The title should probably be changed to “UK enacts Online Safety Act…” or something for the benefit of those who don't know that this is exactly what's expected of the monarch.
“King Charles III signs off” is a perfectly ordinary part of the legislative process. Royal Assent has been granted 100% of the time in probably the last 1000 years. I’m not going to search when was the last time royal assent was not granted, but I’m somewhat certain it was before 1600s.
Edit: looked it up after all. Royal Assent was last withheld in 1708.
(though MediaBasFactCheck's statement that "we rate The Register Least Biased based on minimal editorializing" seems to be based on their lack of a political bias, but El Reg is certainly biased towards iconoclasm, but that's the way I like 'em)
And this has sort of been a historical thing with, actually, some of the better UK tech trade press. It's often deliberately provocative and snarky, but that doesn't make it wrong, and indeed may be insightful in the way that more staid publications aren't. Add to that the fact that headlines often tease and provoke on their own (as they did before there were clicks much of the time).
> but El Reg is certainly biased towards iconoclasm
That seems like a strange perspective. Isn't the whole point of a news source not to be editorially biased? They give you the facts, and you use those facts to draw your own conclusion(s).
> That seems like a strange perspective. Isn't the whole point of a news source not to be editorially biased? They give you the facts, and you use those facts to draw your own conclusion(s).
er...what? what news source do you feel does this?
Various subscription industry intelligence news feeds that hold to unbiased standards.
Eg: Minerals and Resources sector feeds that endeavour to convey all the relevant factoids in the industry domain - "On <this date> <that company> stated <something>".
That's a verifiable fact stated baldly - it's readily provable whether or not a listed company released a statement .. and there is nothing there about whether what the company claimed in their statement was "true".
Later that same feed might release a third party independant technical report that may or may not support the claim made.
Two weeks later the feed might report that an employee at the third party company was arrested for fraud.
The "-oid" suffix denotes a thing that seems like X, but is not X (e.g. "asteroid" -> "seems like a star, but is not a star (it's a space-rock) - or "cuboid": "seems like a cube, but is not a cube".
A factoid is a statement based on an assumption—something that has never been confirmed.
News feeds of "factoids" are a thing - and they are verifiably true if framed as such. See my comment above where I give an example of the recommended framing of domain snippets in unbiased intelligence feeds.
No assumptions are made about the veracity of statements by publicly listed statements and such feeds never state that "Today Rio Tinto aquired property X" instead they seperately report
* Today Rio Tinto stated they acquired property X (link to statement)
and
* Today the mineral resources dept. of the Canadian NWT reported a change of ownership in property X to Subsidiary Holdings ABC12 Ltd.
Thank you for your unthinking condescension, factoid is exactly the word I meant.
I think you're confusing a news source with city council minutes or a police blotter.
Journalists are trade professionals whose job is connect dots and follow leads to try to surface deeper issues and ideas in their reporting. They should adhere to facts, but they should also be using their immersion and expertise to contextualizing those facts and make them understood to an audience who isn't so immersed or expert.
If they can do that earnestly and with the transparency that lets you see where they're working from, and with a style that helps you read/engage, they're doing good work.
There is nothing wrong at all with that headline for British audience, because virtually nobody in the UK is going to interpet it as “King Charles endorses [...]”.
International audience might interpret it exactly like that.
Personally, my experience with The Register has been nothing but positive.
When all the websites were reporting on my "discovery" of a security issue, The Register has been the first (by over a week) and one of the few to ask me by email about the details and the only to publish article with correct information. I know they weren't rushing to publish it as they were far from the first. Also they have been fast to respond back.
Some other website that I will not name have made a lot of mistakes in their reporting and when asked for fixing, the reporter replied 3 days later and complained that my article has been too complicated! I also have a small suspision that they copy-pasted it from some much smaller website without mentioning it, as that website published earlier than them and had the same exact mistakes, which were very hard to make, unless you decided to skip random paragraphs and stop in the middle.
All the other websites have copied from that one without ever checking the authoritative source that was my article and I know this because I explicitly had put a warning to clarify the misinformation :).
Some other big website emailed me after all the other ones have published and I answered their questions and I even told them to not put X as a title as that's not what the issue is about as I saw others doing that. Guess what? They did that exact title :).
End of the monarchy. No fanfare, no big drama, just OK, bye, we’ve got an election for president to organise.
Especially after Brexit the British people have learned the lesson of fucking around for years when it comes to any change, this will happen with lightning speed and determination.
The monarchy might not last very long if it were to actually exercise much of its theoretical power. UK folks love their royalty these days as a kind of mascot, but I doubt they'd tolerate an interventionist king.
