slightly tangential, but at this point I think BBC News just needs to spun off into a visibly separate body from creative production. I wish it wasn't the case - I personally have no problem with BBC News - but it's just too big of an attack surface, and it's not worth sustaining if it risks the loss of probably Britain's greatest cultural asset for the sake of fucking news. amputate the limb before it kills the host
Sorry, I don’t understand what you are saying. Are you claiming that the person criticising the UK state media is a fascist? Or are you saying that the state media not covering these law changes adequately make them fascist?
Maybe next time, GP should be more precise with their words when they make two statements in one comment so low quality replies like these don’t have to exist.
Mostly for dumb historical reasons, currently justified as slightly protecting them from the government cutting their funding.
Objectively European TV licenses are just a terrible wasteful idea, basically creating an entire parallel tax collection system. Of all the important, vital things a government funds, I'm not sure why a public broadcaster should have any special insulation from the usual democratic decision making.
The UK TV license is much less tax-like than the German one. I never paid for the UK one, by the cunning and devious scheme of… never buying a TV once I moved out of my parent's home.
Now I'm in Germany, and here we have to pay for a TV license regardless of if we have a TV or not. (Also, my partner here has a TV).
> currently justified as slightly protecting them from the government cutting their funding.
How does that work? Who sets the TV license rate? If I hate the BBC and want to eliminate their funding, and I also want to be popular, what's stopping me from eliminating the license regime altogether?
In Italy it's now a part of your energy bill, by law. Basically too many people were opting out (legitimately or not), so they made it non-negotiable: "if you have energy, you must be powering screens! Pay up!"
Meanwhile, mainstream TV (both state-run and privately owned) is more and more unwatchable, and more and more people just tune out - but they are still taxed.
You can still opt out, just fill out a declaration that you don't have a TV. It can be done online in two minutes (it must be repeated every year tho).
The difference is that before it was basically opt-in, with spotty enforcement, and as a result about 30% of the population was not paying anything. Today it requires lying on an official form, making it much more serious.
History. It was a way of letting people who don't have TVs not pay a license. There was also an extra charge for colour TVs.
Edit: Oh, the BBC isn't a government agency, it's operationally independent. But always becoming less so, as the board is mostly appointed by the government now.
The BBC is a "quango": quasi-autonomous non government organisation. And the TV license .. well, it's really a tax, as much as vehicle excise duty is, but with outsourced collection. I think it's unsustainable long term but the BBC is still pretty popular for its non-news output.
In 2024 it's a subscription service with the world's worst UX. I only have internet-delivered TV, and so I'd be very happy with an iPlayer that just unlocks more content behind a subscription fee.
What other subscription service are you legally required to be subscribed to merely for owning a television, computer or any other sort of appliance?
Like, suppose your car comes with a subscription service for satellite radio... you're allowed to just not pay it. Owning the object associated with the service doesn't normally oblige you to subscribe to it.
> What other subscription service are you legally required to be subscribed to merely for owning a television, computer or any other sort of appliance?
Things may have changed since I left the country, but last I heard you only needed one if you owned specifically a TV or actually used iPlayer (i.e. more than merely having the capability to use it).
Not quite - the current legislation[1] is that you must have a TV license if you watch/record live TV (however you do it - online, with a TV, etc.), or if you use the BBC's iPlayer app/site.
You do not require a TV license if you have a TV but do not use it to watch live television (e.g. using it for YouTube/Netflix apps)
I'm happy to report that even with a TV license, you're not compelled to watch live TV.
To your actual point, you do now need a license to use iPlayer at all, not merely for live TV -- too many people (like me) were not bothering with a license and relying on catch-up. We stopped using iPlayer as a result.
> What other subscription service are you legally required to be subscribed to merely for owning a television, computer or any other sort of appliance?
Colloquially it's still called Road Tax. Like if someone says "Wait for the Tannoy announcement" you're not obliged to say "Actually they're using the SpeakLouder 3000. Tannoy lost the contract 37 years ago next Tuesday."
It's a quaint anachronism, like afternoon tea and cricket, of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th richest nation on the planet.
Maintained by witless fools who's sole achievement in life was to marry a wealthy woman.
