Seems to be because the definition is arbitrarily shaped to fit the agendas of whoever is writing the definition. UPFs seem like the screen time of the 2020s -- an overly vague and mostly useless definition borne out of hysteria around a real issue in how people eat.
Arbitrarily defining foods that have artificial sweeteners as suddenly being ultra-processed is not coherent.
The prevailing opinion here seems to be that we’d really like for there to not be an omnipresent panopticon because protect the children or terrorists or, apparently, malware. If your imagination is particularly lacking on how this might be weaponized just remember that antifa is now designated as an terrorist organization in US, so you better not be a suspected member of it — as in, you best not have sent a buddy a message on signal about how those tiki torch carrying nazi larpers aren’t exactly great guys, or off to a black site you go for supporting terrorism.
If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.
OK, sorry to keep repeating myself here, but... I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl.
What I would like to see, is, say, Signal complying with lawful interception orders in the same way that any EU telecoms provider currently does.
So, provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party, for a limited time, by judicial order, for a clearly specified reason.
> pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything
This is exactly what lawful intercept laws are supposed to prevent. And yeah, of course, abuse, but under a functioning rule of law there are at least ways to remedy that, unlike with mass surveillance and/or malware...
> I strongly oppose any kind of "panopticon" like ChatControl. What I would like to see, is, say, Signal [...] provide cleartext contents of communications to/from a cleary identified party
Those statements simply aren't compatible.
Right now, Signal is designed by cryptography experts to provide the best privacy we know how to build: messages are only readable by you or the intended recipient. "Lawful intercept" necessarily means some additional third party is given the ability to read messages.
It doesn't matter what kind of legal framework you have around that, because you can't just build a cryptosystem where the key is "a warrant issued under due process." There has to be a system, somewhere, that has access to plaintext messages and can give law enforcement and courts access. The judges, officers, technicians, suppliers, and software involved in building and using this system are all potential vectors by which this access can be compromised or misused -- whether via software or hardware attacks, social engineering, or abuse of power.
Maybe your country has "functioning rule of law", and every single government official and all the vendors they hire are pure as snow, but what about all the rest of us living in imperfect countries? What about when a less-than-totally-law-abiding regime comes into power?
You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks.
> You're proposing that we secure our private conversations with TSA luggage locks
No -- that's an incredibly reductive summary, and the attitude you display here is, if left unchecked, exactly what will allow something equally ridiculous like ChatControl to pass eventually.
There has been plenty of previous debate when innovations like postal mail, telegraph traffic and phone calls were introduced. This debate has resulted in laws, jurisprudence, and corresponding operating procedures for law enforcement.
You may believe there are no legitimate reasons to intercept private communications, but the actual laws of the country you live in right now say otherwise, I guarantee you. You may not like that, and/or not believe in the rule of law anymore anyway, but I can't help you with that.
What I can hopefully convince you of, is that there needs to be some way to bring modern technology in line with existing laws, while avoiding "9/11"-style breakdowns of civil rights.
We can draw analogy between any two things. An encrypted chat is not a letter in the mail or a call on the telephone. It is an entirely new thing. Backdooring such chats is not "bringing technology in line with existing laws" it is, very clearly, passing new laws, and creating new invasions of privacy. It must be justified anew. The justification for wiretapping was not that there was no way to fight crime without it. Otherwise, when the criminals became wise to it, and began to hold their conversations offline, there would have been a new law, requiring that all rooms be fitted with microphones that the police could tap into as necessary. No such law was passed. Instead, the justification for wiretapping was simply that, once police had identified some transmission as relating to the committing of a crime, they could obtain a warrant, and then tap into the communication. The physical capacity without any effort by uninvolved individuals was the entire justification. That capacity does not exist with encrypted chats. The analogy is therefore much closer to the "mandated microphones" described above. Everyone is being required to take action to reduce their own privacy, regardless of whether they are subject to a warrant.
What is most striking about our "mandated microphone" analogy is the utter futility of it. Criminals have no issue breaking the law, and hence have no issue outfitting a room with no microphones in which to carry out their dealings. The same is true of any law targeting encrypted chats.