If you think for a single second that the monarchy is going to do a single thing that might jeopardize their free, cushy, completely out of touch lifestyle, you are horribly horribly wrong.
Philip had his fair share of completely out of touch gaffes, but even he wasn’t so stupid as to believe it wouldn’t ruin everything for him to exercise their “power”.
> That doesn’t alter the point that he’s still responsible for the things happening in his name.
There's case law on this matter actually, coming from the trial of King Charles I.
> The court challenged the doctrine of sovereign immunity and proposed that "the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern 'by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise'."
So no, granting the Royal Assent doesn't happen in the name of King Charles III.
Sure, and when Biden vetoes something it’s happening by the Office of the President. It’s still happening by the hand and pen of President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
History can figure out who held the office when. Maybe we can’t sue either of them personally for those actions (which is what sovereign immunity relates to), but history can sure as shit remember which King took which actions. You think we don’t remember which George lost the American colonies, because it was the Office that lost the colonies?
My point is that enjoying a free, cushy, completely out of touch lifestyle in exchange for acting as a PR figleaf for the government still leaves them responsible for the actions they allow themselves to be a figleaf for, even if they do nothing but go where and do what their ministers direct.
The joke is that he can do this, but once only as afterwards he will no longer have the power to do so.
Realistically it will just be passed anyway one way or the other. e.g. the UK will become a republic, or they will bypass the monarch like they did in Belgium when the king refused to sign the abortion law (parliament declared the king "incapacitated" in which case the PM could sign things in to law, and a few hours later they declared him "capable" again – whether this really was keeping with the spirit or even text of the law is dubious, it's not in my reading, but no one really cared; the only reason Belgium still has a monarchy is because the king didn't object to this hack).
edit: for the ignorant (hello downvoters), this is a true statement.
the last King of England was William III (who died in 1702)
the Kingdom of England ceased to exist in 1707 with the Act of Union when it merged with the with the Kingdom of Scotland to become the Kingdom of Great Britain
Royal assent is a hangover from the settlement of the English civil war. It exists as a backstop to allow the monarch to safeguard their rights and privileges from encroachment by parliament. It does not exist to prevent bad laws. The way to prevent bad laws is to not elect bad governments.
He would probably be either asked to abdicate, or it would be the end of the British monarchy altogether.
It would cause a massive constitutional crisis in the UK where not only the monarchy would be called in question, but also the nobility (i.e. House of Lords)
In the UK the police and military swear allegiance to the Monarch. So I think the true answer to this is that it really depends where loyalties lie.
In the US you have the second amendment to protect you against the state, but in the UK we have the Monarch. In theory the Monarch could tell the government to get lost, but their ability to do that in practise would depend on whether the police and military would side with them.
If Charles withheld consent for this he would probably be overruled in one way or another, but if it was about entering an unpopular war you could see how his consent would become much more important.
Yes the military in Canada also swears allegiance to the monarch in the UK. So maybe he could order Canadian forces to attack the UK government when they try to abdicate him?
> Yes the military it Canada also swears allegiance to the monarchy in the UK.
Technically the military in Canada swear allegiance to the monarchy in Canada.
The monarchy of Canada is legally completely distinct from the one in the UK. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. Or any other of HRHs realms and dominions.
It’s just that they all share the same monarch and the rules of succession.
It’s actually theoretically possible for Charles to abdicate the throne in the UK but still remain the King of Canada. Which would be utterly ridiculous and it’s not going to happen, but theoretically it could.
The monarchy of Canada is the monarchy in the UK. But yes you're right. Pedantically we are both accurate as I intentionally didn't say they swore to the monarchy of UK.
In any case it's a distinction that leads to the same guy.
> The monarchy of Canada is the monarchy in the UK.
they're not, they're different sovereign entities that have the same office holder and follow the same rules of succession (from the Act of Settlement)
in the same way a single person can be a director of multiple different companies
The head of monarchy of Canada is residing in the UK. Being a monarch of UK isn't same as being monarch in UK. The Canadian monarch is in the UK, this is fact.
>y're different sovereign entities that have the same office holder and follow the same rules of succession (from the Act of Settlement)
Brother he lives in the same place cause he's the same guy. He's in the UK.
> The head of monarchy of Canada is residing in the UK. Being a monarch of UK isn't same as being monarch in UK. The Canadian monarch is in the UK, this is fact.