UK resident here. The original version gave me the push I needed to get a rPi 2B+, subscribe to a VPN, and use it as a wifi AP that routes all traffic from my house through it.
Can you trust a VPN who say they don't log? No, but more so than an ISP who might be legally required to at any moment without you ever finding out.
Also, I will now never start a tech company in the UK, and this is because I will never put myself into a position where I am forced to add backdoors to a product.
I'm actually reminded of the movie Children of Men, which seems much more of a realistic view of a dystopian landscape in UK over the next 20-50 years.
It’s just a matter of time for it to happen everywhere unfortunately: it’s possible, it’s easy, most people don’t know or care or understand, so keep trying and it’ll happen.
> It’s impossible to break laws that are impractical and unenforceable?
Huh? When did I ever say it was "impossible to break laws"? My entire point was it very possible to break laws, which is why those laws exist.
The government could pass a law banning encryption tomorrow and there would be nothing besides fear of the law stopping you from continuing to use it, if you so chose to so do (just like the law against battery doesn't mean there's a physical barrier making it impossible for you punch the guy standing next you on the subway). The actual and indented effect of the law would be the technology would be driven underground, and your choice to use it illegally would carry far greater risks to you.
Also, a law against using encryption wouldn't be unenforceable. At the very least they could punish you with a sentencing enhancement or use it as an alternative charge if it successfully cloaked whatever else you were doing (e.g. like how they got Al Capone for tax evasion, not any of the other stuff he did). And anyway, computers make surveillance and enforcement easier, not harder.
There is a lot more than A's fear of the law. There is also B, C and everyone else's fear of the law, compounding and creating chilling effects, to the point where there is simply no one who will carry your message, transact with you, provide a platform, or whatever, for the type of thing you want to break the law for.
It's not just about tech. People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more. They're happy to give it all up if it means that an ever-expanding nanny state will care for them and protect them from all harm, whether it be international terrorism, cigarettes, or insults being hurled online.
The campaign to brand freedom ('freedumb') as a far-right ideal certainly isn't helping.
People simply don't care about freedom or privacy any more.
I don't believe that's true. Our younger generations are way more savvy about those things than our older ones.
What I do see is a sense of hopeless inevitability. People don't feel they can escape the surveillance and other technological dangers because everyone is at it. Both of our major political parties are generally supportive of the police and surveillance state and no-one else has any realistic prospect of forming a government at national level. Unless you give up a large part of modern life and decide not to participate in large parts of our society you have little real choice but to pick your poison from the big tech firms as well.
So people resist in less obvious ways like moving between services and creating new accounts frequently with false details. People from younger generations hardly ever commit to any single account on any service the way their parents or grandparents did. They have no time for terms and conditions that require real identities. (Or the service will do what exactly? Terminate the account they didn't really care about or expect to use for long anyway?) I imagine a lot of young people already know how to use a VPN and probably more will start doing so over time. I wonder how many phones the average teenager really has today.
Of course this attitude creates other problems of its own. With modern tech but little personal accountability we see issues like cyberbullying becoming real problems for our schoolkids for example. Unfortunately the only answer the politicians can seem to think of to deal with a problem like that is trying to be even more authoritarian. We need to do better than that.
I think some of this is selection bias - for many their local peers of similar age are often in the same industry, and of similar education backgrounds. I assume on a site like this it's likely tech-aligned.
Most people do NOT know how to use a VPN, and barely know how to use computers outside of their walled garden app based devices. I'm not sure if there's really much of a difference by age.
The UK's left/right split is very different to that of the US.
In particular, surveillance is extremely popular with both of the big UK parties. Well, I say "big", we'll see if the Tories even manage to win a single seat at the next election — I think they're currently expected to get just under 100 seats, but they're so dysfunctional that total disintegration is absolutely possible between now and then.
You mean the era in which we got things like the Magna Carta, rights of due process, habeas corpus, the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe), the gradual transfer of power from monarchs to parliaments etc.
I think our direction of travel is a lot worse now!
Magna Carta, which was about the relationship between a king and his own feudal lords, which was violated by both sides and annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the First Barons' War — one of the many UK civil wars besides the one commonly known by the title "The" Civil War?
> the gradual abolition of slavery (at least in western Europe)
Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?
> Magna Carta, which was about the relationship between a king and his own feudal lords.
