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When last we visited the UK's long-stewing Online Safety Bill, the issue was the legislation's threat to free speecha common theme of contemporary European lawmaking. But the massive internet regulation bill, which is expected to become law soon, also targets encryption. This has prompted tech companies to warn that Britain's government threatens the privacy of its citizensand the world beyond.

"The Online Safety Bill, now at the final stage before passage in the House of Lords, gives the British government the ability to force backdoors into messaging services, which will destroy end-to-end encryption," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warned last week. "If it passes, the Online Safety Bill will be a huge step backwards for global privacy, and democracy itself. Requiring government-approved software in peoples' messaging services is an awful precedent. If the Online Safety Bill becomes British law, the damage it causes won't stop at the borders of the U.K."

Through continuing debate, the Online Safety Bill has undergone changes, though none of them have much improved the legislation. In its current form, the Online Safety Bill allows OFCOM, Britain's communications regulator, to compel service providers and search engines to "provide information about the use of a service by a named individual" and to compel providers "to take steps so that OFCOM are able to remotely access" services and equipment. Under the bill, it is "an offence" to provide "information which is encrypted such that it is not possible for OFCOM to understand it."

"The Bill as currently drafted givesOfcom the power to impose specific technologies (e.g. algorithmic content detection) that provide for the surveillance of the private correspondence of UK citizens," according to a legal analysis of the legislation for Index on Censorship. "The powers allow the technology to be imposed with limited legal safeguards. It means the UK would be one of the first democracies to place a de facto ban on end-to-end encryption for private messaging apps."

To such objections, says EFF, the U.K. government responded: "We expect the industry to use its extensive expertise and resources to innovate and build robust solutions for individual platforms/services that ensure both privacy and child safety by preventing child abuse content from being freely shared on public and private channels."

This constitutes an instruction to the tech industry to "nerd harder" to develop schemes for magically securing privacy while allowing government access to everybody's communications, points out EFF.

Tech companies and communications services that appeal to customers with assurances of privacy protected by end-to-end encryption aren't thrilled by legislative developments in the UK. Firms including Signal, Threema, and WhatsApp wrote an open letter warning that "global providers of end-to-end encrypted products and services cannot weaken the security of their products and services to suit individual governments. There cannot be a 'British internet,' or a version of end-to-end encryption that is specific to the UK."

"The UK Government must urgently rethink the Bill, revising it to encourage companies to offer more privacy and security to its residents, not less," they added.

Some providers have gone further.

Meredith Whittaker, president of U.S.-based Signal, said the service "would absolutely, 100% walk" away from Britain if the UK proceeds with its encryption ban.

Germany-based Tutanota responded, "We will not 'walk out' of UK. We will also not comply with any requests to backdoor the encryption."

"When the Iranian government blocked Signal, we recognized that the people in Iran who needed privacy were not represented by the authoritarian state, and we worked with our community to set up proxies and other means to ensure that Iranians could access Signal," clarified the encrypted messaging service. "As in Iran, we will continue to do everything in our power to ensure that people in the UK have access to Signal and to private communications. But we will not undermine or compromise the privacy and safety promises we make to people in the UK, and everywhere else in the world."

There's actually something of a contest among online services to tell the British government to go to Hell. In April, the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes Wikipedia, said the online encyclopedia would not comply with the Online Safety Bill's requirements for age checks.

As Wikimedia's resistance to age check requirements suggest, there's rottenness in the Online Safety Bill beyond its attacks on privacy.

"The Online Safety Billestablishes 'duty of care' responsibilities for tech platforms to keep what the government deems 'online harms' (which is broader than just violent or pornographic content) out of the view of children," Reason's Scott Shackford cautioned earlier this year. At that time the bill had just been "made significantly harsher with threats of imprisonment for tech platform managers who run afoul of the complicated regulations."

As I recently noted, attacks on free speech are a cottage industry in the old world. The European Union's Digital Services Act goes into effect this month despite warnings that its restrictions on "hateful content" are nothing more than cover for censorship of online material that government officials dislike.

Comments by European officials threatening to wield the law as a bludgeon against opponents "could reinforce the weaponisation of internet shutdowns, which includes arbitrary blocking of online platforms by governments around the world," 67 organizations protested in a July 26 letter.

The danger in authoritarian legislation passed by nominally liberal democratic countries is that it can be interpreted as a permission slip to restrict civil liberties. That has certainly been the case with Germany's NetzDG law against hate speech, which was rapidly replicated after its passage in 2017.