It only makes no sense if you don't understand the monarch of Canada is in the UK, and thus is monarch in but not necessarily of UK. (But really the same dude and mostly defended as separate as some sort of weird commonwealth saving of face about your nation swearing allegiance to the guy who's the monarch of UK)
You're right. The Canadian armed forces swear allegiance to the monarch of Canada in the UK, the same man not coincidentally currently monarch of UK. The monarchy of Canada, an abstract idea nebulously exists perhaps everywhere (including in the UK) or nowhere depending on how you consider abstract ideas.
> the same man not coincidentally currently monarch of UK.
As it so happens for the moment.
It's not a bound requirement that such be the case .. as any true student of the history of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and the Union would well be aware of.
(Without some truly insane set of circumstances) the biggest crisis since the abdication of Edward VIII. It would threaten the very continuance of the Monarchy.
Charles can withhold consent in the same sense as he can shoot himself in the face.
The requirements of the UK Act and EU Chat Control draft legislation would be enforceable with client-side scanning on devices which have silicon support for AI inference.
At present, this includes Apple iPhones and Apple Silicon Macs that have an underutilized Bionic Engine. Starting in 2023, AMD 7000-series Ryzen laptop CPUs have silicon for AI inference. Starting in 2024, Intel Meteor Lake laptop CPUs will have silicon for AI inference. Starting in 2024, Qualcomm Oryon Arm Windows laptops will compete with Apple Silicon M3 laptops for price/performance, likely including silicon for AI inference.
If the requirements of the act become technically enforceable on most new laptops and flagship phones sold in 2024, then enforcement policy will depend on non-technical considerations, including industry and market response to new vs. old hardware.
EU has draft legislation to stop the sale of all operating system and hypervisor binaries which are not officially accredited. If there are only a limited number of operating systems available in the market, then client-side scanning can be made a legal requirement for accredited distribution of commercial binaries.
Client silicon for AI inference can use WiFi 7 Sensing radar to measure a biometric signature for humans, e.g. breathing rate, typing motion. Will every country allow tech companies to sample human biometric data via RF? Can human identity be cross-referenced with client-side scanning?
I see a lot of people saying offensive things on UK sub-Reddits, often about Muslims, but sometimes about the French too. It's frightening just how much illegal speech is said in plain sight...
There was a video I saw circling on Twitter earlier of a hateful guy being critical of Islam and even going so far as to suggest Muhammad was pedophile... Thankfully he was swiftly attacked by those he offended and subsequently arrested for his hatefulness, but just imagine how many hateful things like this are said behind closed doors every day. The amount of offensive things said to English footballers on Twitter during the world cup was horrible for example.
> There was a video I saw circling on Twitter earlier of a hateful guy being critical of Islam and even going so far as to suggest Muhammad was pedophile... Thankfully he was swiftly attacked by those he offended and subsequently arrested for his hatefulness,
Lol wtf. None of that should be "illegal speech."
Criticizing or hating others should never be illegal. Abhorrent and discouraging, yes. Illegal, no. Similarly, calling Muhammad or whatever divine figure a pedophile should be (and is) allowed in nation-states that respect your freedom of expression.
Imagine calling for someone's arrest and praising attacks on person who hurt your religious feelings.
> but just imagine how many hateful things like this are said behind closed doors every day.
Your comment implies that you want to police what others do in their own houses in their private time, on private platforms like Signal. That is absurd. Do you want to attach a bug in people's houses to monitor "Hateful speech/conduct" as well? I am constantly baffled how many authoritarian POVs hackernews tends to attract these days.
>There was a video I saw circling on Twitter earlier of a hateful guy being critical of Islam and even going so far as to suggest Muhammad was pedophile...
I mean I'm not sure what else you should call people that have sex with nine-year-olds?
> Our position remains firm: we will continue to do whatever we can to ensure people in the UK can use Signal. But if the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we'd leave."
This is an interesting position to take. They built censorship-resistance technology to make Signal work in countries like Iran, Russia or China, but want to leave the UK without even putting up a fight?
76 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] thread“King Charles III signs off” is a perfectly ordinary part of the legislative process. Royal Assent has been granted 100% of the time in probably the last 1000 years. I’m not going to search when was the last time royal assent was not granted, but I’m somewhat certain it was before 1600s.
Edit: looked it up after all. Royal Assent was last withheld in 1708.
MediaBiasFactCheck rates them as "High" on their factuality scale: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-register-uk/
(though MediaBasFactCheck's statement that "we rate The Register Least Biased based on minimal editorializing" seems to be based on their lack of a political bias, but El Reg is certainly biased towards iconoclasm, but that's the way I like 'em)
That seems like a strange perspective. Isn't the whole point of a news source not to be editorially biased? They give you the facts, and you use those facts to draw your own conclusion(s).
er...what? what news source do you feel does this?