Among other things. Some important bits applied more widely, such as the right to a fair trial which applied to any "free man".
It was a also a recognition of existing law that had developed earlier.
> Even with that caveat, didn't that really only happen after the medieval era?
No, slavery declined in medieval times, and was abolished in England by the Normans around the 11th/12th century. Serfdom continued but serfs were not chattel slaves (they could not be traded) and has rights.
European participation in the slave trade revived in early modern times, in and between colonies. Slaver was not revived in Europe itself.
> things like the Magna Carta, rights of due process, habeas corpus
I think Habeas Corpus is one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that still has legal effect (the former is part of the latter).
And remember that Magna Carta was a deal between the "barons" and King John; the rights that Magna Carta purported to confer, only applied to barons (landowners, basically). In the time of King John, the law as most ordinary people encountered it was simply the local baron.
I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.
> I think Habeas Corpus is one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that still has legal effect
I am not sure if it has effect because of the Magna Carta, but right to a fair trial is another right that still exists and applied to any "free man".
> I think it wasn't until Henry II that there were royal courts set up, to deliver the same law everywhere.
Yes, but that was still medieval. Yes, it was not one huge improvement. The Magna Carta was a step in a process that started centuries earlier and went to for centuries afterwards.
The older I get the more I see these bills and trends are really based on economics. Politics is more a less a controlled narrative to maintain this style of wealth distribution.
The wealthy elite class draws most of its income by exploiting labor. This is done in a variety of ways but essentially most UK Billionaires make their money in private equity (over half.. same in US)... which really means they don't actually do much real labor.
Instead they need to extract wealth which often means creating a system where people's labor is exploited. To keep this system in check a control of the narrative is required so you can keep a lower class of workers "occupied" so they don't wise up to the reality of the situation.
One common theme is fear.. war on terror, axis of evil states.. some sort of plague..Y2K.. you can probably pull up many themes from the past.
The other theme is divide by culture.... you see this today with gender issues.. gay rights, etc. For example in most modern western states... the vast majority of citizens don't really care if people are gay .. they may or may not approve personally but honestly don't mind what people do with their private lives etc... So the narrative has to flipped and made more extreme ..it doesn't matter the issue it has to something that gets people riled up enough that they don't have much mental or emotion energy left to focus on the small group that is exploiting their labor. (So gender issue has to get extreme to the point where we talk about surgical altering children for example)
Notice both parties... somehow keep migrants flowing into Europe (and US).. Almost like pressure needs to be kept on keeping wages low.
In the US the federal reserve openly states this as the goal ..(https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/us-federal-reser...). Little coverage is given to this and instead a strange spin is attached on how somehow the worker class will actually benefit by being paid less.
This is the same with survelliance bills. We must keep an eye on the worker class to make sure they don't organize and wise up to the reality of their situation.
Channel 5 on YouTube does a good job presenting this same view point
Whether it's the border crisis, or drug addiction, the numerous wars fought, or the polarization of society, the aim is for the ruling elite to divide and rule, and continue extracting wealth
"Politics is a concentrated expression of economics" - Lenin. He started on a high note of freeing the labor from the capitalists, but quickly realised it's more profitable to put the labor class into cages (gulags) and extract wealth from them in a more direct fashion.
Honestly, although VPNs get a bad rep, there's (in my opinion) a good argument for using one here on privacy grounds. Use two or three-hop routing to frustrate correlation attacks, route your entire internet traffic to one or two other places chosen at random, use DNScrypt / DOH and have the freedom to choose who gets to slurp your data -- and the ability to change them easily. Mullvad's move towards open firmware, diskless servers, and proving verifiability to end users is something I can get towards. [C.f. https://mullvad.net/en/blog/system-transparency-future]
I'm sure nothing wrong will happen with delaying security updates if they ever actually use that clause...
I have little confidence in the security of TOR. I believe any competent adversary can do packet timing correlation attacks, and it turns out just 30 seconds of web browsing gives enough timing data to narrow down to just 1 tor user, since the tor userbase is fairly small.
I'm guessing there are ~10 nation states who can deanonymize tor, and I strongly suspect the UK is on that list.
What are people's thoughts around vpns for select devices at home for nafarious activity?
