal e-books, or if "1 e-book" is a journalistic unit of data (maybe 1MB or so...)by Retr0id
- I believe it means evidence stored as digital data that was translated with AI, which then led to arrests. I don't think the crime gang was translating e-books illegally.by Jtarii
- Apparently an attempt to make e-books the "football fields" and "olympic swimming pools" unit of the digital world.by markdown
- Question whether PoliceAI is going to be deployed to investigate corruption in government and civil service? Thought so...by varispeed
- What corruption is there in the civil service?by Tinkeringz
- Nobody answered your question yet. Did you get an answer from someone else? Are they in the room with you right now?
The answer is: police investigate crimes. So if you go to them with a complaint about corruption, they will investigate it with whatever tools they are legally able to use and can afford.
by markdown - I think this is going to lead towards companies and governments starting to build their own data centres for this kind of thing (reviewing millions of emails to find the smoking gun is what the cops will want to do as will both sides in a civil case). The thing is no-one (probably not OpenAI) wants to send kidnapping footage to data centre in Texas for a Manchester case.
The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful …
And walking through millions of pages of digital evidence is going to cost, and I think governments would rather buy a rack of H100s and spread the cost.
So is the national AI drive one to be able to build frontier models, or one to just build data centre or one to build a chips capability a few years behind ?
- > The thing we are all finding now (software devs) is that AI is great but boy is it pricey if we want anything useful …
What?
A $200/month subscription to Claude, $100/month at OpenAI, and $25/month with Gemini should get you more than you could possibly use? Unless you really want to take a hands-off approach, in which case DeepSeek is pennies on the dollar...
It's still very cheap, is what I'm saying. Am I missing something?
by A_D_E_P_T - These already exist and have existed for decades. They're called fusion centers.by alephnerd
- Wow UK you went full 1984 + usual suspect + minority reportby p0w3n3d
- More like full Mr Bates and Robodebtby uberex
- Literally every police force in the world will be using AI to help solve crimes.by Jtarii