Eg: Minerals and Resources sector feeds that endeavour to convey all the relevant factoids in the industry domain - "On <this date> <that company> stated <something>".
That's a verifiable fact stated baldly - it's readily provable whether or not a listed company released a statement .. and there is nothing there about whether what the company claimed in their statement was "true".
Later that same feed might release a third party independant technical report that may or may not support the claim made.
Two weeks later the feed might report that an employee at the third party company was arrested for fraud.
That word does not mean what you think it means.
The "-oid" suffix denotes a thing that seems like X, but is not X (e.g. "asteroid" -> "seems like a star, but is not a star (it's a space-rock) - or "cuboid": "seems like a cube, but is not a cube".
No assumptions are made about the veracity of statements by publicly listed statements and such feeds never state that "Today Rio Tinto aquired property X" instead they seperately report
* Today Rio Tinto stated they acquired property X (link to statement)
and
* Today the mineral resources dept. of the Canadian NWT reported a change of ownership in property X to Subsidiary Holdings ABC12 Ltd.
Thank you for your unthinking condescension, factoid is exactly the word I meant.
Journalists are trade professionals whose job is connect dots and follow leads to try to surface deeper issues and ideas in their reporting. They should adhere to facts, but they should also be using their immersion and expertise to contextualizing those facts and make them understood to an audience who isn't so immersed or expert.
If they can do that earnestly and with the transparency that lets you see where they're working from, and with a style that helps you read/engage, they're doing good work.
International audience might interpret it exactly like that.
When all the websites were reporting on my "discovery" of a security issue, The Register has been the first (by over a week) and one of the few to ask me by email about the details and the only to publish article with correct information. I know they weren't rushing to publish it as they were far from the first. Also they have been fast to respond back.
Some other website that I will not name have made a lot of mistakes in their reporting and when asked for fixing, the reporter replied 3 days later and complained that my article has been too complicated! I also have a small suspision that they copy-pasted it from some much smaller website without mentioning it, as that website published earlier than them and had the same exact mistakes, which were very hard to make, unless you decided to skip random paragraphs and stop in the middle.
All the other websites have copied from that one without ever checking the authoritative source that was my article and I know this because I explicitly had put a warning to clarify the misinformation :).
Some other big website emailed me after all the other ones have published and I answered their questions and I even told them to not put X as a title as that's not what the issue is about as I saw others doing that. Guess what? They did that exact title :).
Especially after Brexit the British people have learned the lesson of fucking around for years when it comes to any change, this will happen with lightning speed and determination.
Philip had his fair share of completely out of touch gaffes, but even he wasn’t so stupid as to believe it wouldn’t ruin everything for him to exercise their “power”.
Just because he’s selfish and doesn’t want to jeopardize the things his position brings him, doesn’t me he bears no responsibility or culpability.
Maybe refusing royal assent wouldn’t change anything (it likely wouldn’t), he still assents and the law goes forward with his name on it.
There's case law on this matter actually, coming from the trial of King Charles I.
> The court challenged the doctrine of sovereign immunity and proposed that "the King of England was not a person, but an office whose every occupant was entrusted with a limited power to govern 'by and according to the laws of the land and not otherwise'."
So no, granting the Royal Assent doesn't happen in the name of King Charles III.
History can figure out who held the office when. Maybe we can’t sue either of them personally for those actions (which is what sovereign immunity relates to), but history can sure as shit remember which King took which actions. You think we don’t remember which George lost the American colonies, because it was the Office that lost the colonies?
Realistically it will just be passed anyway one way or the other. e.g. the UK will become a republic, or they will bypass the monarch like they did in Belgium when the king refused to sign the abortion law (parliament declared the king "incapacitated" in which case the PM could sign things in to law, and a few hours later they declared him "capable" again – whether this really was keeping with the spirit or even text of the law is dubious, it's not in my reading, but no one really cared; the only reason Belgium still has a monarchy is because the king didn't object to this hack).
edit: for the ignorant (hello downvoters), this is a true statement.
the last King of England was William III (who died in 1702)
the Kingdom of England ceased to exist in 1707 with the Act of Union when it merged with the with the Kingdom of Scotland to become the Kingdom of Great Britain
The parent comment said "England's king", not "The King of England"
with brexit [1].
Royal assent is a hangover from the settlement of the English civil war. It exists as a backstop to allow the monarch to safeguard their rights and privileges from encroachment by parliament. It does not exist to prevent bad laws. The way to prevent bad laws is to not elect bad governments.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/decision-of-the-supreme...
That's an option? I, from the land of lesser evils, am jealous.
essentially whether or not he'd be on the side of whoever won the next election (that would be swiftly triggered)
if the same government was re-elected he'd be made to abdicate
otherwise he'd be ok
No. The only reason why the British monarchy still exists is because they are completely apolitical.