"NetzDG's reproduction in various hybrid and authoritarian regimes is doubly problematicit is both an indication of authoritarian creep into democratic regimes and an instance of authoritarian learning from democratic regimes," Columbia Law School's Isabelle Canaan argued in a 2021 paper.

Authoritarian laws also create a quandary for companies forced to decide between creating walled gardens for different jurisdictions at great expense, or to default to restrictive rules for everybody.

If Britain enacts the Online Safety Bill, as seems likely, it may prove to be yet another assault on liberty around the worldunless online services stick to their guns and treat the U.K. (and other restrictive regimes) as pariahs whose laws should be defied.

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Online Privacy at Risk from Awful U.K. Internet Regulation Bill - Reason

A renowned group of technology activists, Cult of the Dead Cow, has shifted its focus towards developing a system that enables the creation of messaging and social networking apps without retaining users personal data. The group has created a coding framework called Veilid, which allows app developers to build applications for mobile devices and the web using strong encryption. Veilid aims to provide secure end-to-end encryption for messaging, file sharing, and social networking apps passing fully encrypted content between devices. Similar to decentralized networks like BitTorrent, Veilid gets faster and more efficient as more devices join and share the load.

The project aims to address growing concerns about user privacy and government surveillance. Veilid offers an alternative to apps that collect detailed personal information for targeted advertising or product pitching. However, the challenge lies in convincing developers to design apps compatible with Veilid, as the potential revenue streams from these apps are limited the absence of detailed user information.

Veilid enters a market where users are increasingly dissatisfied with platforms like Twitter and Facebook and are searching for more secure alternatives. It also provides support to those opposing governments attempts to weaken encryption with laws requiring content disclosure. Notably, tech giants like Apple, Facebook, and Signal have threatened to withdraw services in the UK if the proposed Online Safety Bill is implemented without changes.

Veilid is a significant release Cult of the Dead Cow, the oldest and most influential hacking group in the US. The group includes cybersecurity experts who have been at the forefront of discovering and addressing security flaws in widely used software. Veilids development is driven members such as Peiter Zatko, known as Mudge, and Christien Rioux, who have significant experience in cybersecurity and hacking.

The Veilid framework, developed Rioux, aims to simplify the process of using encryption for app developers and users. The project seeks to make secure messaging and social networking as user-friendly as popular platforms like Facebook, leveraging the power of mobile devices to create a decentralized cloud.

Veilids potential impact on protecting user privacy and advancing secure communications is significant. By developing apps that do not collect personal data and are encrypted from end to end, it offers an alternative to the prevailing surveillance business model.

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Cult of the Dead Cow Develops Encryption System for Messaging ... - TickerTV News

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Can one see through a scattering medium like ground glass? Conventionally, such a feat would be deemed impossible. As light travels through an opaque medium, the information contained in the light becomes "jumbled up," almost as if undergoes complex encryption. Recently, Professor Choi Wonshik's team from the IBS Center for Molecular Spectroscopy and Dynamics (IBS CMSD) has discovered a way to utilize this phenomenon in optical computing and machine learning.

Since 2010, several previous studies have attempted to harness information lost due to scattering media, such as biological tissues, using mathematics. This has been typically done by employing optical operators such as linear scattering matrices, which can be used to determine the input-output relationships of photons as they undergo scattering.

This topic has been of primary research interest for Professor Choi's team from the IBS CMSD, and they have published many works that combine both hardware- and software-based adaptive optics for tissue imaging. Some of their work was demonstrated in new types of microscopes that can see through scattering media with high opacity, such as mouse skulls, as well as perform deep 3D-imaging of tissues.

However, things become much more complex when nonlinearity enters the equation. If a scattering medium generates nonlinear signals, it can no longer be represented simply by a linear matrix, as the principle of superposition is violated. Moreover, measuring the nonlinear input-output characteristics becomes a daunting challenge, setting a demanding stage for research.

This time, Professor Choi's team has achieved yet another scientific breakthrough. They became the first to discover that the optical input-output response of a nonlinear scattering medium can be defined by a third-order tensor, as opposed to a linear matrix. The findings are published in the journal Nature Physics.

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Third-order tensor is a mathematical object used to represent relationships between three sets of data. In simple terms, it is an array of numbers arranged in a three-dimensional structure. Tensors are generalizations of scalars (0-order tensors), vectors (1st-order tensors), and matrices (2nd-order tensors) and are commonly used in various fields of mathematics, physics, and engineering to describe physical quantities and their relationships.