So most traffic goes through open net, and tv (for example) goes through a privacy first vpn provider with an exit in, say, Switzerland. And Proton mail for a small amount of email with the rest via apple.
I do this the other way around. All my traffic goes through a privacy-first multi-hop VPN provider, and data from things I don't trust and don't care about (set-top boxes, smart TVs [which I detest!], games consoles, house guests, etc) goes through the clearnet and provides a reasonable degree of cover. Literally everything else gets onion routed to some degree, to frustrate correlation analysis. I know that TOR users are logged specifically; I don't know about VPNs directly. All I want is for people to not spy on me. I'm not a criminal and I do nothing wrong(!) -- apparently an impossibly hard ask!
Something someone on HN might be able to answer is this: is there a reason why you couldn't try to configure Wireguard to have a constant bandwidth mode? Continually transmit UDP packets and again frustrate timing or correlation analysis -- if every client spoke to the server on one of a predetermined number of speeds continually then the burstlike connections coming from that server to a potentially identity leaking service (e.g. gmail.com) could not easily be correlated with the origin of the traffic. I imagine that would make it easier to have some stronger degree of privacy protection in aggregate.
Interesting idea. It would only be effective against timing analysis if all clients connected to the wg server use this constant bandwidth mode (otherwise your traffic could be identified through negative correlation against other connections).
It would also have to be aggressively rate limited to make it practical for anything with a battery over wifi, even a constant 2Mbit is not ideal for wifi and will cause a lot of battery drain since radios are most efficient when they can do burst communication. Or maybe it could be limited to bursts at some interval for better bandwidth, or better efficiency (but not both)... that would also make it easier to manage the traffic since it's no longer real-time.
I doubt there is any way to configure wireguard to behave like this, it has quite a specific purpose and wireguard's design focus is performance and security rather than obfuscation from traffic analysis. Maybe it's not necessary to modify WG if the traffic can be manipulated just before the WG interface...
[edit]
Talking of timing analysis, this was the side channel in specter/meltdown that was demonstrated to extract cryptographic keys from JS in the browser. Browser responded by just lowering the resolution of JS timers and introducing noise.
Maybe this would also be sufficient for a wireguard connection at the cost of slightly worse latency performance. The tricky part is how the timing resolution would be tied to activity on the WG server, i.e you would need the packets to be spread out further and further the less activity there is on the server, so you actually end up with better performance the busier the server is.
It would also come at a performance cost to routing which would be forced to hold on to packets artificially.
I actually don't care if I'm honest. I will be a good citizen, use all the normal services and blend in with the noise. Data about you looks much more suspicious if there is none.
If I wanted to do something nefarious I'd do it completely offline.
Who cares if it looks suspicious though? You're still innocent unless proven guilty. I'm not giving up mine (and to be fair I do use it for Torrents mostly :) )
I'm not in the UK though, and I refuse to even visit it for work now since Brexit. Google had some convention there a while ago and I just refused to go. If they don't want us I don't want them.
Actually everyone is moving towards guilty unless caught out. In the Netherlands they fight crime with an unaccountable organisation called the RIEC that doesn’t need any evidence to carry out what it calls interventions against even completely innocent people.
So if they choose to (as opposed to they suspected something) they can steal from you, have you attacked and more and they just pervert the course of justice to cover it up. Such as informing the police they are not allowed to response to your calls. Forbidding you to send in police reports. I know because it happened to me. Because I lived next to someone that they wanted to fuck up and I complained.
UK is a dying state, like the Roman empire, once mighty, now is a small tourist destination. When the good will leaves a nation to its own devices, what's left is a disorganized group of men and women held together by tyranny of a dying dragon of bureaucracy. That bureaucracy doesn't know how to keep a nation prosper, and all it cares about is self-preservation by any means possible.
The Conservatives who have been in government for a long time will most likely lose a general election within a year so we should also be looking at the opposition Labour party's views on this kind of legislation.
Perhaps surprisingly given they are currently led by a former human rights lawyer the Labour side also seem to be authoritarian when it comes to technology and surveillance.
Conservatives more stereotypically spin it for national security/terrorism. But it will come in some form or the other each administration like clockwork.
Generally it seems the intelligence services get a free pass from the entire political class on all sides, regardless of pretence, as we've seen in every Five Eyes countries, including Australia.
