The person whose job it was to speak up in meetings and ask things like “FIFA? Are you sure? Do we really want to get involved with an organization like that?” is no longer employed by Mozilla.

these authorities are intended to be used only in exceptional circumstances and are not exercised lightly

Once again they promise never to use the crazy new powers they’ve just granted themselves for no obvious reason. What is even going on? Did the Liberal Party of Canada somehow get taken over by the same people that wrote Project 2026? Are they thinking fascism is inevitable so we might as well prepare for it? Assuming we have another federal election some day I get the feeling it’s going to go very badly for them, but the damage they’re doing will not be easy to repair.

They promise not to abuse all the ridiculous new powers, but the law will have officially and perhaps irrevocably moved to enable an approach that can only be seen as a totalitarian nightmare if some future government is less completely scrupulous than the saintly Liberals of the present no doubt will be, when it comes to carefully constraining their use of the legal tools they’ll inherit.

Worst of all, I’ll have to find a non-Canadian VPN service to use. It’s not like I’m doing anything top-secret, but just on principle. Canadian electronic services will no longer be trustworthy. Only those which can credibly promise to abandon Canada before giving in to a secret order to spy on their users will be safe, and those are uncommon. But they’re not non-existent. At least for the time being we will still have Signal, Delta Chat, Mullvad, and so on. Maybe the “warrant canary” will be the big feature everyone looks for in years to come.

A timely reminder to the government that while it’s not as exciting as jetting around the world kibitzing with your G7 friends about the latest wars, running the post office is still your job. Get on with it.

The mandatory backdoors would not help with this problem even if they were somehow magically made safe. If they managed to coerce Signal into installing a back door — which of course they can’t do — it would quickly be abandoned by its users and whatever tiny share it has of all the criminal gang recruiting activity would move on to places that are even harder to monitor.

Telegram users, where more of that sort of thing goes on, would probably be slower to move. But still people would eventually catch on and there are already more secure alternatives waiting to take over. They’ll just be ensuring that whichever one wins out won’t be one that’s in any way cooperative with Canadian law enforcement.

Don’t worry, the criminals will be fine. It’s only the normal people who don’t pay any attention to security since they have nothing to hide who will become super easy to spy on.

Yeah I have no idea how to keep track of what’s going on with it myself, let alone how to get word out to everyone else who’s going to be affected by this national disaster of a legislative project. It would be nice if we had a press that was interested in or capable of covering this sort of thing.

There’s another committee meeting on right now and I only know about it because I happened to remember to check.

I tuned in to watch for a few minutes and saw a Conservative MP asking sensible questions that I guess someone had written for her but not really following up on or challenging the responses to them, which were composed of a lot of vague hand-waving denials by the Liberals that any of the problems are a problem, without actually addressing any of the points made. Democracy in action!

It’s a real contrast to committee meetings I remember watching in decades past when I used to tune in to CPAC more frequently, where real expertise was often on display. Support for this bill would fall apart under the slightest scrutiny if the reality-based community were more involved the debate. But what debate there is, it’s just for show. It’s a majority government, they do what they like — and if someone tells them it’s a bad idea they must be the enemy.

It’s the “contains milk” part that seems like it might be false advertising.

Also, remember that your customers are not your fans. They barely tolerate you.

That seems like exactly the lesson the marketing department has been missing for the past ten years. I used to be in the “barely tolerate you” camp myself until I switched to Librewolf; I’m a much happier customer now.

some positive results

I wonder how much of the decline should be attributed to attempts to “disrupt the illegal drug trade” and how much to the slow process of word getting out to people who might otherwise have got themselves hooked on it that this stuff is dangerous.

Skyrim Together Reborn was the one I looked at and it does advertise that it’s working on GOG.

https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_elder_scrolls_v_skyrim_special_edition

(… most mods will work just fine with the GOG version, but maybe there are a few that would have problems. You might want the “anniversary edition” for maximum compatibility as well.)

deleted by creator

Thank you. I’m glad my instincts told me to read the comments on this one before following the link.

Estimated chance of TES6 being good plunges to new lows

If the idea is to connect with family and friends, there are parts of the Fediverse where you can post stuff that’s only visible to followers. Probably not possible on lemmy or piefed though, I think.

I didn’t have time to watch much of that committee meeting video, but from what I did see it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to do anything to meaningfully change the situation. Time to retire all the rhetoric about Chinese companies being untrustworthy because they’re subject to secret orders to spy on their customers on behalf of their government, because the same is about to be true in Canada.

But it wasn’t the final meeting, I guess there’s still time for some kind of miracle.

If the developers of EVE are involved it seems like a safe bet that yes, you will have to worry about attacks from your neighbours, from strangers, and from your closest friends sometimes.

So the plan is to dig up our natural resources, set fire to them, and use expensive machines called “data centres” to dispose of the waste heat? I guess all that activity will juice up the economy numbers but it it’s not easy to understand how that leaves us better off.

What the politicians get: A smug feeling of satisfaction, having done something they were told was good.

What the children get: Anxiety, incentive to cheat the system and to keep their Internet use secret from parents, a new reason to feel that the world is unfair to them.

What the budding “age verification” industry gets: Amazing new business opportunities.

What Facebook gets: A regulatory barrier to entry high enough to keep out any competition from some hypothetical new form of social media that would respect its users, since that is now illegal.

What spies and hackers get: Amazing new opportunities to steal everyone’s personal data.

What those of us too stubborn to ever submit to “age verification” get: We’ll be unable to use regulated social media and will have to make do with the Fediverse, possibly moving to instances hosted in whatever distant corner of the world still allows free use of communications media.

Like everyone else I haven’t seen the text yet but from everything that’s been said about it I guess it’s yet more evidence that the same gang of idiots who led Trudeau astray have found Carney and his crew just as easy to manipulate.