For a real-world example of the problem you're describing, China's Salt Typhoon attacks compromised lawful intercept infrastructure in the USA to engage in espionage. A mandatory backdoor in Signal would be at risk from similar attacks.
The Henley and partners analysis isn't very good, but nor is this, both are from biased sources. It seems to amount to "that isn't a large proportion" rather than looking at the trend.
Dan Neidle[1] and the FT[2] have already done much better debunking of it, although that doesn't mean there isn't truth to it, just that Henley and Partners's report doesn't prove anything.
Thank you, I was trying to put a finer point on what I disagreed with in that comment but that's better than I'd have done. It's like saying "just pick the best option"
Obviously few would with that framing, but if they're given policies, lots of British people across the political spectrum would support ones that are more paternalistic.
Support for the OSA is very high: https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-brit...
British people are much happier with the state being paternalistic, across the political spectrum, it is a very strong differentiator between the US and the UK. "The government should do something!" You can see it in attitudes to the NHS, pensions, welfare. At its peak, in the 70s, 32% of people lived in social housing!
Labour voters, young and old, are generally quite paternalistic. Lots of Conservative voters are too, depending on the flavour. The exceptions are the Lib Dems and some conservative tribes. I am consistently surprised when talking to highly-educated, politically engaged people, left or right, how much the default is that the state should act.
Why won't the government do something is the refrain that everyone including opposing parties are saying. God forbid anyone should take initiative on anything.
And the state keeps on expanding year after year. I cannot remember the last time someone did not promise to shrink the state/government and once elected did a complete 180. It's bonkers.
Great software, I've been using this since the start of this year, I use it every day, initially as a frustration with ChatGPT and Claude not having proper voice support in their desktop versions and then everywhere.
When you are in an environment where you can dictate, it really is a game changer. Not only is dictating much faster than typing, even if you're a fast typist, I find that you don't have the sticking problem of composing a message quite as much. It also makes my typing feel more like natural speech.
I have both the record and cancel actions bound to side buttons on my mouse, and paste to a third, the auto-paste feature is frustrating in my opinion.
I do miss having a taskbar icon to see if I'm recording or not. Sometimes I accidentally leave it running and sometimes the audio cues break until I restart it.
Transformations are great, despite an extreme amount of prompt engineering, I can't seem to stop the transformation model occasionally responding to my message rather than just transforming it though..
Thank you for the support! I'm glad to hear that it's been helping you since the start of the year. Totally agree on the transformation prompts. It's challenging to get the transformation model to not occasionally get short-circuited, especially when I end up having it format a dictated prompt. Instead of formatting, it executes the prompt.
Sorry to hear about the auto-paste feature and taskbar icons. We'll try to restore these in the future, and you can track taskbar here:
As someone sympathetic to this, throwing in the culture war stuff (make jokes about LGBT etc) is a massive own goal and makes it so easy for people to discredit. This could have far more cross-party support but it's just going to amuse the people who already agreed with it and make everyone else think it's the alt-right letting the mask slip..
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│ Switch between Claude models. Applies to this session and future Claude Code sessions. │
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│ 1. Default (recommended) Opus 4.1 for up to 50% of usage limits, then use Sonnet 4 │
│ 2. Opus Opus 4.1 for complex tasks · Reaches usage limits faster │
│ 3. Sonnet Sonnet 4 for daily use │
│ 4. Opus Plan Mode Use Opus 4.1 in plan mode, Sonnet 4 otherwise │
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3.1: A skilled person does, but it's still easy to get led down the garden path, even for very skilled engineers, especially when something is urgent, or at least "urgent"
4: Stakeholders really like chat, and it's a constant battle to make them go through the motions to report things properly. Why wouldn't they like it, it puts the burden onto you rather than them. It's often a tricky balance to strike, depending on the organisation, they can often be more important than you.
OK? But I'm not arguing that there don't exist tensions between employers and employees, of course there are.
I'm saying that liking isolation and not wanting to interact with others isn't good for employers, and don't be surprised if they push back on it. It amounts to saying, I only want to do the fun parts of my job, not the boring but necessary bits, like co-ordinating with other humans.
Spoiler: The science and definitions are... depressingly bad.