>"Additional safeguards have been introduced – notably, in the most recent round of amendments, a 'triple-lock' authorization process for surveillance of parliamentarians
What does this mean exactly? I'm not familiar with UK government terminology.
This sounds like a huge step back towards Spycatcher territory, where MI5 thought it was their job to undermine the Labour Party, because they were all communists.
The UK government seems hell-bent on the control and micromanagement of its own population.
Their recent smoking ban -- which is sure to make cigarette smoking cool again with young people -- was a joke. This hyper-surveillance measure is a lot less funny.
The smoking ban is incredibly popular and supported by most people across all generations, also given we have tax payer funded healthcare this is a clear win for the nation.
Only if smoking is seen as cool, which it isn’t any more. Vaping is the way to go for kids these days and whilst still not great it seems like it’s better than smoking.
Spare some thought as to why it's no longer "seen as cool."
That's about to be turned on its head. Banning smoking will make it seem edgy, transgressive, and alluring. Still worse, banning it only for people below a certain age will make it seem mature and sophisticated to those below the cutoff. The forbidden fruit.
The UK Govt couldn't possibly devise a better way to popularize cigarettes with young people. And they'll create a nice little black market, to boot.
suppose we design a reasonable experiment here, like taking a random sample of teenagers and mitigating for anonymity concerns. are you seriously claiming that this would show an increase after the ban?
or to put it another way --- the phenomenon you point to is real but completely swamped by the more direct impacts
If we were talking of the USA, or of a European nation like Croatia, I'd bet that smoking rates in youth show a slow but gradual increase in the years following a UK-style ban.
In the UK, however, the way to bet is that the government enforces the ban with maniacal zeal, so smoking rates will probably go down slightly in the near term. (For better or worse -- usually worse -- the UK has more state capacity to enforce a ban than the US or indeed the vast majority of other countries.) But smoking will become, once again, a prestigious activity. All the cool kids will smoke, if only for the social signaling benefits. Over more than a decade, youth smoking rates might surpass what they were before the ban.
Worth noting that the harm done, both economically and personally, by overpolicing smoking would probably be worse than the consequences of the smoking it manages to prevent
The Postmaster debacle is the biggest example of this I have ever seen. Something has dramatically changed when people are not being held accountable for their crimes.
We do indeed lead the way in draconian bullshit. We also lead the way in making it utterly unworkable and useless through incompetence, cost cutting and cases getting shot down by ECHR though. Think of us as an example to the rest of the world on how to do a shitty job of consultation, legislation and implementation!
Weren't the Tories going to get the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights? And thus remove the possibility of appealing the the European Court of Human Rights.
Yes they are. They have a valid point leaving it regarding immigration, but the side effects of it are far more advantageous to them personally and this is not being discussed.
It's funny how our next PM will be the person who let off Jimmy Saville yet this bill claims to care about CSAM (signed into law by the brother of a known peadophile).
1st amendment is being killed in America, privacy rights are being killed in the UK.
"Additional safeguards have been introduced – notably, in the most recent round of amendments, a 'triple-lock' authorization process for surveillance of parliamentarians ..."
Thank god, I'm glad the politicians that passed this law will be protected from it /s
This, and requiring tech companies to consult the government before rolling out security updates, make it seem evident that safety isn't really the motivation.
I'm a cool headed person, but reading that sentence was rage inducing for me.
There's literally no good argument to protect politicians other than corruption.
If politicians are worried these powers could be used to target them then it could be used to target literally anyone, and the concern shouldn't have been that they could be target, but that anyone could be targeted.
Plus, if this bill is only going to stop bad guys then they should have anything to worry about anyway right? I mean isn't this what we are told!? Should we be worried about these powers being abused or not!?
I bet you in 10 years there will be a scandal where the Tories spied on an opposing party MP, or vice versa. Doesn't even need malicious intent because the mere act of doing this carries the stench of malicious incompetence.
I have forewarned my employer that if this bill passes I will be considering my position as I am idealogically opposed to being forced to comply with state surveillance.
OTOH, new mass surveillance in combination with optimistic use of new tech will lead to ruining thousands of innocent lives. It's as if they thought that the Horizon scandal was just a bit of bad publicity for a good idea.