To demonstrate this, the team utilized a medium comprised of barium titanate nanoparticles, which generate nonlinear second harmonic generation (SHG) signals due to the inherent noncentrosymmetric properties of barium titanate. These SHG signals emerge as a square of the input electric field through the second harmonic process, causing cross-terms when multiple input channels are activated simultaneously, disrupting the linear superposition principle. The researchers devised and experimentally validated a novel theoretical framework involving these cross-terms in a 3rd-order tensor.

To illustrate this, the researchers measured cross-terms by isolating the difference between the output electric fields produced when two input channels were activated simultaneously, and when each channel was activated separately. This necessitated an additional 1,176 measurements set by the possible combinations of two independent input channels, even with just 49 input channels.

"The effort required to detect cross-terms from weak nonlinear signals was significant," noted Dr. Moon Jungho, the study's lead author.

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The tensor derived from the nonlinear scattering medium has a higher rank than matrices of linear scattering media, hinting at its potential as a scalable physical operator. The team demonstrated this through the real-world implementation of nonlinear optical encryption and all-optical logic gates.

First, the team successfully demonstrated that nonlinear scattering media can be used for the optical encryption process. When specific image information is input into the media, the output second harmonic wave signals are displayed as random patterns, akin to a series of encryption processes. Conversely, by performing an inverse operation of the 3rd-order tensor representation of the second harmonic wave, the original input information can be retrieved through a decryption process.

Utilizing the inverse operation of the tensor input-output response, they decoded original signals from randomly encoded SHG signals, which offers enhanced security over standard optical encryption that uses linear scattering media.

Furthermore, the integration of digital phase conjugation allowed the researchers to showcase all-optical AND logic gates that activate only when two specific input channels are simultaneously activated. This approach offers potential advantages over silicon-based logic, including reduced energy consumption and light-speed parallel processing capabilities.

This research is expected to open up new frontiers in the realms of optical computing and machine learning. "In the burgeoning field of all-optical machine learning, nonlinear optical layers are key in enhancing model performance. We are currently investigating how our research could be integrated into this field," stated Professor Choi.

More information: Jungho Moon et al, Measuring the scattering tensor of a disordered nonlinear medium, Nature Physics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-023-02163-8

Journal information: Nature Physics

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Exploiting nonlinear scattering medium for optical encryption, computation and machine learning - Phys.org

A latest extensive market study titled Encryption Keyboard Market enfolds a comprehensive analysis and assessment of the global market, allowing everyone to understand all-inclusive information associated with the latest market improvements. The report sets out the important statistical data about the market that has been presented in an organized format including charts, graphs, tables, and illustrations. The report explains how the market growth has been unfolding over the recent past and what would be the future market projections during the anticipated period from 2023 to 2029. The research divides the global Encryption Keyboard market into different segments of the global market based on product types, applications, key players, and leading regions.

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Encryption Keyboard Market Revenue Analysis and Industry ... - University City Review

Google has introduced an exciting new feature that will change the way you handle sensitive Excel files. Available in open beta, the new feature lets you import and convert sensitive Excel files into client-side encrypted Google Sheets.

Client-side encryption ensures that the encrypted Excel file remains unchanged even after the conversion into Google Sheets. Most importantly, data privacy remains in the hands of the user throughout the entire process.

With this update, you can import encrypted .xslx Excel file types only. Although additional Excel and tabular file types are not currently supported, Google may expand the range of compatible file formats in future updates.

Secondly, during the import process, certain unsupported Excel features in Sheets will be ignored. Google has set a maximum file size limit of 20MB for imported Excel files. Additionally, the maximum number of cells that can be imported is set at 5 million.

Google Workspace administrators can enable client-side encryption at the domain, organizational unit (OU), or group levels by navigating to the Admin console > Security > Access and data control > Client-side encryption.

The new feature is rolling out gradually to Rapid and Scheduled Release domains, starting August 1, 2023, and may take up to 15 days for the feature to be visible to all users.

The ability to import and convert sensitive Excel files into client-side encrypted Google Sheets will be available to Google Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus customers, this powerful tool is set to transform how organizations handle sensitive data and enhance overall data security.

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You can now import and convert sensitive Excel files into client-side encrypted Google Sheets - Devdiscourse