If that changed, it would very quickly become a bipartisan issue to end the monarchy, irrespective of which side he’d support.
a very similar scenario played out this way in another commonwealth realm in 1975
the monarchy endures
He would probably be either asked to abdicate, or it would be the end of the British monarchy altogether.
It would cause a massive constitutional crisis in the UK where not only the monarchy would be called in question, but also the nobility (i.e. House of Lords)
In the US you have the second amendment to protect you against the state, but in the UK we have the Monarch. In theory the Monarch could tell the government to get lost, but their ability to do that in practise would depend on whether the police and military would side with them.
If Charles withheld consent for this he would probably be overruled in one way or another, but if it was about entering an unpopular war you could see how his consent would become much more important.
Technically the military in Canada swear allegiance to the monarchy in Canada.
The monarchy of Canada is legally completely distinct from the one in the UK. Or Australia. Or New Zealand. Or any other of HRHs realms and dominions.
It’s just that they all share the same monarch and the rules of succession.
It’s actually theoretically possible for Charles to abdicate the throne in the UK but still remain the King of Canada. Which would be utterly ridiculous and it’s not going to happen, but theoretically it could.
In any case it's a distinction that leads to the same guy.
they're not, they're different sovereign entities that have the same office holder and follow the same rules of succession (from the Act of Settlement)
in the same way a single person can be a director of multiple different companies
>y're different sovereign entities that have the same office holder and follow the same rules of succession (from the Act of Settlement)
Brother he lives in the same place cause he's the same guy. He's in the UK.
this "argument" makes no sense whatsoever
No, its technically a separate monarchy that happens to have the same current monarch and current rules of succession.
A monarchy is an abstract system instantiated within the country to which it applies.
The monarchy of Canada does not reside in the UK .. perhaps you're thinking of the current appointed monarch.
> The monarchy of Canada is the monarchy in the UK.
is false.
As it so happens for the moment.
It's not a bound requirement that such be the case .. as any true student of the history of Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and the Union would well be aware of.
HRMs [edit: just HMs] realms and dominions, actually.
Charles can withhold consent in the same sense as he can shoot himself in the face.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...
At present, this includes Apple iPhones and Apple Silicon Macs that have an underutilized Bionic Engine. Starting in 2023, AMD 7000-series Ryzen laptop CPUs have silicon for AI inference. Starting in 2024, Intel Meteor Lake laptop CPUs will have silicon for AI inference. Starting in 2024, Qualcomm Oryon Arm Windows laptops will compete with Apple Silicon M3 laptops for price/performance, likely including silicon for AI inference.
If the requirements of the act become technically enforceable on most new laptops and flagship phones sold in 2024, then enforcement policy will depend on non-technical considerations, including industry and market response to new vs. old hardware.
EU has draft legislation to stop the sale of all operating system and hypervisor binaries which are not officially accredited. If there are only a limited number of operating systems available in the market, then client-side scanning can be made a legal requirement for accredited distribution of commercial binaries.
Client silicon for AI inference can use WiFi 7 Sensing radar to measure a biometric signature for humans, e.g. breathing rate, typing motion. Will every country allow tech companies to sample human biometric data via RF? Can human identity be cross-referenced with client-side scanning?
There was a video I saw circling on Twitter earlier of a hateful guy being critical of Islam and even going so far as to suggest Muhammad was pedophile... Thankfully he was swiftly attacked by those he offended and subsequently arrested for his hatefulness, but just imagine how many hateful things like this are said behind closed doors every day. The amount of offensive things said to English footballers on Twitter during the world cup was horrible for example.
Lol wtf. None of that should be "illegal speech."
Criticizing or hating others should never be illegal. Abhorrent and discouraging, yes. Illegal, no. Similarly, calling Muhammad or whatever divine figure a pedophile should be (and is) allowed in nation-states that respect your freedom of expression.
Imagine calling for someone's arrest and praising attacks on person who hurt your religious feelings.
> but just imagine how many hateful things like this are said behind closed doors every day.
Your comment implies that you want to police what others do in their own houses in their private time, on private platforms like Signal. That is absurd. Do you want to attach a bug in people's houses to monitor "Hateful speech/conduct" as well? I am constantly baffled how many authoritarian POVs hackernews tends to attract these days.
I mean I'm not sure what else you should call people that have sex with nine-year-olds?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisha
This is an interesting position to take. They built censorship-resistance technology to make Signal work in countries like Iran, Russia or China, but want to leave the UK without even putting up a fight?