Instead of admitting blame failures are used to increase budgets.
The simple arguments of "we didn't have enough funding" or "we weren't allowed to collect more data" will be used. More tax payer money is then spent to cement power through mass surveillance and the cycle repeats.
It’s all about competence - it’s why a couple have of competent programmers can stand up and website/program/app for orders of magnitude less time and money than government or large corporate IT can. I’m sure the same is true in law enforcement / intelligence, more power/money is simply the crutch for the incompetent to be more productive
When I was kid I read Bradbury, Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein while dreaming of how by the time I was "old", I'd for sure be living in a sci-fi future. Humans had landed on the moon only the decade before, NASA had launched Skylab (a REAL space station) and was developing a space shuttle that could go to orbit anytime. Personal computers with modems were actually a thing in stores.
Sadly, I now realize I was correct except that I was reading the wrong sci-fi authors. I should have been reading Orwell and Huxley.
The typical government response to European Court rulings against surveillance is just to interpret them in some favorable way, then ignore them. So if the court outlaws "mass surveillance" and you've instituted a mass surveillance system, just call it "targeted surveillance" or ignore the ruling altogether. Maybe in 6-7 years you'll get another ruling against that, but it doesn't matter.
Indeed. A state can pass whatever legislation, but it's not the highest authority in EU member states. States still have to obey the various agreements, treaties and rulings, although enforcing that falls back onto the member states themselves. So a sufficiently determined government (Poland/PiS, Hungary) can still get away with a lot.
Is there something about the EU that would prevent government spying?
Most privacy efforts I've seen in the EU are commercial facing legislation that I find kinda of piecemeal and naive (granted I'll take naive over nothing, sometimes...). I don't know that I've seen efforts that would seriously curtail government surveillance.
The principle certainly has, but without being a lawyer I can't be more detailed than "this sounds like the right vibe". Off the top of my head, it's connected to all of:
> Is there something about the EU that would prevent government spying?
Presumably you mean laws and treaties; those exist. But I wouldn't expect government spies to pay excessive attention to the law.
The problem is the clauses about requiring distributors to get state clearance before deploying an update [ahem - nooo, that disables our backdoor], and increased costs and obligations on ISPs. Thwy won't ever try to enforce the law against the spooks, but for big tech companies, it's just regulatory clutter. They have staff lawyers out the wazoo, all specializing in regulatory clutter.
Hardly anyone is. One of the problems with the EU is that because the media focus on national governments, and because the EU often acts indirectly (through directives, requiring national governments to pass legislation, rather than direct legislation) people really have little idea of what the EU does legislatively.
I am aware of the current attempts to push surveillance laws, although AFAIK the EU parliament did reject the worst of the legislation the commission tried to push.
Pretty sure even without cancer Charlie wouldn't be aware of any backlash, even if there was one. His role is ceremonial at best.
I agree the law is ridiculous though. I hope big internet companies boycott the UK, speaking as a UK citizen. This law won't catch anyone remotely tech sazzy.
>> King Charles has cancer so he won’t have to deal with the backlash of this.
It has nothing to do with him in reality. The monarch has to give ascent to new acts of parliament and by convention always does. They don't (overtly) interfere politically.
Forums are voluminous online and regularly contain such complaints, partly as the anonymity gives people a feeling of being more free to express themselves, versus other types of social group interactions.
Given that cohesive and cooperative direct action from organised groups is relatively rare, it could be seen as statistically likely direct action at least sometimes resulted from a group unifying over discussion on a forum.
What you say is triggering.
Triggered by the darkness.
It’s okay to be afraid of the unknown.
But it’s also time to take a look within ourselves and see that we are co-creating something.
Do we want it?
Is this the best we can do as a human race?
The Irish people have a bit of luck on their side. They follow their hearts and speak up.
The ancient Celtic DNA knows. It’s a magical people, and I mean that in the sense of the Magi; enlightened men and women of knowledge who brought the sciences and the arts to humanity.
The Irish were conquered, but the power and wisdom within the DNA cannot be conquered.
It’s all within.
Like an ancient quantum computer.
It sits. Waiting to be tapped by the brave one who dares to look outside the program.
It's sad but expected that the BBC have ignored this.
reply